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Full Description
Winner of the 2024 TaPRA David Bradby Monograph Prize
How is decadence being staged today - as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for?
This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value - namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism.
Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse - and what might lie in its wake.
Contents
Introduction
Uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and alternative productivities
Decadence in context: from page to stage
Slowdown and the pursuit of busyness
What follows
1. Zombie time: Sickness, performance, and the living dead
- Interminable waiting
- Zombie Time
2. Para-sites and wired bodies: Decadence, scenography, and the
performing body
- Parasitical space: Julia Bardsley
- Techno-productivism: Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca
3. Alien Nation: Afropessimism, Afrofuturism, and the decadent society
- 'What beasts they are': Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
- Alien Nation: The Uhuruverse
4. Frenetic standstill: Decadence, capitalism, and excess on the
Japanese stage
- Unstoppable motility: Toshiki Okada
- Theatre is explosion: Toco Nikaido
5. 'A dangerous form of decadence': Decadence, performance, and the
culture wars
- 'We should not subsidize decadence': Ron Athey
- Art, outrage, and austerity: Paul McCarthy and Wunderbaum
- 'A dangerous form of decadence': The war on woke
6. Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
