First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Theatre's Heterotopias analyses performance space, using the concept of heterotopia: a location that, when apparent in performance, refers to the actual world, thus activating performance in its culture. Case studies cover site-specific and multimedia performance, and selected productions from the National Theatre of Scotland and the Globe Theatre.

Non-representational Theory explores a range of ideas which have recently engaged geographers and have led to the development of an alternative approach to the conception, practice, and production of geographic knowledge. Non-representational Theory refers to a key body of work that has emerged in geography over the past two and a half decades that emphasizes the importance of practice, embodiment, materiality, and process to the ongoing formation of social life. This title offers the first sole-authored, accessible introduction to this work and its impact on geography. Without being prescriptive the text provides a general explanation of what Non-representational Theory is. This includes discussion of the disciplinary context it emerged from, the key ideas and themes that characterise work associated with Non-representational Theory, and the theoretical points of reference that inspires it. The book then explores a series of conjunctions of 'Non-representational Theory and...', taking an area of geographic enquiry and exploring the impact Non-representational Theory has had on how it is researched and understood. This includes the relationships between Non-representational Theory and Practice, Affect, Materiality, Landscape, Performance, and Methods. Critiques of Non-representational Theory are also broached, including reflections on issues on identity, power, and difference. The text draws together the work of a range of established and emerging scholars working on the development of non-representational theories, allowing scholars from geography and other disciplines to access and assess the animating potential of such work. This volume is essential reading for undergraduates and post-graduate students interested in the social, cultural, and political geographies of everyday living.

This book examines the performance of 'Britishness' on the musical stage. Covering a tumultuous period in British history, it offers a fresh look at the vitality and centrality of the musical stage, as a global phenomenon in late-Victorian popular culture and beyond. Through a re-examination of over fifty archival play-scripts, the book comprises seven interconnected stories told in two parts. Part One focuses on domestic and personal identities of 'Britishness', and how implicit anxieties and contradictions of nationhood, class and gender were staged as part of the popular cultural condition. Broadening in scope, Part Two offers a revisionary reading of Empire and Otherness on the musical stage, and concludes with a consideration of the Great War and the interwar period, as musical theatre performed a nostalgia for a particular kind of 'Britishness', reflecting the anxieties of a nation in decline.

Collective theatres are collectively organized and run performing groups, usually socially conscious and politically oriented, often aligned with the people's theatre movement. This book examines collectivization as a way of successfully challenging the hierarchy and ideology of traditional theatre and of society. It asserts that the collective process is a vibrant and accessible method of creating theatre, of representing a variety of cultures in the United States and of providing a supportive environment for the creative artist. The study offers a general theory of the process of collective creation and explores its application and results in the theatre.

Weinberg examines the process, then traces the history of collectives and the place of collective theatre in the American cultural tradition. Detailed studies of four such theatres then illustrate the way the collective process has manifested itself and describe exemplary methods and outcomes. Attention is given to the political nature of the companies in their organization and operation, to the art and politics of their plays, and to the relationship of process to production. El Teatro de la Esperanza concentrates on issues of importance to the Chicano community. The Dakota Theatre Caravan had as its major focus the problems, interests, and political awareness of rural people. The United Mime Workers, which was far from a traditional mime troupe, appealed to a general audience, but its scripts often dealt with the world of the workplace. Split Britches, a feminist collective, challenges traditional theatre's heterosexual imperative through startling performances combining narrative, vaudeville, and personal history. The final section contains a summary of the legacy of collective theatre and speculates on the theoretical and practical value of recent trends in collective creation. Assembling and analyzing a mass of fascinating detail culled from archives and interviews as well as published material, this work will be of value to theatre historians and professionals and anyone interested in the interplay of politics and the arts in society, and to those wishing to form collective theatres themselves.

This book investigates the role of arts practitioners in cultural policy-making, challenging the perception that arts practitioners have little or no involvement in policy and seeking to discover the extent and form of their engagement. Examining the subject through a case-study of playwriting policy in England since 1945, and paying particular attention to playwrights' organisations and their history of self-directed activity, the book explores practitioners' participation in cultural policy-making, encompassing both "invited" and "uninvited" interventions that also weave together policy activity and creative practice. It discusses why their involvement matters, and argues that arts practitioners and their organisations can be understood as participants in civil society whose policy activity contributes to the maintenance and enlargement of democratic practices and values.

This volume offers an examination of Brecht's largely forgotten theatrical fragments of a life of David, written just after the Great War but prior to Brecht winning the Kleist Prize in 1922 and the acclaim that would launch his extraordinary career. David J. Shepherd and Nicholas E. Johnson take as their starting point Brecht's own diaries from the time, which offer a vivid picture of the young Brecht shuttling between Munich and the family home in Augsburg, surrounded by friends, torn between women, desperate for success, and all the while with 'David on the brain'. The analysis of Brecht's David, along with his notebooks and diaries, reveals significant connections between the reception of the Biblical David and one of Germany's most tumultuous cultural periods. Drawing on theatrical experiments conducted with an ensemble from Trinity College Dublin, this volume includes the first ever translation of the David fragments in English, an extensive discussion of the theatrical afterlife of David in the early twentieth century as well as new interdisciplinary insights into the early Brecht: a writer entranced by the biblical David and utterly committed to translating the biblical tradition into his own evolving theatrical idiom.

"Riotous Performances is a thorough and daring analysis of the theater as a cultural space. Through this work Burke recovers the voices of the dispossessed Irish and the non-elite members of the Dublin audience. I think it will be essential reading for those interested in Irish Studies and eighteenth-century English literature." -Christopher Wheatley, Catholic University of America Riotous Performances explores the significance of theater "riots" and other disruptive practices that occurred in Dublin playhouses between 1712 and 1784. Helen Burke's study reveals that during this period Irish theater was a site of struggle between different ethnic, religious, and class factions competing for power in eighteenth-century Ireland. Key players in this drama included Irish Protestant patriots, an emerging Catholic middle class, a dispossessed native gentry, and an increasingly politicized Dublin "mob." Burke contends that these groups expressed their resistance to the ruling British culture through explosive acts as well as through more subtle counter-cultural behaviors such as wearing Irish manufactured clothing, singing Irish songs, and opposing the Theater Royal. Using a wide array of primary materials, including dramatic texts, newspaper accounts, pamphlets, broadsides, and songs, Burke places the riotous performances she describes in their social and political context. Her analysis reveals that in the 1740s and 1750s the theater was the focus of intense struggles between Catholic-identified gentry reformers and Protestant-identified populist reformers. But by the1780s new, united Irish themes were emerging in Dublin playhouses. She argues that the Irish Parliament passed the first Irish Stage Act in 1786 to contain these revolutionary theatrics. Riotous Performances demonstrates that eighteenth century Irish theater was not a static colonial institution, but rather a deeply contested arena of intense ethnic, religious, and class struggle.

This book investigates how the British theatrical community offered an alternative and oppositional historical narrative to the heritage culture promulgated by the Thatcher and Major Governments in the 1980s and early 1990s. It details the challenges the theatre faced, especially reductions in government funding, and examines seminal playwrights of the period - including but not limited to Caryl Churchill, Howard Brenton, Sarah Daniels, David Edgar, and Brian Friel - who dramatized a more inclusive vision of history that gave voice to traditionally marginalized communities. It employs James Baldwin's concept of witnessing as the means by which history could be deployed to articulate an alternative and emergent political narrative: "the history we haven't had". This book will appeal to students and scholars of theatre and cultural studies as well as theatre practitioners and enthusiasts.

"Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body" is a study of the representation of the body in Samuel Beckett's work (both novels and plays), specifically focused on the 'prosthetic' aspect of the organs and senses. While making use of the theoretical potential of the concept of 'prosthesis', this book aims to resituate Beckett in the broad cultural context of modernism in which the impact of new media and technologies was variously registered.

This is a handbook of detailed step-by-step information, examples, and suggestions for directing a school theatre program.

Why should the digital bring about ideas of progress in the theatre arts? This question opens up a rich seam of provocative and original thinking about the uses of new media in theatre, about new forms of cultural practice and artistic innovation, and about the widening purposes of the theatre's cultural project in a changing digital world. Through detailed case-studies on the work of key international theatre companies such as the Elevator Repair Service and The Mission Business, Bill Blake explores how the digital is providing new scope for how we think about the theatre, as well as how the theatre in turn is challenging how we might relate to the digital.

The Art of Experience provides an interdisciplinary analysis of selected plays from Ireland's premier female playwright, Marina Carr. Dagmara Gizlo explores the transformative impact of a theatrical experience in which interdisciplinary boundaries must be crossed. This book demonstrates that theatre is therapeutic and therapy is theatrical. The role of emotions, cognitions, and empathy in the theatrical experience is investigated throughout. Dagmara Gizlo utilises the methodological tools stemming from modern empirically grounded psychology (such as cognitive-behavioural therapy or CBT) to the study of theatre's transformative potential. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, performance, and literature, and will be a fascinating read for those at the intersection of cognitive studies and the humanities.

Travelling Players in Shakespeare's England is the first extended study of the touring practices and performances of Elizabethan and Jacobean travelling players. It opens with a general introduction to the lively, competitive world of professional touring theatre. Following chapters focus on playing practices and performances in the spaces used as temporary theatres by touring actors (such a town halls and country houses). The final chapter looks at the decline of this important theatrical tradition in the 1620s.

For literary scholars, plays are texts; for scenographers, plays are performances. Yet clearly a drama is both text and performance. Dramatic Spaces examines period-specific stage spaces in order to assess how design shaped the thematic and experiential dimensions of plays. This book highlights the stakes of the debate about spatiality and the role of the spectator in the auditorium - if audience members are co-creators of the drama, how do they contribute? The book investigates: Roman comedy and Shakespearean dramas in which the stage-space itself constituted the primary scenographic element and actors' bodies shaped the playing space more than did sets or props the use of paid applauders in nineteenth-century Parisian theaters and how this practice reconfigured theatrical space transactions between stage designers and spectators, including work by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, William Ritman, and Eiko Ishioka Dramatic Spaces aims to do for stage design what reader-response criticism has done for the literary text, with specific case studies on Coriolanus, The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Tales of Hoffman, M. Butterfly and Tiny Alice exploring the audience's contribution to the construction of meaning.

"This book examines how violence was used as a spectacle in Cuban and Argentine theater in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a reflection of and a dialogue with the violence occurring in the public arena. Using the international affair of the Caso Padilla as a way to appreciate how the notion of revolutionary spectacle pertains to culture, Ford deftly examines the use of violence in four plays from Cuba and Argentina to understand how simulated violence was used as a tool to address the very real violence that was taking place offstage."--BOOK JACKET.

With a foreword from Rustom Bharucha, this book is a timely anthology which aims to unsettle our habituated modes of thinking about the place of the secular in cultural productions. The last decade alone has witnessed many religious protests against cultural productions, which have led, in some cases, to the closure of theatre and opera performances. Threats to artists led to the exile of Indian painter, MF Husain, and murder of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, the controversy over the depiction of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005 led to the cancellation of performances of Mozart's Idomeneo for the season. Offering fresh and provocative readings that probe the limits and promise of secularity in relation to questions of performance, politics, and the public sphere, this book will be invaluable to scholars who seek to understand the dramatic rise of politicized theology in our new century.

Moss Hart's "Act One," which Lincoln Center Theater is presenting as a play written and directed by James Lapine, is one of the great American memoirs, a glorious memorial to a bygone age filled with all the wonder, drama, and heartbreak that surrounded Broadway in the early twentieth century. Hart's story inspired a generation of theatergoers, dramatists, and readers everywhere as he eloquently chronicled his impoverished childhood and his long, determined struggle to reach the opening night of his first Broadway hit. "Act One" is the quintessential American success story.

Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice explores the impact of digital technologies on the theatrical performance of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century, both in terms of widening cultural access and developing new forms of artistry. Through close analysis of dozens of productions, both high-profile and lesser known, it examines the rise of live broadcasting and recording in the theatre, the growing use of live video feeds and dynamic projections on the mainstream stage, and experiments in born-digital theatre-making, including social media, virtual reality, and video-conferencing adaptations. In doing so, it argues that technologically adventurous performances of Shakespeare allow performers and audiences to test what they believe theatre to be, as well as to reflect on what it means to be present-with a work of art, with others, with oneself-in an increasingly online world.

This book offers an exploration of the postcolonial hybrid experience in anglophone Caribbean plays and performance from a feminist perspective. In a hitherto unattempted consideration of Caribbean theatre and performance, this study of gendered identities chronicles the postcolonial hybrid experience - and how it varies in the context of questions of sex, performance and social designation. In the process, it examines the diverse performances of the anglophone Caribbean. The work includes works by Caribbean anglophone playwrights like Derek Walcott, Mustapha Matura, Michael Gikes, Dennis Scott, Trevor Rhone, Earl Lovelace and Errol John with more recent works of Pat Cumper, Rawle Gibbons and Tony Hall. The study would also engage with Carnival, calypso and chutney music, while commenting on its evolving influences over the hybrid imagination. Each section covers the dominant socio-political thematics associated with the tradition and its effect on it, followed by an analysis of contemporaneously significant literary and cultural works - plays, carnival narrative and calypso and chutney lyrics as well as the experiences of performers. From Lovelace's fictional Jestina to the real-life Drupatee, the book critically explores the marginalization of female performances while forming a hybrid identity.

This book explores the role of alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Hermetic philosophy in one of Shakespeare's last plays, The Winter's Tale. A perusal of the vast literary and iconographic repertory of Renaissance alchemy reveals that this late play is imbued with several topoi, myths, and emblematic symbols coming from coeval alchemical, Paracelsian, and Hermetic sources. It also discusses the alchemical significance of water and time in the play's circular and regenerative pattern and the healing role of women. All the major symbols of alchemy are present in Shakespeare's play: the intertwined serpents of the caduceus, the chemical wedding, the filius philosophorum, and the so-called rex chymicus. This book also provides an in-depth survey of late Renaissance alchemy, Paracelsian medicine, and Hermetic culture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. Importantly, it contends that The Winter's Tale, in symbolically retracing the healing pattern of the rota alchemica and in emphasising the Hermetic principles of unity and concord, glorifies King James's conciliatory attitude.

This pivot considers the history, methodology and practice of Asian theatre and investigates the role of Asian theatre and film in contemporary transnational Asian identities. It critically reviews the topics of transnationalism and intercultural political difference, arguing that the concept of Transnational Asian theatre or 'TransAsia' can promote cultural diversity and social transformation. The book notably offers an understanding of theatre as a cultural laboratory, a repository for diverse histories and a forum for intercultural dialogue, allowing for a better understanding of sociocultural patterns surrounding transnational Asian identity and mobility.

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.

The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy is a volume of especially commissioned critical essays, conversations, collaborative, creative and performative writing mapping the key contexts, debates, methods, discourses and practices in this developing field. Firstly, the collection offers new insights on the fundamental question of how thinking happens: where, when, how and by whom philosophy is performed. Secondly, it provides a plurality of new accounts of performance and performativity - as the production of ideas, bodies and knowledges - in the arts and beyond. Comprising texts written by international artists, philosophers and scholars from multiple disciplines, the essays engage with questions of how performance thinks and how thought is performed in a wide range of philosophies and performances, from the ancient to the contemporary. Concepts and practices from diverse geographical regions and cultural traditions are analysed to draw conclusions about how performance operates across art, philosophy and everyday life. The collection both contributes to and critiques the philosophy of music, dance, theatre and performance, exploring the idea of a philosophy from the arts. It is crucial reading material for those interested in the hierarchy of the relationship between philosophy and the arts, advancing debates on philosophical method, and the relation between Performance and Philosophy more broadly.