Explore the vast range of titles available.

\"The Sixties, Center Stage offers rich insights into the innovative and provocative political underpinnings of mainstream and popular performances in the 1960s. While much critical attention has been focused on experimental and radical theater of the period, the essays confirm that mainstream performances not only merit more scholarly attention than they have received, but through serious examination provide an important key to understanding the 1960s as a period. The introduction provides a broad overview of the social, political, and cultural contexts of artistic practices in mainstream theater from the mid-fifties to mid-seventies. Readers will find detailed examinations of the mainstream's surprising attention to craft and innovation; to the rich exchange between European and American theatres; to the rise of regional theaters; and finally, to popular cultural performances that pushed the conceptual boundaries of mainstream institutions. The book looks afresh at productions of Hair, Cabaret, Raisin in the Sun, and Fiddler on the Roof, as well as German theater, and performances outside the Democratic National Convention of 1968\"-- Provided by publisher.

The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s)offers a strikingly new perspective on key controversies and debates within avant-garde studies, arguing for the importance of reopening pivotal controversies and debates in avant-garde studies and challenging pronouncements of the \"death of the avant-garde\" that tend to obscure the diversity and plurality of avant-garde gesture and expression.James M. Harding revisits iconic sites of early 20th-century performance to examine how European avant-gardists attempted-unsuccessfully-to employ that discourse as a strategy for enforcing uniformity among a politically and culturally diverse group of artists. He then takes aim at historical and aesthetic categories that have promoted a restrictive history and theory of the avant-garde and narrow readings of avant-garde performance. Harding reveals the Eurocentric undercurrents that underlie these categories and urges a consideration of the global political dimensions of avant-garde gestures. His book will interest scholars of theater and performance, art history, and literary studies, as well as those interested in the relation of art to politics in various historical periods and cultures.

Response to David Lyon's \"God’s Eye: A Reason for Hope.\"

\"A thoughtful and engaging contribution to the field that will have a sustained and lasting impact on the way feminist performance is defined and understood, as well as on how feminist histories and historiographies continue to challenge and transform the larger field of performance.\"---Charlotte Canning, The University of Texas at Austin \"Harding forcefully challenges and destabilizes the male-centered Eurocentric genealogy of the avant-garde, which he claims is an uncontested, linear, positivistic history, unproblematized by theory. Then he argues that this gendered biased version of the European avant-garde is carried over into American historiography . . . A forceful case for a revisionist history.\"---Daniel Gerould, The City University of New York Graduate Center Cutting Performanceschallenges four decades' worth of scholarship on the American avant-garde by offering a provocative reconceptualization of the history of avant-garde performance along feminist lines. Focusing on five women artists (Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gertrude Stein, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, and Valerie Solanas) whose performance aesthetics made prominent use of collage techniques, James M. Harding sheds light on the cultural history of the avant-garde and the role that experimental women artists played in that history. He investigates the prominent position that collage technique occupied within the artists' performance aesthetic, and the decisively feminist inflection that their work gives to collage as a mode of avant-garde expression. The radical juxtapositions in their works produce the powerful effects of making the familiar strange and establishing contexts from which new understandings may emerge. Harding examines the performative dimensions of collage in experimental, feminist redefinitions of the literary, graphic, and theatrical arts, filling a void in a scholarly discourse that, while ostensibly about the vanguard, has lagged well behind other significant theoretical and historiographical currents.Cutting Performancesnot only challenges assumptions that have governed scholarship on the American avant-garde but also establishes a context to rethink the history of American avant-garde performance along feminist lines. It will appeal to audiences interested in theater history and performance studies as well as those interested in the cultural history of the avant-garde and the role that feminist experimental artists have played in it. James M. Harding is Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington. His other books includeNot the Other Avant-Garde: Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance(with John Rouse);Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and Their Legacies(with Cindy Rosenthal); andContours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality. Illustration: Carolee Schneemann inEye Body-36 Transformative Actions(1963) Action for camera (Photograph by Erró). Reproduced by permission of Carolee Schneemann.

On June 11, 1963, a procession of somewhere between 200 and 350 Buddhist monks and nuns made its way toward the Cambodian Embassy in Saigon, Vietnam. The monks and nuns carried signs of protest that drew attention to the Buddhist-Catholic crisis in Vietnam under the government of then President Ngo Dinh Diem, a devout Catholic who used the power of his office, among other things, to repress non-Catholic religious traditions. The turning point in the demonstration came when Thich Quang Duc, a sixty-six year-old Buddhist monk emerged from the sedan leading the procession, assumed the lotus position at a busy intersection, was doused with gasoline by fellow monks, and then set himself on fire. Shocking photograph by Malcolm Brown of Thich Quang Duc documents a performative act that opened up a profound cultural vortex. As an event, that act was an event horizon to a kind of black hole. Here, Harding argues the case of Thich Quang Duc's self-immolation as an event that reshapes history, reminding the effect of black holes more generally.

Almost without exception, studies of the avant-garde take for granted the premise that the influential experimental practices associated with the avant-garde began primarily as a European phenomenon that in turn spread around the world. These ten original essays, especially commissioned for Not the Other Avant-Garde, forge a radically new conception of the avant-garde by demonstrating the many ways in which the first—and second—wave avant-gardes were always already a transnational phenomenon, an amalgam of often contradictory performance traditions and practices developed in various cultural locations around the world, including Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, Argentina, India, and Japan. Essays from leading scholars and critics—including Marvin Carlson, Sudipto Chatterjee, John Conteh-Morgan, Peter Eckersall, Harry J. Elam Jr., Joachim Fiebach, David G. Goodman, Jean Graham-Jones, Hannah Higgins, and Adam Versényi—suggest collectively that the very concept of the avant-garde is possible only if conceptualized beyond the limitations of Eurocentric paradigms. Not the Other Avant-Garde is groundbreaking in both avant-garde studies and performance studies and will be a valuable contribution to the fields of theater studies, modernist studies, art history, literature, and music history.

This article discusses the Buddhist socio-political tradition of self-immolation as an expression of ontological abhorrence of repressive political systems through the lens of theatre, theatrical performance, ritual theory and historiography One can talk at length about how the images of Thích Qung c radicalized international public opinion against the repressiveness of the Diem government, drew international attention to the plight of Buddhists in Vietnam, and set the stage for the wide range of human rights and anti-war demonstrations that challenged the emerging debacle of the Vietnam War. Thích Qung cs act accomplished all this, but it did so, arguably, because his act of self-immolation was the kind of transformative moment that functioned like intense heat in an enclosed area, which, as it begins to cool, pulls in the air around it to fill the empty space that its previous incendiary expansiveness created. In such moments, parallel paths bend into each other and historical trajectories collide. In this particular moment, the cool pull after Thích Qung cs self-immolation was situated at the explosive collision of multiple, seemingly parallel forms of vanguardism, forms that like particles in Einsteins notion of the universe appear to be linear and parallel in their trajectories only then to collide as the universe itself bends and curves into its own revolution and vortex. OA

Single-agent nivolumab showed durable responses, manageable safety, and promising survival in patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma in the phase 1–2 CheckMate 040 study. We aimed to investigate nivolumab monotherapy compared with sorafenib monotherapy in the first-line setting for patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma. In this randomised, open-label, phase 3 trial done at medical centres across 22 countries and territories in Asia, Australasia, Europe, and North America, patients at least 18 years old with histologically confirmed advanced hepatocellular carcinoma not eligible for, or whose disease had progressed after, surgery or locoregional treatment; with no previous systemic therapy for hepatocellular carcinoma, with Child-Pugh class A and Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status score of 0 or 1, and regardless of viral hepatitis status were randomly assigned (1:1) via an interactive voice response system to receive nivolumab (240 mg intravenously every 2 weeks) or sorafenib (400 mg orally twice daily) until disease progression or unacceptable toxicity. The primary endpoint was overall survival assessed in the intention-to-treat population. Safety was assessed in all patients who received at least one dose of study drug. This completed trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02576509. Between Jan 11, 2016, and May 24, 2017, 743 patients were randomly assigned to treatment (nivolumab, n=371; sorafenib, n=372). At the primary analysis, the median follow-up for overall survival was 15·2 months (IQR 5·7–28·0) for the nivolumab group and 13·4 months (5·7–25·9) in the sorafenib group. Median overall survival was 16·4 months (95% CI 13·9–18·4) with nivolumab and 14·7 months (11·9–17·2) with sorafenib (hazard ratio 0·85 [95% CI 0·72–1·02]; p=0·075; minimum follow-up 22·8 months); the protocol-defined significance level of p=0·0419 was not reached. The most common grade 3 or worse treatment-related adverse events were palmar-plantar erythrodysaesthesia (1 [<1%] of 367 patients in the nivolumab group vs 52 [14%] of patients in the sorafenib group), aspartate aminotransferase increase (22 [6%] vs 13 [4%]), and hypertension (0 vs 26 [7%]). Serious treatment-related adverse events were reported in 43 (12%) patients receiving nivolumab and 39 (11%) patients receiving sorafenib. Four deaths in the nivolumab group and one death in the sorafenib group were assessed as treatment related. First-line nivolumab treatment did not significantly improve overall survival compared with sorafenib, but clinical activity and a favourable safety profile were observed in patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma. Thus, nivolumab might be considered a therapeutic option for patients in whom tyrosine kinase inhibitors and antiangiogenic drugs are contraindicated or have substantial risks. Bristol Myers Squibb in collaboration with Ono Pharmaceutical.