Affective Movements, Methods and Pedagogies invites readers to think with affect about performance, pedagogies and their inherent activist, embodied and collective natures. It works across multiple spheres to help readers understand how to deploy affective approaches rather than to simply think with affect theory about traditional methods. The book is structured and curated across three main thematic sections: affective movements, methods and pedagogies, each of which treats the core explorations of affect and performance through a different perspective. It is concerned with the ways performance and theatrical methods work with and through a theoretics of affect. The sixteen chapters include work that models theoretical practices in writing, and demonstrates how theorising affect and its methods is itself a performative practice. The contributors offer rich examples from diverse geopolitical as well as disciplinary contexts, innovative methods, and finally, intersectional theoretics. This collection will be of interest to higher education students exploring methodologies, and academic researchers and teachers in the fields of performance studies, communication, critical studies, sociology and the arts.

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.

Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music offers a range of approaches central to the performance of French piano music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors include scholars and active performers who see performance not as an independent activity but as a practice enriched by a wealth of historical and analytical approaches. To underline the usefulness of contextual understanding for performance, each author highlights the choices performers must confront with examples drawn from particular repertoires and composers. Topics explored include editorial practice, the use of early recordings, emergent disciplines such as analysis-and-performance, and traditions passed down from teacher to student. Themes that emerge demonstrate the importance of editions as a form of communication, the challenges of notation, the significance of detail and of deeper continuity, the importance of performing and teaching traditions, and the influence of cross disciplinary frameworks. A link to a set of performed examples on the frenchpianomusic.com website allows readers to hear and compare performances and interpretations of the music discussed. The volume will appeal to musicologists and analysts interested in performance, performers, students, and piano teachers.

Chaos arises when letters begin to fall from a town monument and government officials ban them one by one. The community depends on the strength of a determined teenage girl to fight for their freedom of speech. Adapted from Mark Dunn's 2001 award-winning debut novel, Ella Minnow Pea, this unique musical is part romance, part clever word game, and part adult fable that reminds us how precious our liberties are and how important it is to have the courage to stand up for what we believe.

This volume critically analyses and theorises Asian interventions in the expanding phenomenon of Global Shakespeare. It interrogates Shakespeare's 'universality' from Asian perspectives: how this has been modified or even replaced by the 'global bard' as a recognisable brand, and how Asian Shakespeares have contributed to or subverted this process by both facilitating the worldwide dissemination of the bard's plays and challenging and resisting the very templates through which they become globally legible. Critically acclaimed Asian productions have prominently figured at premier Western festivals, and popular Asian appropriations like Bollywood, manga and anime have created new kinds of globally accessible Shakespeare. Essays in this collection engage with the emergent critical issues: the efficacy of definitions of the 'local', 'global', 'transnational' and 'cosmopolitan' and of the liminalities and mobilities in between. They further examine the politics of 'West' and 'East', the evolving markers of the 'Asian' and the equation of the 'glocal' with the 'Asian'; they attend to performance and archiving protocols and bring the current debates on translation, appropriation, and world literature to speak to the concerns of global and transnational Shakespeare. These investigations analyse recent innovative Asian theatre productions, popular cinematic and manga appropriations and the increasing presence of Shakespeare in the Asian digital sphere. They provide an Asian standpoint and lens in rereading the processes of cultural globalisation and the mobilisation of Shakespeare.

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 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.

This book studies the intersection of performance and nationalism in South Asia.It traces the emergence of the culture of nationalism from the late nineteenth century through to contemporary times. Drawing on various theatrical performance texts, it looks at the ways in which performative narratives have reflected the national narrative and analyses the role performance has played in engendering nationhood. The volume discusses themes such as political martyrdom as performative nationalism, the revitalisation of nationalism through new media, the sanitisation of physical gestures in dance, the performance of nationhood through violence in Tajiki films, as well as K-Pop and the new northeastern identity in India. A unique contribution to the study of nationalism, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of history, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, modern India, Asian studies, political studies, social anthropology and sociology.

The Applied Theatre Reader is the first book to bring together new case studies of practice by leading practitioners and academics in the field and beyond, with classic source texts from writers such as Noam Chomsky, bell hooks, Mikhail Bakhtin, Augusto Boal and Chantal Mouffe. This new edition brings the field fully up to date with the breadth of applied theatre practice in the twenty-first century, adding essays on playback theatre, digital technology, work with indigenous practitioners, inter-generational practice, school projects and contributors from South America, Australia and New Zealand. The Reader divides the field into key themes, inviting critical interrogation of issues in applied theatre whilst also acknowledging the multi-disciplinary nature of its subject, crossing fields like theatre in educational settings, prison theatre, community performance, theatre in conflict resolution, interventionist theatre and theatre for development. A new lexicon of Applied Theatre and further reading for every part will equip readers with the ideal tools for studying this broad and varied field. This collection of critical thought and practice is essential to those studying or participating in the performing arts as a means for positive change.

A practical guide to creating successful immersive theatre productions, by an experienced theatre-maker and practitioner. Placing the audience at the heart of a production - not as passive bystanders but as active participants - is the impetus behind the hugely varied work of leading immersive theatre companies such as Punchdrunk, OneOhOne and Hobo Theatre. Done well, it can generate powerful, gut-level emotional effects that will long outlast the production itself. Creating Worlds offers a step-by-step breakdown of the entire journey towards making an immersive theatre production, and covers everything you need to consider, including: Deciding what kind of production you want to make, and the 'mission statement' for your piece Understanding and anticipating audience behaviour Planning and influencing journeys through the space Balancing interaction with narrative Giving your audience an active role, and navigating the thin line between free will and uncontrolled chaos Managing complex rehearsals, and preparing your cast for the unexpected Extending the audience experience outside of the performance Generating innovative ideas and tactics for marketing your production Throughout the book, Jason Warren draws on his own experiences of creating immersive theatre work in a variety of styles and settings. Also included is a glossary of key terms, and a schedule to help you make the most of your rehearsal period. An essential how-to guide for theatre-makers, artists, students and teachers who want to create their own immersive theatre, Creating Worlds is also a fascinating read for those interested in the inspirations and ideas that fuel the performances they love. 'The joy of working in this field is that there is so much left to discover... my aim with this book is to help you craft your own beliefs on what makes good immersive theatre - and to create responsive and rich worlds of your own.' Jason Warren

Digital technologies have transformed archives in every area of their form and function, and as technologies mature so does their capacity to change our understanding and experience of material and performative cultural production. There has been an exponential explosion in the production and consumption of video online and yet there is a scarcity of knowledge and cases about video and the digital archive. This book seeks to address that through the lens of the project Circus Oz Living Archive. This project provides the case study foundation for the articulation of the issues, challenges and possibilities that the design and development of digital archives afford. Drawn from eight different disciplines and professions, the authors explore what it means to embrace the possibilities of digital technologies to transform contemporary cultural institutions and their archives into new methods of performance, representation and history.

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the fascinating and strikingly diverse history of imagination in the context of theatre and drama. Key questions that the book explores are: How do spectators engage with the drama in performance, and how does the historical context influence the dramaturgy of imagination? In addition to offering a study of the cultural history and theory of imagination in a European context including its philosophical, physiological, cultural and political implications, the book examines the cultural enactment of imagination in the drama text and offers practical strategies for analyzing the aesthetic practice of imagination in drama texts. It covers the early modern to the late modernist period and includes three in-depth case studies: William Shakespeare's Macbeth (c.1606); Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879); and Eugene Ionesco's The Killer (1957).

This book provides a conceptual understanding of objectives and trends of lighting design and technology so that the reader will be able to wisely keep up with the rapid and never-ending expansion of the field. Uniquely explores how quietive practices can deepen the creative design process Written for students of Theatrical Lighting courses and emerging lighting professionals, The Heart of Light is a must-read for anyone intrigued by the power of light.

A San Francisco programmer, Will, latches onto an idea for a startup that will automate the work teachers do in their classrooms. But as the idea begins to take off, it becomes clear that Will's new company may threaten his fiancee's job.

Bullying is a social phenomenon that defines the contemporary workplace with much of the emphasis on psychosocial rather than physical suffering. In France, workplace bullying has emerged as a subject of intense interest and controversy among scholars, policy makers and cultural producers - notably novelists, playwrights and film directors. It has a high public profile as reflected in specific legislation, a wealth of critical literature on workplace suffering, and an extensive range of novels, plays and films. This study contextualises and analyses this wave of fictional storytelling that has emerged in France since the year 2000. It critically analyses more than a dozen such stories with a view to determining how they reflect the lived experiences of workers. Each story is considered from the perspectives of critical commentaries and research from France and elsewhere, focusing on the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, medicine, anthropology, sociology, literary analysis, economics, law and business management. This study also examines how fiction reflects changes in the nature of the French economy, organisations and work itself since the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s.

How did the American western feature film genre rebrand itself in the late seventies and respond to the fury of global and domestic political affairs? In Hold It Real Still, Lawrence Jackson examines Clint Eastwood's influence on the western film while also exploring how that genre continues to operate into the twenty-first century as an ideological channel for ideas about race and imperialism. Jackson argues that the western genre pivoted from an initial doctrine of racial liberalism, albeit a clumsy one, during the John Wayne years to a motile agenda of substitution, exclusion, and false equivalency during the Clint Eastwood period. The book traces how Eastwood, an actor first associated with the avant-garde, anti-colonialist discourse of "spaghetti" western cinema, reversed himself in the second half of the 1970s with The Outlaw Josey Wales-a film that had at its heart the fantasy of Black erasure from American life. Jackson situates Eastwood's work as a response to massive social and political upheavals in America: defeat in Vietnam, riots in northern cities, the civil rights movement and associated legislation, and the Great Migration, which made possible a degree of mixed-race public interaction that was impossible even as late as the 1960s. Hinged by a close reading of four blockbuster films which continue to shape discourses in cinematic arts, American liberalism, the westerns, and race relations today-The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Josey Wales, Ride with the Devil, and Django Unchained-Jackson's unique critique flashes on the contradictory symbolic structures at work in these masterpieces. Juxtaposing the films' motifs, tropes, and hidden Black figures with historicist readings lays bare the containment strategies of the 1970s and beyond used to stymie civil rights progress and racial equity in the United States. Tackling the rise of neoracism and the domestic apparatus of surveillance, control, and erasure, Hold It Real Still offers an astonishing revision of what audiences and critics thought they understood about a uniquely American genre of film.

The Affects, Cognition, and Politics of Samuel Beckett's Postwar Drama and Fiction: Revolutionary and Evolutionary Paradoxes theorizes the revolutionary and evolutionary import of Beckett's works in a global context defined by increasingly ubiquitous and insidious mechanisms of capture, exploitation, and repression, alongside unprecedented demands for high-volume information-processing and connectivity. Part I shows that, in generating consistent flows of solidarity-based angry laughter, Beckett's works sabotage coercive couplings of the subject to social machines by translating subordination and repression into processes rather than data of experience. Through an examination of Beckett's attack on gender/ class-related normative injunctions, the book shows that Beckett's works can generate solidarity and action-oriented affects in readers/ spectators regardless of their training in textual analysis. Part II proposes that Beckett's works can weaken the cognitive dominance of constrictive "frames" in readers/ audiences, so that toxic ideological formations such as the association of safety and comfort with simplicity and "sameness" are rejected and more complex cognitive operations are welcomed instead-a process that bolsters the mind's ability to operate at ease with increasingly complex, malleable, extensible, and inclusive frames, as well as with increasing volumes of information.

In 1919 the last Habsburg rulers, Emperor Karl and Empress Zita, left Austria, going into exile. That same year, the fairy-tale opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), featuring a mythological emperor and empress, premiered at the Vienna Opera. Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal and German composer Richard Strauss created Die Frau ohne Schatten through the bitter years of World War I, imagining it would triumphantly appear after the victory of the German and Habsburg empires. Instead, the premiere came in the aftermath of catastrophic defeat. The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy explores how the changing circumstances of politics and society transformed their opera and its cultural meanings before, during, and after the First World War. Strauss and Hofmannsthal turned emperors and empresses into fantastic fairy-tale characters; meanwhile, following the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy after the war, their real-life counterparts, removed from political life in Europe, began to be regarded as anachronistic, semi-mythological figures. Reflecting on the seismic cultural shifts that rocked post-imperial Europe, Larry Wolff follows the story of Karl and Zita after the loss of their thrones. Karl died in 1922, but Zita lived through the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the Cold War. By the time of her death in 1989, she had herself become a fairy-tale figure, a totem of imperial nostalgia. Wolff weaves together the story of the opera's composition and performance; the end of the Habsburg monarchy; and his own family's life in and exile from Central Europe, providing a rich new understanding of Europe's cataclysmic 20th century, and our contemporary relationship to it.

An intrepid troupe of pageant players races across medieval Europe, struggling to outrun the Black Death. The arrival of a mysterious outsider sends Hollis, the leading lady, in search of answers that can only be found off-script... and soon the 14th century plague begins to look like another, more recent one. This wildly inventive and funny new work examines the evolution of human creativity in a dark age: when does a crisis destroy us, and when does it open new frontiers?

In this volume, we are particularly interested in approaching theatre and performance as a dynamic and evolving practice of continuous change, regeneration and cultural mobility. Neither the dramatic texts nor their stage versions should be viewed as finished products but as creative processes in the making. Their richness lies in their unfinished and never-ending potential energy and their openness to constant revision, rehearsal, revival, and collective enterprise. This edited collection aims to create a dialogue on the artistic processes implicated in the various ways of working with the play text, the staging practices, the way audiences and critical reception can impact a production, and the many lives of Iberian theatre beyond the page or the stage. That is, its cultural and social legacies.

In 1991, Boyz N the Hood made history as an important film text and the impetus for a critical national conversation about American urban life in African American communities, especially for young urban black males. Boyz N the Hood: Shifting Hollywood Terrain is an interdisciplinary examination of this iconic film and its impact in cinematic history and American culture. This interdisciplinary approach provides an in-depth critical perspective of Boyz N the Hood as the embodiment of the blues: how Boyz intimates a world beyond the symbolic world Singleton posits, how its fictive stance pivots to a constituent truth in the real world. Boyz speaks from the first person perspective on the state of being "invisible." Through a subjective narrative point of view, Singleton interrogates the veracity of this claim regarding invisibility and provides deep insight into this social reality. This book is as much about the filmmaker as it is about the film. It explores John Singleton's cinematic voice and helps explicate his propensity for a type of folk element in his work (the oral tradition and lore). In addition, this text features critical perspectives from the filmmaker himself and other central figures attached to the production, including a first-hand account of production behind the scenes by Steve Nicolaides, Boyz's producer. The text includes Singleton's original screenplay and a range of critical articles and initial movie reviews.

Dramaturgy in the Making maps contemporary dramaturgical practices in various settings of theatre-making and dance to reveal the different ways that dramaturgs work today. It provides a thorough survey of three major areas of practice - institutional dramaturgy, production dramaturgy and dance dramaturgy - with each illustrated through a range of case studies that illuminate methodology and which will assist practitioners in developing their own 'dramaturgical toolbox'. In tracing the development of the role of the dramaturg, the author explores the contribution of Lessing, Brecht and Tynan, foundational figures who shaped the practice. She excavates the historical and theoretical contexts for each strand of the work, uniquely offering a history of dance dramaturgy and its associated theories. Based on extensive research, the volume features material from the author's interviews with fifty eminent professionals from Europe and North America, including: Robert Blacker, Jack Bradley, DD Kugler, Ruth Little and Hildegard De Vuyst. Through these, a detailed and precise insight is provided into dramaturgical processes at organisations such as the Akram Khan Company, les ballets C de la B (Gent), the National Theatre and the Royal Court (London), the Schaubuhne (Berlin) and The Sundance Institute Theatre Lab (Utah), among others. Dramaturgy in the Making will prove indispensable to anyone working in theatre or wanting to better understand the dramaturgical processes in performance-making today. The book features a foreword by Geoff Proehl, author of Toward a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and Journey.