This is the first anthology to focus exclusively on the lives of Black South African women. This collection represents the work of both female and male writers, including national and international award-winning playwrights. The collection includes six full-length and four one-act plays, as well as interviews with the writers, who candidly discuss the theatrical and political situation in the new South Africa. Written before and after apartheid, the plays present varying approaches and theatrical styles from solo performances to collective creations.
The plays dramatise issues as diverse as:
* women's rights
* displacement from home
* violence against women
* the struggle to keep families together
* racial identity
* education in the old and new South Africa
* and health care.

Acoustic Interculturalism is a study of the soundscapes of intercultural performance through the examination of sound's performativity. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, the book examines an akoumenological reception of sound to postulate the need for an acoustic knowing - an awareness of how sound shapes the intercultural experience.

From hip performance spaces in New York and Los Angeles to the heart of Middle America, the last twenty years have seen a rich proliferation of gay and lesbian performance art In O Solo Homo, Holly Hughes, the First Lady of queer performance, and theater critic and professor David Roman have brought together the best solo work from some of the most acclaimed and influential artists in the field.

The pieces in O Solo Homo touch nerves that run deep -- racism and misogyny, AIDS and breast cancer, the struggles and joys of family and the complicated transcendence of desire. Peggy Shaw, of the Obie Award-winning trio Split Britches, looks at butch/femme identity and describes how she learned to be a man. The acclaimed author, performer, and "gender outlaw" Kate Bornstein takes apart gender, from the street to the bedroom to Geraldo. The late Ron Vawter, of the Wooster Group, conjures two very different men who died of AIDS: diva filmmaker Jack Smith and Nixon crony Roy Cohn. And Carmelita Tropicana, the "national songbird of Cuba", makes an unforgettable, hilarious return to Havana. O Solo Homo will move and provoke you, make you laugh, and make you think.

Directing Actors: A Practical Aesthetics Approach is the first book to apply the Practical Aesthetics acting technique to the craft of directing. Lee Cohn lays out a step-by-step, no-nonsense methodology for the director that includes a deep dive into the mechanics of storytelling, the rehearsal process, working with writers, and the practical realities of the director's job. Featuring end-of-chapter exercises, this book provides a clear and effective means of breaking down a script in order to tell a story with clarity, simplicity, and dramatic force and gives directors a clear working vocabulary that will allow effective communication with actors. The techniques in this book are applicable to any theatrical style and any media platform in which a director might work. Written in an accessible, conversational style, this book strips the process of directing down to its most essential components to explain how to become an "actor's director." A must-read for students in directing courses and professional directors working with actors who prescribe to the Practical Aesthetics technique, as well as anyone interested in the process of working with actors, Directing Actors will help directors to get the very best their actors are capable of while approaching the work with a joyful, open spirit.

Although the sciences have long understood the value of practice-based research, the arts and humanities have tended to structure a gap between practice and analysis. This book examines differences and similarities between Performance as Research practices in various community and national contexts, mapping out the landscape of this new field.

Peter Brook is known internationally as a theatre visionary, and a daring experimenter on the cutting-edge of performance and production. This book concentrates on Brook's early years, and his innovative achievements in opera, television, film, and the theatre. His productions are viewed separately, in chronological order, suggesting Brook's developing and changing interests. The authors include thought-provoking interviews with Brook (and with numerous outstanding artists who have worked with him) and bring to the reader penetrating critiques of Brook's theories and practices as a man of the theatre.

Renaissance Drama in Action is a fascinating exploration of Renaissance theatre practice and staging. Covering questions of contemporary playhouse design, verse and language, staging and rehearsal practices, and acting styles, Martin White relates the characteristics of Renaissance theatre to the issues involved in staging the plays today. This refreshingly accessible volume: * examines the history of the plays on the English stage from the seventeenth century to the present day * explores questions arising from reconstructions, with particular reference to the new Globe Theatre * includes interviews with, and draws on the work and experience of modern theatre practitioners including Harriet Walter, Matthew Warchus, Trevor Nunn, Stephen Jeffreys, Adrian Noble and Helen Mirren * includes discussions of familiar plays such as The Duchess of Malfi and 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, as well as many lesser known play-texts Renaissance Drama in Action offers undergraduates and A-level students an invaluable guide to the characteristics of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and its relationship to contemporary theatre and staging.

This book addresses the notion posed by Thomas Kilroy in his definition of a playwright's creative process: 'We write plays, I feel, in order to populate the stage'. It gathers eclectic reflections on contemporary Irish theatre from both Irish theatre practitioners and international academics. The eighteen contributions offer innovative perspectives on Irish theatre since the early 1990s up to the present, testifying to the development of themes explored by emerging and established playwrights as well as to the (r)evolutions in practices and approaches to the stage that have taken place in the last thirty years. This cross-disciplinary collection devotes as much attention to contextual questions and approaches to the stage in practice as it does to the play text in its traditional and revised forms. The essays and interviews encourage dialectic exchange between analytical studies on contemporary Irish theatre and contributions by theatre practitioners.

From the celebrated and award winning composer, Dave Malloy comes Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera based on a scandalous slice of Leo Tolstoy's War & Peace. Young and impulsive, Natasha Rostova arrives in Moscow to await the return of her fiance from the front lines. When she falls under the spell of the roguish Anatole, it is up to Pierre, a family friend in the middle of an existential crisis, to pick up the pieces of her shattered reputation. Following a critica

William Shakespeare's Hamlet (c.1600-1601) has achieved iconic status as one of the most exciting and enigmatic of plays. It has been in almost constant production in Britain and throughout the world since it was first performed, fascinating generations of audiences and critics alike.

Taking the form of a sourcebook, this guide to Shakespeare's remarkable play offers:

• extensive introductory comment on the contexts, critical history and performance of the text, from publication to the present
• annotated extracts from key contextual documents, reviews, critical works and the text itself
• cross-references between documents and sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
• suggestions for further reading.

Renaissance Drama in Action is a fascinating exploration of Renaissance theatre practice and staging. Covering questions of contemporary playhouse design, verse and language, staging and rehearsal practices, and acting styles, Martin White relates the characteristics of Renaissance theatre to the issues involved in staging the plays today.
This refreshingly accessible volume:
* examines the history of the plays on the English stage from the seventeenth century to the present day
* explores questions arising from reconstructions, with particular reference to the new Globe Theatre
* includes interviews with, and draws on the work and experience of modern theatre practitioners including Harriet Walter, Matthew Warchus, Trevor Nunn, Stephen Jeffreys, Adrian Noble and Helen Mirren
* includes discussions of familiar plays such as The Duchess of Malfi and 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, as well as many lesser known play-texts
Renaissance Drama in Action offers undergraduates and A-level students an invaluable guide to the characteristics of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and its relationship to contemporary theatre and staging.

With this special issue of Performing Arts International, the papers and presentations from the Black Theatre in Higher Education Conference, held in London in April 1994 and organized by Hazel Carey and Ruth Tompsett, are made more widely available. It offers readers a chance to engage in debates on topical issues, to widen their knowledge and understanding of black performance, and to catch something of its spirit from the combination here of critical comment, practitioner insight, and personal testimony. For academics, critics, and practitioners alike, to study, attend, or participate in black theatre is to be engaged in a rich and diverse contemporary arts reality.

Although films about the presidency have been a popular subject for analysis, there is no equivalent literature about plays that portray chief executives. This book fills that gap by examining in detail about 50 plays depicting historical, fictional and even musical presidents. It explains how, as the public's trust in government has declined, the heroic presidents of the first half of the twentieth century have been replaced on stage by such antiheroes as Nixon and Harding.

Slapstick comedy has a long and lively history from Greek Theatre to the present day. This book explores the ways in which comic pain and comic violence are performed within slapstick to make the audience laugh. It draws examples from theatre, television and film on both sides of the Atlantic.

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.

Focusing on contemporary English theatre, this book asks a series of questions: How has theatre contributed to understandings of the North-South divide? What have theatrical treatments of riots offered to wider debates about their causes and consequences? Has theatre been able to intervene in the social unease around Gypsy and Traveller communities? How has theatre challenged white privilege and the persistent denigration of black citizens? In approaching these questions, this book argues that the nation is blighted by a number of internal rifts that pit people against each other in ways that cast particular groups as threats to the nation, as unruly or demeaned citizens - as 'social abjects'. It interrogates how those divisions are generated and circulated in public discourse and how theatre offers up counter-hegemonic and resistant practices that question and challenge negative stigmatization, but also how theatre can contribute to the recirculation of problematic cultural imaginaries.

Auditioners often complain of seeing the same speeches over and over again. Director, Simon Dunmore, has seen well over ten thousand audition speeches performed, and has drawn on his experience to select and edit a new collection of fascinating, fresh and unusual audition speeches from Shakespeare's plays. This book brings together fifty speeches for women from plays frequently ignored such as Coriolanus, Pericles and Love's Labours Lost. It also includes good, but over-looked speeches from the more popular plays such as Diana from All's Well That Ends Well, Perdita from The Winter's Tale and Hero from Much Ado About Nothing. Each speech is accompanied by a character description, brief explanation of the context, and notes on obscure words, phrases and references - all written from the viewpoint of the auditioning actor.

Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. This study rediscovers the lives and notable accomplishments of five prominent, yet historically neglected women dramatists of the Progressive Era: Martha Morton, Madeleine Lucette Ryley, Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland, Beulah Marie Dix, and Rida Johnson Young.

Working in partnership with the National Theatre, these new playscripts bring the theatre alive in the classroom. Each play has been carefully selected to ensure maximum impact and relevance to students, while the activities and teaching support are underpinned by National Theatre strategies so that teachers can feel confident using these approaches. Vibrant production images and the 'Making the play' section show how the play is brought to life on stage while the activities combine a focus on English skills with the play as a perfomance. Adapted by Bryony Lavery, this is an exciting new adaptation of Stevenson's classic tale of money, murder and mutiny. Young Jim Hawkins leads a quiet life at the Admiral Benbow Inn run by her Grandma. One night, fate brings Billy Bones, a large sea chest and a treasure map to their door. As Jim sets off on a voyage to find the treasure, she encounters a crew of the bloodthirstiest pirates, including the infamous Long John Silver, and she begins to wonder whether any of them will make it back alive...

Alternative Theatre in Poland 1954-1989 describes a theatre movement about which little has been written in English. The complex nature of the relationship between theatre and politics is explored in this unique study of the exceptionally vibrant Polish theatre scene.
Tracing its evolution from the beginnings of the movement in the 1950s when two amateur student theatre groups performed programs of short, satiric skits which expanded the limits of the artistically permissable within a Communist society, the development of this movement is followed through the 1960s, when these satiric theatres, and others which sprang up in their wake, were forced by government censorship to become less politically active. During this period, other student groups concentrated on artistic experimentation, creating such forms as visual theatre, one-person shows, fact-montages, and poetry theatre. Furthermore, the period after 1956 saw the founding of two non-student theatres, Tadeusz Kantor's Cricot 2 and Jerzy Grotowski's Laboratory Theatre, both dedicated to artistic experimentation and having significant influence on alternative theatres worldwide.
In th 1970s, during the next period of political liberalization, the alternative theatre movement linked the avant-garde format it had acquired in the 1960s with the political engagement of the 1950s and reached its zenith with the works of groups such as the Theatre of the 8th Day. After the Solidarity period (1980-81), the movement declined in societal importance but groups such as Akademia Ruchu, Provisorium and Gardzienice continue to exist and produce experimental work.

While remapping the region by examining enduring historical and cultural connections, this study discusses multiple traditions and practices of theatre and performance in five South Asian countries within their specific political and socio-cultural contexts.

This collection of essays investigates the way Africa has been portrayed on the London stage from the 1950s to the present. It focuses on whether - and, if so, to what extent - the Africa that emerges from the London scene is subject to stereotype, and/or in which ways the reception of audiences and critics have contributed to an understanding of the continent and its arts. The collection, divided into two parts, brings together well-established academics and emerging scholars, as well as playwrights, directors and performers currently active in London. With a focus on Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, Bola Agbaje, Biyi Bandele, and Dipo Agboluaje, amongst others, the volume examines the work of key companies such as Tiata Fahodzi and Talawa, as well as newer companies Two Gents, Iroko Theatre and Spora Stories. Interviews with Rotimi Babatunde, Ade Solanke and Dipo Agboluaje on the contemporary London scene are also included.

Theater critic Jerry Tallmer, remarking on Joseph Papp's death on October 31, 1991, said, He was a guy from Brooklyn who had a passion for Shakespeare and a passion for people. He was able to combine the two like no one else ever did. Barbara Horn, documenting Papp's career, declares it to have been inextricably tied to that of the New York Shakespeare Festival, which Papp founded in 1954, serving as its artistic leader for 37 years, and which survives him. His dream of producing free Shakespeare in the Park was expanded into the largest arts institution in the United States, combining Shakespeare with innovative contemporary theater performed at his nonprofit Public Theater as well as in New York City parks and schools. Papp produced some 450 plays, directing over 40. He nurtured some of the greatest playwriting talents, including Vaclav Havel, David Mamet, David Rabe, David Henry Hwang, John Guare, and Tina Howe, and provided opportunities for fledgling actors, among them George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, James Earl Jones, Al Pacino, Kevin Kline, Raul Julia, Meryl Streep, and William Hurt. Public Theater plays such as Hair, A Chorus Line, and That Championship Season became huge hits on Broadway. Papp's productions, most with the New York Shakespeare Festival, are thoroughly documented, with credits, runs, synopses, and review commentary in this reference guide, which also includes a chronology of Papp's life and career, a biographical sketch, an annotated bibliography of works by and about Papp, and appendixes on film and television credits, related activities, and awards. Indexes of authors of bibliographic works, of playwrights and playtitles, and of production crew and cast complete the work.

In this book, Shannon Rose Riley provides a critically rich investigation of representations of Cuba and Haiti in US culture in order to analyze their significance not only to the emergence of empire but especially to the reconfiguration of US racial structures along increasingly biracial lines. Based on impressive research and with extensive analysis of various textual and performance forms including a largely unique set of skits, plays, songs, cultural performances and other popular amusements, Riley shows that Cuba and Haiti were particularly meaningful to the ways that people in the US re-imagined themselves as black or white and that racial positions were renegotiated through what she calls acts of palimpsest: marking and unmarking, racing and erasing difference. Riley's book demands a reassessment of the importance of the occupations of Cuba and Haiti to US culture, challenging conventional understandings of performance, empire, and race at the turn of the twentieth century.