Description
Beginning from the conviction that appearance matters – and matters as the very ‘stuff’ and substance of the kind of things we call performance – this issue examines the materiality of appearance as a key component of theatrical and social events. Exploring the role appearance plays in a range of cultural forms – from body art to live TV, shamanic invocation to video installation, magic show to ‘non-professional’ performance – On Appearance charts the construction, circulation and contestation of some of the imagined possibilities, lived realities, political identifications, and performative opportunities opened up by thinking through the logic of appearance. As well as examining the correlation between modes of appearance and practices of disappearance, and investigating their inscription in the recuperative dynamics of power, On Appearance explicates the ways in which appearance matters in affecting and positively producing the conditions, forms and relations structuring what Jacques Rancière calls ‘the distribution of the sensible’: the political organisation of sense-making activities within the intelligible framework of the visible.
Editorial: On Appearance
Adrian Kear
pp. 1 – 3
Susan and Darren: The appearance of authenticity
Geraldine (Gerry) Harris
pp. 4 – 15
Intensities of Appearance
Adrian Kear
pp. 16 – 24
Figuring the Face
Simon Bayly
pp. 25 – 37
Returning Appearance to Itself: Trisha Brown, Koosil-ja and the materiality of appearance
Musetta Durkee
pp. 38 – 47
Wanted [artists’ pages]
Kinkaleri
pp. 48 – 55
How to Act, How to Spectate (Laughing Matter)
Joe Kelleher
pp. 56 – 63
Body Events and Implicated Gazes
Jim Drobnick
pp. 64 – 74
Appearance, Reality and Truth in Magic: A personal memoir
aladin
pp. 75 – 81
Theatre and the Technologies of Appearances: The spirit of apprehensions
Anthony Kubiak
pp. 82 – 92
Extracts from the Notebook of Xavier Valery
Carl Lavery, Gerry Davies
pp. 93 – 99
Ambivalent apparitions: the pop-psychic art of TV medium John Edward
Bryoni Trezise
pp. 100 – 110
Appearing to Play: A Memory Toy Theatre to Cut-Out and Collect [artists’ page]
Richard Allen, Kasia Coleman
pp. 111 – 114
Girls Interrupted: Gendered spectres. Atlantic drag
Kathleen M. Gough
pp. 115 – 126
The Picturesque World Stage
Glen Mcgillivray
pp. 127 – 139
Sweating Blood: Intangible heritage and reclaimed labour in Caribbean New Orleans
Joseph Roach
pp. 140 – 148
Notes on Contributors
pp. 149 – 150
