A historical, theoretical, and comparative study of the emergence of the director-as-author phenomenon, posing questions of authorship and redefining the relationship between 'playwright' and the director-playwright.

In this book, Erika Fischer-Lichte traces the emergence of performance as 'an art event' in its own right. In setting performance art on an equal footing with the traditional art object, she heralds a new aesthetics. The peculiar mode of experience that a performance provokes – blurring distinctions between artist and audience, body and mind, art and life – is here framed as the breeding ground for a new way of understanding performing arts, and through them even wider social and cultural processes. With an introduction by Marvin Carlson, this translation of the original Ästhetik des Performativen addresses key issues in performance art, experimental theatre and cultural performances to lay the ground for a new appreciation of the artistic event.

Gift exchange plays a crucial role in the social and political organization of Mendi in Papua New Guinea. This book reveals how considerable light can be shed on Mendi society, particularly on its political economy, by examining both the well-known ceremonial exchange festivals and the hitherto relatively little-studied everyday gift-giving practices. The author shows that the latter are crucial for understanding inter-group politics, the process of leadership, male-female relationships and the status of women, and the production, distribution and circulation of wealth. Currently the only book available on this society, the work offers an unusual combination of a social structural analysis with a study of local history and change. It is also of interest for its integration of the study of gift exchange and politics with the study of gender roles and relationships.

The Internet is changing the way we communicate. As a cross between letter-writing and conversation, email has altered traditional letter-writing conventions. Websites and chat rooms have made visual aspects of written communication of greater importance, arguably, than ever before. New communication codes continue to evolve with unprecedented speed. This book explores playfulness and artfulness in digital writing and communication and anwers penetrating questions about this new medium. Under what conditions do old letter-writing norms continue to be important, even in email? Digital greetings are changing the way we celebrate special occasions and public holidays, but will they take the place of paper postcards and greeting cards? The author also looks at how new art forms, such as virtual theatre, ASCII art, and digital folk art on IRC, are flourishing, and how many people collect and display digital fonts on handsome Websites, or even design their own. Intended as a time capsule documenting developments online in the mid- to late 1990s, when the Internet became a mass medium, this book treats the computer as an expressive instrument fostering new forms of creativity and popular culture.

This collection asks what's at stake when a theatrical space is created and when a performance takes place: under what circumstances the topology of theatre becomes political. It visits a politics of inclusion and exclusion, of distributions and placements, and of spatial appropriation and utopian concepts in theatre history and contemporary performance.

Prime ministers stand at the apex of government and loom large in the consciousness of the nations they lead. This book examines how prime ministers operate and how their performance as public leaders can be understood and evaluated.