New Books in Performing Arts

Cultural Narratives of Old Age in the Lives, Work, and Reception of Old Musicians (Routledge, 2024) discusses the creative work of old musicians—composers, performers, listeners, and scholars—and how those forms of music- making are received and understood. Joseph Straus argues that composing oldly, performing oldly, and listening oldly are distinctive and valuable ways of making music—a difference, not a deficit; to be celebrated, not ignored or condemned. This book follows Age Studies in seeing old age through a cultural lens, as something created and understood in culture. Straus’ text seeks to identify the ways that old musicians (composers, performers, listeners, and scholars) accept, resist, adapt, and transform the cultural scripts for the performance of old age. Musicking oldly (making music in old age) often represents an attempt to rewrite ageist cultural scripts and to find ways of flourishing musically in a largely hostile landscape.
Joseph Straus is Distinguished Professor of Music at the City University of New York Graduate Center, specializing in music since 1900. He has written technical music-theoretical articles, analytical studies of music by a variety of modernist composers, and, more recently, a series of articles and books that engage disability as a cultural practice. You can also listen to his episodes on SMT-POD in which he further discusses musicking in old age.
Emily Ruth Allen is an Instructor in Music History and Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina.
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Pamela Allen Brown joins Jana Byars to talk about The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage (Oxford University Press, 2022), which traces the transnational connections between Shakespeare's all-male stage and the first female stars in the West. The book is the first to use Italian and English plays and other sources to explore this relationship, focusing on the gifted actress who radically altered female roles and expanded the horizons of drama just as the English were building their first paying theaters. 
By the time Shakespeare began to write plays, women had been acting professionally in Italian troupes for two decades, traveling across the Continent and acting in all genres, including tragicomedy and tragedy. Some women became the first truly international stars, winning royal and noble patrons and literary admirers beyond Italy, with repeat tours in France and Spain.Elizabeth and her court caught wind of the Italians' success, and soon troupes with actresses came to London to perform. Through contacts direct and indirect, English professionals grew keenly aware of the mimetic revolution wrought by the skilled diva, who expanded the innamorata and made the type more engaging, outspoken, and autonomous. Some English writers pushed back, treating the actress as a whorish threat to the all-male stage, which had long minimized female roles. Others saw a vital new model full of promise. 
Faced with rising demand for Italian-style plays, Lyly, Marlowe, Kyd, and Shakespeare used Italian models from scripted and improvised drama to turn out stellar female parts in the mode of the actress, altering them in significant ways while continuing to use boys to play them. Writers seized on the comici's materials and methods to piece together pastoral, comic, and tragicomic plays from mobile theatergrams - plot elements, roles, stories, speeches, and star scenes, such as cross-dressing, the mad scene, and the sung lament. Shakespeare and his peers gave new prominence to female characters, marked their passions as un-English, and devised plots that figured them as self-aware agents, not counters traded between men. Playing up the skills and charisma of the boy player, they produced stunning roles charged with the diva's prodigious theatricality and alien glamour. Rightly perceived, the diva's celebrity and her acclaimed skills posed a radical challenge that pushed English playwrights to break with the past in enormously generative and provocative ways.
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Women’s Dance Traditions of Uzbekistan: Legacy of the Silk Road (Bloomsbury, 2024) is the first comprehensive work in English on the three major regional styles of Uzbek women's dance – Ferghana, Khiva and Bukhara – and their broader Silk Road cultural connections, from folklore roots to contemporary stage dance. The book surveys the remarkable development from the earliest manifestations in ancient civilizations to a sequestered existence under Islam; from patronage under Soviet power to a place of pride for Uzbek nationhood. It considers the role that immigration had to play on the development of the dances; how women boldly challenged societal gender roles to perform in public; how both material culture and the natural world manifest in the dance; and it illuminates the innovations of pioneering choreographers who drew from Central Asian folk traditions, gestures and aesthetics – not Russian ballet – to first shape modern Uzbek stage dance. Written by the first American dancer invited to study in Uzbekistan, this book offers insight into the once-hidden world of Uzbek women's dance.
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The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Katie Beisel Hollenbach reconsiders the story of American popular music, celebrity following, and fan behavior during World War II through close examination of “bobbysoxers.” Preserved in popular memory as primarily white, hysterical, teen girl devotees of Frank Sinatra clad in bobby socks and saddle shoes, these girls were accused of displaying inappropriate behavior and priorities in their obsessive pursuit of a crooning celebrity at a time of international crisis. Dr. Beisel Hollenbach peels back the stereotypes of girlhood idol adoration by documenting the intimate practices of wartime Sinatra fan clubs, revealing a new side of this familiar story in American history through the perspective of the bobbysoxer.
In World War II America, fan clubs and organizations like Teen Canteens offered a haven for teenage girls to celebrate their enjoyment of popular culture while cultivating relationships with each other through media icons and the entertainment industry. Many of these organizations attempted to encourage diverse memberships, influenced in part by Frank Sinatra's public work on racial and religious tolerance, and by Sinatra's own identity as an Italian American. Away from the critical public eye, these communities offered girls a place to safely explore and discuss issues including civil rights, politics, the war, patriotism, internationalism, and professional development in the context of their shared Sinatra fandom. With these broader social and political complexities in mind, The Business of Bobbysoxers shines a light on musical fan communities that provided teenage girls with peer groups at a critical moment of personal and historical change, allowing them to creatively express their desires and imagine their futures as American women together.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Narrative strategies, immersion, interaction, participation, identification, multimodality, characters and the connection between physical and fictional or virtual worlds: the fields of inquiry into the complex relationship between live performance and video games are numerous and diverse. For the first time, Live Performance and Video Games: Inspirations, Appropriations and Mutual Transfers (Transcript Publishing, 2024) brings together international researchers and artists to explore this relationship in a variety of essays. The contributors to this volume focus on reciprocal inspirations, appropriations and transfers applied by theatre artists, game designers and researchers. They analyze several artistic forms such as VR performance, immersive theatre, speedrunning or game theatre.
Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist.
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