Cities, with their rising populations and complex configurations, have become key symbols of a fast-changing modernity. This timely collection gathers together various urban writings from a range of relevant disciplines, including architecture, geography, sociology, visual art, ethnography and psychoanalysis. Its focus, however, is performance. Underscoring the importance of the field, it shows how performance functions as a dynamic, interdisciplinary mechanism which is central not only to understanding the multiplicity of urban living but also to the way the identities of cities are shaped. Gathering together key writings on the city and performance by authors ranging from Walter Benjamin to Tim Etchells to Carl Lavery, the reader can be navigated in any number of ways. Supported by extensive introductory material, it will be essential and evocative reading for anyone interested in making connections between performance and urban life.

Originally published in 1923, this book addresses the old controversy regarding the exact location of the Globe Theatre. Through a wealth of evidence extracted from the records concerning Shakespeare's London, this book is a direct response to William Westmoreland Braines's pamphlet, issued by the London County Council in 1921, in which Braines demonstrated that the theatre must have stood to the south of Maiden Lane in Southwark. George Hubbard, unconvinced by Braines's theory, presents one of the most important and compelling cases of evidence for placing the site of Shakespeare's playhouse to the north of Maiden Lane. This exchange is the culmination of the controversy over the precise site of the Globe Theatre, which dominated the earlier part of the twentieth century. Detailed maps of London are included. This book will be of considerable value to scholars of Shakespeare as well as to anyone with an interest in theatre.

A readable, workable text that deals with everything about theatre and the artists who make theatre possible. Styles of drama, staging, production, directing and acting, along with all backstage functions, are defined in detail. Theatre history and the business of theatre are covered fully for the use of both students and instructors. The book is divided into three sections: Part I - Theatre, Drama and Place, Part II - The Production, Part III - Theatre History. At the end of each chapter is a summary and questions for in-class discussion. This text has been classroom tested and updated to be fully adaptable to any teaching requirement. 15 chapters: What Are Theatre and Drama?, Dramatic Structure, Dramatic Genre and Style. Theatre Design, The Production. The Actor, The Director, The Designers, The Business of Theatre, The Audience and Critic, five Theatre History chapters, plus a Glossary and Theatre on the Web guide.

Bernard Shaw on the American Stage is the first comprehensive study of the production of Bernard Shaw's plays in America. During his lifetime (1856-1950), Shaw was America's most popular living playwright; productions of his plays were outnumbered only by Shakespeare. Forty-four of Shaw's plays were staged in America before his death, eight more posthumously. Eleven of the productions were world premieres. Bernard Shaw on the American Stage tells the story of the fifty-two premieres, which, apart from a few fragments, is his total dramatic oeuvre. The book also includes, again for the first time, production data and concise overviews of dozens of the most notable American revivals of the plays, from the 1890s to the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. Illustrations-production photographs, programmes, theatre buildings, playbills, actors' studio portraits- inform the study throughout.

This book analyses the work of applied theatre practitioners using a new framework of 'responsivity' to make visible their unique expertise. In-depth investigation of practice combines with theorisation to provide a fresh view of the work of artists and facilitators. Case studies are drawn from community contexts: with women, mental health service users, refugees, adults with a learning disability, older people in care, and young people in school. Common skills and qualities are given a vocabulary to help define applied theatre work, such as awareness, anticipation, adaptation, attunement, and responsiveness. The Applied Theatre Artist is of scholarly, practical, and educational interest. The book offers detailed analysis of how skilled theatre artists make in-action decisions within socially engaged participatory projects. Rich description of in-session activity reveals what workshop facilitators actually do and how they think, offering a rare focus in applied theatre.

The purpose of this Handbook is to provide students with an overview of key developments in queer and trans feminist theories and their significance to the field of contemporary performance studies. It presents new insights highlighting the ways in which rigid or punishing notions of gender, sexuality and race continue to flourish in systems of knowledge, faith and power which are relevant to a new generation of queer and trans feminist performers today. The guiding question for the Handbook is: How do queer and trans feminist theories enhance our understanding of developments in feminist performance today, and will this discussion give rise to new ways of theorizing contemporary performance? As such, the volume will survey a new generation of performers and theorists, as well as senior scholars, who engage and redefine the limits of performance. The chapters will demonstrate how intersectional, queer and trans feminist theoretical tools support new analyses of performance with a global focus. The primary audience will be students of theatre/ performance studies as well as queer /gender studies. The volume's contents suggest close links between the formation of queer feminist identities alongside recent key political developments with transnational resonances. Furthermore, the emergence of new queer and trans feminist epistemologies prompts a reorientation regarding performance and identities in a 21st-century context.

Winner of the 2019 ASCA Book Award Participation is the utopian sweet dream that has turned into a nightmare in contemporary neoliberal societies. Yet can the participatory ideal be discarded or merely replaced with another term, just because it has become disemboweled into a tool of pacification? The gestures of participatory art insists that the concept of participation must be re-imagined and shifted onto other registers. Moving from reflections on institutional critique and impact to concrete analyses of moments of unsolicited, delicate participation and refusal, the book examines a range of artistic practices from India, Sudan, Guatemala and El Salvador, the Lebanon, the Netherlands and Germany. It proposes the concept of the gesture as a way of theorising participatory art, situating it between the visual and the performing arts, as both individual and collective, both internal attitude and social habitude. -- .

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 center 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.

Examining twenty-five years of theatre history, this book covers the major plays that feature representations of the Industrial Workers of the World. American class movement and class divisions have long been reflected on the Broadway stage and here Michael Schwartz presents a fresh look at the conflict between labor and capital.

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is the founder of modern theater, and his plays are performed all over the world. Yet in spite of his unquestioned status as a classic of the stage, Ibsen is often dismissed as a fuddy-duddy old realist, whose plays are of interest only because they remain the gateway to modern theater. In Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, Toril Moi makes a powerful case not just for Ibsen's modernity, but for his modernism. Situating Ibsen in his cultural context, she shows how unexpected his rise to world fame was, and the extent of his influence on writers such Shaw, Wilde, and Joyce who were seeking to escape the shackles of Victorianism.
Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism also rewrites nineteenth-century literary history; positioning Ibsen between visual art and philosophy, the book offers a critique of traditional theories of the opposition between realism and modernism. Modernism, Moi argues, arose from the ruins of idealism, the dominant aesthetic paradigm of the nineteenth century. She also shows why Ibsen still matters to us today, by focusing on two major themes-his explorations of women, men, and marriage and his clear-eyed chronicling of the tension between skepticism and the everyday.
This radical new account places Ibsen in his rightful place alongside Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Manet as a founder of European modernism.

Because dance materializes through and for people, because we learn to dance from others and often present dance to others, the moment of its transmission is one of dance's central and defining features. Valuing Dance looks at the occasion when dancing passes from one person to another as an act of exchange, one that is redolent with symbolic meanings, including those associated with its history and all the labor that has gone into its making. It examines two ways that dance can be exchanged, as commodity and as gift, reflecting on how each establishes dance's relative worth and merit differently. When and why do we give dance? Where and to whom do we sell it? How are such acts of exchange rationalized and justified? Valuing Dance poses these questions in order to contribute to a conversation around what dance is, what it does, and why it matters.

Written to honour the distinguished work and career of Alexandra F. Johnston, 'Bring furth the pagants' brings together original essays in early English drama by colleagues and students of the founder and director of the Records of Early English Drama Project

Editors David N. Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek have grouped the contributions into three primary areas of Johnston's research: the study of documentary records in relation to drama, including new research on the York documents; the interpretation of early English drama, focusing both on the biblical plays and also on the moral interludes, including a broad survey of the role of the Expositor figure in English and French plays; and the drama of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Marlowe and Shakespeare) from the standpoint of its medieval background.

Diverse, thought-provoking, and original, this collection acts as an important complement to the REED volumes and provides a fitting tribute to the scholar it honours.

ContributorsCaroline M. BarronDavid BevingtonGarrett P.J. EppDavid N. KlausnerSally-Beth MacLeanKaren Sawyer MarsalekPeter MeredithDavid MillsBarbara D. PalmerK. Janet RitchMargaret RogersonChester ScovilleJ.A.B. SomersetMeg Twycross

Theatre Across Oceans: Mediators Of Transatlantic Exchange allows the reader to enter and understand the infrastructural 'backstage area' of global cultural mobility during the years between 1890 and 1925. Located within the research fields of global history and theory, the geographical focus of the book is a transatlantic one, based on the active exchange in this phase between North and South America and Europe. Emanating from a rich body of archival material, the study argues that this exchange was essentially facilitated and controlled by professional theatrical mediators (agents, brokers), who have not been sufficiently researched within theatre or historical studies. The low visibility of mediators in the scientific research is in diametrical contrast to the enormous power that they possessed in the period dealt with in this book.

Based on extensive archival research, this open access book examines the poetics and politics of the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) over the first three decades of its existence, discussing some of its remarkable productions in the comparative contexts of avant-garde theatre, Hollywood cinema, popular culture, and the development of Irish-language theatre, respectively. The overarching objective is to consider the output of the Gate in terms of cultural convergence - the dynamics of exchange, interaction, and acculturation that reveal the workings of transnational infrastructures.

Between the advent of the French Revolution and the short-lived success of the Chartist Movement, overworked and underpaid labourers struggled to achieve solidarity and collective bargaining. That history has been told in numerous accounts of the age, but never before has it been told in terms of the theatre of the period. To understand the play lists of a theatre, it is crucial to examine the community which that theatre serves. In the labouring-class communities of London and the provinces, the performances were adapted to suit the local audiences, whether weavers, or miners, or field workers. Examining the conditions and characteristics of representative provincial theatres from the 1790s to 1830s, Frederick Burwick argues that the meaning of a play changes with every change in the performance location. As contributing factors in that change, Burwick attends to local political and cultural circumstances as well as to theatrical activities and developments elsewhere.

The most reliable source for data on productions of the New York stage, both Broadway and Off Broadway, is now complete from 1920 through 1950 with the publication of this third volume devoted to the 1940s. The volumes for 1920-1930 and 1930-1940 have been called invaluable, indispensable, essential, and other superlatives by reviewers, widely utilized by theatre scholars and researchers, consulted by companies producing revivals, and quoted by Playbill magazine in answering readers' queries. The continuing series represents a remarkable achievement for theatre historian Samuel Leiter, who singlehandedly has set out to provide such detailed coverage of New York theatre in the twentieth century.

Like its predecessor volumes, "The Encyclopedia of the New York Stage, 1940-1950" provides a description of every legitimate production--play, musical, revue, or revival; English-language or foreign-language, domestic or import--staged in the New York professional theatre and reviewed by the press during the decade: in this case, nearly 1150 productions. Each listing begins with genre designation and subject categorization and proceeds to writing and production credits, theatre, opening dates, and run. The narrative text that follows, provides, along with plot summary, a lively account of background, anecdotal commentary from biographies and autobiographies, and critical responses to play and production with reference to and quotes from reviews. Ten appendixes offer listings of plays chronologically and in categories as well as play sources, awards, information on theatres, institutional theatres, foreign companies, reviewers, and various statistics. A selected bibliography and indexes of proper names and titles complete the work. The volume introduction is itself a history of New York theatre in the period of World War II and its aftermath. It deals with the hazardous business of theatre, both commercial and nonprofit, with the critical establishment of the day, with the increasing professionalism of Off Broadway, with ethnic theatre and visiting companies, and provides a fascinating overview of production highlights. Although the 1940s is not regarded as a landmark era in American theatre, it did see first productions of such classics as Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire," Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," and Rodgers and Hammerstein's breakthrough musical "Oklahoma " This volume and the predecessor volumes of this encyclopedia series are indispensable reference tools.

This anthology explores how theatre and performance use home as the prism through which we reconcile shifts in national, cultural, and personal identity. Whether examining parlor dramas and kitchen sink realism, site-specific theatre, travelling tent shows, domestic labor, border performances, fences, or front yards, these essays demonstrate how dreams of home are enmeshed with notions of neighborhood, community, politics, and memory. Recognizing the family home as a symbolic space that extends far beyond its walls, the nine contributors to this collection study diverse English-language performances from the US, Ireland, and Canada. These scholars of theatre history, dramaturgy, performance, cultural studies, feminist and gender studies, and critical race studies also consider the value of home at a time increasingly defined by crises of homelessness - a moment when major cities face affordable housing shortages, when debates about homeland and citizenship have dominated international elections, and when conflicts and natural disasters have displaced millions. Global struggles over immigration, sanctuary, refugee status and migrant labor make the stakes of home and homelessness ever more urgent and visible, as this timely collection reveals.

This book strives to unmask the racial inequity at the root of the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the US Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). This book focuses on physical culture - systematic, non-competitive exercise performed under the direction of an expert - because tracing how people practiced physical culture in the Progressive Era, especially middle- and upper-class white women, reveals how modes of popular performance, institutional regulation, and ideologies of individualism and motherhood combined to sublimate whiteness beneath the veneer of liberal progressivism and reform. The sites in this book give the fullest picture of the different strata of physical culture for white women during that time and demonstrate the unracialization of whiteness through physical culture practices. By illuminating the ways in which whiteness in the US became a default identity category absorbed into the "universal" ideals of culture, arts, and sciences, the author shows how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions, audience, and promised profitability. Finally, the chapters reveal troubling connections between the daily habits physical culturists promoted and the eugenics movement's drive towards more reproductively efficient white bodies. By examining these written, visual, and embodied texts, the author insists on a closer scrutiny of the implicit whiteness of physical culture and forwards it as a crucial site of analysis for performance scholars interested in how corporeality is marshaled by and able to contest local and global systems of power.

Reformations of the Body establishes new ties between theology and theatricality in the time of Shakespeare, juxtaposing original readings of religious thinkers such as John Calvin with case studies of influential tragedies such as Doctor Faustus and Othello. While current accounts of the Reformation often assume that Protestant iconoclasts devalued sensory experience and bodily praxis, Jennifer Waldron shows how and why the human body and the bodily senses retained sacred value after the Reformation. In readings of scenes of providential revival, bloody pacts with the devil, and sacrificial rites of revenge, she shows how theological problems became tightly bound to the living medium of theater itself.

Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media studies the performative nature of evil characters, acts and emotions across intersecting genres, disciplines and historical eras. This collection brings together scholars and artists with different institutional standings, cultural backgrounds and (inter)disciplinary interests with the aim of energizing the ongoing discussion of the generic and thematic issues related to the representation of villainy and evil in literature and media. The volume covers medieval literature to contemporary literature and also examines important aspects of evil in literature such as social and political identity, the gothic and systemic evil practices. In addition to literature, the book considers examples of villainy in film, TV and media, revealing that performance, performative control and maneuverability are the common characteristics of villains across the different literary and filmic genres and eras studied in the volume.

Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory reconsiders, after 20 years of intense critical and creative activity, the theory and practice of adapting Shakespeare to different genres and media. Organized around clusters of key metaphors, the book explicates the principal theories informing the field of Shakespearean adaptation and surveys the growing field of case studies by Shakespeare scholars. Each chapter also looks anew at a specific Shakespeare play from the perspective of a prevailing set of theories and metaphors. Having identified the key critics responsible for developing these metaphors and for framing the discussion in this way, Iyengar moves on to analyze afresh the implications of these critical frames for adaptation studies as a whole and for particular Shakespeare plays. Focusing each chapter around a different play, the book contrasts comic, tragic, and tragicomic modes in Shakespeare's oeuvre and within the major genres of adaptation (e.g., film, stage-production, novel and digital media). Each chapter seasons its theoretical discussions with a lively sprinkling of allusions to Shakespeare - ranging from TikTok to tissue-boxes, from folios and fine arts to fan work. To conclude each chapter, the author provides a case-study of three or four significant and interesting adaptations from different genres or media. A glossary of terms compiled by Philip Gilreath and the author completes the book.

Intermedial Shakespeares argues that intermediality has refashioned performances of Shakespeare's plays over the last two decades in Europe. It describes ways in which text and author, time and space, actor and audience have been redefined in Shakespearean productions that incorporate digital media, and it traces transformations in practice.

This book offers a wide-ranging examination of acts of 'virtual embodiment' in performance/gaming/applied contexts that abstract an immersant's sense of physical selfhood by instating a virtual body, body-part or computer-generated avatar. Emergent 'immersive' practices in an increasingly expanding and cross-disciplinary field are coinciding with a wealth of new scientific knowledge in body-ownership and self-attribution. A growing understanding of the way a body constructs its sense of selfhood is intersecting with the historically persistent desire to make an onto-relational link between the body that 'knows' an experience and bodies that cannot know without occupying their unique point of view. The author argues that the desire to empathize with another's ineffable bodily experiences is finding new expression in contexts of particular urgency. For example, patients wishing to communicate their complex physical experiences to their extended networks of support in healthcare, or communities placing policymakers 'inside' vulnerable, marginalized or disenfranchised virtual bodies in an attempt to prompt personal change. This book is intended for students, academics and practitioner-researchers studying or working in the related fields of immersive theatre/art-making, arts-science and VR in applied performance practices.

This book is about joint intelligence in action. It brings together scholarship in performance studies, cognitive science, sociology, literature, anthropology, psychology, architecture, philosophy and sport science to ask how tightly knit collaboration works. Contributors apply innovative methodologies to detailed case studies of martial arts, social interaction, freediving, site-specific artworks, Body Weather, human-AI music composition, Front-of-House at Shakespeare's Globe, acrobatics and failing at handstands. In each investigation, performance and theory are mutually revealing, informative and captivating. Short chapters fall into thematic clusters exploring complex ecologies of skill, collaborative learning and the microstructure of embodied coordination, followed by commentaries from leading scholars in performance studies and cognitive science. Each contribution highlights unique features of the performance ecology, equipping performance makers, students and researchers with the theoretical, methodological and practical inspiration to delve deeper into their own embodied practices and critical thinking.