This book investigates transdisciplinary, arts-based approaches to developing innovative and pertinent higher education pedagogy. Introducing timely critical thinking strategies, the author addresses some of the key issues facing educators today in an increasingly complex digital, technological and ecological world. The author combines emerging ideas in the New Materialism and Posthumanism schools of thought with arts-based teaching and learning, including Practice-as-Research, for Social Science contexts, thus exploring how this approach can be used to productively create new pedagogical strategies. Drawing on a rich repertoire of real-life examples, the volume suggests transferrable routes into practice that are suitable for lecturers, researchers and students. This practical and innovative volume will appeal to researchers and practitioners interested in Posthuman and New Materialist theories, and how these can be applied to the educational landscape in future.

This book explores the textured process of rewriting and revising theatrical works in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean as both a material and metaphorical practice. Deftly tracing these themes through community theater groups, ancient Greek theater, religious traditions, and national historical events, Katherine Ford weaves script, performance and final product together with an eye to the social significance of revision. Ultimately, to rewrite and revise is to re-envision and re-imagine stage practices in the twentieth-century Hispanic Caribbean.

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.

Renowned theatre and film director Nancy Meckler delves into her hugely varied experiences in the rehearsal room and shares examples of tried-and-tested "tools" to bring a play to life. Meckler encourages you to interrogate, play, experiment and to use her methods as a starting point to begin creating your own unique directing toolkit and finding your own style. The examples are drawn from her experience directing a range of work from classic plays, including work by Chekhov, Brecht and Shakespeare, to new writing, including work by Pam Gems and Sam Shepard, and in a wide range of renowned theatres, including the RSC, National Theatre, Royal Court and a number of the UK's regional theatres. The author's approachable and relatable writing style enables an in-depth look into how she works with actors and the many ways in which she may approach a new project while also providing with a unique insight into her own wealth of experience over a remarkable career as an award-winning and internationally celebrated director.

This book offers a creative and practical guide for K-6 teachers on how to effectively integrate creative movement and the performing arts into the curriculum to increase student engagement, deepen learning, improve retention, and get kids moving during the school day. Chapters offer concrete ideas for integrating creative movement and theater into subjects such as math, science, literacy, and social studies. Drawing on two decades of experience, Dr. Becker outlines key skills, offers rich examples, and provides adaptable and flexible classroom tested lesson plans that align with Common Core Standards, the NGSS, C3 Social Studies Standards, and the National Core Arts Standards. Activities are grounded in arts integration, which is steadily gaining interest in school reform as an effective teaching strategy that increases student outcomes academically and socially; particularly effective for students who have traditionally been marginalized. This book will benefit practicing educators who want to invigorate their practice, pre-service teachers who want to expand their toolkit, as well as school leaders looking to employ policies that support movement and arts during the school day. Jump in and get your kids Moving Through the School Day and see how active and engaging learning can be!

Placing 'literature' at the centre of Renaissance economic knowledge, this book offers a distinct intervention in the history of early modern epistemology. It is premised on the belief that early modern practices of change and exchange produced a range of epistemic shifts and crises, which, nonetheless, lacked a systematic vocabulary. These essays collectively tap into the imaginative kernel at the core of economic experience, to grasp and give expression to some of its more elusive experiential dimensions. The essays gathered here probe the early modern interface between imaginative and mercantile knowledge, between technologies of change in the field of commerce and transactions in the sphere of cultural production, and between forms of transaction and representation. In the process, they go beyond the specific interrelation of economic life and literary work to bring back into view the thresholds between economics on the one hand, and religious, legal and natural philosophical epistemologies on the other.

A Galaxy of Things explores the ways in which all puppets, masks, and makeup-prosthetic figures are "material characters," and uses Star Wars creatures, droids, and helmeted-characters to illustrate what makes the good ones not only compelling, but meaningful. The book begins with author Colette Searls' Star Wars thing aesthetic, described through a release-order overview of what creatures, droids and masked characters have brought to 45+ years of live-action Star Wars. Building on theories from the burgeoning field of puppetry and material performance, it sees these "material characters" as a group and describes three specific powers that they share - distance, distillation, and duality - using the ubiquitously recognizable Star Wars characters to illustrate them. The book describes Distance, Distillation, and Duality as material character powers, using characters like C-3PO and Jabba the Hutt to illustrate how all three work to generate meaning. An in-depth exploration of the original Empire Strikes Back Yoda and "Baby" Yoda (Grogu) reveals how these two puppets use those powers to transform their human companions: Luke Skywalker, and then Din Djarin. Searls provides an in-depth analysis of Darth Vader's mask trajectory across three trilogies (1977 - 2019), revealing its contribution as a "performing thing." Finally, the book presents problematic uses of material character powers by critiquing droids in service, and the historical use of racial stereotypes in characters like Jar Jar Binks, before offering a hopeful analysis of how early 2020s live-action Star Wars began centering the non-, semi-, and concealed human in redemptive ways. This is an accessible exploration for students and scholars of theatre, film, media studies and popular culture who want to better understand puppets, masks, and makeup-prosthetic characters. Its terms and concepts will be useful to scholarly explorations of non-, semi-, and concealed human portrayals for a range of other fields, including posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, ethnic studies, and material culture.

Pivotal Lines in Shakespeare and Others defines a pivotal line as "a moment in the script that serves as a pathway into the larger play ... a magnet to which the rest of the play, scenes before and after, adheres." Homan offers his personal choices of such lines in five plays by Shakespeare and works by Beckett, Brecht, Pinter, Shepard, and Stoppard. Drawing on his own experience in the theatre as actor and director and on campus as a teacher and scholar, he pairs a Shakespearean play with one by a modern playwright as mirrors for each other. One reviewer calls his approach "ground-breaking." Another observes that his "experience with the particular plays he has chosen is invaluable" since it allows us to find "a wedge into such ironic texts." Academics and students alike will find this volume particularly useful in aiding their own discovery of a pivotal line or moment in the experience of reading about, watching, or performing in a play.

This book examines the relations between Western religion, secularism, and modern theatre and performance. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi posits that the ongoing cultural power of religious texts, icons, and ideas on the one hand and the artistic freedom enabled by secularism and avant-garde experimentalism on the other, has led theatre artists throughout the twentieth century to create a uniquely modern theatrical hybrid - theatre performances that simultaneously re-inscribe and grapple with religion and religious performativity. The book compares this phenomenon with medieval forms of religious theatre and offers deep and original analyses of significant contemporary works ranging from plays and performances by August Strindberg, Hugo Ball (Dada), Jerzy Grotowski, and Hanoch Levin, to those created by Adrienne Kennedy, Rina Yerushalmi, Deb Margolin, Milo Rau, and Sarah Ruhl. The book analyses a new and original historiography of a uniquely modern theatrical phenomenon, a study that is of high importance considering the reemergence of religion in contemporary culture and politics.

Dancing Motherhood explores how unique factors about the dance profession impact mothers working in it. Ali Duffy introduces the book by laying a foundation of social and cultural histories and trends leading to the issues mothers in dance negotiate today. This study then reveals perspectives from mothers in dance working in areas such as performance choreography, dance education, writing, and advocacy though survey and interview data. Based on participant responses, recommendations for changes in policy, hiring, evaluation, and other work practices to better support working mothers in dance are outlined and discussed. Finally, essays from five working mothers in dance offers more intimate, personal stories and guidance geared to mothers, future mothers, and colleagues and supervisors of mothers in the dance field. By describing lived experiences and offering suggestions for improved working conditions and self-advocacy, this book initiates expanded discussion about women in dance and promotes change to positively impact dancing mothers, their employers, and the dance field.

The collective volume seeks to respond to these questions by exploring crip time in disability performance as both a concept and a phenomenon. Out of time has many different meanings, amongst them outmoded, out of step, under time pressure, no time left, or simply delayed. In the disability context it may also refer to resistant attitudes of living in "crip time" that contradict time as a linear process with a more or less predictable future. According to Alison Kafer, "crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds." What does this mean in the disability arts? What new concepts of accessibility, crip futures, and crip resistance can be staged or created by disability performance? And how does the notion of "out of time" connect crip time with pandemic time in disability performance? The book tackles the topic from two angles: on the one hand from a theoretical point of view that connects performance analysis with crip and performance theory, on the other hand from a practice-based perspective of disability artists who develop new concepts and dramaturgies of crip time based on their own lived experiences and observations in the field of the performing and disability arts. The book gathers different types of text genres, forms and styles that mirror the diversity of their authors. Besides theoretical and academic chapters on disability performance the book also includes essays, poems, dramatic texts, and choreographic concepts that reflect upon the alternative knowledge in the disability arts.

This book expands understanding of conditions defining the creation and circulation of contemporary dance that differ across Europe. It focuses upon festival-making connected with the Balkan regional project 'Nomad Dance Academy' (NDA), the book highlights collective approaches to sustain a theorisation of festivals using the concepts of dissensus and imperceptible politics. Drawing from anthropological methods, three festivals PLESkavica, Slovenia, Kondenz, Serbia and LocoMotion, North Macedonia are explored through social, political, and historical currents affecting curatorial practice. This book closely follows how festival-makers navigate the values of international development that during and after the Yugoslav wars looked to art as part of peacekeeping and nation-building processes, and coincided with increasing discourse and practices of contemporary dance that gained momentum in the 1980s alongside European festivalisation. I show how contemporary dance acts as an agent for transformation, but also a carrier of older forms of social organisation, reflecting methods and values of Yugoslav Worker Self-management that are deployed by the groups creating the festivals. This book will be of interest to dance scholars as well as researchers tracing the long-term effects of the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Drawing on a wealth of unpublished archival material, this study offers a comprehensive assessment of the importance of theatrical performance in Vladimir Nabokov's thinking and writing. Siggy Frank provides fresh insights into Nabokov's wider aesthetics and arrives at new readings of his narrative fiction. As well as emphasising the importance of theatrical performance to our understanding of Nabokov's texts, she demonstrates that the theme of theatricality runs through the central concerns of Nabokov's art and life: the nature of fiction, the relationship between the author and his fictional world, textual origin and derivation, authorial control and textual property, literary appropriations and adaptations, and finally the transformation of the writer himself from the Russian emigre writer Sirin to the American novelist Nabokov.

A radically urgent intervention, An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre: 1900 - 1950 uncovers the hidden Black history of this most influential of artforms. Drawing on lost archive material and digitised newspapers from the turn of the century onwards, this exciting story has been re-traced and restored to its rightful place. A vital and significant part of British cultural history between 1900 and 1950, Black performance practice was fundamental to resisting and challenging racism in the UK. Join Mayes (a Broadway- and Toronto-based Music Director) and Whitfield (a musical theatre historian and researcher) as they take readers on a journey through a historically-inconvenient and brilliant reality that has long been overlooked. Get to know the Black theatre community in London's Roaring 20s, and hear about the secret Florence Mills memorial concert they held in 1928. Acquaint yourself with Buddy Bradley, Black tap and ballet choreographer, who reshaped dance in British musicals - often to be found at Noel Coward's apartment for late-night rehearsals, such was Bradley's importance. Meet Jack Johnson, the first African American Heavyweight Boxing Champion, who toured Britain's theatres during World War 1 and brought the sounds of Chicago to places like war-weary Dundee. Discover the most prolific Black theatre practitioner you've never heard of, William Garland, who worked for 40 years across multiple continents and championed Black British performers. Marvel at performers like cabaret star Mabel Mercer, born in Stafford in 1900, who sang and conducted theatre orchestras across the UK, as well as Black Birmingham comedian Eddie Emerson, who was Garland's partner for decades. Many of their names and works have never been included in histories of the British musical - until now.

This anthology examines maternity in contemporary performance at the intersection of a wide range of topics from nationhood to mental health, queer parenting, embodied dramaturgy, cultural practice, and immigration. Across the breadth of these themes, we interrogate the cultural implications and politics of how we script, perform, receive, and define mothers, challenging many of the normalizing and patriarchal tropes associated with the mother-as-character. This book includes critical essays examining twenty-first century dramatic literature, first-hand ethnographic accounts of motherhood in practice, interviews, feminist manifestos, and artist reflections. In its deliberately curated variety, this collection seeks to resist homogeneity and offer instead a range of approaches to key questions: what versions of motherhood get staged, and why? And what do dramatic representations tell us about the role of mothers in our own fraught contemporary moment? This collection will be of great interest to those in academia who are teaching, researching, or studying in the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, American Studies, and Feminist and Gender Studies.

Interest in the management of creative and cultural organisations has grown at pace with the size of this sector. This textbook uniquely focuses on how innovation in these industries transforms practice. Uncovering the strategic role of innovation for organizations in the creative and cultural sector, the book provides readers with practical guidance to help traverse seismic disruptions brought about by global health and economic crises. The authors examine how innovation in business models, products, services, and technology has disrupted the competitive landscapes of the arts world. Innovations are characterized as deriving from other industries as well as via exogenous shocks that privilege some companies over others. Case studies bring to life how innovation is used strategically in different ways around varying competitive forces. Enhanced by conceptual tools and replete with industry examples, this textbook is an ideal resource for students and reflective practitioners to understand how innovation can be a productive tool for transforming their own creative and cultural industry practice and performance during a period of rapid technological change and unprecedented societal challenge.

Interest in the management of creative and cultural organisations has grown at pace with the size of this sector. This textbook uniquely focuses on how innovation in these industries transforms practice. Uncovering the strategic role of innovation for organizations in the creative and cultural sector, the book provides readers with practical guidance to help traverse seismic disruptions brought about by global health and economic crises. The authors examine how innovation in business models, products, services, and technology has disrupted the competitive landscapes of the arts world. Innovations are characterized as deriving from other industries as well as via exogenous shocks that privilege some companies over others. Case studies bring to life how innovation is used strategically in different ways around varying competitive forces. Enhanced by conceptual tools and replete with industry examples, this textbook is an ideal resource for students and reflective practitioners to understand how innovation can be a productive tool for transforming their own creative and cultural industry practice and performance during a period of rapid technological change and unprecedented societal challenge.

This collection aims to map a diversity of approaches to the artform by creating a 360° view on the circus. Three sections of the book, Aesthetics, Practice, Culture, approach aesthetic developments, issues of artistic practice, and the circus’ role within society. This book consists of a collection of articles from renowned circus researchers, junior researchers, and artists. It also provides the core statements and discussions of the conference UpSideDown—Circus and Space in a graphic recording format. Hence, it allows a clear entry into the field of circus research and emphasizes the diversity of approaches that are well balanced between theoretical and artistic point of views. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of circus studies, emerging disciples of circus and performance.

Courageous artists working in conflict regions describe exemplary peacebuilding performances and groundbreaking theory on performance for transformation of violence. Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict is a two-volume work describing peacebuilding performances in regions beset by violence and internal conflicts. Volume I: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence, emphasizes the role theatre and ritual play both in the midst and in the aftermath of direct violence, while Volume II: Building Just and Inclusive Communities, focuses on the transformative power of performance in regions fractured by "subtler" forms of structural violence and social exclusion. Volume I: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence focuses on the role theatre and ritual play both in the midst and in the aftermath of violence. The performances highlighted in this volume nourish and restore capacities for expression, communication, and transformative action, and creatively support communities in grappling with conflicting moral imperatives surrounding questions of justice, memory, resistance, and identity. The individual chapters, written by scholars, conflict resolution practitioners, and artists who work directly with the communities involved, offer vivid firsthand accounts and analyses of traditional and nontraditional performances in Serbia, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Israel, Argentina, Peru, India, Cambodia, Australia, and the United States. Complemented by a website of related materials, a documentary film, Acting Together on the World Stage, that features clips and interviews with the curators and artists, and a toolkit, or "Tools for Continuing the Conversation," that is included with the documentary as a second disc, this book will inform and inspire socially engaged artists, cultural workers, peacebuilding scholars and practitioners, human rights activists, students of peace and justice studies, and whoever wishes to better understand conflict and the power of art to bring about social change. The Acting Together project is born of a collaboration between Theatre Without Borders and the Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts at the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University. The two volumes are edited by Cynthia E. Cohen, director of the aforementioned program and a leading figure in creative approaches to coexistence and reconciliation; Roberto Gutierrez Varea, an award-winning director and associate professor at the University of San Francisco; and Polly O. Walker, director of Partners in Peace, an NGO based in Brisbane, Australia..

This book details the history of Chinese theatre, and British representations of Chinese theatre, on the London stage over a 250-year period. A wide range of performance case studies - from exhibitions and British Chinese opera inspired theatre, to translations of Chinese plays and visiting troupes - highlight the evolving nature of Sino-British trade, fashion, migration, the formation of diaspora, and international relations. Collectively, they outline the complex relationship between Britain and China - the rise and fall of the British Empire, and the fall and rise of China - as it was played out on the stages of London across three centuries. Drawing extensively upon archival materials and fieldwork research, the book offers new insights for intercultural British theatre in the 21st century - 'the Asian century'.

This book argues that the digital revolution has fundamentally altered the way musicals are produced, followed, admired, marketed, reviewed, researched, taught, and even cast. In the first hundred years of its existence, commercial musical theatre functioned on one basic model. However, with the advent of digital and network technologies, every musical theatre artist and professional has had to adjust to swift and unanticipated change. Due to the historically commercial nature of the musical theatre form, it offers a more potent test case to reveal the implications of this digital shift than other theatrical art forms. Rather than merely reflecting technological change, musical theatre scholarship and practice is at the forefront of the conversation about art in the digital age. This book is essential reading for musical theatre fans and scholars alike.

Part of the series Key Concepts in Indigenous Studies, this book focuses on the concepts that recur in any discussion of nature, culture and society among the indigenous. This final volume in the five-volume series deals with the two key concepts of performance and knowledge of the indigenous people from all continents of the world. With contributions from renowned scholars, activists and experts across the globe, it looks at issues and ideas of the indigenous peoples in the context of imagination, creativity, performance, audience, arts, music, dance, oral traditions, aesthetics and beauty in North America, South America, Australia, East Asia and India from cultural, historical and aesthetic points of view. Bringing together academic insights and experiences from the ground, this unique book, with its wide coverage, will serve as a comprehensive guide for students, teachers and scholars of indigenous studies. It will be essential reading for those in social and cultural anthropology, tribal studies, sociology and social exclusion studies, cultural studies, media studies and performing arts, literary and postcolonial studies, religion and theology, politics, Third World and Global South studies, as well as activists working with indigenous communities.

Directing for Community Theatre is a primer for the amateur director working in community theatre. With an emphasis on preparedness, this book gives the amateur director the tools and techniques needed to effectively work on a community theatre production. Covering play analysis, blocking, staging, communication, and working with actors, designers, and other theatre personnel, this how-to book is designed to have the community theatre director up and running quickly, with full knowledge of how to direct a show. The book also contains sample forms and guidelines, including acting analysis, character analysis, rehearsal schedule, audition form, prop list, and blocking pans. Directing for Community Theatre is written for the community theatre participant who is interested, or already cast, in the role of the director.

In this book, Paul Whitfield White examines the interplay between theatre and religion in provincial England from the early Tudors to 1660. In challenging the critical narrative of secularization, suppression, and demise, he recasts the history of that drama in the light of fresh sources and scholarship. The project engages with recent interests in Shakespearean criticism concerning the theatrical culture of the north of England, where a documented contemporary touring troupe performed Shakespeare's plays in Catholic households. Defying the 'medieval/renaissance' divide of past drama/literature scholarship, the book begins in the early Tudor period, when parish revels flourished as part of a nationwide surge in religious fund-raising and charity. It proceeds with the argument that the history of early modern theatre in provincial society, as in London, remained vibrant and diverse for popular audiences in many parts of the country, and that religion contributed to that vitality and variety.

What is the role of costume in Shakespeare production? Shakespeare and Costume in Practice argues that costume design choices are central not only to the creation of period setting and the actor's work on character, but to the cultural, political, and psychological meanings that the theatre makes of Shakespeare. The book explores questions about what the first Hamlet looked like in his mourning cloak; how costumes for a Shakespeare comedy can reflect or critique the collective nostalgias a culture has for its past; how costume and casting work together to ask new questions about Shakespeare and race. Using production case studies of Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest, the book demonstrates that costume design can be a site of experimentation, playfulness, and transgression in the theatre - and that it can provoke audiences to think again about what power, race, and gender look like on the Shakespearean stage.