In this ground-breaking collection of critical essays, 15 writers explore the experimental, interdisciplinary and radically transgressive field of contemporary live art in South Africa.

Set against a contemporary South African society that is chronologically `post' apartheid, but one that continues to grapple with material redress, land redistribution and systemic racism, Acts of Transgression finds a representation of the complexity of this moment within the rich potential of a performative art form that transcends disciplinary boundaries and aesthetic conventions. The collection probes live art's intersection with crisis and socio-political turbulence, shifting notions of identity and belonging, embodied trauma and loss, questions of archive, memory and the troubling of colonial systems of knowing,

an interrogation of narratives of the past and visions for the future.These diverse essays, analysing the work of more than 25 contemporary South African artists and accompanied by a striking visual record of more than 50 photographs, represent the first major critical study of contemporary live art in South Africa; a study that is as timeous as it is imperative.

Taking a curtain call with a live snake in her wig...

Cavorting naked through the countryside painted green...

Acting opposite a child with a pumpkin on his head...

These are just a few of the things Dame Judi Dench has done in the name of Shakespeare.

For the very first time, Judi opens up about every Shakespearean role she has played throughout her seven-decade career, from Lady Macbeth and Titania to Ophelia and Cleopatra.

Here she reveals her behind the scenes secrets; inviting us to share in her triumphs, disasters, and backstage shenanigans, all brightened by her mischievous sense of humour and striking honesty.

Witty, provocative and inspiring, this is ultimately Judi's love letter to Shakespeare, or rather, The Man Who Pays The Rent.

Elesin Oba, the King's Horseman, has a single destiny. When the King dies, he must commit ritual suicide and lead his King's favourite horse and dog through the passage to the world of the ancestors. A British Colonial Officer, Pilkings, intervenes to prevent the death and arrests Elesin. The play is a set text for NEAB GCSE, NEAB A Level and NEAB A/S Level. 'A masterpiece of 20th century drama' - Guardian "A transfixing work of modern world drama" (Independent); "clearly a masterpiece. . . he achieves the full impact of Greek tragedy" (Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday); "the action of the play is as inevitable and eloquent as in Antigone: a clash of values and cultures so fundamental that tragedy issues: a tragedy for each individual, each tribe" (Michael Schmidt, Daily Telegraph)

In Spectacular Men, Sarah E. Chinn investigates how working class white men looked to the early American theatre for examples of ideal manhood. Theatre-going was the primary source of entertainment for working people of the early Republic and the Jacksonian period, and plays implicitly and explicitly addressed the risks and rewards of citizenship. Ranging from representations of the heroes of the American Revolution to images of doomed Indians to plays about ancient Rome, Chinn unearths dozens of plays rarely read by critics. Spectacular Men places the theatre at the center of the self-creation of working white men, as voters, as workers, and as Americans.

Queer Virgins examines the creation and theatrical performance of queer puns in Renaissance London. Its argument--that a small theatre known as the Whitefriars was run by a community of playwrights who self-consciously targeted an audience sympathetic to homoerotic desire and to homoerotic puns in particular--revises the current scholarly belief that early modern Londoners did not form self-conscious communities based on erotic desire. This book is for students of the early modern theatre; those who are interested in the history of erotic relations between men, and all who delight in puns and bawdy.

First published in 1984, Gerald Bordman's Oxford Companion to American Theatre is the standard one-volume source on our national theatre. Critics have hailed its "wealth of authoritative information" (Back Stage), its "fascinating picture of the volatile American stage" (The Guardian), and its "well-chosen, illuminating facts" (Newsday).
Now thoroughly revised, this distinguished volume once again provides an up-to-date guide to the American stage from its beginnings to the present. Completely updated by theater professor Thomas Hischak, the volume includes playwrights, plays, actors, directors, producers, songwriters, famous playhouses, dramatic movements, and much more. The book covers not only classic works (such as Death of a Salesman) but also many commercially successful plays (such as Getting Gertie's Garter), plus entries on foreign figures that have influenced our dramatic development (from Shakespeare to Beckett and Pinter). New entries include recent plays such as Angels in America and Six Degrees of Separation, performers such as Eric Bogosian and Bill Irwin, playwrights like David Henry Hwang and Wendy Wasserstein, and relevant developments and issues including AIDS in American theatre, theatrical producing by Disney, and the rise in solo performance.
Accessible and authoritative, this valuable A-Z reference is ideal not only for students and scholars of theater, but everyone with a passion for the stage.

Is God Is is a modern myth about twin sisters who sojourn from the Dirty South to the California desert to exact righteous revenge. Winner of the 2016 Relentless Award, Aleshea Harris collides the ancient, the modern, the tragic, the Spaghetti Western, and Afropunk in this darkly funny and unapologetic world premiere.

The relationship between the practice of dance and the technologies of representation have excited artists since the advent of film. Dancers, choreographers, and directors are increasingly drawn to screendance, the practice of capturing dance as a moving image mediated by a camera. While the interest in screendance has grown in importance and influence amongst artists, it has until now flown under the academic radar. Emmy-nominated director and auteur Douglas Rosenberg's groundbreaking book considers screendance as both a visual art form as well as an extension of modern and post-modern dance without drawing artificial boundaries between the two. Both a history and a critical framework, Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image is a new and important look at the subject. As he reconstructs the history and influences of screendance, Rosenberg presents a theoretical guide to navigating the boundaries of an inherently collaborative art form. Drawing on psycho-analytic, literary, materialist, queer, and feminist modes of analysis, Rosenberg explores the relationships between camera and subject, director and dancer, and the ephemeral nature of dance and the fixed nature of film. This interdisciplinary approach allows for a broader discussion of issues of hybridity and mediatized representation as they apply to dance on film. Rosenberg also discusses the audiences and venues of screendance and the tensions between commercial and fine-art cultures that the form has confronted in recent years. The surge of screendance festivals and courses at universities around the world has exposed the friction that exists between art, which is generally curated, and dance, which is generally programmed. Rosenberg explores the cultural implications of both methods of reaching audiences, and ultimately calls for a radical new way of thinking of both dance and film that engages with critical issues rather than simple advocacy.

Tandem Dances: Choreographing Immersive Performance is the first book to propose dance and choreography as frames through which to examine immersive theatre, more broadly known as immersive performance. Indicative of a larger renaissance in storytelling during the digital age, immersive performance is influenced by emerging computer technologies, such as virtual reality and advances in video-gaming, as well as increased interest in new forms of experiential entertainment. The idea of tandemness - suggesting motion that is achieved by two bodies working together and acting in conjunction with one another - is critical throughout the book. Author Julia M. Ritter persuasively argues that practitioners of immersive productions deploy choreography as a structural mechanism to mobilize the bodies of cast and audience members to perform together. Furthermore, choreography is contextualized as an effective tool for facilitating audience participation towards immersion as an affect. Through a focus on Western dance histories, theories, and practices, Ritter's close choreographic analysis of immersive productions, along with unique insights from choreographers, directors, performers, and spectators, enlivens discourse across dramaturgy, kinesthesia, affect, and co-authorship. By foregrounding the choreographic in order to examine its specific impact on the evolution of immersive theater, Tandem Dances explores choreography as a discursive domain that is fundamentally related to creative practice, agendas of power and control, and concomitant issues of freedom and agency.

Copyright looms large in the digital world. As users and creators of expressive works, we all know more about copyright than we did a decade ago. But scholars of modernism have felt a special urgency in grappling with this branch of law, whose rapid expansion in recent years has prolonged or revived the rights in many modernist works. Indeed, thanks to public clashes between estates and users, 'modernism' has lately begun to seem like a byword for contested intellectual property. At the same time, today's volatile legal climate has prompted us to ask how modernism was, from its beginning, shaped by intellectual property law-and how modernists sought variously to exploit, reform, anoint, and evade copyright. We are beginning to discover, too, how copyright's transatlantic and imperial asymmetries during the modernist decades helped set the stage for its geopolitical role in the new millennium. Modernism and Copyright is the first book to take up these questions and discoveries in all their urgency. A truly multi-disciplinary study, it brings together essays by well-known scholars of literature, theater, cinema, music, and law as well as by practicing lawyers and caretakers of modernist literary estates. Its contributors' methods are as diverse as the works they discuss: Ezra Pound's copyright statute and Charlie Parker's bebop compositions feature here, as do early Chaplin, EverQuest, and the Madison Avenue memo. As our portrait of modernism expands and fragments, Modernism and Copyright locates works like these on one of the few landscapes they all clearly share: the uneven terrain of intellectual property law.

The past twenty years have seen an extraordinary and exciting growth in Canadian theater. Today, 200 professional theater companies span the country and more than 10,000 published plays appear in bibliographies. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre is the first reference book to document the growth and development of Canadian drama and theater in English and French--from its beginnings to the present day. The book offers 680 entries written by 155 contributors that provide biographies of actors, playwrights, directors, and designers; major theaters, including 19th-century theaters, and companies; major plays; and numerous miscellaneous subjects such as collective theater, design, directing, ethnic theater, musical theater, radio and television drama, and local theater. The result of almost four years' research, this authoritative reference offers a wealth of fascinating and important information, as well as over 200 beautiful illustrations.

Based on new research, and informed by recent developments in literary and historical studies, The Theatres of War reveals the importance of the theatre in the shaping of response to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1793-1815). Gillian Russell explores the roles of the military and navy as both actors and audiences, and shows their performances to be crucial to their self-perception as actors fighting on behalf of an often distant domestic audience. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of 1793-1815 had profound consequences for British society, politics, and culture. In this, the first in-depth study of the cultural dimension of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Gillian Russell examines an important dimension of the experience of these wars - theatricality. Through this study, the theatre emerges as a place where battles were celebrated in the form of spectacular reenactments, and where the tensions of mobilization on an hitherto unprecedented scale were played out in the form of riots and disturbances. This book is intended for scholars, postgraduates, and undergraduates studying theatre and theatre history, cultural studies, Romanticism, social and political (British)

If there's a God, which at the moment I DOUBT, I want you to curse him. If there's any justice, I want them - both of them - in a car crash. Her husband's gone and her future isn't bright. Imprisoned in her marital home, Medea can't work, can't sleep and increasingly can't cope. While her child plays, she plots her revenge. This startlingly modern version of Euripides' classic tragedy explores the private fury bubbling under public behaviour and how in today's world a mother, fuelled by anger at her husband's infidelity, might be driven to commit the worst possible crime. The production is written and directed by one of the UK's most exciting and in-demand writers, Mike Bartlett, who has received critical acclaim for his plays including Earthquakes in London; Cock (Olivier Award), a new stage version of Chariots of Fire, and Love Love Love. This programme text coincides with a run at the Headlong Theatre in London from the 27th of September to the 1st of December 2012.

In September of 1809 during the opening night of Macbeth at the newly rebuilt Covent Garden theatre the audience rioted over the rise in ticket prices. Disturbances took place on the following sixty-six nights that autumn and the Old Price riots became the longest running theatre disorder in English history. This book describes the events in detail, sets them in their wider context, and uses them to examine the interpenetration of theatre and disorder. Previous understandings of the riots are substantially revised by stressing populist rather than class politics. Baer concentrates on the theatricality of audiences, the role of the stage in shaping English self-image and the relationship between contention and consensus. In so doing, theatre and theatricality are rediscovered as explanations for the cultural and political structures of the Georgian period. Based on meticulous research in theatre and governmental records, newspapers, private correspondence, and satirical prints and other ephemera, this study is an unusually interesting and original contribution to the social and political history of early 19th-century Britain.

What was the role of mousike, the realm of the Muses, in Greek life? More wide-ranging in its implications than the English 'music', mousike lay at the heart of Greek culture, and was often indeed synonymous with culture. In its commonest form, it represented for the Greeks a seamless complex of music, poetic word, and physical movement, encompassing a vast array of performances - from small-scale entertainment in the private home to elaborate performances involving the entire community. Yet the history of the field, particularly in anglophone scholarship, has been hitherto narrowly conceived, and the broader cultural significance of mousike largely ignored. Focusing mainly on classical Athens these new and specially commissioned essays analyse the theory and practice of musical performance in a variety of social contexts and demonstrate the centrality of mousike to the values and ideology of the polis. The so-called 'new musical revolution' in late fifth-century Athens receives serious treatment in this volume for the first time. A major theme of the book is the musical and mousike dimension of Greek religion, rarely analysed in its own right. The ethical and philosophical aspects of Athenian mousike are another central concern, with the figure of the dancing philosopher as an emblem of music's role in intellectual life. The book as a whole provides an integrated cultural analysis of central aspects of Greek mousike, which will be of interest to classical scholars, to cultural historians, and to anyone concerned with understanding the power of music as a cultural phenomenon.

In Landscape of the Now, author Kent De Spain takes readers on a deep journey into the underlying processes and structures of postmodern movement improvisation. Based on a series of interviews with master teachers who have developed unique approaches that are taught around the world - Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Lisa Nelson, Deborah Hay, Nancy Stark Smith, Barbara Dilley, Anna Halprin, and Ruth Zaporah - this book offers the rare opportunity to find some clarity in what is often a complex and confusing experience. After more than 20 years of research, De Spain has created an extensive list of questions that explore issues that arise for the improviser in practice and performance as well as resources that influence movements and choices. Answers to these questions are placed side by side to create dialog and depth of understanding, and to see the range of possible approaches experienced improvisers might explore. In its nineteen chapters, Landscape of the Now delves into issues like the influence of an audience on an improviser's choices or how performers "track" and use their experience of the moment. The book also looks at the role of cognitive skills, memory, space, emotion, and the senses. One chapter offers a rare opportunity for an honest discussion of the role of various forms of spirituality in what is seen as a secular dance form. Whether read from cover to cover or pulled apart and explored a subject at a time, Landscape of the Now offers the reader a kind of map into the mysterious realm of human creativity, and the wisdom and experience of artists who have spent a lifetime exploring it.

Examines pantomime and theatricality in nineteenth-century histories of folklore and the fairy tale. In nineteenth-century Britain, the spectacular and highly profitable theatrical form known as ""pantomime"" was part of a shared cultural repertoire and a significant medium for the transmission of stories, especially the fairy tales that permeated English popular culture before the advent of folklore study. Rowdy, comedic, and slightly risque, pantomime productions were situated in dynamic relationship with various forms of print and material culture. Popular fairy-tale theater also informed the production and reception of folklore research in ways that are often overlooked. In Staging Fairyland: Folklore, Children's Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime, Jennifer Schacker reclaims the place of theatrical performance in this history, developing a model for the intermedial and cross-disciplinary study of narrative cultures. The case studies that punctuate each chapter move between the realms of print and performance, scholarship and popular culture. Schacker examines pantomime productions of such well-known tales as ""Cinderella,""""Little Red Riding Hood,"" and ""Jack and the Beanstalk,"" as well as others whose popularity has waned-such as ""Daniel O'Rourke"" and ""The Yellow Dwarf."" These productions resonate with traditions of impersonation, cross-dressing, literary imposture, masquerade, and the social practice of ""fancy dress."" Schacker also traces the complex histories of Mother Goose and Mother Bunch, who were often cast as the embodiments of both tale-telling and stage magic and who move through various genres of narrative and forms of print culture. Theoretically informed and methodologically innovative, these examinations push at the limits of prevailing approaches to the fairy tale across media. They also demonstrate the degree to which perspectives on the fairy tale as children's entertainment often obscure the complex histories and ideological underpinnings ofspecific tales. Mapping the intermedial histories of tales requires a fundamental reconfi guration of our thinking about early folklore study and about ""fairy tales"": their bearing on questions of genre and ideology but also their signifying possibilities-past, present, and future. Readers interested in folklore, fairy-tale studies, children's literature, and performance studies will embrace this informative monograph.

Theatre of the Book explores the impact of printing on the European theatre, 1480-1880. Far from being marginal to Renaissance dramatists, the printing press played an essential role in the birth of the modern theatre. Looking at playtexts, engravings, actor portraits, notation systems, and theatrical ephemera as part of the broader history of theatrical ideas, this illustrated book offers both a history of European dramatic publication and an examination of the European theatre's continual refashioning of itself in the world of print.

The Festival Cities of Edinburgh and Adelaide examines how these cities' world-famous arts events have shaped and been shaped by their long-term interaction with their urban environments. While the Edinburgh International Festival and Adelaide Festival are long-established, prestigious events that champion artistic excellence, they are also accompanied by the two largest open-access fringe festivals in the world. It is this simultaneous staging of multiple events within Edinburgh's Summer Festivals and Adelaide's Mad March that generates the visibility and festive atmosphere popularly associated with both places. Drawing on perspectives from theatre studies and cultural geography, this book interrogates how the Festival City, as a place myth, has developed in the very different local contexts of Edinburgh and Adelaide, and how it is challenged by groups competing for the right to use and define public space. Each chapter examines a recent performative event in which festival debates and controversies spilled out beyond the festival space to activate the public sphere by intersecting with broader concerns and audiences. This book forges an interdisciplinary, comparative framework for festival studies to interrogate how festivals are embedded in the social and political fabric of cities and to assess the cultural impact of the festivalisation phenomenon.