This book represents the first study dedicated to Twentieth Century German Art, the 1938 London exhibition that was the largest international response to the cultural policies of National Socialist Germany and the infamous Munich exhibition Degenerate Art. Provenance research into the catalogued exhibits has enabled a full reconstruction of the show for the first time: its contents and form, its contributors and their motivations, and its impact both in Britain and internationally. Presenting the research via six case-study exhibits, the book sheds new light on the exhibition and reveals it as one of the largest emigre projects of the period, which drew contributions from scores of German emigre collectors, dealers, art critics, and from the 'degenerate' artists themselves. The book explores the show's potency as an anti-Nazi statement, which prompted a direct reaction from Hitler himself.

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.

Staging Detection reveals how the new figure of the stage detective emerged in nineteenth-century Britain. The first book to explore the productive intersections between detection and performance across a range of Victorian plays, Staging Detection foregrounds the role of the stage detective in shaping important theatrical modes of the period, from popular melodrama to society comedy. Beginning in 1863 with Tom Taylor's blockbuster play, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, the book criss-crosses London following the earliest performances of stage detectives. Centring the work of playwrights, novelists, critics and actors, from Sarah Lane and Horace Wigan to Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde, Staging Detection sheds new light on Victorian acting styles, furthers our understanding of melodrama, and resituates the famous Wildean dandy as a successor to the stage detective. Drawing on histories of masculinity and gender performance as well as developing scientific theory and nineteenth-century visual culture, Staging Detection shows how the earliest stage portrayals of the detective shaped broader Victorian debates concerning fraud, omniscience and earned authority. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre history, Victorian literature and popular culture - as well as anyone with an interest in the figure of the detective.

This book argues that Shakespeare and various cultures of celebrity have enjoyed a ceaselessly adaptive, symbiotic relationship since the final decade of the sixteenth century, through which each entity has contributed to the vitality and adaptability of the other. In five chapters, Jennifer Holl explores the early modern culture of theatrical celebrity and its resonances in print and performance, especially in Shakespeare's interrogations of this emerging phenomenon in sonnets and histories, before moving on to examine the ways that shifting cultures of stage, film, and digital celebrity have perpetually recreated the Shakespeare, or even the #shakespeare, with whom audiences continue to interact. Situated at an intersection of multiple critical conversations, this book will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students of Shakespeare and Shakespearean appropriations, early modern theater, and celebrity studies.

This book offers the perspective of a program leader, practitioner, and scholar of actor training. It appeals to theatre artists and scholars alike. Students and teachers will also be interested in this firsthand account of training in an age of pandemics and social justice. The book's examination of training programs through cultural diversity and social justice is ripe for the current moment. It addresses the past and present state of training to envision the field's future. The book's unique research method offers an ethnographic investigation of training at drama schools in six countries spanning three continents. Over 100 interviews accompany onsite investigations of eighteen of the most distinguished acting programs in the world. Actor Training in Anglophone Countries is the only book of its kind that studies the history of training from an international perspective.

Theatre-Rites are regarded as pioneers in the field of object-led and site-specific performance, creating ground-breaking work for family audiences since 1995. This book marks the company's 25th anniversary, offering the first in-depth exploration of artistic director Sue Buckmaster's visionary practice, in which anything can be animated. This book draws on original research, including five years of in-depth interviews between its authors, images from Theatre-Rites' archive and Buckmaster's private collection, detailed observations from the company's professional training workshops and personal reflections on past productions. A timely and compelling advocacy for the importance of high-quality experimental arts provision for young audiences is made, distilling learning from decades of the company's professional activities to motivate and empower the next generation of object-led theatre-makers. Theatre-Rites: Animating Puppets, Objects and Sites is an invaluable resource for any puppeteer, actor, dancer, visual artist, poet or student interested in expanding their understanding of how to incorporate puppetry and/or symbolic objects as metaphors in their work.

Encountering the work of Alan Davie (1920-2014) at Wakefield Art Gallery in 1958, a young David Hockney (b.1937) was struck by Davie's landmark Abstract Expressionist paintings, which mirrored and stimulated his own fledgling experimentation with colourful abstraction. Juxtaposing the remarkable early work of two greats of post-war painting, this book provides an original perspective on an important aspect of two significant artistic careers. A richly illustrated text demonstrates points of convergence - such as the painterly surface, passion and poetry, and an exploration of text within the pictorial frame - while also presenting divergence, moving the discussion beyond comparison to reveal a moment when each artist expanded the expressive potential of the painted canvas. Seeking to suggest new relationships and continuities between two generations previously segregated, this beautifully produced publication is ambitious in its intention, pushing the boundaries of traditional interpretations of British art history.

Kay Fisker (1893-1965) is considered one of the most influential Danish architects of the twentieth century, and yet there has existed until now no in-depth English-language study of his works and writing. Published as part of the Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture series, which brings to light the work of significant yet overlooked modernist architects, this book examines Fisker's key projects - from his early railway stations and innovative housing projects to the Danish Academy in Rome - and analyses his work as a historian and writer. Fisker's output is closely associated with the functional tradition, a hybridization of international modernism and regional architectural typologies, and this book shows how his architectural poetics can be understood as an amalgamation of an ideal order with the contingent conditions of landscapes and urban sites. Hybridization is not only a valuable notion for understanding Fisker, the book argues, it can also be applied to an understanding of modernist architecture as a whole, with its various expressions, agendas and tensions both regionally and internationally.

This broad-based collection of essays is an introduction both to the concerns of contemporary folklore scholarship and to the variety of forms that folk performance has taken throughout English history. Combining case studies of specific folk practices with discussion of the various different lenses through which they have been viewed since becoming the subject of concerted study in Victorian times, this book builds on the latest work in an ever-growing body of contemporary folklore scholarship. Many of the contributing scholars are also practicing performers and bring experience and understanding of performance to their analyses and critiques. Chapters range across the spectrum of folk song, music, drama and dance, but maintain a focus on the key defining characteristics of folk performance - custom and tradition - in a full range of performances, from carol singing and sword dancing to playground rhymes and mummers' plays. As well as being an essential reference for folklorists and scholars of traditional performance and local history, this is a valuable resource for readers in all disciplines of dance, drama, song and music whose work coincides with English folk traditions.

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.

The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science integrates key findings from the cognitive sciences (cognitive psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary studies and relevant social sciences) with insights from theatre and performance studies. This rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field dynamically advances critical and theoretical knowledge, as well as driving innovation in practice. The anthology includes 30 specially commissioned chapters, many written by authors who have been at the cutting-edge of research and practice in the field over the last 15 years. These authors offer many empirical answers to four significant questions: How can performances in theatre, dance and other media achieve more emotional and social impact? How can we become more adept teachers and learners of performance both within and outside of classrooms? What can the cognitive sciences reveal about the nature of drama and human nature in general? How can knowledge transfer, from a synthesis of science and performance, assist professionals such as nurses, care-givers, therapists and emergency workers in their jobs? A wide-ranging and authoritative guide, The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science is an accessible tool for not only students, but practitioners and researchers in the arts and sciences as well.

This book argues that today's professoriate has become increasingly theatrical, largely as a result of neoliberal policies in higher education, but also in response to an anti-intellectual scrutiny that has become pervasive throughout the Western world. The Theatrical Professoriate: Contemporary Higher Education and Its Academic Dramas examines how the Western professoriate increasingly finds itself enacting command performances that utilize scripting, characterization, surrogation, and spectacle-the hallmarks of theatricality-toward neoliberal ends. Roxworthy explores how the theatrical nature of today's professoriate and the resultant glut of performances about academia on stage and screen have contributed to a highly ambivalent public fascination with academia. She further documents the "theatrical turn" witnessed in American higher education, as academic institutions use performance to intervene in the diversity issues and disciplinary disparities fueled by neoliberalism. By analyzing academic dramas and their audience reception alongside theoretical approaches, the author reveals how contemporary academia drives the professoriate to perform in what seem like increasingly artificial ways. Ideal for practitioners and students of education, ethnic, and science studies, The Theatrical Professoriate deftly intervenes in Performance Studies' still-unsettled debates over the differential impact of live versus mediated performances.

Cybernetic-Existentialism: Freedom, Systems, and Being-for-Others in Contemporary Arts and Performance offers a unique discourse and an original aesthetic theory. It argues that fusing perspectives from the philosophy of Existentialism with insights from the 'universal science' of cybernetics provides a new analytical lens and deconstructive methodology to critique art. In this study, Steve Dixon examines how a range of artists' works reveal the ideas of Existentialist philosophers including Kierkegaard, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Sartre on freedom, being and nothingness, eternal recurrence, the absurd, and being-for-others. Simultaneously, these artworks are shown to engage in complex explorations of concepts proposed by cyberneticians including Wiener, Shannon, and Bateson on information theory and 'noise', feedback loops, circularity, adaptive ecosystems, autopoiesis, and emergence. Dixon's groundbreaking book demonstrates how fusing insights and knowledge from these two fields can throw new light on pressing issues within contemporary arts and culture, including authenticity, angst and alienation, homeostasis, radical politics, and the human as system.

Moving through Conflict: Dance and Politics in Israel is a pioneering project in examining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through dance. It proposes a research framework for study of the social, cultural, aesthetic and political dynamics between Jews and Arabs as reflected in dance from late 19th-century Palestine to present-day Israel. Drawing on multiple disciplines, this book examines a variety of social and theatrical venues (communities, dance groups, evening classes and staged performances), dance genres (folk dancing, social dancing and theatrical dancing) and different cultural identities (Israeli, Palestinian and American). Underlying this work is a fundamental question: can the body and dance operate as nonverbal autonomous agents to mediate change in conflicting settings, transforming the "foreign" into the "familiar"? Or are they bound to their culturally dependent significance - and thus nothing more than additional sites of an embodied politics? This anthology expounds on various studies on dance, historical periods, points of view and points of contact that help promote thinking about this fundamental issue. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of dance studies, sociology, anthropology, art history, education and cultural studies, as well as conflict and resolution studies.

In this book, Gregory Salter traces how artists represented home and masculinities in the period of social and personal reconstruction after the Second World War in Britain. Salter considers home as an unstable entity at this historical moment, imbued with the optimism and hopes of post-war recovery while continuing to resonate with the memories and traumas of wartime. Artists examined in the book include John Bratby, Francis Bacon, Keith Vaughan, Francis Newton Souza and Victor Pasmore. Case studies featured range from the nuclear family and the body, to the nation. Combined, they present an argument that art enables an understanding of post-war reconstruction as a temporally unstable, long-term phenomenon which placed conceptions of home and masculinity at the heart of its aims. Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain sheds new light on how the fluid concepts of society, nation, masculinity and home interacted and influenced each other at this critical period in history and will be of interest to anyone studying art history, anthropology, sociology, history and cultural and heritage studies.

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 dynamic book offers a comprehensive companion to the theory and practice of Theatre of the Oppressed. Developed by Brazilian director and theorist Augusto Boal, these theatrical forms invite people to mobilize their knowledge and rehearse struggles against oppression. Featuring a diverse array of voices (many of them as yet unheard in the academic world), the book hosts dialogues on the following questions, among others: Why and how did Theatre of the Oppressed develop? What are the differences between the 1970s (when Theatre of the Oppressed began) and today? How has Theatre of the Oppressed been shaped by local and global shifts of the last 40-plus years? Why has Theatre of the Oppressed spread or "multiplied" across so many geographic, national, and cultural borders? How has Theatre of the Oppressed been shaped by globalization, "development," and neoliberalism? What are the stakes, challenges, and possibilities of Theatre of the Oppressed today? How can Theatre of the Oppressed balance practical analysis of what is with ambitious insistence on what could be? How can Theatre of the Oppressed hope, but concretely? Broad in scope yet rich in detail, The Routledge Companion to Theatre of the Oppressed contains practical and critical content relevant to artists, activists, teachers, students, and researchers.