Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices [Paperback]

Performing Animality provides theoretical and creative interventions into the presence of the animal and ideas of animality in performance. Animals have always played a part in human performance practices. Maintaining a crucial role in many communities' cultural traditions, animal-human encounters have been key in the development of performance. Similarly, performance including both living animals and/or representations of animals provides the context for encounters in which issues of power, human subjectivity and otherness are explored. Crucially, however, the inclusion of animals in performance also offers an opportunity to investigate ethical and moral assumptions about human and non-human animals. This book offers a historical and theoretical exploration of animal presence in performance by looking at the concept of animality and how it has developed in theatre and performance practices from the eighteenth century to today. Furthermore, it points to shifts in political, cultural, and ethical animal-human relations emerging within the context of animality and performance.Introduction: Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck PART I: SETTING THE STAGE 1. From Homo Performans to Interspecies Collaboration: Expanding the Concept of Performance to Include Animals; Laura Cull PART II: BULLS, DOGS, PIGS, BEARS, AND HORSES: ANIMALS IN PERFORMANCE 2. The Art of Fierceness: The Performance of the Spanish Fighting Bull; Garry Marvin 3. 'Genus Porcus Sophisticus': The Learned Pig and the Theatrics of National Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century London; Monica Mattfeld 4. 'A Very Good Act For an Unimportant Place': Animals, Ambivalence, and Abuse in Big-Time Vaudeville; Catherine Young 5. Acrobatic Circus Horses: Military Training to Natural Wildness; Peta Tait PART III: 'PERFORMING' ANIMALS AND 'THEATRES OF SPECIES' 6. Massive Bodies in Mortal Performance: War Horse and the Staging of Anglo-American Equine Experience in Combat; Kim Marra 7. Embattled Animals in a Theatrelƒ$