Essentials of Dance Movement Psychotherapy contributes to the global interest in embodiment approaches to psychotherapy and to the field of dance movement psychotherapy specifically. It includes recent research, innovative theories and case studies of practice providing an inclusive overview of this ever growing field. As well as original UK contributions, offerings from other nations are incorporated, making it more accessible to the dance movement psychotherapy community of practice worldwide. Helen Payne brings together well-known, experienced global experts along with rising stars from the field to offer the reader a valuable insight into the theory, research and practice of dance movement psychotherapy. The contributions reflect the breadth of developing approaches, covering subjects including: * combining dance movement psychotherapy with music therapy; * trauma and dance movement psychotherapy; * the neuroscience of dance movement psychotherapy; * the use of touch in dance movement psychotherapy; * dance movement psychotherapy and autism; * relational dance movement psychotherapy. Essentials of Dance Movement Psychotherapy will be a treasured source for anyone wishing to learn more about the psychotherapeutic use of creative movement and dance. It will be of great value to students and practitioners in the arts therapies, psychotherapy, counselling and other health and social care professions.

Applied Shakespeare is attracting growing interest from practitioners and academics alike, all keen to understand the ways in which performing his works can offer opportunities for reflection, transformation, dialogue regarding social justice, and challenging of perceived limitations. This book adds a new dimension to the field by taking an interdisciplinary approach to topics which have traditionally been studied individually, examining the communication opportunities Shakespeare's work can offer for a range of marginalized people. It draws on a diverse range of projects from across the globe, many of which the author has facilitated or been directly involved with, including those with incarcerated people, people with mental health issues, learning disabilities and who have experienced homelessness. As this book evidences, Shakespeare can be used to alter the spatial constraints of people who feel imprisoned, whether literally or metaphorically, enabling them to speak and to be heard in ways which may previously have been elusive or unattainable. The book examines the use of trauma-informed principles to explore the ways in which consistency, longevity, trust and collaboration enable the development of resilience, positive autonomy and communication skills. It explores this phenomenon of creating space for people to find their own way of expressing themselves in a way that mainstream society can understand, whilst also challenging society to 'see better' and to hear better. This is not a process of social homogenisation but of encouraging positive interactions and removing the stigma of marginalization.

While the infamous Theatre du Grand-Guignol in Paris closed its doors in 1962, the particular form of horror theatre it spawned lives on and has, moreover, witnessed something of a resurgence over the past twenty years. During its heyday it inspired many imitators, though none quite as successful as the Montmartre-based original. In more recent times, new Grand-Guignol companies the world over have emerged to reimagine the form for a new generation of audiences. This book, the fourth volume in University of Exeter Press's series on the Grand-Guignol by Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, examines the ongoing influence and legacy of the Theatre du Grand-Guignol through an appraisal of its contemporary imitators and modern reincarnations. As with the previous volumes, Grand-Guignolesque consists of a lengthy critical introduction followed by a series of previously unpublished scripts, each with its own contextualizing preface. The effect thereof is to map the evolution of horror theatre over the past 120 years, asking where the influence of the Grand-Guignol is most visible today, and what might account for its recent resurgence. This book will be of interest not only to the drama student, theatre historian and scholar of popular theatre, but also to the theatre practitioner, theatregoer and horror fan.

Theatre and Performance in East Africa looks at indigenous performances to unearth the aesthetic principles, sensibilities and critical framework that underpin African performance and theatre. The book develops new paradigms for thinking about African performance in general through the construction of a critical framework that addresses questions concerning performance particularities and coherences, challenging previous understandings. To this end, it establishes a common critical and theoretical framework for indigenous performance using case studies from East Africa that are also reflected elsewhere in the continent. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and performance, especially those with an interest in the close relationship between theatre and performance with culture.

Four Caribbean Women Playwrights aims to expand Caribbean and postcolonial studies beyond fiction and poetry by bringing to the fore innovative women playwrights from the French Caribbean: Ina Cesaire, Maryse Conde, Gerty Dambury, Suzanne Dracius. Focussing on the significance of these women writers to the French and French Caribbean cultural scenes, the author illustrates how their work participates in global trends within postcolonial theatre. The playwrights discussed here all address socio-political issues, gender stereotypes, and the traumatic slave and colonial pasts of the Caribbean people. Investigating a range of plays from the 1980s to the early 2010s, including some works that have not yet featured in academic studies of Caribbean theatre, and applying theories of postcolonial theatre and local Caribbean theatre criticism, Four Caribbean Women Playwrights should appeal to scholars and students in the Humanities, and to all those interested in the postcolonial, the Caribbean, and contemporary theatre.

As readers head into the second fifty years of the modern critical study of blackness and black characters in Renaissance drama, it has become a critical commonplace to note black female characters' almost complete absence from Shakespeare's plays. Despite this physical absence, however, they still play central symbolic roles in articulating definitions of love, beauty, chastity, femininity, and civic and social standing, invoked as the opposite and foil of women who are "fair". Beginning from this recognition of black women's simultaneous physical absence and imaginative presence, this book argues that modern Shakespearean adaptation is a primary means for materializing black women's often elusive presence in the plays, serving as a vital staging place for historical and political inquiry into racial formation in Shakespeare's world, and our own. Ranging geographically across North America and the Caribbean, and including film and fiction as well as drama as it discusses remade versions of Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World will attract scholars of early modern race studies, gender and performance, and women in Renaissance drama.

This book examines the figure of Joan of Arc as depicted in stage works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially those based on or related to Schiller's 1801 romantic tragedy, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans). The author elucidates Schiller's appropriation of themes from Euripides's Iphigenia plays, chiefly the quality of "sublime sanctity," which transforms Joan's image from a victim of fate to a warrior-prophet who changes history through sheer force of will. Finding the best-known works of his time about her - Voltaire's La pucelle d'Orleans and Shakespeare's Henry VI, part I - utterly dissatisfying, Schiller set out to replace them. Die Jungfrau von Orleans was a smashing success and inspired various subsequent treatments, including Verdi's opera Giovanna d'Arco and a translation by the father of Russian Romanticism, Vasily Zhukovsky, on which Tchaikovsky based his opera Orleanskaya deva (The Maid of Orleans). In turn, the book's final chapter examines Shaw's Saint Joan and finds that the Irish playwright's vociferous complaints about Schiller's "romantic flapdoodle" belie a surprising affinity for Schiller's approach.

The Invention of Suspicion argues that the English justice system underwent changes in the sixteenth century that, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect and a decisive impact on the development of English Renaissance drama. These changes gradually made evidence evaluation a popular skill: justices of peace and juries were increasingly required to weigh up the probabilities of competing narratives of facts. At precisely the same time, English dramatists were absorbing, from Latin legal rhetoric and from Latin comedy, poetic strategies that enabled them to make their plays more persuasively realistic, more 'probable'. The result of this enormously rich conjunction of popular legal culture and ancient forensic rhetoric was a drama in which dramatis personae habitually gather evidence and 'invent' arguments of suspicion and conjecture about one another, thus prompting us, as readers and audience, to reconstruct this 'evidence' as stories of characters' private histories and inner lives. In this drama, people act in uncertainty, inferring one another's motives and testing evidence for their conclusions. As well as offering an overarching account of how changes in juridical epistemology relate to post-Reformation drama, this book examines comic dramatic writing associated with the Inns of Court in the overlooked decades of the 1560s and 70s. It argues that these experiments constituted an influential sub-genre, assimilating the structures of Roman comedy to current civic and political concerns with the administration of justice. This sub-genre's impact may be seen in Shakespeare's early experiments in revenge tragedy, history play and romance comedy, in Titus Andronicus, Henry VI and The Comedy of Errors, as well as Jonson's Every Man in his Humour, Bartholomew Fair and The Alchemist. The book ranges from mid-fifteenth century drama, through sixteenth century interludes to the drama of the 1590s and 1600s. It draws on recent research by legal historians, and on a range of legal-historical sources in print and manuscript.

Winner of the MRDS 2013 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies Many unspoken assumptions permeated the experience of performance in Shakespeare's theatre. Drawing on scientific treatises, murder pamphlets, travel narratives, dream manuals, religious sermons, festive sports, and other fascinating primary sources, Lin reconstructs playgoers' typical ways of thinking and feeling and demonstrates how these culturally-trained habits of mind shaped not only dramatic narratives but also the presentational dynamics of onstage action. Combining literary criticism, theatre history, and performance theory, this ground-breaking study explodes received ideas about mimesis, spectacle, and semiotics as it uncovers the ways in which early modern performance functioned as a material medium, revising and producing social attitudes and practices.

This book analyses the partnership between applied theatre and sexual health communication in a theatre-making project in Nyanga, a township in South Africa. By examining the bridges and schisms between the two fields as they come together in the project, an alternative way of approaching sexual health communication is advocated. This alternative considers what it is that applied theatre does, and could become, in this context. Moments of value which lie around the margins of the practice emerge as opportunities that can be overlooked. These somewhat ephemeral, intangible moments, which appear on the edges, are described as 'apertures of possibility' and occur when one takes a step back and realises something unnoticed in the moment. This book offers an invitation to pause and notice the seemingly insignificant moments that often occurs tangentially to the practice. The book also calls for more outcry about sexual health and sexual violence, arguing for theatre-making as a route to multitudes of voices, nuanced understandings, and diverse spaces in which discussions of sexuality and sexual health are shared, felt, and experienced.

Prop Building for Beginners outlines the basic concepts of prop building by featuring step-by-step instructions to create twenty of the most commonly featured items in theatrical and filmed productions. This book uses a combination of projects to expose readers to a wide range of materials and tools that they might find in a basic scenery or costume shop, serving both as a guide to building simple props and as a crash course in the variety of items a props person may have to build. The projects require a variety of tools, techniques, and materials so that a practitioner who completes all of them will have received a complete introduction to the basics of prop building. Assuming no previous knowledge of prop building, this is the perfect primer for students, hobbyists, or community theater enthusiasts looking to enter the prop shop. Prop Building for Beginners includes access to full-scale printable versions of the patterns featured in the book.

This book draws on the author's experience as a storyteller, drama practitioner and researcher, to articulate an emerging dialogic approach to storytelling in participatory arts, educational, mental health, youth theatre, and youth work contexts. It argues that oral storytelling offers a rich and much-needed channel for intergenerational dialogue with young people. The book keeps theory firmly tethered to practice. Section 1, 'Storyknowing', traces the history of oral storytelling practice with adolescents across diverse contexts, and brings into clear focus the particular nature of the storytelling exchange and narrative knowledge. Section 2, 'Telling Stories', introduces readers to some of the key challenges and possibilities of dialogic storytelling by reflecting on stories from the author's own arts-based practice research with adolescents, illustrating these with young people's artistic responses to stories. Finally, section 3, 'Story Gaps', conceptualises dialogic storytelling by exploring three different 'gaps': the gap between storyteller and listener, the gaps in the story, and the gaps which storytellers can open up within institutions. The book includes chapters taking a special focus on storytelling in schools and in mental health settings, as well as guided reflections for readers to relate the issues raised to their own practice.

A truly groundbreaking collaboration of original theatre history with exciting literary criticism, Shakespeare in Parts is the first book fully to explore the original form in which Shakespeare's drama overwhelmingly circulated. This was not the full play-text; it was not the public performance. It was the actor's part, consisting of the bare cues and speeches of each individual role. With group rehearsals rare or non-existent, the cued part alone had to furnish the actor with his character. But each such part-text was riddled with gaps and uncertainties. The actor knew what he was going to say, but not necessarily when, or why, or to whom; he may have known next to nothing of any other part. It demanded the most sensitive attention to the opportunities inscribed in the script, and to the ongoing dramatic moment. Here is where the young actor Shakespeare learnt his trade; here is where his imagination, verbal and technical, learnt to roam. This is the story of Shakespeare in Parts. As Shakespeare developed his playwriting, the apparent limitations of the medium get transformed into expressive opportunities. Both cue and speech become promise-crammed repositories of meaning and movement, and of individually discoverable space and time. Writing always for the same core group of players, Shakespeare could take - and insist upon - unprecedented risks. The result is onstage drama of astonishing immediacy. Starting with a comprehensive history of the part in early modern theatre, Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern's mould-altering work of historical and imaginative recovery provides a unique keyhole onto hitherto forgotten practices and techniques. It not only discovers a newly active, choice-ridden actor, but a new Shakespeare.

Recovering a lost literary movement that was the most consuming preoccupation of W. B. Yeats's literary life and the most integral to his poetry and drama, Ronald Schuchard's The Last Minstrels provides an historical, biographical, and critical reconstruction of the poet's lifelong attempt to restore an oral tradition by reviving the bardic arts of chanting and musical speech. From the beginning of his career Yeats was determined to return the 'living voice' of the poet from exile to the centre of culture - on its platforms, stages, and streets - thereby establishing a spiritual democracy in the arts for the non-reading as well as the reading public.
Schuchard's study enhances our understanding of Yeats's cultural nationalism, his aims for the Abbey Theatre, and his dynamic place in a complex of interrelated arts in London and Dublin. With a wealth of new archival materials, the narrative intervenes in literary history to show the attempts of Yeats and Florence Farr to take the 'new art' of chanting to Great Britain, America, and Europe, and it reveals for the first time the influence of their auditory poetics on the visual paradigm of the Imagists. The penultimate chapter examines the adjustments Yeats made for his movement during the war, including chanting and other adaptations from Noh drama for his dance plays and choruses, until the practice of his 'unfashionable art' became dormant in the 1920s before the restless rise of realism. The final chapter resurrects his heroic effort in the 1930s to reunite poetry and music and reconstitute his dream of a spiritual democracy through the medium of public broadcasting.

Through a contemporary Gothic lens, the book explores theatre theories, processes and practices that explore; the impacts of continuing drought and natural disaster, the conflicts concerning resource extraction and mining and current political debates focussed on climate change denial. While these issues can be argued from various political and economic platforms, theatrical investigations as discussed here suggest that scholars and theatre makers are becoming empowered to dramaturgically explore the ecological challenges we face now and may face in the future. In doing so the book proposes that theatre can engage in not only climate change analysis and discussion but can develop climate literacies in a broader socio-cultural context.

Features step-by-step planning for each stage of touring an international production. Essential reading for Technical Directors and Production Managers of touring shows, along with students in Production Management, Tour Management, and Technical Direction courses. This is the only book to cover in-depth touring international theatrical productions.

W.B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Censorship, and the Irish State: Adding the Half-pence to the Pence utilizes new source material to reconstruct the current understanding of the relationship between the productions of the Abbey Theatre and the politics of the Irish state. This study begins in 1916, at the start of the Irish Revolution and in the midst of the theatre's financial crisis, and it ends with the death of the Abbey Theatre's last surviving founder, W.B. Yeats. To date, histories of the Abbey Theatre have repeated Yeats's assertion that there was no censorship of the theatre in Ireland. However, this study incorporates financial records, government correspondence, Dail debates, and minutes from the Abbey's directors' meetings to produce surprising conclusions: censorship of the theatre did occur, but it occurred internally rather than by external means. Yeats and his fellow directors privately self-censored plays when there was potential for financial gain, such as in the Abbey's campaign for a state-sponsored reconstruction scheme - the details of which have never been explored prior to this study. Any attempts by the state to directly interfere in the theatre's programme were unsuccessful but were manipulated by the press-savvy Yeats in order to create profitable controversies. Despite Yeats's vocal campaign against censorship, his organisation of the Irish Academy of Letters, and his famous speeches from the Abbey stage decrying the censorship of the 'mob', he was willing to sacrifice the freedom of the artist when he foresaw an opportunity to ensure the longevity of his theatrical enterprise.

What part did Shakespeare play in the construction of a 'white people' and how has his work been enlisted to define and bolster a white cultural and racial identity? Since the court of Queen Elizabeth I, through the early modern English theatre to the storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, white people have used Shakespeare to define their cultural and racial identity and authority. White People in Shakespeare unravels this complex cultural history to examine just how crucial Shakespeare's work was to the early modern development of whiteness as an embodied identity, as well as the institutional dissemination of a white Shakespeare in contemporary theatres, politics, classrooms and other key sites of culture. Featuring contributors from a wide range of disciplines, the collection moves across Shakespeare's plays and poetry and between the early modern and our own time to interrogate these relationships. Split into two parts, 'Shakespeare's White People' and 'White People's Shakespeare', it explores a variety of topics, ranging from the education of the white self in Hamlet, or affective piety and racial violence in Measure for Measure, to Shakespearean education and the civil rights era, and interpretations of whiteness in more contemporary work such as American Moor and Desdemona.

When the eighteenth-century choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre sought to develop what is now known as modern ballet, he turned to ancient pantomime as his source of inspiration; and when Isadora Duncan and her contemporaries looked for alternatives to the strictures of classical ballet, they looked to ancient Greek vases for models for what they termed 'natural' movement. This is the first book to examine systematically the long history of the impact of ideas about ancient Greek and Roman dance on modern theatrical and choreographic practices. With contributions from eminent classical scholars, dance historians, theatre specialists, modern literary critics, and art historians, as well as from contemporary practitioners, it offers a very wide conspectus on an under-explored but central aspect of classical reception, dance and theatre history, and the history of ideas.

Based on extensive archival research and containing rare and previously unpublished photos, this book provides the most detailed reconstruction ever of one of the most important events in Spanish theatrical history. Winner of the 2019-20 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize On 18 June 1933, one of the most important events in Spanish theatrical history took place before an audience of 3,000 spectators in the ruins of the Roman Theatre in Merida. Translated into Spanish by philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, staged by the renowned Xirgu-Borras Company and funded by the government, the performance of Seneca's Medea was a triumph of republican culture and widely hailed for its new dramatic and scenic languages. This book provides the most detailed reconstruction of this pivotal production to date, setting it in context and analysing its origin and legacy. Early twentieth-century intellectuals considered Seneca, 'the philosopher from Cordoba', the epitome of Spanishness and the first in an illustrious line of playwrights stretching from Spain's Roman Antiquity to its Silver Age. His play was seen as the ideal vehicle to showcase the Second Spanish Republic's cultural, social and educational agenda but provoked a furious backlash from opponents to the government's progressive programme. The book shows how the performance became a cultural ritual which stood at the centre of critical discussions on national identity, politics, secularism, women's rights and new European aesthetics of theatre-making. Based on extensive archival research and containing rare and previously unpublished photos, it will be of interest to theatre historians, scholars of Classical Reception and historians of the Second Spanish Republic.

Black Matters: Lewis Morrow Plays is a play anthology that maps the impact of emotional, social, cultural, and economic forces that shape the quality of African American life in the 21st century. Focusing on the narratives of Black men and women carrying the hopes and dreams of a generation, Morrow writes stories of dreams deferred, lives incarcerated, and families broken by circumstance who strive to beat the stereotypes of Blackness. Bending time to create hyperreal poetic engagements with anti-Blackness and systemic racism, Morrow questions who has the audacity of hope while living within circumstances that anticipate premature death. Morrow's poignant characters speak truth to power directly from their hearts as they present as unapologetically Black in a world that is indifferent to, and fatigued by, claims of racism and inequality. Baybra's Tulips: Baybra, a recently rereleased convict, returns home to live with sister Tallulah and her husband Charles under the pretence of rehabilitation but with the objective to avenge his sister's spousal abuse by his brother-in-law that resulted in the loss of her child. Begetters: Explores generational inheritance of trauma focusing on husband and wife, Spicer and Norma, in the twilight years of their marriage, and their descent into darkness and therapy after the loss of a family member Mother/son: A dark dramedy about a white mother who is in denial about her racist perspective and her cocaine addiction. Forced to get clean, she comes to live with her Black son (mixed race) who is reluctant to invest in her latest efforts to get clean in the converging pandemics of BLM and Covid.

This comprehensive text is the first survey to explore the theory, history and practice of immersive theatre. Charting the rise of the immersive theatre phenomenon, Josephine Machon shares her wealth of expertise in the field of contemporary performance, inviting the reader to immerse themselves within this abundantly illustrated text. The first section of the book introduces concepts of immersion, situating them within a historical context and establishing a clear critical vocabulary for discussion. The second section then presents contributions from a wealth of immersive artists. Assuming no prior knowledge with its critical commentary, this is a rich resource for lecturers and students at all levels and internationally, including undergraduates and post-graduates, as well as practitioners and researchers of contemporary performance. This would also be an ideal text for general enthusiasts and readers with an interest in immersive theatre.

Performing Southeast Asia: Performance, Politics and the Contemporary is an important reconsideration of the histories and practices of theatre and performance in a fluid and dynamic region that is also experiencing an overarching politics of complexity, precarity and populist authoritarian tendencies. In a substantial introductory essay and essays by leading scholars, activists and practitioners working inside the region, the book explores fundamental questions for the arts. The book asks how theatre contributes to and/or addresses the political condition in the contemporary moment, how does it represent the complexity of experiences in peoples' daily lives and how does theatre engage in forms of political activism and enable a diversity of voices to flourish. The book shows how, in an age of increasingly violent politics, political institutions become sites for bad actors and propaganda. Forces of biopolitics, neo-liberalism and religious and ethnic nationalism intersect in unpredictable ways with decolonial practices - all of which the book argues are forces that define the contemporary moment. Indeed, by putting the focus on contemporary politics in the region alongside the diversity of practices in contemporary theatre, we see a substantial reformation of the idea of the contemporary moment, not as a cosmopolitan and elite artistic practice but as a multivalent agent of change in both aesthetic and political terms. With its focus on community activism and the creative possibilities of the performing arts the region, Performing Southeast Asia, is a timely intervention that brings us to a new understanding of how contemporary Southeast Asia has become a site of contest, struggle and reinvention of the relations between the arts and society. Peter Eckersall The Graduate Center City University of New York Performing Southeast Asia - with chapters concerned with how regional theatres seek contextually-grounded, yet post-national(istic) forms; how history and tradition shape but do not hold down contemporary theatre; and how, in the editors' words, such artistic encounters could result in theatres 'that do not merely attend to matters of cultural heritage, tradition or history, but instead engage overtly with theatre and performance in the contemporary' - contributes to the possibility of understanding what options for an artistically transubstantiated now-ness may be: to the possibility, that is, of what might be called a 'Present-Tense Theatre'. C. J. W.-L. Wee Professor of English Nanyang Technological University Performing Southeast Asia examines contemporary performance practices and their relationship with politics and governance in Southeast Asia in the twenty-first century. In a region haunted historically by strongman politics, authoritarianism and militarism, religious tension and ethnic strife, the chapters reveal how contemporary theatre and performances in the present reflect yet challenge dominant socio-political discourses. The authors analyse works of political commitment and conviction, created and performed by Southeast Asian artists, as modes and platforms of reaction and resistance to the shifting political climates that inform contemporary life in urban Southeast Asia. The discussions center on issues of state hegemonies and biopolitics, finance and sponsorship, social liberalism and conservatism, the relevance of history and tradition, and globalisation and cultural practice. These diverse yet related concerns converge on an examination of the efficacies of theatre and performance as means of political intervention and transformation that point to alternative embodiments of political consciousness through which artists propose critical options for rethinking the state, citizenship, identity and belonging in a time of seismic socio-political change. The editors also reframe an understanding of 'the contemporary' not simply as a temporal adjective but, in the context of present Southeast Asia, as a geopolitical condition that shapes artistic and performance practices.

This volume is the first concise introduction to the splendid variety of the Chinese theatrical tradition. It presents a rounded perspective on the development of Chinese theater by considering all of its major aspects--history and social context, performance, costume, makeup, actors, playwrights, and theaters--and by discussing all the major forms of Chinese theater, including the Beijing opera, which arose in the eighteenth century, and the spoken play, an entirely twentieth-century form. Its contributors are uniquely qualified to write about the Chinese theater. They have enjoyed an intimate relationship with their subject, both as academics and as theater workers, and they have combined a deep knowledge of Chinese theater with a high regard for its long tradition and continuing vitality. The book is intended for general as well as more specialized readers. Those with an interest in theater as a worldwide phenomenon and those wanting a new light on Chinese culture and society will find it equally useful. To those with a particular interest in Chinese theater, it will be a rich and important resource.