The living statue: Performer, poseur, posthuman

Lavender, Andy

doi:10.1386/stap.33.2.119_1

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…To give the impression of being completely still, many performers consciously minimize their blinking and breathing. Some performers have prior training as mimes, and many meditate or engage in other activities that enhance corporeal control and the ability to remain motionless for extended periods (Lavender, ).…”

Section: Living Statues and The ‘Golden Age’ Of Busking In Barcelonamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are various historical precedents for the modern‐day living statue, including the tableaux vivants of the medieval and renaissance periods, and the provocative poses plastiques , a Victorian performance style that became popular in theaters, music halls and circuses during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Erdman, ; Anae, ; Lavender, ). As a form of busking, the living statue emerged during the last few decades of the twentieth century.…”

Section: Living Statues and The ‘Golden Age’ Of Busking In Barcelonamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Street Performance, Public Space, and the Boundaries of Urban Desirability: The Case of Living Statues in Barcelona

Astor¹

2019

Int J Urban Regional Res

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How do cities determine who has the right to station themselves in iconic public spaces? This article explores this question by analyzing the evolution of Barcelona's approach to regulating street performance, with a particular focus on regulations pertaining to ‘living statues’. Although most buskers have been expelled from the Ramblas, one of the city's most emblematic walkways, living statues remain permitted on the promenade. This, I argue, is due to the general embrace of statues as part of local tradition and their integration within city‐branding campaigns, as well as their own organizing and boundary work. As the image Barcelona seeks to cultivate has changed, however, the right of statues to station themselves in public space has become ever more tenuous. My findings speak to broader questions regarding how cities determine the boundaries of ‘urban desirability’, as well as why and how such boundaries change over time. They also elucidate the strategies that groups located at the margins employ in attempting to position themselves favorably in relation to such boundaries. More generally, they highlight how current approaches to analyzing urban inclusion and exclusion may benefit from a more sustained engagement with the burgeoning social scientific literature on symbolic boundaries.

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Section: Living Statues and The ‘Golden Age’ Of Busking In Barcelonamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Living Statues and The ‘Golden Age’ Of Busking In Barcelonamentioning

confidence: 99%

Street Performance, Public Space, and the Boundaries of Urban Desirability: The Case of Living Statues in Barcelona

Astor¹

2019

Int J Urban Regional Res

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“…Frequently, passersby do not realize the performer is a real person, which often sparks surprise when the “statue” makes a small gesture (such as a wink or nod). When busking, the performer aims to create instants of interaction with the public that result in a tip (Lavender, 2013).…”

Section: The Living Statue: a Form Of Street Theatermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is a form of street theater, which can also be seen as busking, especially in tourist attractions. The artist, dressed up and made up like a statue, creates the illusion of complete stillness by standing still, without a flicker or a twitch, sometimes for hours, in an everyday, public, dynamic, urban environment (Lavender, 2013; https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_statue).…”

Section: The Living Statue: a Form Of Street Theatermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This mastery of the body also involves a disciplining of the self, which is subjected to rigorous deprivation (of movement and relaxation) that devolves the body entirely to the performance. Practices such as yoga, the Alexander Method, and mime can help artists develop the skills needed (Lavender, 2013). Although the living statues medium is still a relatively new artistic form that only began in the mid-20th century, it can already be seen in many cities, festivals, and events around the world.…”

Section: The Living Statue: a Form Of Street Theatermentioning

confidence: 99%

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Doing Less Is Doing More: Living Statues as a Medium in Drama Therapy

Berger¹

2019

Journal of Humanistic Psychology

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This article presents the living statues method as a prime medium in expressive art therapy and particularly in drama therapy. It describes the method, its specific characteristics and their meaning, and shows how a public performance can be a space for a creative, art-based, therapeutic process. Two vignettes from practice illustrate how the living statues method can be applied to work with teenagers with behavioral problems and the elderly. It also highlights the relationships between this nonverbal, creative, “body–mind–spirit” performance-oriented method and humanistic psychology.

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Paris in Korean Cinema: Fraudulence and the Female Form in Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day and Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals

Choe¹

2023

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This article explores how and why fraudulence and deception get coded as feminine in Korean politics and popular culture. Focusing on the processes whereby deception gets conflated with the female body, it examines filmic articulations of physical and rhetorical attacks—ranging from subtle to overt—against works of art about the female body, in which aesthetic judgments take on a moral character. The article begins with a discussion of Kim Soyoung's new woman: her first song (2004), which locates the possibilities for subject formation that the figure of the new Korean woman exemplifies in deformations, ruptures and breakages. The article then turns to a pair of films, Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day (2007) and Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals (1997), which explore the threat and possibilities that such a model of feminine subjectivity offers. The article then closes by way of reference to Jeon Soo-il's A Korean in Paris (2015), in which the possibility of formless subjectivity becomes disavowed within a paranoid vision of the new Korean woman as a fraud. In all of these films, the misogynist tendencies within contemporary Korean society are specifically displaced onto the distant location of Paris, which is not coincidentally regarded as the origin point of the new Korean woman. Generally, in Korean cinema, Paris has been featured both as a site of authenticity and formal experimentation in art and also as the scene of sexual awakening for women. The films discussed in this article foreground questions of aesthetic style around the figure of the female body, and in the process, the female subject's engagement to art becomes conflated with and assessed by questions of morality, becoming divorced from the more relevant aesthetic contexts.

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The living statue: Performer, poseur, posthuman

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Street Performance, Public Space, and the Boundaries of Urban Desirability: The Case of Living Statues in Barcelona

Street Performance, Public Space, and the Boundaries of Urban Desirability: The Case of Living Statues in Barcelona

Doing Less Is Doing More: Living Statues as a Medium in Drama Therapy

Paris in Korean Cinema: Fraudulence and the Female Form in Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day and Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals

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