Your Subtitle text

Books

On the Edge of Utopia:

Performance and Ritual at Burning Man

Available at Amazon.com

Since 1986, Burning Man has evolved from founder Larry Harvey’s personal healing ritual into a cultural movement where ritual, visual art, and performance collide on an epic scale. During the week before Labor Day, forty-nine thousand people gather in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to build Black Rock City. At the center of Black Rock City is a forty-foot wooden effigy of a Man, an icon around which art, performance, and community revolve. In this book Rachel Bowditch – performer, theatre director, scholar, and Burning Man participant – explores the spectrum of performance and ritual practices within Black Rock City from the everyday to spectacle, from the profane to the sublime. Burning Man can be seen as a revival of the ancient Roman Saturnalia, a site for rehearsals of utopia, and a secular pilgrimage that is forging new paradigms for performance, installation art, community, and invented rituals bringing the avant-garde into the 21^st century.

Books

On the Edge of Utopia: Performance and Ritual at Burning Man

Seagull Books Enactments Series distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Festive Performance: Staging Identity, Politics, and Utopia in the Americas.

(Work-in-Progress)

Co-editing with Pegge Vissicaro (Associate Chair of Dance).

Under contract with Seagull Books Enactments Series distributed by University of Chicago Press. May 2012.

Festive Performance: Staging Identity, Politics, and Utopia in the Americas locates the festival or “fiesta” as a site for utopian/dystopian negotiation of identity, politics and nationality in the context of the Americas. This anthology will include scholars from around the Americas whose work focuses on festivals as utopian sites for social transformation. The “Americas” as a theoretical discourse frames the book and allows us to place festivals occurring across the hemisphere side by side in dynamic conversation with one another.

Crossing the Line: Rasaboxes Sourcebook (working title)

(Work-in-progress)

Co-editing with Paula Murray Cole with essays by Richard Schechner, Michele Minnick and others. In development.

Devised by Richard Schechner-- based on ideas from French theorist Antonin Artaud, the Natyasastra, a classical Indian treatise on performance, and contemporary scientific studies on emotion--the rasaboxes exercises comprise a unique improvisational, psychophysical approach for finding truthful, fully embodied sensations of presence and emotional specificity through direct physical engagement.

Working holistically, this technique unifies mind, body, emotion and intention to produce performance work that is viscerally engaging – whether applied to the subtlety of film acting or the boldness of commedia dell’arte. The rasaboxes exercises integrate, rather than separate, acting, movement and voice, engaging the whole performer in one approach. Rigorous daily training includes yoga, extensive breath, voice and movement work, and solo and ensemble generated performance composition developed from the rasaboxes material. The Rasaboxes Sourcebook will include theoretical essays, exercises, and applications of the work in K-12 education, undergraduate and graduate theatre training, in directing, and in drama therapy.