This issue of Music and Arts in Action (MAiA) marks the start of our third year of publication. The articles in this issue address varied fields of performance: opera, rock music, and engaged theatre. Taken together, these pieces look in detail at how individual performers, prop-makers, directors, playwrights, composers, and others work interactively with aesthetic materials (e.g., scripts, lights, bodies, musical scores and instruments, etc.) to carefully design and carry out a ‘successful’ performance (both in terms of achieving a set aim of audience impact, as well as seamlessly integrating performer and performance). In other words, success in performance not only requires close attention to an artistic and aesthetic narrative, but also significant emotional and social management by individual performers to play a role in this narrative.

Recent Submissions

  • Theatre and activism: the agit prop theatre way 

    Pal, Swati (University of Exeter, 2010)
    Agit prop or agitational propaganda, as the very term implies, seeks to deliberately change people’s beliefs through well-planned strategies of persuasion, transformations of spectators into (spect)actors, and their ...
  • Women rockers and the strategies of a minority position 

    Fournet, Adele Keala (University of Exeter, 2010)
    This article is a distillation of an ethnography conducted in the fall of 2008 of female rock instrumentalists performing in bands in the Tampa, Florida bay area. The study looked into why there are comparatively very few ...
  • Making opera work: bricolage and the management of dramaturgy 

    Atkinson, Paul (University of Exeter, 1 October 2010)
    Based on an ethnographic study of an international opera company, the paper reports a number of aspects of preparation, rehearsal and performance. It documents the creation of operatic productions as everyday, mundane ...
  • Editorial 

    MAiA Editorial Team (University of Exeter, 2010)
    The articles in this issue address varied fields of performance: opera, rock music, and engaged theatre. Taken together, these pieces look in detail at how individual performers, prop-makers, directors, playwrights, ...
  • Plague and the Moonflower: a regional community celebrates the environment 

    Curtis, David John (University of Exeter, 18 October 2010)
    This paper is based on a case study of audience responses to the oratorio Plague and the Moonflower. The oratorio was performed by the community of Armidale in rural New South Wales, Australia. Through an examination of ...