The newest addition to the USITT/Routledge Backstage series, covering behind the scenes information for the technical theatre industry. The book covers the challenges stage managers face on the job and in real life, outlining best practices for achieving a work/life balance. Includes a focus on the work/life balance of a stage manager.

This transnational and transcultural study intimately investigates the theatre making practices of Indigenous women playwrights from Australia, Aotearoa, and Turtle Island. It offers a new perspective in Performance Studies employing an Indigenous standpoint, specifically an Indigenous woman's standpoint to privilege the practices and knowledges of Maori, First Nations, and Aboriginal women playwrights. Written in the style of ethnographic narrative the author affords the reader a ringside seat in providing personal insights on the process of negotiating access to rehearsals in each specific cultural context, detailed descriptions of each rehearsal location, and describing the visceral experiences of observing Indigenous theatre makers from inside the rehearsal room. The Indigenous scholar and theatre maker draws on Rehearsal Studies as an approach to documenting the day-to-day working practices of Indigenous theatre makers and considers an Indigenous Standpoint as a valid framework for investigating contemporary Indigenous theatre practices in a colonised context.

This book explores the various manifestations of affects in British theatre of the 21st century. The introduction gives a concise survey of existing and emerging theoretical and research trends and argues in favour of a capacious understanding of affects that mediates between more autonomous and more social approaches. The twelve chapters in the collection investigate major works in Britain by playwrights and theatre makers including Mojisola Adebayo, Mike Bartlett, Alice Birch, Caryl Churchill, Tim Crouch and Andy Smith, Rachel De-lahay, Reginald Edmund, James Fritz, David Greig, Idris Goodwin, Zinnie Harris, Kieran Hurley, Lucy Kirkwood, Anders Lustgarten, Yolanda Mercy, Anthony Neilson, Lucy Prebble, Sh!t Theatre, Penelope Skinner, Stef Smith, Kae Tempest and debbie tucker green. The interpretations identify significant areas of tension as they relate affects to the fields of cognition, politics and hope. In this, the chapters uncover interrelations of thought, intention and empathy; they reveal the nexus between identities, institutions and ideology; and, finally, they explore how theatre can accomplish the transition from a sense of crisis to utopian visions.

As the first full-length study to analyse utopian plays in Western drama from antiquity to the present, Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre offers an illuminating appraisal of the objectives of utopianism as manifested in drama through the ages, and carefully ascertains the added value that live performance brings to the persuasion of utopian thought. Sian Adiseshiah scrutinises the distinctive intervention of utopian drama through its examination alongside the utopian prose tradition - in this way, the book establishes new ways of approaching utopian aesthetics and new ways of interpreting utopian drama. This book provides fresh understandings of the generic features of utopian plays, identifies the gains of establishing a new genre, and ascertains ways in which this genre functions as political theatre. Referring to over 40 plays, of which 18 are examined in detail, Utopian Drama traces the emergence of the utopian play in the Western tradition from ancient Greek Comedy to experimental contemporary work. Works discussed in detail include plays by Aristophanes, Margaret Cavendish, George Bernard Shaw, Howard Brenton, Claire MacDonald, Cesi Davidson, and Mojisola Adebayo. As well as offering extended attention to the work of these playwrights, the book reflects on the development of utopian drama through history, notes the persistent features, tropes, and conventions of utopian plays, and considers the implications of their registration for both theatre studies and utopian studies.

From director and cofounder of the Royal Shakespeare Company Peter Brook, "The Empty Space" is a timeless analysis of theatre from the most influential stage director of the twentieth century.
As relevant as when it was first published in 1968, groundbreaking director and cofounder of the Royal Shakespeare Company Peter Brook draws on a life in love with the stage to explore the issues facing a theatrical performance--of any scale. He describes important developments in theatre from the last century, as well as smaller scale events, from productions by Stanislavsky to the rise of Method Acting, from Brecht's revolutionary alienation technique to the free form happenings of the 1960s, and from the different styles of such great Shakespearean actors as John Gielgud and Paul Scofield to a joyous impromptu performance in the burnt-out shell of the Hamburg Opera just after the war.
Passionate, unconventional, and fascinating, this book shows how theatre defies rules, builds and shatters illusions, and creates lasting memories for its audiences.

In the 1890s, when Henry James tried to achieve fame and financial security by turning to the theater, he was unceremoniously booed off the stage. Since the 1940s and '50s his fiction has nevertheless been consistently interpreted by composers and film directors, culminating in the recent film adaptations of his novels by Merchant-Ivory, Jane Campion, and Iain Softley. Henry James on Stage and Screen traces this historical development.

Shakespeare in Cuba: Caliban's Books explores how Shakespeare is consumed and appropriated in Cuba. It contributes to the underrepresented field of Latin American Shakespeares by applying the lens of cultural anthropophagy, a theory with Latin American roots, to explore how Cuban artists ingest and transform Shakespeare's plays. By consuming these works and incorporating them into Cuban culture and literature, Cuban writers make the plays their own while also nourishing the source texts and giving Shakespeare a new afterlife.

With the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan opened its doors to the West and underwent remarkable changes as it sought to become a modern nation. Accompanying the political changes that Western trade ushered in were widespread social and cultural changes. Newspapers, novels, poems, and plays from the Western world were soon adapted and translated into Japanese. The combination of the rich storytelling tradition of Japan with the realism and modernism of the West produced some of the greatest literature of the modern age. Historical Dictionary of Modern Japanese Literature and Theater presents a broad perspective on the development and history of literature narrative, poetry, and drama in modern Japan. This book offers a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, literary and historical developments, trends, genres, and concepts that played a central role in the evolution of modern Japanese literature."

The Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Studies in Singing, Volume I: Development introduces the many voices necessary to better understand the act of singing-a complex human behaviour that emerges without deliberate training. Presenting research from the social sciences and humanities alongside that of the natural sciences and medicine alike, this companion explores the relationship between hearing sensitivity and vocal production, in turn identifying how singing is integrated with sensory and cognitive systems while investigating the ways we test and measure singing ability and development. Contributors consider the development of singing within the context of the entire lifespan, focusing on its cognitive, social, and emotional significance in four parts: Musical, historical and scientific foundations Perception and production Multimodality Assessment In 2009, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded a seven-year major collaborative research initiative known as Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing (AIRS). Together, global researchers from a broad range of disciplines addressed three challenging questions: How does singing develop in every human being? How should singing be taught and used to teach? How does singing impact wellbeing? Across three volumes, The Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Studies in Singing consolidates the findings of each of these three questions, defining the current state of theory and research in the field. Volume I: Development tackles the first of these three questions, tracking development from infancy through childhood to adult years.

The Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Studies in Singing, Volume III: Wellbeing explores the connections between singing and health, promoting the power of singing-in public policy and in practice-in confronting health challenges across the lifespan. These chapters shape an interdisciplinary research agenda that advances singing's theoretical, empirical, and applied contributions, providing methodologies that reflect individual and cultural diversities. Contributors assess the current state of knowledge and present opportunities for discovery in three parts: Singing and Health Singing and Cultural Understanding Singing and Intergenerational Understanding In 2009, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded a seven-year major collaborative research initiative known as Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing (AIRS). Together, global researchers from a broad range of disciplines addressed three challenging questions: How does singing develop in every human being? How should singing be taught and used to teach? How does singing impact wellbeing? Across three volumes, The Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Studies in Singing consolidates the findings of each of these three questions, defining the current state of theory and research in the field. Volume III: Wellbeing focuses on this third question and the health benefits of singing, singing praises for its effects on wellbeing.

Bram Stoker worked in the theatre for most of his adult life, as theatre reviewer in Dublin in the 1870s and as business manager at London's Royal Lyceum Theatre in the final two decades of the 19th century. Despite this, critical attention to the influence of the stage on Stoker's writing has been sparse. Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage addresses this lacuna, examining how Stoker's fictions respond to and engage with Victorian theatre's melodramatic climate and, in particular, to supernatural plays, Gothic melodramas and Shakespearean productions that Henry Irving and Ellen Terry performed at the Lyceum. Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage locates the writer between stage and page. It reconsiders his literary relationships with key actors, and challenges the biographical assumption that Henry Irving provided the model for the figure of Count Dracula.

Dance on its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies anthologizes a wide range of subjects examined from dance-centered methodologies: modes of research that are emergent, based in relevant systems of movement analysis, use primary sources, and rely on critical, informed observation of movement. The anthology fills a gap in current scholarship by emphasizing dance history and core disciplinary knowledge rather than theories imported from disciplines outside dance. Individual chapters serve as case studies that are further organized into three categories of significant dance activity: performance and reconstruction, pedagogy and choreographic process, and notational and other written forms that analyze and document dance. The breadth of the content reflects the richness and vibrancy of the dance field; each deeply informed examination serves as a window opening onto the larger world of dance. Conceptually, each chapter also raises concerns and questions that point to broadly inclusive methodological applications. Engaging and insightful, Dance on its Own Terms represents a major contribution to research on dance.

-Step-by-step exercises and tutorials thoroughly explain hand-drafting and drafting with the visualization programs Vectorworks and Sketchup. -Written to complement a regular 14-or15-week semester course. -The primary focus of the book is how to construct a drawing, providing in-depth coverage fundamentals for hand drafting and visualization software.

This book details the Irish socialistic tracks pursued by Bernard Shaw and Sean O'Casey, mostly after 1916, that were arguably impacted by the executed James Connolly. The historical context is carefully unearthed, stretching from its 1894 roots via W. B. Yeats' dream of Shaw as a menacing, yet grinning sewing machine, to Shaw's and O'Casey's 1928 masterworks. In the process, Shaw's War Issues for Irishmen, Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress, The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, Saint Joan, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, and O'Casey's The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, and The Silver Tassie are reconsidered, revealing previously undiscovered textures to the masterworks. All of which provides a rethinking, a reconsideration of Ireland's great drama of the 1920s, as well as furthering the knowledge of Shaw, O'Casey, and Connolly.

In the first conceptual overview of current practices and debates in theatre education, Helen Nicholson explores the contribution that professional theatre practitioners make to the education of young people. She maps the environments in which theatre and learning meet, and looks at how the educational concerns and artistic inventiveness of people living in different times and places have inflected theatre and changed education. This inspiring book tells the story of ground-breaking developments of twentieth century theatre education, and explores the ways in which current theatre practitioners have upheld these radical traditions. Helen Nicholson investigates the effects on theatre education of a newly globalised economy, and asks pertinent questions such as: how can theatre education continue to encourage debates about social justice in the political landscape of the twenty-first century? How do the practices, policies and principles of theatre speak to different generations? Offering diverse illustrations of practice from around the world, Helen Nicholson draws on much personal experience and expert knowledge to demonstrate how cutting edge performance practices continue to engage young people today.

Fired from his skiffle band, Francis Henshall becomes minder to Roscoe Crabbe, a small time East End hood, now in Brighton to collect GBP6,000 from his fiancee's dad. But Roscoe is really his sister Rachel posing as her own dead brother, who's been killed by her boyfriend Stanley Stubbers. Holed up at The Cricketers' Arms, the permanently ravenous Francis spots the chance of an extra meal ticket and takes a second job with one Stanley Stubbers, who is hiding from the police and waiting to be re-united with Rachel. To prevent discovery, Francis must keep his two guvnors apart. Simple. Based on Carlo Goldoni's classic Italian comedy The Servant of Two Masters, in this new English version by prize winning playwright Richard Bean, sex, food and money are high on the agenda.

The book offers an introduction to adaptations between stage and screen, examining stage and screen works as texts but also as performances and cultural events. Case studies of distinct periods in British film and theatre history are used to illustrate the principle that adaptations can't be divorced from the historical and cultural moment in which they are produced and to look at issues around theatrical naturalism and cinematic realism. Written in a refreshingly accessible style, it offers an original analysis with emphasis on performance and event. It opens up new avenues of exploration to include non-literary issues such as the treatment of space and place, mise en scene, acting styles and star personas. The recent growth of digital theatre is examined to foreground the 'events' of theatre and cinema, with phenomena such as NT Live analysed for the different ways that 'liveness' is adapted. Adapting Performance Between Stage and Screen explores how cultural values can be articulated in the act of translating between mediums. The book takes as its subject the interaction between film and theatre and argues that, rather than emphasising differences between the two mediums, the emphasis should be placed on elements that they share, in particular the emphasis on performance and the participation in an event. It uses a number of case studies to show how this relationship is affected by changes in technology - the coming of film sound, the invention of live-casting - and in the nature of the event being offered to particular audiences. These examples, ranging from the well-known to the obscure, are all treated with relevant and knowledgeable analysis and a strong and appropriate sense of context. The book offers a welcome overview of previous work in this area and demonstrates the importance of basing analysis on historical context, as well as giving new insights into some familiar examples. Discussion ranges from Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock to Robert Lepage and Ivo van Hove. There are detailed analyses of Alfie, Gone Too Far and Festen as well as authoritative analyses of NT Live performances and British New Wave cinema. The book will be of primary interest to academics, researchers, teachers and students working in adaptation studies, film studies and theatre studies. Written in an accessible style it will appeal to teachers and students on A-level, undergraduate and postgraduate film, theatre, media and cultural studies courses. The chapter on digital theatres will add to the growing body of literature in this area and appeal to students and academics working on digital cultures and new media. Live screenings of theatre events are becoming more widely available and increasingly popular, including some of the productions discussed. There is potential interest for a general audience interested in British films, theatre and actors.

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No play in the history of the American stage has been as ubiquitous and as widely viewed as Uncle Tom's Cabin. This book traces the major dramatizations of Stowe's classic from its inception in 1852 through modern versions on film. Frick introduces the reader to the artists who created the plays and productions that created theatre history.

This book takes Roland Barthes's famous proclamation of 'The Death of the Author' as a starting point to investigate concepts of authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance. By offering a new understanding of 'the author' as neither a source of unquestioned authority nor an obsolete construct, but rather as a performative figure, the book illuminates wide-ranging aesthetic and political aspects of 'authorial death' by asking: how is the author constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality? And what are the politics and ethics of these constructions?

The Merchant of Venice and Othello are the two Shakespeare plays which serve as touchstones for contemporary understandings and responses to notions of 'the stranger' and 'the other'. This groundbreaking collection explores the dissemination of the two plays through Europe in the first two decades of the 21st-century, tracing how productions and interpretations have reflected the changing conditions and attitudes locally and nationally. Packed with case studies of productions of each play in different countries, the volume opens vistas on the continent's turbulent history marked by the instability of allegiances and boundaries, and shifting senses of identity in a context of war, decolonization and migration. Chapters examine productions in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Italy, France, Portugal and Germany to shed light on wide-scale European developments for the first time in English. In a final section, performance insights are offered by interviews with three directors: Karin Coonrod on directing The Merchant in Venice at the Venetian Ghetto in 2016, Plamen Markov on his 2020 Othello for the Varna Theatre (Bulgaria) and Arnaud Churin, whose Othello toured France in 2019. In drawing attention to the ways in which historical circumstances and collective memory shape and refashion performance, Shakespeare's Others in 21st-century European Performance offers a rich review of European theatrical engagements with Otherness in the productions of these two plays.

Theatre and Ghosts brings theatre and performance history into dialogue with the flourishing field of spectrality studies. Essays examine the histories and economies of the material operations of theatre, and the spectrality of performance and performer.

Middle Eastern American Theatre explores the burgeoning Middle Eastern American theatre movement with a focus on Arab American, Jewish American, Armenian American, Iranian American, and Turkish American theatres, playwrights, directors, and actors. By exploring the rich religious and cultural heritage of this diverse group - which includes Arabs, Armenians, Iranians, Jews, and Turks - and religions that include the Baha'i faith, Christianity, Chaldean, Druze, Ishik Alevism, Judaism, Islam, Mandaeism, Samaratin, Shabakism, Yazidi, and Zoroastrianism - the rich and paradoxical nature of the term 'Middle Eastern' is interrogated through the dramas written and performed by those in the Diaspora. Featuring a clear introduction and examination of the context and the various push and pull factors that have contributed to the mass migrations to North America - including the so-called "Great Migration" of 1890-1915, the Armenian Genocide, the European Holocaust, the two world wars, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and other social and political conflicts. With chapters devoted to Arab American, Israeli American, Iranian American and Turkish American theatre, Middle Eastern American Theatre traces the history and examines the work of key artists and directors including Heather Raffo, Yussef El Guindi, Jamil Khoury, Mona Mansour, Danny Bryck, Ken Kaissar, Ari Roth, Torange Yeghiazarian, Reza Abdoh, Sedef Ecer, Torange Yeghiazarian, of Golden Thread Productions, and Jamil Khoury, of Silk Road Rising. The volume provides readers with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of millions of Middle Eastern Americans, and how they have contributed to American theatre today.

In 1991, Boyz N the Hood made history as an important film text and the impetus for a critical national conversation about American urban life in African American communities, especially for young urban black males. Boyz N the Hood: Shifting Hollywood Terrain is an interdisciplinary examination of this iconic film and its impact in cinematic history and American culture. This interdisciplinary approach provides an in-depth critical perspective of Boyz N the Hood as the embodiment of the blues: how Boyz intimates a world beyond the symbolic world Singleton posits, how its fictive stance pivots to a constituent truth in the real world. Boyz speaks from the first person perspective on the state of being "invisible." Through a subjective narrative point of view, Singleton interrogates the veracity of this claim regarding invisibility and provides deep insight into this social reality. This book is as much about the filmmaker as it is about the film. It explores John Singleton's cinematic voice and helps explicate his propensity for a type of folk element in his work (the oral tradition and lore). In addition, this text features critical perspectives from the filmmaker himself and other central figures attached to the production, including a first-hand account of production behind the scenes by Steve Nicolaides, Boyz's producer. The text includes Singleton's original screenplay and a range of critical articles and initial movie reviews.