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.

Acting is all about charisma. Whether you’re an A-list star or an extra, when you’re on stage you need to perform in a way that makes your audience listen.

That stage presence is something we can all learn from. Every time you speak up in a meeting, recount an anecdote, or tell a joke, it’s essential to communicate with gravitas.

Jeannette Nelson knows a thing or two about gravitas. As Head of Voice at the National Theatre, she has spent three decades working with the world’s leading actors – from Al Pacino to Benedict Cumberbatch to Juliette Binoche – teaching them to speak clearly and move confidently.

Now, Nelson pulls back the curtain on the tricks that professional performers use to own the room. Starting with clear speech and good posture, before moving on to the art of rhetoric and overcoming stage fright, she outlines a holistic three-stage method to communicating with authority, authenticity and eloquence. Throughout, she peppers the book with stories of how world-renowned actors learnt to make themselves heard – and how you can, too.

The result is a fascinating and eminently practical guide to the art of performance. If all the world’s a stage, then this book will turn you into its lead actor.

Inside The Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises is the first full-length volume dedicated to the history, theory, practice, and application of a suite of performer training exercises developed by Richard Schechner and elaborated by the editors and contributors. This work began in the 1960s with The Performance Group, and has continued to evolve. Rasaboxes - a featured set of exercises - is an interdisciplinary approach for training emotional expressivity through the use of breath, body, voice, movement, and sensation. It brings together: the concept of rasa from classical Indian performance theory and practice research on emotion from neuroscience and psychology experimental performance practices theories of ritual, play, and performance This book combines both practical 'how-to' guidance, and applications in diverse contexts including undergraduate and graduate actor training, television acting, K-12 education, devising, and drama therapy. The book serves as an introduction to the work as well as an essential resource for experienced practitioners.

How should a seventeenth-centry Spanish verse play be presented to a contemporary English-speaking audience? For many reasons, but most usually the lack of playable modern translations, the plays of the seventeenth-century Spanish Comedia have appeared infrequently on the stages of the English-speaking world. Once such translations began to appear in the final decades of the twentieth century, productions followed and audiences were once again given the opportunity of discovering the enormous riches of this theatre. The bringing of Spanish seventeenth-century verse plays to the contemporary English-speaking stage involves a number of fundamental questions. Are verse translations preferable to prose, and if so, what kind of verse? To what degree should translations aim to be "faithful"? Which kinds of plays "work", and which do not? Which values and customs of the past present no difficulties for contemporary audiences, and which need to be decoded in performance? Which kinds of staging are suitable, and which are not? To what degree, if any, should one aim for "authenticity" in staging? And so on. In this volume, a distinguished group of translators, directors, and scholars explores these and related questions in illuminating and thought-provoking essays. EDITORS: Susan Paun de Garcia and Donald Larson are Associate Professors of Spanish at the Universities of Denison and Ohio State respectively. OTHER CONTRIBUTORS: Isaac Benabu, Catherine Boyle, Victor Dixon, Susan Fischer, Michael Halberstam, David Johnston, Catherine Larson, A. Robert Lauer, Dakin Matthews, Anne McNaughton, Barbara Mujica, James Parr, Dawn Smith, Jonathan Thacker, Sharon Voros

This book examines performative strategies that contest nationalist prejudices in representing the conditions of refugees, the stateless and the dispossessed. In the light of the European Union failing to find a political solution to the current migration crisis, it considers a variety of artistic works that have challenged the deficiencies in governmental and transnational practices, as well as innovative efforts by migrants and their hosts to imagine and build a new future. It discusses a diverse range of performative strategies, moving from a consideration of recent adaptations of Greek tragedy, to performances employing fictive identification, documentary dramas, immersive theatre, over-identification and subversive identification, nomadism and political activism. This study will appeal to those interested in questions of statelessness, migration, and the problematic role of the nation-state.

Digital art practitioners work under the constant threat of a medium - the digital - that objectifies the self and depersonalises artistic identities. If digital technology is a pharmakon in that it can be either cure or poison, with regard to digital art practices the digital may have in fact worked as a placebo that has allowed us to push back the date in which the crisis between digital and art will be given serious thought. This book is hence concerned with an analysis of such a relationship and proposes their rethinking in terms of an ethico-phenomenological practice informed by an in-depth understanding of the digital medium. Giuseppe Torre engages with underground cultures such as Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and its ties with art discourse. The discussion is informed by various philosophical discourses and media theories, with a focus on how such ideas connect back to the existing literature in performance studies. Replete with examples of artwork and practices, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and performance studies, art and technology.