American Indian performing arts

"[The] essays in this new volume on Native performing arts bring much deserved critical attention to a fabulous and diverse group of Native performers and performances. The scope is exciting, both in what the essays focus on -- contemporary Native plays, an early 20th century Sun Dance opera, punk rock band musicians, turn-of-the-century jazz bands, contemporary modern dance -- and also in the issues the authors raise and consider. These include ways of acknowledging the spiritual power of Native performance in contemporary settings, as well as tendencies to exotify; the power of performance to transform, and the difference between this and concepts of theatricality as mimesis; tribally specific rhetorics for reading and staging works previously filtered through other frames; appropriation and encroachment, codes of conduct in Native theater production, and the possibilities of Native/non-Native collaboration. Discussion of some commonalities that many Native performances share weave throughout, such as the close interconnections among place, time, memory and language; Indigenous cosmologies; ancestral connections; incisive political critique; sly and wry humor"--Pub. info.