Les Waters is a master director who has worked with many of the most important American theatre artists of the 21st century. A thorough examination of his creative practice and body of work amounts to a picture of American theatre in our time. While collaboration is promoted and celebrated in practical theatre courses and professional training programs far and wide, this book offers concrete and situation-specific examples of how accomplished theatre artists have grapple with the challenges of creating together. The book features writing from the full spectrum of professional disciplines (actors, designers, stage managers, and dramaturgs, as well as directors and playwrights).

Born into a large, musical, and bohemian family in London, the British artist John Craxton (1922-2009) has been described as a Neo-Romantic, but he called himself a "kind of Arcadian". His early art was influenced by Blake, Palmer, Miro, and Picasso. After achieving a dream of moving to Greece, his work evolved as a personal response to Byzantine mosaics, El Greco, and the art of Greek life. This book tells his adventurous story for the first time. At turns exciting, funny, and poignant, the saga is enlivened by Craxton's ebullient pictures. Ian Collins expands our understanding of the artist greatly-including an in-depth exploration of the storied, complicated friendship between Craxton and Lucian Freud, drawing on letters and memories that Craxton wanted to remain private until after his death.

The 20th century was a dynamic period for the theatrical arts in China. Booming urban theatres, the interaction between commercial practice and theatre, dramas staged during the War of Resistance against Japan and a healthy dialogue between Western and Eastern theatres all contributed to the momentousness of this period. The four volumes of A History of Chinese Theatre in the 20th Century display the developmental trajectories of Chinese theatre over those 100 years. This volume deals with the development of Chinese theatre from 1949 to 2000, covering the fluctuations of 'drama reform', spectacles of the 'Cultural Revolution', and theatre in the immediate years before the opening up of the country. The author demonstrates how Chinese dramatic traditions endured and adapted in the face of modernity and how politics and art interacted. By combining academic rigour with a high degree of readability, this volume is both an essential guide for scholars and students in the history of the arts and general readers interested in Chinese theatre.

This book examines how circus and circus imaginary have shaped the historical avant-gardes at the beginning of the 20th century and the cultures they help constitute, to what extent this is a mutual shaping, and why this is still relevant today. This book aims to produce a better sense of the artistic work and cultural achievements that have emerged from the interplay of circus and avant-garde artists and projects, and to clarify both their transhistorical and trans-medial presence, and their scope for interdisciplinary expansion. Across 14 chapters written by leading scholars - from fields as varied as circus, theatre and performance studies, art, media studies, film and cultural history - some of which are written together with performers and circus practitioners, the book examines to what extent circus and avant-garde connections contribute to a better understanding of early 20th century artistic movements and their enduring legacy, of the history of popular entertainment, and the cultural relevance of circus arts. Circus and the Avant-Gardes elucidates how the realm of the circus as a model, or rather a blueprint for modernist experiment, innovation and (re)negotiation of bodies, has become fully integrated in our ways of perceiving avant-gardes today. The book does not only map the significance of circus/avant-garde phenomena for the past, but, through an exploration of their contemporary actualisations (in different media), also carves out their achievements, relevance, and impact, both cultural and aesthetic, on the present time.

- A comprehensive guide to musicals that are based on musicians' existing back catalogues - how they work, why they work and why they are so successful. - Written for musical theatre students at all levels - primarily on the 150 BA degrees across the UK and North America. - The first book to address this relatively new genre of musical theatre, doing so with in-depth and wide ranging analysis.

1. The last specialised study of Deburau (the most famous and influential mime actor of all time) in French or English was the biography by Tristan Remy in 1954, Jean-Gaspard Deburau. 2. This book is very wide-ranging: starting with Deburau's Pierrot figure, it discusses nineteenth-century theatre, novels, poetry, society, and twentieth-century echoes in cinema and modern mime. 3. Readers who think they know who and what 'Pierrot' is (and was) will be surprised by what they find in this book; for example, his relation to colonialism and race. 4. There are 26 figures in the book, all of them discussed in depth. 5. Deburau is well-known among scholars, and the wider public know his image even if they can't necessarily put a name to it, but he has never been studied through such a wide range of manuscript as well as published sources, many of them identified for the first time.

Surveys the key figures in the development and evolution of LGBTQ representation in contemporary US theatre. Aimed at the full breadth of theatre and performing arts students in the USA. No other book has the same breadth and depth of coverage in this subject area, or a comparable roster of leading scholars.

The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy is a volume of especially commissioned critical essays, conversations, collaborative, creative and performative writing mapping the key contexts, debates, methods, discourses and practices in this developing field. Firstly, the collection offers new insights on the fundamental question of how thinking happens: where, when, how and by whom philosophy is performed. Secondly, it provides a plurality of new accounts of performance and performativity - as the production of ideas, bodies and knowledges - in the arts and beyond. Comprising texts written by international artists, philosophers and scholars from multiple disciplines, the essays engage with questions of how performance thinks and how thought is performed in a wide range of philosophies and performances, from the ancient to the contemporary. Concepts and practices from diverse geographical regions and cultural traditions are analysed to draw conclusions about how performance operates across art, philosophy and everyday life. The collection both contributes to and critiques the philosophy of music, dance, theatre and performance, exploring the idea of a philosophy from the arts. It is crucial reading material for those interested in the hierarchy of the relationship between philosophy and the arts, advancing debates on philosophical method, and the relation between Performance and Philosophy more broadly.

Bridget Riley, one of the leading abstract painters of her generation, holds a unique position in contemporary art. She has developed and extended the range of her interests ever since her first success in the 1960s, creating a body of work which is both consistent and highly varied. This volume, now fully revised and updated, reveals the mind behind this remarkable aachievement, drawing together the most important texts and interviews of the last fifty years. Riley's writings show a passionate engagement with her subjects and a great insight paired with a freshness of approach and an exceptional clarity of expression. Quite apart from providing a key to understanding her own work, this book is a fascinating document reflecting the issues and problems facing an artist in the 21st century.

Digital art practitioners work under the constant threat of a medium - the digital - that objectifies the self and depersonalises artistic identities. If digital technology is a pharmakon in that it can be either cure or poison, with regard to digital art practices the digital may have in fact worked as a placebo that has allowed us to push back the date in which the crisis between digital and art will be given serious thought. This book is hence concerned with an analysis of such a relationship and proposes their rethinking in terms of an ethico-phenomenological practice informed by an in-depth understanding of the digital medium. Giuseppe Torre engages with underground cultures such as Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and its ties with art discourse. The discussion is informed by various philosophical discourses and media theories, with a focus on how such ideas connect back to the existing literature in performance studies. Replete with examples of artwork and practices, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and performance studies, art and technology.

From bottle gardens, the bachelor pad and Batman to designer gnomes and monogamy spray, this book uses a diverse range of objects to explore the changing significance of kitsch. With its unique approach to its subject, Kitsch! Cultural politics and taste promises to advance debates in cultural studies and sociology around taste, while providing an invaluable introduction for students and interested readers. Kitsch! examines how the idea of kitsch is mobilised - progressively, as bad taste, as camp and as cool - to inform notions of identity and sensibility. Where most studies proceed from the kitsch object, this book takes the moment of aesthetic judgement as its starting point and attempts to identify the ideological work performed by the category itself. The book poses the strongest challenge to those who argue that taste is democratised in contemporary culture, offering ample evidence that judgements of taste have shifted ground rather than relaxed. Above all, the story of kitsch proposed by the authors is intended to disturb kitsch's reputation as the source of a ready-made sensibility and politics. Kitsch has a history and not, as it has been supposed, an essence and is consequently the site of love, hate, joy, exasperation, irony, nausea and all of the twisted possibilities between. -- .

This revised third edition of The Male Dancer updates and enlarges a seminal book that has established itself as the definitive study of the performance of masculinities in twentieth century modernist and contemporary choreography. In this authoritative and lively study, Ramsay Burt presents close readings of dance works from key moments of social and political change in the norms around gender and sexuality. The book's argument that prejudices against male dancers are rooted in our ideas about the male body and behaviour has been extended to take into account recent interdisciplinary discussions about whiteness, intersectionality, disability studies, and female masculinities. As well as analysing works by canonical figures like Nijinsky, Graham, Cunningham, and Bausch, it also examines the work of lesser-known figures like Michio Ito and Eleo Pomare, as well as choreographers who have recently emerged internationally like Germaine Acogny and Trajal Harrell. The Male Dancer has proven to be essential reading for anyone interested in dance and the cultural representation of gender. By reflecting on the latest studies in theory, performance, and practice, Burt has thoroughly updated this important book to include dance works from the last ten years and has renewed its timeliness for the 2020s.

The mention of the term "melodrama" is likely to evoke a response from laymen and musicians alike that betrays an acquaintance only with the popular form of the genre and its greatly heightened drama, exaggerated often to the point of the ridiculous. Few are aware that there exists a type of melodrama that contains in its smaller forms the beauty of the sung ballad and, in the larger-scale works, the appeal of the spoken play. This category of melodrama is one that surfaced in many cultures but was perhaps never so enthusiastically cultivated as in the Czech lands. The melodrama varied greatly at the hands of its Czech advocates. While the works of Zdenek Fibich and his contemporary Josef Bohuslav Foerster, a composer best known for his songs, remained closely bound to the text, those of conductor/composer Otakar Ostrcil reveal a stance that privileged the music and, given their creator's orchestral experience, are more reminiscent of the symphonic poem. Fibich in his staged works and Josef Suk (composer/violinist and Dvorak's son-in-law), in his incidental music reflect variously late nineteenth-century Romanticism, the influence of Wagner, and early manifestations of Impressionism. In its more recent guise, the principles of the staged melodrama reside quite comfortably in the film score. Judith A. Mabary's important volume will be of interest not only to musicologists, but those working in Central and East European studies, voice studies, European theatre, and those studying music and nationalism.

In this study, Josefine Wikstroem challenges a concept of performance that makes no difference between art and non-art and argues for a new concept. This book confronts and criticises the way in which the dominating concept of performance has been used in art theory and performance and dance studies. Through an analysis of 1960s performance practices, Wikstroem focuses specifically on task-dance and event-score practices and provides an examination of the key philosophical concepts that are inseparable from such a concept of art and are necessary for the reconstruction of a critical concept of performance, such as "practice", "experience", "object", "abstraction" and "structure". This book will be of great interest to scholars, students and practitioners across dance, performance art, aesthetics and art theory.

The Routledge Companion to Applied Performance provides an in-depth, far-reaching and provocative consideration of how scholars and artists negotiate the theoretical, historical and practical politics of applied performance, both in the academy and beyond. These volumes offer insights from within and beyond the sphere of English-speaking scholarship, curated by regional experts in applied performance. The reader will gain an understanding of some of the dominant preoccupations of performance in specified regions, enhanced by contextual framing. From the dis(h)arming of the human body through dance in Colombia to clowning with dementia in Australia, via challenges to violent nationalism in the Balkans, transgender performance in Pakistan and resistance rap in Kashmir, the essays, interviews and scripts are eloquent testimony to the courage and hope of people who believe in the power of art to renew the human spirit. Students, academics, practitioners, policy-makers, cultural anthropologists and activists will benefit from the opportunities to forge new networks and develop in-depth comparative research offered by this bold, global project.

Ronnie Wood is one of the foremost rock guitarists in the world, but his artistic talents extend beyond music. Throughout his stellar musical career from The Birds to the Faces and the Rolling Stones, Ronnie has never lost his passion for painting, drawing and sculpture. Exuding the same irrepressible energy as Ronnie himself, Ronnie Wood: Artist is the first ever comprehensive collection of his paintings and other artworks, created to mark the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The bright, bold volume brings together the fruits of a lifetime in the arts, brimming with six decades of memorable and diverse work, from his art college portfolio (he studied alongside Pete Townshend) to the intimate work of his personal life today. Inside, a generous selection of his Stones work, including rare watercolours of Mick, Keith and Charlie backstage, meets acrylics of contemporaries Rod Stewart, Jeff Beck and Keith Moon. Portraits of formative jazz innovators Count Basie, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday sit alongside blues heroes Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and Big Bill Broonzy. Paintings of Hollywood's elite - Paul Newman, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe - juxtapose real-time fashion sketches of Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell and deft pastel compositions from his residency at the Royal Ballet. The artist himself provides the captions and insights into the thought and motivation behind each piece. With an introduction by Emmanuel Guigon (director of the Museu Picasso, Barcelona, where Ronnie will be beginning a residency in 2018) and an afterword by none other than Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood: Artist exists where fine art and rock 'n' roll collide. This extensive and eclectic collection offers unique insights into the entire world of Ronnie Wood, and, with close to 400 works, is a fitting testament to the artistic range and ambition of rock 'n' roll's most successful artist

* Showcases an exploration of monstrosity in performance through key themes including race, gender and sexuality, disability studies * Interdisciplinary book that will be relevant to students and scholars from many backgrounds including Theatre and Performance, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Disability Studies * Uniquely international approach to the study of monstrosity which sets it apart from other books whose focus are more Eurocentric/Western

If today students of social theory read Jurgen Habermas, Michael Foucault and Anthony Giddens, then proper regard to the question of culture means that they should also read Raymond Williams, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zizek. The second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Social and Cultural Theory is fully revised and updated to provide students, teachers and researchers with a comprehensive, critical guide to the major traditions of thought in social and cultural theory, as well as tracing the complex intellectual connections between these distinct but related approaches to understanding society and culture. The Handbook, edited by acclaimed sociologist Anthony Elliott, develops a powerful argument for bringing together social and cultural theory more systematically than ever before. Key social and cultural theories, ranging from classical approaches to postmodern, psychoanalytic and post-feminist approaches, are drawn together and critically appraised. There are also new chapters on mobilities and migrations, as well as posthumanism. The Handbook, written in a clear and direct style will appeal to a wide audience of students and scholars. The extensive references and sources will direct students to areas of further study.

Relevance and Marginalisation in Scandinavian and European Performing Arts 1770-1860: Questioning Canons reveals how various cultural processes have influenced what has been included, and what has been marginalised from canons of European music, dance, and theatre around the turn of the nineteenth century and the following decades. This collection of essays includes discussion of the piano repertory for young ladies in England; canonisation of the French minuet; marginalisation of the popular German dramatist Kotzebue from the dramatic canon; dance repertory and social life in Christiania (Oslo); informal cultural activities in Trondheim; repertory of Norwegian musical clocks; female itinerant performers in the Nordic sphere; preconditions, dissemination, and popularity of equestrian drama; marginalisation and amateur staging of a Singspiel by the renowned Danish playwright Oehlenschlager, also with perspectives on the music and its composers; and the perceived relevance of Henrik Ibsen's staged theatre repertory and early dramas. By questioning established notions about canon, marginalisation, and relevance within the performing arts in the period 1770-1860, this book asserts itself as an intriguing text both to the culturally interested public and to scholars and students of musicology, dance research, and theatre studies.

A guide to the contemporary London stage as well as an argument about its future, the book walks readers through the city's performance spaces following the Brexit vote. Austerity-era London theatre is suffused with the belief that private ownership defines full citizenship, its perspective narrowing to what an affluent audience might find relatable. From pub theatres to the National, Michael Meeuwis reveals how what gets put on in London interacts with the daily life of the neighbourhoods in which they are set. This study addresses global theatregoers, as well as students and scholars across theatre and performance studies-particularly those interested in UK culture after Brexit, urban geography, class, and theatrical economics.

In the first three decades of the 20th century Augustus John (1878-1961) was widely considered one of the greatest living British artists, famous almost as much for his extraordinary Bohemian lifestyle as for his outstanding portraits, etchings and drawings. John was born in Wales in 1878 and educated at the Slade School of Art in London in the 1890s, where the onus of teaching was on the daily life class and a close study of the Old Masters. He soon emerged as a wonderfully gifted draughtsman - indeed, the American painter John Singer Sargent would declare that John's youthful drawings were amongst the fi nest seen since the Renaissance. Dividing his life between England, Wales and France, and reaching his prime in the years immediately before the outbreak of the Great War, by 1910 John would be likened to a British Gauguin, a Welsh Post-Impressionist using bold colours and a willfully naive and primitive style to explore the complex combination of romanticism, escapism and alienation engendered by 20th-century life. The great American collector John Quinn considered John and his sister Gwen key European artists, and his work would be included in the infl uential Armory Show in New York in 1913. After the War he would become Britain's leading society portraitist, earning a fortune in commissions - though it was his more personal paintings of friends, lovers, family and fellow artists and writers such as W.B. Yeats, T.E. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Ottoline Morrell and his muse/ mistress Dorelia McNeill that best revealed his great talents. Published to coincide with exhibitions at Poole Museum in Dorset in the summer of 2018 and at Salisbury Museum in Wiltshire in the summer of 2019, Augustus John: Drawn from Life re-examines the life and work of this signifi cant but increasingly overlooked British artist. Focusing on around sixty works drawn from private and public collections, including the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of Wales, the book will off er new insights into John's life and development as an artist from the late 1890s to the outbreak of the Second World War.