A dance begins beneath the outstretched branches of the giant umunyinya tree in Rwanda. First there is drumming and clapping, then the lead dancers step into the center of the gathering. The dancing subsides and the gacaca court, the community hearin...

Auschwitz. Hiroshima. Cambodia's killing fields. The World Trade Center. The mass graves of Rwanda. These places of violent death have become part of the recreational landscape of tourism, an industry that is otherwise dedicated to pleasure and escap...

From cannibalism to light-calligraphy, from self-harming to animal sacrifice, from meat entwined with sex toys to a commodity-embedded ice wall, the idiosyncratic output of Chinese time-based art over the past twenty-five years has invigorated contem...

"Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China" is the first comprehensive review of the history and development of avant-garde drama and theater in the People's Republic of China since 1976. Drawing on a range of critical pers...

In "The Avant-Garde", Mike Sell rejects the common idea that the avant-garde is only about art and insists that it is much more than a European phenomenon. In doing so, he redefines the historical, geographical, ideological, disciplinary, and theoret...

For the last fifteen years, performance artist and writer Guillermo Gomez-Pena has led a series of ongoing conversations with cultural luminaries from both North and South America. These dialogues with theorists, curators, activists, and fellow artis...

In her book "In a Different Voice", psychologist Carol Gilligan proffered the controversial idea that a psychology of male development could not suffice as a psychology of all human development, both male and female. Since the publication of that rev...

During the week before Labor Day every year, 35,000 people gather in Nevada's Black Rock Desert and build Black Rock City. At the center of Black Rock City is a 40-foot wooden effigy of a man, an icon around which art, performance, and community revo...

From the Greeks and Shakespeare to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, war has often been a major theme of dramatic performances. However, many of the most extraordinary theater projects in recent years not only have been about war but also have origin...

Over the centuries, observances of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, have traveled far from their origins at Karbala – a windswept desert plain that is now a town in present-day Iraq – where, according to tradition, Hussein, the belo...