Play and Performance offers hope to those lamenting the loss of play in the twenty-first century and aims to broaden the understanding of what play is. This volume showcases the work of programs from early childhood through adulthood, in a variety of educational and therapeutic settings, and from a range of theoretical and practical perspectives. The chapters cover an array of practices that can be seen across the play to performance continuum. Taken together, the myriad ways that play is performance and performance is play become clear, sometimes blurring the need for distinction. The volume provides play advocates, researchers and practitioners a wealth of practical and theoretical ideas for expanding the use of performance as a tool for creating playful environments where children and adults can create and develop.

Play helps define who we are as human beings. However, many of the leisurely/ludic activities people participate in are created and governed by corporate entities with social, political, and business agendas. As such, it is critical that scholars understand and explicate the ideological underpinnings of played-through experiences and how they affect the player/performers who engage in them. This book explores how people play and why their play matters, with a particular interest in how ludic experiences are often constructed and controlled by the interests of institutions, including corporations, non-profit organizations, government agencies, religious organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Each chapter explores diverse sites of play. From theme parks to comic conventions to massively-multiplayer online games, they probe what roles the designers of these experiences construct for players, and how such play might affect participants' identities and ideologies. Scholars of performance studies, leisure studies, media studies and sociology will find this book an essential reference when studying facets of play.

Play, Philosophy and Performance is a cutting-edge collection of essays exploring the philosophy of play. It showcases the most innovative, interdisciplinary work in the rapidly developing field of Play Studies. How we play, and the relation of play to the human condition, is becoming increasingly recognised as a field of scholarly inquiry as well as a significant element of social practice, public policy and socio-cultural understanding. Drawing on approaches ranging through morality and ethics, language and the nature of reality, aesthetics, digital culture and gaming, and written by an international group of emerging and established scholars, this book examines how our performance at play describes, shapes and influences our performance as human beings. This is essential reading for anybody with an interest in leisure, education, childhood, gaming, the arts, playwork or many branches of philosophical enquiry.

In this second edition, the author opens with a discussion of important developments in the discipline. His closing chapter, 'Global and Intercultural Performance', is completely rewritten in light of the post-9/11 world. Fully revised chapters with new examples, biographies and source material provide a lively, easily accessible overview of the full range of performance for undergraduates at all levels in performance studies, theatre, performing arts and cultural studies. Among the topics discussed are the performing arts and popular entertainments, rituals, play and games as well as the performances of everyday life. Supporting examples and ideas are drawn from the social sciences, performing arts, post-structuralism, ritual theory, ethology, philosophy and aesthetics. User-friendly, with a special text design, Performance Studies: An Introduction also includes the following features: numerous extracts from primary sources giving alternative voices and viewpoints biographies of key thinkers student activities to stimulate fieldwork, classroom exercises and discussion key reading lists for each chapter twenty line drawings and 202 photographs drawn from private and public collections around the world.

A lively, deeply reported tour of the science and strategies helping athletes like Tom Brady, Serena Williams, Carli Lloyd, and LeBron James redefine the notion of “peak age.” Season after season, today’s sports superstars seem to defy the limits of physical aging that inevitably sideline their competitors. How much of the difference is genetic destiny and how much can be attributed to better training, medicine, and technology? Is athletic longevity a skill that can be taught or a mental discipline that can be mastered? Can career-ending injuries be predicted and avoided? Journalist Jeff Bercovici spent extensive time with professional and Olympic athletes, coaches, and doctors to find the answers to these questions. His quest led him to training camps, tournaments, hospitals, antiaging clinics, and Silicon Valley startups, where he tried cutting-edge treatments and technologies firsthand and investigated the realities behind health fads like alkaline diets, high-intensity interval training, and cryotherapy. Through fascinating profiles and first-person anecdotes, Bercovici illuminates the science and strategies extending the careers of elite older athletes, uncovers the latest advances in fields from nutrition to brain science to virtual reality, and offers empowering insights about how the rest of us can find peak performance at any age.

Growing out of a series of articles written over a 15 year period, and illustrated with over 100 photos, this volume offers a narrowed focus examination of various performing traditions that rely on the expressive power and imagination of masks. It explores the redefinition of self into "other," when the mask is worn, and examines actors and their performances in Papua New Guinea, Orissa, India, and Bali.