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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Theatre, drama > General
In Theatre of Anger, Olivia Landry offers a provocative new vision
of anger as more than just hate and violence. Studying the work of
a new generation of transnational theatre practitioners in Berlin,
she illuminates how anger can be an affirmative and critical tool
in the project of social justice and resistance. To develop her
theory of anger, Landry delves into philosophical texts, theatre
history, and Black feminist theory from Aristotle, Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing, and Bertolt Brecht to Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Sara
Ahmed. Landry focuses not only on the social and political
significance of the theatre of anger and the ways in which it rages
against racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, sexism, and homophobia,
but also on its aesthetic and theoretical innovation. Through
readings of key works, Theatre of Anger asks what it means in our
present world to construct political theatre.
All the Classroom's a Stage reveals how teachers can apply theater
skills to the craft of teaching and enhance their ability to engage
and motivate students, cultivate collaborative learning, and become
stronger and more dynamic 'performers' in the classroom. This book
illustrates how to use theater techniques to invigorate the craft
of teaching in college classrooms across multiple disciplines. The
book shows readers how to explore and apply improvisation,
actor-training, and directing techniques to their classroom. By
using discipline-specific examples, case studies, and a breadth of
theater and teacher-training experience, the book reveals how
theatre can strengthen teaching and learning, improve attendance,
retention, and students' commitment to their education and to each
other. Whether a new teacher navigating the job for the first time
or an experienced veteran hungry for new teaching methods, All the
Classroom's a Stage will transform a traditional classroom into a
dynamic creative space built on collaborative sharing of the
educational experience.
This collection of essays addresses emergent trends in the meeting
of the disciplines of phenomenology and performance. It brings
together major scholars in the field, dealing with phenomenological
approaches to dance, theatre, performance, embodiment, audience,
and everyday performance of self. It argues that despite the wide
variety of philosophical, ontological, epistemological, historical
and methodological differences across the field of phenomenology,
certain tendencies and impulses are required for an investigation
to stand as truly phenomenological. These include: description of
experience; a move towards fundamental conditions or underlying
essences; and an examination of taken-for-granted presuppositions.
The book is aimed at scholars and practitioners of performance
looking to deepen their understanding of phenomenological concepts
and methods, and philosophers concerned with issues of embodiment,
performativity and enaction.
Many theatres and theatre companies host post-show discussions, or
talkbacks, as part of their season. Often these are done for
established plays with the goal of audience cultivation; others are
done as part of the new development process. While post-show
discussions are fairly ubiquitous, without a clear definition of
what they are, who they are for, how they are led, and how they are
structured, they are floundering. Playwrights consider them a joke,
theatres use them for audience cultivation on top of helping the
playwright, thus muddying the focus of the discussions, and
audiences are unsure as to their role in the post-show discussion
because they aren't properly prepared for them. This book is a
critical examination of what has and has not worked with post-show
discussions utilized in new play development.
This volume takes a deep dive into the philosophical hermeneutics
of Shakespearean tradition providing insight into the foundations,
theories, and methodologies of hermeneutics in Shakespeare. Central
to this research, this volume investigates fundamental questions
including: what is philosophical hermeneutics, why philosophical
hermeneutics, what do literary and cultural Hermeneutics do, and in
what ways can literary and cultural hermeneutics benefit the
interpretation of Shakespearean plays? Hermeneutic Shakespeare
guides the readers through two main discussions. Beginning with the
understanding of "Philosophical Hermeneutics," and the general
principles of literary and cultural Hermeneutics, the volume
includes philosophers such as Fredrich Ast, Daniel Friedrich
Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm Dilthey, as well as Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and more
recently, Steven Connor. Part two of this volume applies universal
principles of philosophical hermeneutics to explicate the
historical, philosophical, acquired, and applied literary
interpretations through the critical practices of Shakespeare's
plays or their adaptations, including The Merchant of Venice,
Hamlet, and Comedy of Errors. Aimed at scholars and students alike,
this volume aims to contribute to contemporary understanding of
Shakespeare and literature hermeneutics.
This book charts the personal and professional journey of Greg
Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 2012
until 2022 and "one of the great Shakespearians of his generation"
(Sunday Times). During his illustrious career, Doran has directed
or produced all of the plays within Shakespeare's First Folio -- a
milestone reached in the same year that the world celebrates the
400th anniversary of its original publication. Each chapter looks
at a different play, considering the choices made and weaving in
both autobiographical detail and background on the RSC, as well as
giving insights into key collaborations, including those with
actors such as Judi Dench, David Tennant, Harriet Walter, Patrick
Stewart, Simon Russell Beale, Paterson Joseph and Doran's husband,
the late Antony Sher, as well as seminal practitioners such as
Cicely Berry, John Barton and Terry Hands. The book also includes
16 striking pages with stills from some of the RSC plays. Through
Doran's account of this extraordinary journey, we see how Henry
VIII, initially regarded as a poisoned chalice, became his lucky
break; how the tragedy of 9/11 unfolded during a matinee of King
John and how the language of the play went some way in helping to
articulate the unfathomable; how a RSC supporter bequeathed their
skull to the company to be used as Yorick in Hamlet; how meeting
Nelson Mandela inspired the production of Julius Caesar; how
Falstaff was introduced to China for the very first time; and how
arachnophobia informed the production of Macbeth. This book
uniquely captures the excitement, energy, surprises, joys and
agonies of working on these greatest of plays; sheds new light on
these plays through Doran's own research and discoveries made in
the rehearsal room; and gives unprecedented access into the craft,
life and loves of this exceptional director.
The Complete Guide to Dance Nutrition is the first complete
textbook written by an experienced dietitian specialising in the
field of dance nutrition and provideS both dancers-in-training and
instructors with practical advice on dance nutrition for health and
performance. It is also highly relevant for dance professionals.
With an in-depth and extensive coverage on all nutrition topics
relevant to dancers, this textbook covers nutrition for the
scenarios dancers face, including day to day training and
rehearsals, peak performance, injuries, immunonutrition, nutrition
and stress management. Information is included on topics applicable
to individual dancers including advice for dancers with type 1
diabetes and clinical conditions relating to gut health. This book
guides the reader through the macronutrients making up the diet,
their chemical structure and their role in health and optimal
performance. Readers will be shown how to estimate energy and
nutrient needs based on their schedule, type of dance undertaken,
and personal goals before considering the practical aspects of
dance nutrition; from nutrition planning to dietary supplements,
strategies for assessing the need to alter body composition and
guidance on undertaking health focused changes is presented. The
Complete Guide to Dance Nutrition combines and condenses the
author's knowledge and many years of experience working in the
dance industry to translate nutrition science into a practical
guide. Bringing together the latest research in dance science and
nutrition, this book aims to be a trusted reference and practical
textbook for students of Dance, Dance Nutrition, Dance Performance,
Sport Nutrition and Sport Science more generally as well as for
those training in the dance industry, dance teachers and
professionals.
Stage rights! explores the work and legacy of the first feminist
political theatre group of the twentieth century, the Actresses'
Franchise League. Formed in 1908 to support the suffrage movement
through theatre, the League and its membership opened up new roles
for women on stage and off, challenged stereotypes of suffragists
and actresses, created new work inspired by the movement and was an
integral part of the performative propaganda of the campaign.
Introducing new archival material to both suffrage and theatre
histories, this book is the first to focus in detail on the
Actresses' Franchise League, its membership and its work. The
volume is formulated as a historiographically innovative critical
biography of the organisation over the fifty years of its
activities, and invites a total reassessment of the League within
the accepted narratives of the development of political theatre in
the UK. -- .
The American Theatre series discusses every Broadway production chronologically--show by show and season by season. It offers plot summaries, production details, names of leading actors and actresses--the roles they played, as well as any special or unusual aspects of individual shows. This second volume in the series, covers what is probably the richest period in American theater, the years 1914 through 1930. Bordman includes most of Eugene O'Neill's work, along with playwrights as diverse as Elmer Rice and George Kaufman. Among the era's stars one finds John and Ethel Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Katherine Cornell, and Lynn Fontaine and Alfred Lunt. Considering the sheer number of productions, American theater climbed to its all-time high in the 1920s; by mid-decade, nearly 300 new plays appeared on Broadway each year. America saw more theatrical activity--in every sense of the word-- than any time before or since.
The principal purpose of topics in musicology has been to identify
meaning-bearing units within a musical composition that would have
been understood by contemporary audiences and therefore also by
later receivers, albeit in a different context and with a need for
historically aware listening. Since Leonard Ratner (1980)
introduced the idea of topics, his relatively simple ideas have
been expanded and developed by a number of distinguished authors.
Topic theory has now become a well-established branch of
musicology, often embracing semiotics, but its relationship to
performance has received less attention. Musical Topics and Musical
Performance thus focuses on the interface of theory and practice,
and investigates how an appreciation of topical presence in a work
may prompt interpretative thoughts for a potential performer as
well as how performers have responded to such a presence in
practice. The chapters focus on music from the nineteenth,
twentieth and twenty-first centuries with case studies drawn from
composers as diverse as Beethoven, Scriabin and Peter Eoetvoes.
Using both scores and recordings, the book presents a variety of
original and innovative perspectives on the subject from a range of
distinguished authors, and addresses a neglected area of musicology
and musical performance.
Written by a scholar of satire and politics, Trump Was a Joke
explains why satire is an exceptional foil for absurd political
times and why it did a particularly good job of making sense of
Trump. Covering a range of comedic interventions, it analyzes why
political satire is surprisingly effective at keeping us sane when
politics is making us crazy. Its goal is to highlight the unique
power of political satire to encourage critical thinking, foster
civic action, and further rational debate in moments of political
hubris and hysteria. The book has been endorsed by Bassem Youssef,
referred to as the Jon Stewart of Egypt, and Srdja Popovic, author
of Blueprint for Revolution, who used satirical activism to bring
down Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. With a foreword by
award-winning filmmaker, satirist and activist Michael Moore, this
study will be of interest to readers who follow politics and enjoy
political comedy and will appeal to the communications, comedy
studies, media studies, political science, rhetoric, cultural
studies, and American studies markets.
This monograph provides the first sustained, chronological account
of Northern Irish police officers' representation in theatre.
Importantly, its scope comprises a critical period of national and
organisational development, beginning with the Partition of Ireland
in 1921 and the founding of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) one
year later in 1922. It progresses through the relevant theatrical
and historical events of the century, through the period after the
RUC's dissolution and replacement with the Police Service of
Northern Ireland (PSNI) in 2001, and concludes in 2021 to coincide
with the centenary of Partition. As such, this project is
distinctive in its ability to trace paradigm shifts in perceptions
of the police over time, as they intersect with relevant historical
events and milestones of political conflict in the province.
Shakespeare has been a central figure in German literature and
theatre. This book tells the story of Shakespeare in the
German-speaking theatre against the background of German culture
and politics in the twentieth century. It follows the earlier
volume by Simon Williams on the reception of Shakespeare during the
previous 300 years (Shakespeare on the German Stage, 1586-1914).
Hortmann concentrates on the two most important and fruitful
periods: the years of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) and the
turbulent decades of the sixties and seventies, when the German
theatre was revitalised by a stormy marriage of avant-garde art and
revolutionary politics. A section by Maik Hamburger covers
developments in the theatres of the German Democratic Republic.
Hortmann focuses on the most representative and colourful directors
and actors, describing and illustrating individual productions as
examples of particular trends or movements.
This collection of commissioned essays by established scholars,
responds to critical debate on political theatre of the turbulent
early years of the seventeenth century. Theatre is widely
interpreted. The authors discuss censorship, the social
implications of pageantry, Reformation ideals, popular theatre and
the politics of the masque throughout the period. An early chapter
discusses political theatre in the light of work by revisionist and
post-revisionist historians. The drama of Jonson, Dekker,
Middleton, Massinger, Chapman, Heywood and Rowley is given detailed
attention, while Shakespeare's plays are considered in the
introductory chapter.
This is the first volume in the series Theatre in Europe: a
documentary history. The authors have compiled a documentary
account of the theatre in Britain during the Restoration and
Georgian period, which covers some 120 years of theatrical
activity. It was an exciting period that saw the first arrival of
the scenic stage in the public theatres of London, bringing with it
a whole new approach to staging and performance. The development
outlined in the volume shows the progression of the theatre from a
tightly controlled, court-based institution in the Restoration to
an ebullient, bustling, commercial undertaking with wide popular
appeal in the late Georgian period. The collection of primary
source material (both verbal and visual) documents changes in
government control and censorship, company management, actors and
acting styles, stage presentation, playhouse design and audience
response.
Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgy
offers fresh perspectives on how dramaturgs can support a
production beyond rigid disciplinary expectations about what
information and ideas are useful and how they should be shared. The
sixteen contributors to this volume offer personal windows into
dramaturgy practice, encouraging theater practitioners, students,
and general theater-lovers to imagine themselves as dramaturgs
newly inspired by the encounters and enquiries that are the juice
of contemporary theater. Each case study is written by a dramaturg
whose body of work explores important issues of race, cultural
equity, and culturally-specific practices within a wide range of
conventions, venues, and communities. The contributors demonstrate
the unique capacity of their craft to straddle the ravine between
stage and stalls, intention and impact. By unpacking, in the most
up-to-date ways, the central question of "Why this play, at this
time, for this audience?," this collection provides valuable
insights and dramaturgy tools for scholars and students of
Dramaturgy, Directing, and Theater Studies.
Asian City Crossings is the first volume to examine the
relationship between the city and performance from an Asian
perspective. This collection introduces "city as method" as a new
conceptual framework for the investigation of practices of
city-based performing arts collaboration and city-to-city
performance networks across East- and Southeast Asia and beyond.
The shared and yet divergent histories of the global cities of Hong
Kong and Singapore as postcolonial, multiethnic, multicultural, and
multilingual sites, are taken as points of departure to demonstrate
how "city as method" facilitates a comparative analytical space
that foregrounds in-betweenness and fluid positionalities. It
situates inter-Asian relationality and inter-city referencing as
centrally significant dynamics in the exploration of the material
and ideological conditions of contemporary performance and
performance exchange in Asia. This study captures creative dialogue
that travels city-based pathways along the Hong Kong-Singapore
route, as well as between Hong Kong and Singapore and other cities,
through scholarly analyses and practitioner reflections drawn from
the fields of theatre, performance, and music. This book combines
essays by scholars of Asian studies, theatre studies,
ethnomusicology, and human geography with reflective accounts by
Hong Kong and Singapore-based performing arts practitioners to
highlight the diversity, vibrancy, and complexity of creative
projects that destabilise notions of identity, belonging, and
nationhood through strategies of collaborative conviviality and
transnational mobility across multi-sited networks of cities in
Asia. In doing so, this volume fills a considerable gap in global
scholarly discourse on performance and the city and on the
production and circulation of the performing arts in Asia.
This book delivers an admirably comprehensive and rigorous analysis
of African oral literatures and performance. Gathering insights
from distinguished scholars in the field, the book provides a range
of contemporary interdisciplinary perspectives in the study of oral
literature and its transformations in everyday life, fiction,
poetry, popular culture, and postcolonial politics. Topics
discussed include folklore and folklife; oral performance and
masculinities; intermediated orality, modern transformations, and
globalisation; orality and mass media; spoken word and imaginative
writing. The book also addresses research methodologies and the
thematic and theoretical trajectories of scholars of African oral
literatures, looking back to the trailblazing legacies of Ruth
Finnegan, Harold Scheub, and Isidore Okpewho. Ambitious in scope
and incisive in its analysis, this book will be of interest to
students and scholars of African literatures and oral performance
as well as to general readers interested in the dynamics of
cultural production.
Performing Power explores 18th-century fabrication of the royal
image by focusing on the example of King Gustav III (1746-1792) -
one of Sweden's most acclaimed and controversial monarchs - who
conspicuously chose theater as the primary media for his
image-making and role construction. The text postulates that Gustav
III was motivated by theater's ability to aid him in fulfilling
Enlightenment's tenet of broadly educating the populace and
inculcating it with royal ideology. That he was an amateur actor,
stage director, and playwright were other engines driving his
choice. The project challenges and expands the commonly accepted
perception of Gustav III's contribution to Swedish theater, which
has generally been limited to founding its National Opera,
developing its national drama, and forming its national dramatic
repertoire. Maria Berlova presents Gustav III as a performing King
who strategically used political events as a framework through
which he could embody the image of the ideal or enlightened monarch
as presented by Voltaire. Through this, Performing Power explores
the tight relationship and complex bond between theatrical arts and
politics. This unique study will be of great interest to students
and scholars in theater studies, 18th-century culture, and
politics.
Code-Choice and Identity Construction on Stage challenges the
general assumption that language is only one of the codes employed
in a theatrical performance; Sirkku Aaltonen changes the
perspective to the audience, foregrounding the chosen language
variety as a trigger for their reactions. Theatre is 'the most
public of arts', closely interwoven with contemporary society, and
language is a crucial tool for establishing order. In this book,
Aaltonen explores the ways in which chosen languages on stage can
lead to rejection or tolerance in diglossic situations, where one
language is considered unequal to another. Through a selection of
carefully chosen case studies, the socio-political rather than
artistic motivation behind code-choice emerges. By identifying
common features of these contexts and the implications of theatre
in the wider world, this book sheds light on high versus low
culture, the role of translation, and the significance of
traditional and emerging theatrical conventions. This intriguing
study encompassing Ireland, Scotland, Quebec, Finland and Egypt,
cleverly employs the perspective of familiarising the foreign and
is invaluable reading for those interested in theatre and
performance, translation, and the connection between language and
society.
In Staging and Re- cycling , John Keefe and Knut Ove Arntzen
re-visit and reappraise a selection of their work to explore how
the retrieval, re-approaching and re-framing of material can offer
pathways for new work and new thinking. The book includes a
collection of reprinted and first-published (although previously
presented) textual material interspersed with editorial material -
reflective essays from John and Knut on these pieces from the
archives and original essays from invited scholars that explore the
theme of repetition and re-cycling. The project has a number of
aims: to suggest how the status of 'new' with regard to academic
and staged dramaturgical materials may be reframed; to re-examine
these through certain lenses and concepts (re-cycling; re-working;
the spectator; landscape, post- and other dramaturgies); to explore
the possibilities of critique offered by particular modes of
juxtaposition, dialogue and dialectic; to offer further
provocations to received ideas; and to retrieve and re-approach
material, once published or presented, that becomes 'lost' in
archives or on library shelves. As shown here, the role of the
hyphen acts as an indicator to the status of 're-' in relation to
the 'new'. Written for scholars and academics, researchers,
undergraduate and postgraduate students, and practitioners working
in all forms for theatre and performance, Staging and Re-cycling
suggests a new form of dialogue between work, authors and readers,
and draws out threads that extend back into the past and
potentially forward into the future.
The Self-Centred Art is a study of the plays of Ben Jonson and the
actors who first performed in them. Jakub Boguszak shows how the
idiosyncrasies of Jonson's comic characters were thrown into relief
in actors' part-scripts-scrolls containing a single actor's lines
and cues-some five hundred of which are reconstructed here from
Jonson's seventeen extant plays. Reading Jonson's spectating parts,
humorous parts, apprentice parts, and plotting parts, Boguszak
argues that the kind of self-absorption which defines so many of
Jonson's famous comic creations would have come easily to actors
relying on these documents. Jonson's actors would have moreover
worked on their cues, studied their speeches, and thought about the
information excluded from their parts differently, depending on the
type they had to play. Boguszak thus shows that Jonson brilliantly
adapted his comedies to the way the actors worked, making the
actors' self-centredness serve his art. This book addresses
Jonson's dealings with the actors as well as the printers of his
plays and supplements the discussion of different types of parts
with a colourful range of case studies. In doing so, it presents a
new way of understanding not just Ben Jonson, but early modern
theatre at large.
The Problems of Viewing Performance challenges long-held
assumptions by considering the ways in which knowledge is received
by more than a single audience member, and breaks new ground by,
counterintuitively, claiming that viewing performance is not a
shared experience. Given that viewers come to each performance with
differing amounts and types of knowledge, they each make different
assumptions as to how the performance will unfold. Often modified
by other viewers and often after the performance event, knowledge
of performance is made more accurate by superimposing the
experiences and justified beliefs of multiple viewers. These
differences in the viewing experience make knowledge surrounding a
performance intersubjective. Ultimately, this book explains the how
and the why audience members have different viewing experiences.
The Problems of Viewing Performance is important reading for
theatre and performance students, scholars and practitioners, as it
unpacks the dynamics of spectatorship and explores how audiences
work.
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