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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Theatre, drama > General
Replete with interviews with key practitioners (both in the book and online) will give up-to-date information on the techniques, forms and concepts used by leading figures in contemporary Live Visuals.
Although the myth of Atreus' gruesome vengeance on his brother, Thyestes, was embedded in Greek and Roman culture long before his time, Seneca's play is the only literary or dramatic account to have survived intact. Written probably in late Neronian Rome, Thyestes is now widely regarded as one of the tragedian's finest achievements and represents Seneca's most mature reflections on power and civilization, and on the tragic theatre itself. The play's impact on European literature and drama from antiquity to the present has been considerable; now much studied in universities and colleges, and regularly adapted and performed, it still contains much that speaks pointedly to our times: its focus on appetite, lust, violence, and horror; its preoccupation with rhetoric, morality, and power; its concern with the problematics of kinship, and with political, social, and religious institutions and their fragility and impotence; its dramatization of reason's failure, the triumph and cyclicity of evil, the determinism of history, the mastery of the world through mastery of the word; its theatricalized and godless universe. This new edition of Seneca's Thyestes offers a comprehensive introduction, newly edited Latin text, an English verse translation designed for both performance and high-level academic study, and a detailed exegetic, analytic, and interpretative commentary on the play. The aim throughout has been to elucidate the text dramatically as well as philologically, and to locate the play firmly in its contemporary historical and theatrical context and in the ensuing literary and dramatic tradition. As such, the reception of the play by European dramatists is given especial emphasis in the introduction and throughout the commentary; this and the accessible notes on the text make this edition of particular use not only to scholars and students of classics, but also of literature and drama, and to anyone interested in the cultural dynamics of literary reception and in the interplay between theatre and history.
Winner! Three 1947 Donaldson Awards, for Best Book, Best Lyrics and Best Score Nominee: Seven 2005 Helen Hayes Awards Winner! Two 2005 Helen Hayes Awards for Outstanding Resident Musical and Outstanding Director This ensemble musical chronicles nearly four decades in the life of an Everyman, Joseph Taylor, Jr., from cradle through a mid-life discovery of who he is and what his life is truly about. The first musical to be staged by a director who also served as choreographer (the legendary Agnes de Mille), Allegro followed a unique structural format traveling from Joe's birth through his childhood, from college dorm to marriage altar, and on to his career; from the tranquility of his small Midwestern hometown to the hectic din of big city life, in a series of vignettes and musical sequences dazzling in their simplicity and stunning in their impact. Ahead of its time theatrically, Allegro remains timeless in its appeal.
The voices that are represented in this collection come from various parts of the world and express the views of practitioners and scholars who have all had first-hand experience working in Zimbabwean theatre from the last days of Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. The collection views the long continuum of developments in local theatre history as a case of the intrusive hegemonies that came with colonial Rhodesia as a conquest society, and localised identities in the form of the persistence of indigenous and syncretic popular forms. With time, all these came together to constitute the makings of a contested post-colony in contemporary theatre practice in Zimbabwe. The primary interest of scholars who are represented here is located at the intersection of political, cultural and performative discourses and the flow of Zimbabwean history. The focus, moreover, is not only on the history of performance cultures in postcolonial Zimbabwe - it extends its critical gaze to include the history of political ideas that gave rise to cultural contestation in the field of theatre and performance.
A study of tragedies, comedies, romances, and histories, this book examines the dynamic interplay of three concepts--gender, text, and habitat--as metaphors for cross-cultural definition. The book focuses on the cross-cultural experience, arguing that Shakespeare reinterprets, refashions, and reinscribes stage aliens such as Jews, Moors, Amazons and gypsies and thus interrogates a Eurocentric perspective and the caricatures that cultures create of one another. Writing in an accessible, compelling style, de Sousa recovers a wealth of information on race and gender relations in early modern Europe.
Every artist has a dream project an enterprise that he or she has continuously taken up but never completed. Via archived notes and drafts, a retrospective reconstitution of such projects can serve as a key for better understanding the authors artistic corpus. The present study reaches out to the authorship of Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini. Claudel deferred and never completed the fourth segment of his Trilogie des Coufontaine. The only indication of the existence of this prospective fourth part of the theatre sequence is a brief entry in his Journal. In 1949, he began writing a third version of his first great work Tete dOr. Like the unfinished fourth section that was to be added to the trilogy, the draft of the third version of Tete dOr reveals a dialogue between the Old and New Testaments a theme that appears to be central to Claudels entire corpus. Genet labored over La Mort for many years. At the conclusion of Saint Genet, comedien et martyr (1952), Sartre mentions this final work of Genet. Genet discussed his progress on La Mort in correspondence and even published Fragments of La Mort in the literary magazine Les Temps Modernes. While the project never came to fruition, it nevertheless remains an important means through which to understand Genets work. The aborted production of Fellinis Voyage de G. Mastorna has become a legend. After 8" and Giulietta degli spiriti, Fellini wrote a screenplay that he began to film but subsequently abandoned, much to the chagrin of producer Dino de Laurentiis who had already invested in sets and costumes. Fellini would often revisit this project, but never completed it. This book also examines additional dream projects taken from different art forms: poetry (Mallarmes Le Livre); literature (Vignys Daphne); painting (Monets Nympheas); music (Schoenbergs Moses und Aron); and various films (Clouzots LEnfer, Viscontis La Recherche, Kubricks Napoleon, etc.).
Performance Art: Education and Practice is an introduction to performance art through activities and practice prompts that are framed by seminal moments in the history of the medium as well as the current theoretical discussions surrounding performance. The book begins by introducing the terminology related to performance art and its early history. The basic elements of performance, including the body, objects, space, the public, and the public sphere are approached through thematic and conceptual correlations such as objects as autobiography, body as an expression of gendered identity, performance and the everyday, the augmented body, the archive of performance, and public space as space for intervention. Case studies analysed in each chapter are accompanied by reflexive questions and discussion topics. The book proposes a wide range of exercises and comprehensive practice prompts that aim to enhance performance skills, promote experimentation, and encourage an experiential understanding of the theory, history, and concepts relating to performance art. Performance Art: Education and Practice is addressed to students of Fine Arts and Performance Studies from beginner to intermediate level, performance and visual artists who are interested in expanding their knowledge base and creative range, and artist-teachers who are interested in developing their own curriculum and workshop content.
This volume explores connections between architecture and theatre, and encourages imagination in the design of buildings and social spaces. Imagination is arguably the architect's most crucial capacity, underpinning memory, invention and compassion. No simple power of the mind, architectural imagination is deeply embodied, social and situational. Its performative potential and holistic scope may be best understood through the model of theatre. Theatres of Architectural Imagination examines the fertile relationship between theatre and architecture with essays, interviews and entr'actes arranged in three sections: Bodies, Settings and (Inter)Actions. Contributions explore a global spectrum of examples and contexts, from ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy to modern Europe, North America, India and Japan. Topics include: the central role of the human body in design; the city as a place of political drama, protest and phenomenal play; and world-making through language, gesture and myth. Chapters also consider sacred and magical functions of theatre in Balinese and Persian settings; eccentric experiments at the Bauhaus and 1970 Osaka World Expo; and ecological action and collective healing amid contemporary climate chaos. Inspired by architect and educator Marco Frascari, the book performs as a Janus-like memory theatre, recalling and projecting the architect's perennial task of reimagining a more meaningful world. This collection will delight and provoke thinkers and makers in theatrical arts and built environment disciplines, especially Architecture, Landscape and Urban Design.
Sets out a clear argument for care and caregiving as an aesthetic experience and aesthetic act. Written for all advanced students of nursing and applied theatre, as well as professionals in care, nursing and dramatherapy. The first and only book to advance this concept, disturbing the boundaries of artistic and care practice.
A Beginner's Guide to Special Makeup Effects: Monsters, Maniacs and More is an introduction to special effects makeup using cost-effective tools and materials that can be found in local stores. The book is divided into three sections - Simple Makeup, Advanced Materials and Techniques and Advanced Makeup - and features tutorials to create characters such as a pirate, vampire, ghost, robot, burn victim, witch, zombie and goblin. Each character is introduced with a full-page photograph of the finished makeup and illustrated with full-color, step-by-step photographs. The book also includes instructions on how to make fake teeth, apply bald caps, create gory wounds and injuries and make simple prosthetics. Each makeup tutorial is designed to progressively build on the techniques outlined in the preceding tutorial, guiding readers from the basics of foundation, highlight and shadow to creating advanced creature makeups. This is a beginner makeup book suited for students of Stage Makeup courses, as well as for the theatre technician working and training on their own.
An essential guide for young people who want to work in the theatre - but aren't sure exactly what they want to do, or how to get to do it. Many young people are eager to experience the excitement and allure of working in theatre, but often this only goes as far as imagining themselves as actors, on stage in front of an audience every night. In reality, there are more jobs off the stage than on it. They can be every bit as rewarding as acting - and certainly more secure because there are invariably fewer people competing for each one. Using her expertise as Education and Training Editor for The Stage, Susan Elkin encourages aspiring theatre-makers and workers to look beyond acting to some of the other behind-the-scenes options available: playwriting, directing, producing, designing, stage management, administration, publicity, front-of-house, stage door... * She describes what each job entails and how you might achieve that role, including relevant courses and training opportunities offered in the UK. There are also numerous case studies of theatre professionals describing how they got where they are, and top tips for following in their footsteps. Written in a clear, no-nonsense style, this book is an ideal starting point for students considering a career in theatre, but also a useful tool for parents, teachers and career-advisers looking to learn more about the options open to interested young people. * And, for those of you who really must, the book does cover how to get into acting too.
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.
Winner! 1993 Olivier Award, Best Musical Revival Winner! Five 1994 Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical Winner! Three 1994 Drama Desk Awards Nominee: Seven 1994 Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Musical Revival Winner! Two 2018 Tony Awards Nominee: Eleven 2018 Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical Winner! Five 2018 Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Orchestrations Nominee: Twelve 2018 Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Musical Revival In a Maine coastal village toward the end of the 19th century, the swaggering, carefree carnival barker, Billy Bigelow, captivates and marries the gentle millworker, Julie Jordan. Billy loses his job just as he learns that Julie is pregnant and, desperately intent upon providing a decent life for his family, he is coerced into being an accomplice to a robbery. Caught in the act and facing the certainty of prison, he takes his own life and is sent 'up there.' Billy is allowed to return to earth for one day fifteen years later, and he encounters the daughter he never knew. She is a lonely, friendless teenager, her father's reputation as a thief and bully having haunted her throughout her young life. How Billy instills in both the child and her mother a sense of hope and dignity is a dramatic testimony to the power of love.
This volume considers prewar theatre in Hitler's Germany, a previously neglected subject in theatre history. An extended introduction sets the theatre scene of 1933 and charts the major theatre regulations and organizations formed that year. The initial essay examines the unified folk community used to achieve power and served by purged and revived German art. Plays that achieved great success in Nazi Germany--"Die endlose Strasse" by Sigmund Graff and six works by Eberhard Wolfgang Moller--are considered. In essays devoted to specific theatres, the work examines how Reinhardt's Grosses Schauspielhaus fared under the Nazis and how the regional Detmold Stadttheater was obliged to observe the new politicized aesthetics. The famous and privileged actor Werner Krauss is the subject of an essay on artistic responsibility, while a chapter on three famed directors--Grundgens, Fehling, and Hilpert--shows how artists maneuvered for artistic freedom. The Propaganda Ministry's first national festival in Dresden in 1934 is covered. The final two essays look at minority theatre--Jewish theatre in the anti-Semitic Third Reich and, as a postscript to the volume, theatre in the Nazi concentration camps.
Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century explores the modes of authorship in twenty-first century theatre - spanning classical theatre, devising and adaptation, new writing, verbatim and contemporary performance - with reference to genealogies through which these categories have been constructed in the English-speaking world.Based on substantial original research, it is the first book to deliberately bring together text-based and performance-based theatre, and offer their consideration with reference to different cultures (European vs. Anglo-American). Amongst other things, the book argues that devising has now become a historical category, that playwrights in the twenty-first century are more akin to music composers and that contemporary performance-makers are finally beginning to understand Brecht. Examples under discussion range from the Royal Shakespeare Company's kinaesthetic approach to Shakespeare, to the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed's interactive shows. Drawing on interviews with leading contemporary practitioners and companies, such as Tim Crouch, Kneehigh and Simon Stephens, amongst others, the book usefully bridges the gap between dramatic theatre and devised performance by exploring the role of the theatre writer, writing and text in all of these diverse manifestations of theatre and performance-making.
‘Anthony Neilson's 2004 play is half a lark, half deadly serious’ TIME OUT ‘A profane, madcap, Alice-in-Wonderland trip morphs into something much more profound in Anthony Neilson’s weirdly compelling 2004 study of mental instability’ EVENING STANDARD Lisa Jones is on a journey. It's a colourful and exciting off-kilter trip in search of one lost hour that has tipped the balance of her life. The inhabitants of the wonderful world she finds herself in – Dissocia – are a curious blend of the funny, the friendly and the brutal. This Student Edition of Anthony Neilson’s 2004 play, which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival, features a commentary and notes by anna six. It introduces students to debates surrounding mental health and situates Neilson within a British theatrical tradition, including through an interview with him.
In Shanghai during the early portion of the twentieth century, a hybrid theatrical form emerged that was based on Western spoken theatre, classical Chinese theatre, and a Japanese hybrid form of kabuki and Western-style spoken theatre called shinpa (new school drama). Known as wenmingxi (civilized drama), this form has, until recently, largely been ignored by scholars in China and the West as it does not fit into the current binary "traditional/modern" model in non-Western theatre and performance studies. This book places wenmingxi in the context of its hybridized literary and performance elements, giving it a definitive place in modern Chinese theatre.
Victorian Shakespeare (Volume 2): Literature and Culture explores some of the responses to Shakespeare by leading nineteenth-century novelists, poets and critics including Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, Tennyson, Browning and Ruskin. Through certain key plays, especially Hamlet and Othello, Shakespeare provided them with ways of thinking about the authority of the past, about the emergence of a new mass culture, about the relations between artistic and industrial production, about the nature of creativity, about racial and sexual difference, about individual and national identity.
Love's Victory by Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1651) is the first romantic comedy written in English by a woman. The Revels Plays publishes for the first time a fully-authorised, modern spelling edition of the Penshurst manuscript, the only copy of the play containing all five acts, handwritten by Wroth and privately owned by the Viscount De L'Isle. Edited by Alison Findlay, Philip Sidney and Michael G. Brennan, their critical introduction provides details of Wroth's remarkable life and work as a member of the Sidney family, tracing connections between Love's Victory, her prose and poetry and her family's extensive writings. The editors introduce readers to the influence of court drama on Love's Victory and offer a new account of the play's stage history in productions from 1999-2018. Extensive commentary notes guiding the modern reader include explanatory glosses, literary references and staging information. -- .
This book covers the history of theater as well as the literature of America from 1880-1930. The years covered by this volume features the rise of the popular stage in America from the years following the end of the Civil War to the Golden Age of Broadway, with an emphasis on its practitioners, including such diverse figures as William Gillette, Mrs. Fiske, George M. Cohan, Maude Adams, David Belasco, George Abbott, Clyde Fitch, Eugene O'Neill, Texas Guinan, Robert Edmond Jones, Jeanne Eagels, Susan Glaspell, The Adlers and the Barrymores, Tallulah Bankhead, Philip Barry, Maxwell Anderson, Mae West, Elmer Rice, Laurette Taylor, Eva Le Gallienne, and a score of others. Entries abound on plays of all kinds, from melodrama to the newly-embraced realistic style, ethnic works (Irish, Yiddish, etc.), and such diverse forms as vaudeville, circus, minstrel shows, temperance plays, etc. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Modernism covers the history of modernist American Theatre through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 2,000 cross-referenced entries on actors and actresses, directors, playwrights, producers, genres, notable plays and theatres. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the American Theater in its greatest era.
This reference book has entries for some 300 women in American theater, ranging from actors, directors, choreographers, playwrights, and designers, to critics, agents, and managers, and should provide focus for future scholars of women's studies and theater. . . . . The volume will prove valuable to scholars and the curious. "Library Journal" The current and thoughtful treatment of this book will be valuable for academic and large public libraries, especially those that support research in women's studies, theater, American studies, and biography. "Booklist" From Mrs. Lewis Hallam, the first known professional actress in America to outstanding women of the present era, this biographical dictionary alphabetically examines some 300 notable women who had distinguished careers in the American theatre. Not simply a list of names and activities, the volume--to the extent possible--narrates and evaluates the women's lives and accomplishments providing not only relevant biographical information and bibliographical materials but also describing the women's professional contributions. In representing the careers of theatre artists from actors, directors, and designers, to choreographers, managers, playwrights, educators, critics, variety performers, and agents, this first reference of its kind devoted exclusively to women also serves as a unique survey of the history of American theatre. "Notable Women in the American Theatre" documents the widespread activities of women in the American theatre. As many of them functioned in more than one capacity, one of the two appendixes lists names in the various professional categories. Each entry describes the pertinent facts of biography and contains a descriptive narrative relating to the individual's career with a special notation of her distinguished role in the American theatre. A bibliography of the featured woman, including sources to be found in books, magazines, and newspapers, is also part of the alphabetical entry. To aid readers and researchers, 2 separate appendixes contain listings by place of birth and by profession and collate the interrelatedness of the careers of many of the women. Compiled primarily as a reference for college and university libraries, the volume would be a useful supplement to courses in women's studies, American studies, drama courses taught in English and theatre departments, courses in the history of the theatre, American history, and biography.
This book focuses on two important topics in Shaw's Major Barbara and Pygmalion that have received little attention from critics: language and metadrama. If we look beyond the social, political, and economic issues that Shaw explored in these two plays, we discover that the stories of the two "Shavian sisters"- Barbara Undershaft and Eliza Doolittle-are deeply concerned with performance and what Jacques Derrida calls "the problem of language." Nearly every character in Major Barbara produces, directs, or acts in at least one miniature play. In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins is Eliza's acting coach and phonetics teacher, as well as the star of an impromptu, open-air phonetics show. The language content in these two plays is just as intriguing. Did Eliza Doolittle have to learn Standard English to become a complete human being? Should we worry about the bad grammar we hear at Barbara Undershaft's Salvation Army shelter? Is English losing its precision and purity? Meanwhile, in the background, Shaw keeps reminding us that language and theatre are always present in our everyday lives-sometimes serving as stabilizing forces, and sometimes working to undo them. |
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