Lively and innovative, these well-illustrated essays on the making of the Victorian entertainment industry get inside the popular experience of the pub, music-hall, theater and comic press. In this new leisure world, audiences learned how to be performers themselves, adopting roles and styles appropriate to the unsettling dynamics of the modern city. A major advance in understanding how popular culture actually works, this is a model of the successful integration of the theory and practice of social history and cultural studies.

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.

How was the experience of watching a play influenced by practices beyond the walls of the playhouse, and what were the broader social and historical implications of the culture of playgoing? This book sets out to answer such questions. Since the two authors have very different perspectives on the issues discussed, they have chosen a unique format: rather than submerging their opposition, they have highlighted it. Their attacks and counter-attacks, as they contest each other's views in paired chapters, result in a lively and illuminating debate.

Drawing on unique multi-arts, multi-city scholarly research, Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts makes a timely and urgent contribution to debates about the place of arts and culture in contemporary society. The authors critically interrogate the challenges of access, diversity, privilege and responsibility in contemporary art. Asking who benefits from, pays for and consumes the arts, the book highlights fresh, forward-thinking audience and organisational attitudes that show the potential of live arts engagement to contribute to engaged citizenship. Complemented by comparative global analysis, the cutting-edge insights in this book are relevant for interdisciplinary researchers across audience studies and beyond. Enhanced by a new framework for the understanding audience engagement, the book is relevant to scholars, policymakers and reflective practitioners across the spectrum of arts and cultural industries management. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license here.

"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.

Boxing and Performance is the first substantial piece of work to place the lived experience of female and male boxers in dialogue with one another. Crews and Lennox critically reflect on their ethnographic experiences of boxing and their reading of the cultural representations of the sport. They conceive of the project as an extended sparring session. This book offers a unique perspective on boxing in/as performance and boxing in/as culture. It explores how the connections between boxing and performance address ideas about bodies, relationships, intimacy, and combat. It challenges and renegotiates oft-repeated narratives used to make meaning about boxing. This volume examines questions of visibility, voice, and agency and will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of performance and media, and sport and social studies.

"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.

LEWISTON: Alice and Connor sit by their roadside stand selling cheap fireworks while developers swallow the land around them. Promised a condo in the new development, their future is secure. Enter Marnie, Alice's long-lost granddaughter, proposing to buy the land to save her family's legacy. Marnie and Alice will become reacquainted with each other's deeply held secrets, uncertain pasts, and hopeful futures. Hunter, a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship recipient, explores the emotional frontiers of a family struggling to make a home in the vastness of the American landscape with affection, poignancy, and a profound sense of empathy. CLARKSTON: Jake meets Chris when they are assigned to the same night shift at Costco in Clarkston, Washington. Chris has a hard life; his mom is a meth addict, and living in Clarkston has forced him down a dead-end road. He has promise, but he's "stuck." Jake went to a liberal arts school, is gay and out, but fled his Connecticut town when he was diagnosed with a fatal illness. Wanting to see the ocean, he came to Clarkston, but was sidetracked by his illness. He and Chris form an awkward bond: both are gay, but have led completely different lives. Can they learn to help each other?

This ground-breaking book is the first to bring an ecological focus to theatre and performance design, both in scholarship and in practice. Ecoscenography weaves environmental philosophies and practices across genres and fields to provide a captivating vision for the future of sustainable theatre production. The book forefronts leading designers that are driving this emerging field into the mainstream through their relational and reciprocal engagement with place, audiences, materials, and processes. Beyond its radical philosophy and framework, Ecoscenography makes a compelling case for pursuing an ecological ethic in theatre and performance design, not only as a moral imperative, but for the extraordinary possibilities that it offers for more-than-human engagement. Based on her personal insights as a leading ecological researcher and practitioner, Beer offers a rich resource for scholars, students and practitioners alike, opening up new processes and aesthetics of theatrical design that enhance the environmental and social advocacy of the field.

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.

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.

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.

1) This is the first handbook of its kind in Audience studies. 2) The final section, Part 4, consists of shorter chapters and is orientated not thematically but around a series of keywords. This will enable greater diversity of voice (including of artists and audiences) and space for the playful, the unexpected, the sideways view.

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.

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.

Burlesque has been a powerful and enduring weapon in the critique of legitimate Shakespearean culture by a seemingly illegitimate popular culture, particularly in the nineteenth century. This first study of nineteenth-century Shakespeare burlesques explores the paradox that plays obviously not Shakespearean appear to be the most genuinely Shakespearean of all. The book brings together archival research, rare photographs and illustrations, studies of burlesque scripts, and an awareness of theatrical, literary, and cultural contexts.

In Spectacular Men, Sarah E. Chinn investigates how working class white men looked to the early American theatre for examples of ideal manhood. Theatre-going was the primary source of entertainment for working people of the early Republic and the Jacksonian period, and plays implicitly and explicitly addressed the risks and rewards of citizenship. Ranging from representations of the heroes of the American Revolution to images of doomed Indians to plays about ancient Rome, Chinn unearths dozens of plays rarely read by critics. Spectacular Men places the theatre at the center of the self-creation of working white men, as voters, as workers, and as Americans.

"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.

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.

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.

British theater became big business in the nineteenth century, and the role of laissez-faire in this cultural industry consistently troubled the government. This is the first full-length study to investigate the theater's growth from an economic perspective, reflecting the debates of theorists from Adam Smith to Alfred Marshall. Tracy Davis' wide-ranging analysis grounds issues such as subsidization and the economic viability of the live arts in an era predating government funding, offering fresh insight into the history of cultural policy for the arts in Britain.

This interesting young man, Monty Brewster, begins poor and suddenly wakes to find himself heir to $1,000,000. The first news hardly becomes cold when Monty is called upon by a representative of a law firm with the information that a wealthy uncle whom he had forgotten had died and left his fortune to Monty but with the provision that every cent of the million left by the old man be spent in a year, legitimately, with receipts acceptable to the administrator to show for it. Monty accepts and gets busy spending that million. One of the most novel plots ever conceived.

One of the most thrilling plays ever, this is a medley of mystery, farce and intrigue an especially fine example of the American mystery play and one of the outstanding dramatic successes of modern times. A writer goes to a mountain inn to plot. He gets more than he bargained for.