Böcker av Yana Meerzon

This book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual arts, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection draws on the complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability to address what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, scientific, cultural, and artistic experimentation, and discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Probing "what arouses" in relation to the ethics of representation, the book investigates the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism, underscores the political impact of aroused bodies, and explores how arousal can turn the body into a mediated object.

The book examines how European and North American theatres stage this divided subjectivity: both from within, the way we tell stories about ourselves to others, and from without, through the stories the others tell about us.

Nephew of Anton Chekhov and a disciple of Konstantin Stanislavskii, Russian émigré actor Michael Chekhov (1891-1955) created one of the most challenging and inspiring acting theories of the 20 century. This book is a reinterpretation of Chekhov¿s theory both in the context of the cultural and political milieu of his time and in the light of theatre semiotics: from Prague Structuralism to French Poststructuralism and contemporary performance theory. This work presents Chekhov¿s understanding of the actor¿s stage product ¿ stage mask ¿ as a psychological, psychophysical and cultural construct engaged with the mysteries of the actor/character or, what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as the author/hero, dialectical relationships. It offers new horizons in interdisciplinary and intercultural visions on theatre acting described by Chekhov as a most liberating and cathartic process.