This article deals with the collective practice of techno music
	 in a festive situation. First of all, one has to understand how the music takes
	 part in the setting of the rave party, determining its spatiotemporal borders.
	 Secondly, we will move on to the collective reception of techno music. More
	 particularly by referring to an arti~cle written by Alfred Schutz, one will see
	 how the joint participation to the musical temporality creates a social
	 relation.

A “Musical Communication”

Peta Tait, Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) In Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance, Peta Tail positions aerial performance of the past 140 years in the context of changing cultural beliefs about bodies. She channels a wealth of archival research into a nuanced account of the ways in which the tricks, choreography and costuming of aerialists have responded to 'shifts in cultural moods' (6), including cultural assumptions about male and female bodies. Her main contention is that the aerial body's complex combination of artistry and athleticism allows it to work with, against and beyond gender type, and so challenge 'assumptions about innate physical gender difference' (2). Tail's argument is persuasive, skilfully balancing a roughly chronological account of technical advances in aerial performance with the more critical task of mapping cultural representation and reception of gendered, racialised bodies in aerial performance in the past century and a half. Tait begins Circus Bodies with Jules Leotard's triumphant Parisian debut on trapeze in 1859. Though traditional rope and pole acts paved the way for Leotard's trapeze, and the still, swinging and flying return acts that swiftly followed, Tait suggests trapeze captured the public imagination in an unprecedented way (9). Her account contextualises public fascination with flying bodies in terms of a popular craving for spectacle established with nineteenth-century exhibitions of empire (13), a longstanding spiritual and scientific aspiration for mastery of the air (11), and Darwinian notions of natural and social evolution (15). Playing into such nineteenthcentury cultural tropes, 'aerialists flew between scientific precepts and poetic accolades' (16) Tait says, with narratives framing aerial acts ranging from the birdlike, godlike grace of Leotard to the 'comic pantomimes about macabre deaths' (25) of the Hanlon-Lees brothers. For Tait, aerial performance is fundamentally paradoxical; it taps into ideas of freedom, defiance, transgression and danger, but only through the most disciplined muscular training (26, 28). This muscularity mixes up (9) or doubles (28) the aerialist's identity in unique ways, showing 'the light gracefulness of males and the steely muscular strength of females' (1). In the early chapters of Circus Bodies, Tait convincingly attributes cultural anxiety about aerial acts in the late nineteenth century to male-female interchangeability in muscular prowess, and in flying, catching and weightbearing (28, 30-1 ). She looks, for instance, at the trapeze and iron jaw work of LaIa, Leona Dare and Emma Jutau (40-8). Taking the weight of themselves and their male counterparts on their teeth, these women's acts sat awkwardly with spectators' socially conditioned response to sex and race characteristics. Still, Tait reminds readers, while their acts showed a body that 'momentarily outmanoeuvred its low social positioning' (45), their feminised iron jaw apparatus was soon recuperated into a 'more socially conformist female aerial identity' (55) in anonymous aerial ballet and butterfly acts. Turning to the twentieth century, Tait acquaints readers with crossdressing and drag traditions in aerial performance. Her account of heightened hetero masculinity in the sometimes aggressive offstage behaviour of the well-documented 1920s female impersonator Barbette (72) is thorough and insightful. This said, I personally found her analysis of Luisita Leers, a female endurance performer from the same period for whom muscularity on a non-masculine body itself became a form of drag (77), more thought provoking. Tail's analysis unpacks press articles at pains to suggest that the tension between muscularity and inner identity need not queer Leers' femininity in a transgressive way (80-2), successfully underscoring her point about a cultural desire to recoup ambiguous representations of identities, relationships and power in aerial performance. …

Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance

Concentrating on the series “Girls” (2012–2017), “Fleabag” (2016), and “Insecure” (2016–), this article examines the female-centered dramedy as a current genre of U.S.-American television culture w...

Through the Gaps of My Fingers: Genre, Femininity, and Cringe Aesthetics in Dramedy Television:

This paper unpacks some of the complexities of the female comic project, focusing on the creation of physical comedy, via multiple readings of the term ‘serious’. Does female desire to be taken seriously in the public realm compromise female-driven comedy? Historically, female seriousness has been a weapon in the hands of such female-funniness sceptics as the late Christopher Hitchens, who (in)famously declared that women are too concerned with the grave importance of their reproductive responsibility to make good comedy. The dilemma is clear: for the woman attempting to elicit laughs, she is not serious enough outside the home, and far too serious inside it.

/pdf/take-me-seriously-now-laugh-at-me-how-gender-influences-the-4ofz3tyqca.pdf

Take me seriously. Now laugh at me! How gender influences the creation of contemporary physical comedy

Editorial Associates Paul Allain, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK; Len Berkman, Smith College, USA; Peter M. Boenisch, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK; Maggie Gale, University of Manchester, UK; Jen Harvie, Queen Mary, University of London; Paul Rae, National University of Singapore; Dan Rebellato, Royal Holloway, University of London; Joanne Tompkins, University of Queensland, Australia

Contemporary Theatre Review

This paper examines some of the ways in which gender impacts upon contemporary physical comedy. According to the late Christopher Hitchens (2007, 2), women are too concerned with the seriousness of their reproductive responsibility to make good comedy; as slapstick film director Mack Sennett (in Dale, 2000, 92) maintained: “No joke about a mother ever got a laugh”. This article proposes a method of understanding what happens to the body in the comic moment, then draws upon Kristeva’s notion of abjection to help understand how gender inflects the creation of physical comedy.

Bits and Bumps: gender, comedy and the body

In theatre, hierarchies that delineate role and function often obscure the collaborative work of conceptualising a performance. Similarly, group processes may mask hidden creative hierarchi...

/pdf/pennies-falling-collaborative-rewards-in-a-state-of-creative-1uu3onvzkp.pdf

Pennies falling: collaborative rewards in a state of creative emergency

In theatre, the hierarchies that delineate role and function often obscure the vital collaborative work that the creative team does to realise a performance Similarly, group processes may mask hidden creative hierarchies by labelling themselves ‘collaborative’ Either way, it is widely held that it’s difficult to make things in groups 
In the third year of the Bachelor of Fine Arts (Drama) program at the Queensland University of Technology students creatively develop a new performance to proof of concept stage Though pragmatics of time, space and resources are initial frames, when the groups begin collaborating, they have no idea of what the end point may be It emerges It is a creative emergency 

‘Then the penny dropped’ is a colloquial English expression capturing the moment of realisation after a period of uncertainty or confusion The creative development module under investigation is a learning experience in which the penny is still falling 

This article surveys three years of this program in action, comprising 23 separate creative projects and groups It describes the distinct characteristics of this learning environment, while developing taxonomy of the student works, group processes that realised them and identifying strategies for realising the opportunities offered by collaborative creativity

Bridget Boyle

Papers

Take me seriously. Now laugh at me! How gender influences the creation of contemporary physical comedy

Bits and Bumps: gender, comedy and the body

Pennies falling: collaborative rewards in a state of creative emergency

Pennies falling: Collaborative rewards in a state of creative emergency