The Dancing God: Staging Hindu Dance in Australia charts the sensational and historic journey of de-provincialising and popularising Hindu dance in Australia. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonialism, orientalism and nationalism came together in various combinations to make traditional Hindu temple dance into a global art form. The intricately symbolic Hindu dance in its vital form was virtually unseen and unknown in Australia until an Australian impresario, Louise Lightfoot, brought it onto the stage. Her experimental changes, which modernised Kathakali dance through her pioneering collaboration with Indian dancer Ananda Shivaram, moved the Hindu dance from the sphere of ritualistic practice to formalised stage art. Amit Sarwal argues that this movement enabled both the authentic Hindu dance and dancer to gain recognition worldwide and created in his persona a cultural guru and ambassador on the global stage. Ideal for anyone with an interest in global dance, The Dancing God is an in-depth study of how a unique dance form evolved in the meeting of travellers and cultures.

Since young male players were the norm during the English Renaissance, were all cross-dressed performances of female characters played with the same degree of seriousness? Probably not. Spectrums of Representation in Shakespearean Crossdressing examines these varied types of female characters in English Renaissance drama, drawing from a range of play texts themselves in order to investigate if evidence exists for varying performance practices for male-to-female crossdressing. This book argues for a reading of the representation of female characters on the English Renaissance stage that not only suggests categorizing crossdressing along a spectrum of theatrical artifice, but also explores how this range of artifice enriches our understanding of the plays. The scholarship surrounding cross-dressing rarely makes this distinction, since in our study of early modern plays we tend to accept as a matter of course that all crossdressing was essentially the same. The basis of Spectrums of Representation in Shakespearean Crossdressing is that it was not.

Preaching the Blues: Black Feminist Performance in Lynching Plays examines several lynching plays to foreground black women's performances as non-normative subjects who challenge white supremacist ideology. Maisha S. Akbar re-maps the study of lynching drama by examining plays that are contingent upon race-based settings in black households versus white households. She also discusses performances of lynching plays at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the South and reviews lynching plays closely tied to black school campuses. By focusing on current examples and impacts of lynching plays in the public sphere, this book grounds this historical form of theatre in the present day with depth and relevance. Of interest to scholars and students of both general Theatre and Performance Studies, and of African American Theatre and Drama, Preaching the Blues foregrounds the importance of black feminist artists in lynching culture and interdisciplinary scholarship.

Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre examines the function of dramaturgy and the role of the dramaturg in making a theatre performance situated at the crossroads of multiple theatre forms and performative devices. This book explores how these forms and devices are employed, challenged, experimented with, and reflected upon in the work of migrant theatre by performance and dance artists. Meerzon and Pewny ask: What impact do peoples' movement between continents, countries, cultures, and languages have on the process of meaning production in plays about migration created by migrant artists? What dramaturgical devices do migrant artists employ when they work in the context of multilingual production, with the texts written in many languages, and when staging performances that target multicultural and multilingual theatregoers? And, finally, how do the new multilingual practices of theatre writing and performance meet and transform the existing practices of postdramatic dramaturgies? By considering these questions in a global context, the editors explore the overlapping complexities of migratory performances with both range and depth. Ideal for scholars, students, and practitioners of theatre, dramaturgy, and devising, Dramaturgy of Migration expresses not only the practicalities of migratory performances but also the emotional responses of the artists who stage them.

A History of Romanian Theatre from Communism to Capitalism analyses the last three decades of Romanian theatre and connects it to the international stage. Cristina Modreanu questions the relationship between artists and power, both before 1989, behind the Iron Curtain, and in the current global political context, with nationalism manifesting itself in Eastern Europe, as seen in the critical work of Romanian theatre makers. This study covers the complex cases of theatre makers such as Lucian Pintilie, Liviu Ciulei and Andrei Serban, who built their international careers in exile, and the most innovative Romanian artists of today, such as Silviu Purcarete, Mihai Maniutiu, Gianina Carbunariu, Radu Afrim, and Bogdan Georgescu, who reached the status of transglobal artists. Filling a considerable gap in Romanian theatre discourse, this book will be of a great interest to students and scholars of contemporary theatre and history.

Over the past 50 years, Indigenous Australian theatre practice has emerged as a dynamic site for the discursive reflection of culture and tradition as well as colonial legacies, leveraging the power of storytelling to create and advocate contemporary fluid conceptions of Indigeneity. Performing Indigenous Identities on the Contemporary Australian Stage offers a window into the history and diversity of this vigorous practice. It introduces the reader to cornerstones of Indigenous Australian cultural frameworks and on this backdrop discusses a wealth of plays in light of their responses to contemporary Australian identity politics. The in-depth readings of two landmark theatre productions, Scott Rankin's Namatjira (2010) and Wesley Enoch & Anita Heiss' I Am Eora (2012), trace the artists' engagement with questions of community consolidation and national reconciliation, carefully considering the implications of their propositions for identity work arising from the translation of traditional ontologies into contemporary orientations. The analyses of the dramatic texts are incrementally enriched by a dense reflection of the production and reception contexts of the plays, providing an expanded framework for the critical consideration of contemporary postcolonial theatre practice that allows for a well-founded appreciation of the strengths yet also pointing to the limitations of current representative approaches on the Australian mainstage. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars of Postcolonial, Literary, Performance and Theatre Studies.

After the Long Silence offers a ground-breaking, meticulously researched criticism of Brazilian contemporary performance created by its post-dictatorship generation, whose work expresses the consequences of decades of state-imposed censorship. By offering an in-depth examination of key artists and their works, Claudia Tatinge Nascimento highlights Brazil's political trajectory while never allowing the weight of historical events to offset key aesthetic trends. Brazilian theater artists born around the time of the nation's 1964 military coup experienced the oppressive rule of dictatorship throughout their formative years, but came of age as Brazil re-entered democracy some two decades later. This book showcases how the post-dictatorship generation developed performances that mapped the uncharted territories of Brazil's political trauma with new dramaturgies, site-specific and street productions, and aesthetic experimentation. The author's in-depth research into a wide array of archival materials and publications in both Portuguese and English demonstrates how the artistic practices of significant post-dictatorship artists such as Cia. dos Atores, Teatro da Vertigem, Grupo Galpao, Os Fofos Encenam, and Newton Moreno were driven by critical thinking and a postcolonial sentiment, proving symptomatic of the nation's shift from an ethos of half-truth telling into a transitional justice that fell short in affirming citizenship. Ideal for scholars of the intersection of theatre and politics, After the Long Silence: The Theater of Brazil's Post-Dictatorship Generation offers insight into the function of theater in times of political turmoil and artmaking practices that emerge in response to oppressive regimes.

This volume collects twenty original essays on the philosophy of film. It uniquely brings together scholars working across a range of philosophical traditions and academic disciplines to broaden and advance debates on film and philosophy. The book includes contributions from a number of prominent philosophers of film including Noel Carroll, Chris Falzon, Deborah Knight, Paisley Livingston, Robert Sinnerbrink, Malcolm Turvey, and Thomas Wartenberg. While the topics explored by the contributors are diverse, there are a number of thematic threads that connect them. Overall, the book seeks to bridge analytic and continental approaches to philosophy of film in fruitful ways. Moving to the individual essays, the first two sections offer novel takes on the philosophical value and the nature of film. The next section focuses on the film-as-philosophy debate. Section IV covers cinematic experience, while Section V includes interpretations of individual films that touch on questions of artificial intelligence, race and film, and cinema's biopolitical potential. Finally, the last section proposes new avenues for future research on the moving image beyond film. This book will appeal to a broad range of scholars working in film studies, theory, and philosophy.

Drawing on expertise in art history, exhibition studies and cultural studies as well as politics and international relations, China in Australasia presents significant new perspectives on the role of art in the cultural diplomacy of the People's Republic of China. The book tells the forgotten story of the loan, exchange, and gifting of Chinese art, museum exhibitions-and the use of Chinese arts more broadly-in growing diplomatic relations with Australia and New Zealand, from 1949 to the present day. Its scope includes pre-modern, modern and contemporary sculpture, painting and peasant art, as well as ancient artefacts, performance arts and gardens. In considering the geopolitical connections opened by the arts, this book presents new insights into some of the ways in which China, often in conjunction with local supporters, sought to present itself to the people of Australia and New Zealand. It also considers how, for their part, New Zealanders and Australians worked to expand understandings of their powerful northern neighbour within changing political contexts. The first of its kind, this book-length interdisciplinary study of Chinese soft diplomacy in Australasia will be invaluable to students and scholars of Chinese studies, cultural diplomacy, museum studies and art history.

This book applies ecolinguistics and psychoanalysis to explore how films fictionalising environmental disasters provide spectacular warnings against the dangers of environmental apocalypse, while highlighting that even these apparently environmentally friendly films can still facilitate problematic real-world changes in how people treat the environment. Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis argues that these films exploit cinema's inherent Cartesian grammar to construct texts in which not only small groups of protagonist survivors, but also vicarious spectators, pleasurably transcend the fictionalised destruction. The ideological nature of the 'lifeboats' on which these survivors escape, moreover, is accompanied by additional elements that constitute contemporary Cartesian subjectivity, such as class and gender binaries, restored nuclear families, individual as opposed to social responsibilities for disasters, and so on. The book conducts extensive analyses of these processes, before considering alternative forms of filmmaking that might avoid the dangers of this existing form of storytelling. The book's new ecosophy and film theory establishes that Cartesian subjectivity is an environmentally destructive 'symptom' that everyday linguistic activities like watching films reinforce. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of film studies, literary studies (specifically ecocriticism), cultural studies, ecolinguistics, and ecosophy.

a short and accessible introduction on AI and Art written by leading experts

Theatre of the Sphere is Luis Valdez's exploration of the principles that underlie his innovations as a playwright, teacher, and theatrical innovator. He discusses the unique aesthetic, more than five decades in the making, that defines the work of his group El Teatro Campesino-from shows staged on the backs of flatbed trucks by the participants in the Delano Grape Strike of the 1960s to international megahits like Zoot Suit. Opening with a history of El Teatro Campesino, rich with Valdez's insights and remembrances, the book's first part provides context for the development of the Theatre of the Sphere acting method. The second part delivers the conceptual framework for Valdez's acting theory and practice, situating it in Mayan mathematics and metaphysics. The third part of the book applies this methodology to describe the "viente pasos," the 20-element exercise sequence that comprises the core practice of El Teatro Campesino-strengthening the body, balance, precision, and flexibility but also leadership, collaboration, observation, vulnerability, trust, and expression of passion; of consciousness of time, place, self, community, language, and belief; of honour, faith, morality, and commitment. The book concludes with the full text of Valdez's poem, "El Buen Actor/El Mal Actor," and a comprehensive bibliography for further study. This is a vital and indispensable text for today's actor, as well as scholars and students of contemporary theatre, American and Chicano performance, and the process of theatre-making, actor training, and community performance.

This volume brings together philosophical and interdisciplinary perspectives on improvisation. The contributions connect the theoretical dimensions of improvisation with different viewpoints on its practice in the arts and the classroom. The chapters address the phenomenon of improvisation in two related ways. On the one hand, they attend to the lived practices of improvisation both within and without the arts in order to explain the phenomenon. They also extend the scope of improvisational practices to include the role of improvisation in habit and in planned action, at both individual and collective levels. Drawing on recent work done in the philosophy of mind, they address questions such as whether improvisation is a single unified phenomenon or whether it entails different senses that can be discerned theoretically and practically. Finally, they ask after the special kind of improvisational expertise which characterizes musicians, dancers, and other practitioners, an expertise marked by the artist's ability to participate competently in complex situations while deliberately relinquishing control. Philosophy of Improvisation will appeal to anyone with a strong interest in improvisation, to researchers working in philosophy, aesthetics, and pedagogy as well as practitioners involved in different kinds of music, dance, and theater performances.

Girls, Performance, and Activism offers artists, activists, educators, and scholars a comprehensive analysis, celebration, and critique of the ways in which teenage girls create and perform activist theater. Girls, particularly Black and Latinx teenagers, are using the tools of performance to share their stories, devise new ones, and use the stage to advocate for social change. Interweaving interviews, poetic text, drama, and theory, this book provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of how and why this field erupted and the ways in which girls are using performance to transform themselves and enact change in their communities. As a white woman who has collaboratively created theater with hundreds of girls of color over the past 20 years, Dana Edell offers strategies for engaging with girls across difference through an intersectional lens in order to acknowledge the ways in which race, gender, age, class, ability, and sexuality influence girls' experiences and relationships with adult collaborators as they work to create meaningful, impactful, and often personal activist performances. This is the go-to handbook for teachers, theater directors, and performance makers who want to create politically engaged work with teenage girls.

Emphasizing the resilience of theatre arts in the midst of significant political change, Theatre After Empire spotlights the emergence of new performance styles in the wake of collapsed political systems. Centering on theatrical works from the late nineteenth century to the present, twelve original essays written by prominent theatre scholars showcase the development of new work after social revolutions, independence campaigns, the overthrow of monarchies, and world wars. Global in scope, this book features performances occurring across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The essays attend to a range of live events-theatre, dance, and performance art-that stage subaltern experiences and reveal societies in the midst of cultural, political, and geographic transition. This collection is an engaging resource for students and scholars of theatre and performance; world history; and those interested in postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and transnationalism.

Emphasizing the resilience of theatre arts in the midst of significant political change, Theatre After Empire spotlights the emergence of new performance styles in the wake of collapsed political systems. Centering on theatrical works from the late nineteenth century to the present, twelve original essays written by prominent theatre scholars showcase the development of new work after social revolutions, independence campaigns, the overthrow of monarchies, and world wars. Global in scope, this book features performances occurring across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The essays attend to a range of live events-theatre, dance, and performance art-that stage subaltern experiences and reveal societies in the midst of cultural, political, and geographic transition. This collection is an engaging resource for students and scholars of theatre and performance; world history; and those interested in postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and transnationalism.

Through a series of case studies, this book explores the role of live animals on the stage, from the early modern era to the present time. The contributors deal with visual and textual representations of performing animals; typologies of animals in the theatre; the hybridization of the drama with the circus, the zoo, and the cinema; as well as the semiotic transfer of animal roles from the text to the stage. The focus lies on the changing historical fortunes of the four-footed actor and on exploring the ways that attitudes to the animal affect their dramatic representations - within aesthetic contexts but also in their dramatized scientific use. Exploring snapshots of acting animals from their earliest manifestation on the early modern stage, the chapters contextualize and theorize particular uses of the animal actor, and key into current debates on the cutting edge of animal performance studies. While seeking to consider how these theoretical perspectives were formed, the collection delves into the multiple ways through which the animal presence problematizes the practice of theatricality. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studies in Theatre and Performance.

A unique exploration of the culinary imagination and creativity of a stellar array of international contemporary artists - a host of intriguing personal recipes shown through the artists' own words and images Creativity doesn't stop at an artist's studio door - for many, it continues into the kitchen. For the first time, more than 70 artists, including Ghada Amer, Jimmie Durham, Studio Olafur Eliasson, Subodh Gupta, Nikolai Haas, Jeppe Hein, Carsten Hoeller, Dorothy Iannone, Ragnar Kjartansson, John Lyons, Philippe Parreno, Nicolas Party, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Tiffany Sia, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, and others, have been invited to share and illustrate a recipe of their own. These are either the best culinary concoctions they have ever invented, or an especially meaningful dish. The result is an exciting range of contributions spanning all manner of meals and drinks, both savory and sweet, from around the globe, brilliantly brought to life by a wealth of sketches, photographs, collages, paintings, and personal snaps. Many of the culinary creations included are achievable by adventurous home cooks, but the pages include an incredibly diverse array of dishes from the conceptual to the personal, the elaborate to the simple, the sweet to the savory, and from the serious to the funny to the downright bizarre. With an introduction by the globally celebrated chef and art enthusiast Massimo Bottura, this is an intriguing and entertaining gift for food lovers and contemporary art enthusiasts alike.

A detailed account of the cultural history of the Chinese diaspora, with a focus on the performers and audiences who were involved in the making of Chinese performing cultures in Southeast Asia. Focusing on five different kinds of theatre troupes from China and their respective travels in Singapore, Bangkok, Malaya and Hong Kong, Zhang examines their different travelling experiences and divergent cultural practices. She thus sheds light on how transnational mobility was embodied, practised and circumscribed in the course of troupes' travelling, sojourning and interacting with diasporic communities. These troupes communicated diverse discourses and ideologies influenced by different social political movements in China, and these meanings were further altered by transmission. By unpacking multiple ways of performing Chineseness that was determined by changing time-space constructions, this volume provides valuable insight for scholars of the Chinese Diaspora, Transnational History and Performing Arts in Asia.

This book provides a thorough analysis of terpsichorean lexis in Renaissance drama. Besides considering not only the Shakespearean canon but also the Bard's contemporaries (e.g., dramatists as John Marston and Ben Jonson among the most refined Renaissance dance aficionados), the originality of this volume is highlighted in both its methodology and structure. As far as methods of analysis are concerned, corpora such as the VEP Early Modern Drama collection and EEBO, and corpus analysis tools such as #LancsBox are used in order to offer the widest range of examples possible from early modern plays and provide co-textual references for each dance. Examples from Renaissance playwrights are fundamental for the analysis of connotative meanings of the dances listed and their performative, poetic and metaphoric role in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama. This study will be of great interest to Renaissance researchers, lexicographers and dance historians.

Art forms tend to mirror themselves in each other. In order to understand literature and fine arts better, we often turn to music, speaking of the 'tone' in a book and of the 'rhythm' in a painting. In attempts to understand music better, we turn instead to the narrative arts, speaking of the 'story' of a musical piece. This book focuses on two examples of such conceptual mirror reflexivity: narrativity in jazz music and musicality in spoken theatre. These intermedial metaphors are shown to be significant to the practice and reflection of performing artists through their ability to mediate holistic views of what is considered to be of crucial importance in artistic practice, analysis, and education. This exploration opens up possibilities for new theoretical and practical insights with regard to how the borderland between temporal art forms can be conceptualized. The book will be of interest not only to scholars of music and theatre, but also to those who work in the fields of aesthetics, intermedial studies, cognitive linguistics, arts theory, communication theory, and cultural studies.

Art forms tend to mirror themselves in each other. In order to understand literature and fine arts better, we often turn to music, speaking of the 'tone' in a book and of the 'rhythm' in a painting. In attempts to understand music better, we turn instead to the narrative arts, speaking of the 'story' of a musical piece. This book focuses on two examples of such conceptual mirror reflexivity: narrativity in jazz music and musicality in spoken theatre. These intermedial metaphors are shown to be significant to the practice and reflection of performing artists through their ability to mediate holistic views of what is considered to be of crucial importance in artistic practice, analysis, and education. This exploration opens up possibilities for new theoretical and practical insights with regard to how the borderland between temporal art forms can be conceptualized. The book will be of interest not only to scholars of music and theatre, but also to those who work in the fields of aesthetics, intermedial studies, cognitive linguistics, arts theory, communication theory, and cultural studies.

Aimed to fashion students and designers, Palette Perfect is both a practical guide and an inspirational book that proposes a reflection on the universe of colour combinations, the moods and atmospheres they evoke and how we associate particular places and emotions to special colours. Each chapter explores a particular mood and describes the corresponding feelings and colour combinations, using as examples exquisite photographs of objects, still-lives, landscapes, interiors and fashion. At the end of each chapter, a wide variety of palettes representing the chapter's particular mood or atmosphere is included.