Beyond Innocence

Children in Performance

Adele Senior

$284

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Routledge
23 October 2024

Performance art; Theatre Studies; Dance; Social issues & processes; Age groups: children

Series: Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

On a global platform we are witnessing the increased visibility of the people we call children and teenagers as political activists. Meanwhile, across the contemporary performance landscape, children are participating as performers and collaborators in ways that resonate with this figure of the child activist. Beyond Innocence: Children in Performance proposes that performance has the ability to offer alternatives to hegemonic perceptions of the child as innocent, in need of protection, and apolitical. Through an in-depth analysis of selected performances shown in the UK within the past decade, alongside newly gathered documentation on children’s participation in professional performance in their own words, this book considers how performance might offer more capacious representations of and encounters with children beyond the nostalgic and protective adult gaze elicited within mainstream contexts. Motivated by recent performative attempts to reimagine the figure of the child by working with children on stage, the book offers a new approach to both reading age in performance and also doing research with children rather than on or about them. By redressing the current imbalance between the way that we read children and adults’ bodies in performance and taking seriously children’s cultures and experiences, Beyond Innocence asks what strategies contemporary performance has to offer both children and adults in order to foster shared spaces for social and political change. As such, the book develops an approach to analysing performance that not only recognises children as makers of meaning but also as historically, politically, and culturally situated subjects and bodies with lived experiences that far exceed the familiar narratives of innocence and inexperience that children often have to bear.

By: Adele Senior
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780367488352
ISBN 10: 0367488353
Series: Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 23 October 2024
Audience: College/higher education , College/higher education , Further / Higher Education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

PART I Performing Children 1. The Problem Child of Contemporary Performance The Innocent Child The Child as a Blank Slate The Evil Child What is a Child? Children on Stage PART II Reading Children 2. From Age Transvestism to Trans*-age Performance: children playing adults 3. Age Crossing in Five Easy Pieces 4. The female-girl-child-teenager in The Hamilton Complex 5. From Gender to Age: a new approach to reading age in performance PART III Experiencing Children 6. Queer(ing) Methodologies 7. The Embodied Child of Blind Cinema 8. Growing Sideways Together: Zina Abaraonye and Sorrel Barnes on Men and Girls Dance and We Are Not Finished 9. The Child as Researcher and Archivist: documenting News News News Conclusion - The Glitch: child activism in performance

Adele Senior is a Reader in Theatre and Performance at Leeds Beckett University, UK.