The Performing Life: A Singer’s Guide to Survival is the first-hand account of the 35-year career of singer, music professor, and recording artist Sharon Mabry, who draws on personal experience to explore how professional singers survive in the face of personal and professional pressures, exorbitant expectations, illness, and the demands of their public. She details the factors that can change the course of a particular performance or an entire career. Mabry offers sage advice for how singers can bolster themselves mentally, physically, and emotionally in order to maintain their powers of performance. Divided into two parts The Performing Life focuses first on such basics as the need for extensive preparation, discovering your performance niche, acquiring mentors, determining your “maintenance level,” finding a strong support system, learning how and what to organize, and discovering how to groom body and mind. In the second half, Mabry draws on her wealth of personal stories to dig more deeply into such seemingly mundane but absolutely critical matters as personal health (illness, food allergies, insomnia), logistical challenges presented by venue location and performance dynamics, and the difficulties off-stage organized by the recording studio. In all instances, Mabry illustrates how perseverance, organization, attention to detail, excellent training, strong planning, a resilient support system, and a good sense of humor can lead to a successful and satisfying career during even the most difficult times.

The collection of plays in this book is not only entertaining but also offers valuable life lessons. Whether you're a parent, teacher, or individual seeking personal growth and reflection, this book has something for everyone. With exercises and questions to enhance understanding, this book is a valuable tool for imparting moral lessons and inspiring personal growth.

Ethics is, in an important sense, a matter of ‘being good’ but it is also a question about how to live a ‘good life’. This book's emphasis on the theatrical and performative and their relationship to ethics, highlights that being good is, a matter of acting good and that acting good is a question of performing (or not-performing) certain roles and duties. This book surveys the most recent work in the field of ethics and performance, organizing this research through the metaphor of ‘the good life’. Each chapter explores a question about what it means to ‘act good’ at a different point in life and thus the book moves from natality to fatality, and beyond in its meditation on the relationship between performance and life itself. In this, it offers an important contribution to the contemporary debate about the relationship between ethics, theatre and performance studies.

We want to live good lives, but determining what a good life is isn’t easy, especially if we want the lives we lead to be ours, rather than somebody else’s. Tom Kennedy helps us see why it is hard to find our way when it comes to living well and what we can do about that. Finding our way requires knowing who we are, understanding ourselves, and Christians, because of their experience with God, will understand themselves differently than others in at least some ways. Kennedy explores that understanding and discovers that Christian encounters with God lead to beliefs about God, human nature, forgiveness, values, and loving well that have important implications for what we do and feel, for how we should live. In clear and familiar language, and with probing questions, he helps us think more carefully, and deeply, about our identities and what it should look like for us to live well.

This book examines the prolific and widely-attended popular theater boom of the género chico criollo in the context of Argentina’s modernization. Victoria Lynn Garrett examines how selected plays mediated the impact of economic liberalism, technological changes, new competing and contradictory gender roles, intense labor union activity, and the foreign/nativist dichotomy. Popular theaters served as spaces for cultural agency by portraying conventional and innovative performances of daily life. This dramatic corpus was a critical mass cultural medium that allowed audiences to evaluate the dominant fictions of liberal modernity, to critique Argentina’s purportedly democratic culture, and to imagine alternative performances of everyday life in accordance with their realities. Through a fresh look at the relationship among politics, economics, popular culture, and performance in Argentina’s modernization period, the book uncovers largely overlooked articulations of popular-class identities and desires for greater inclusion that would drive social and political struggles to this day.

Writing Performance, Identity, and Everyday Life invites the reader into Ronald J. Pelias’ world of artistic and everyday performance. Calling upon a broad range of qualitative methods, these selected writings from Pelias submerge themselves in the evocative and embodied, in the material and consequential, often creating moving accounts of their topics. The book is divided into four sections: Foundational Logics, Performance, Identity, and Everyday Life. Part I addresses the methodological underpinnings of the book, focusing on the ‘touchstones’ that inform Pelias’ work: performative, autoethnographic, poetic, and narrative methods. These directions push the researcher toward empathic engagement, a leaning toward others; using the literary to evoke the cognitive and affective aspects of experience; and an ethical sensibility located in social justice. Parts II–IV focus on artistic and everyday life performances, including discussions of the disciplinary shift from the oral interpretation of literature to the field of performance studies; empathy and the actor’s process; conceptions of performance; the performance of race, gender, and sexuality; and performances in interpersonal relations and academic circles. By the end, readers will see Pelias demonstrate the power of qualitative methods to engage and to present alternative ways of being. Pelias’ work shows us how to understand and feel the evocative strength of thinking performatively.

Safety, Reliability, Risk and Life-Cycle Performance of Structures and Infrastructures contains the plenary lectures and papers presented at the 11th International Conference on STRUCTURAL SAFETY AND RELIABILITY (ICOSSAR2013, New York, NY, USA, 16-20 June 2013), and covers major aspects of safety, reliability, risk and life-cycle performance of str