A Working Costume Designer's Guide to Fit explores the concept of fit in theatrical costumes - what it is, how to assess it, and how to achieve it. Being able to assess whether a costume fits or not is a learned skill, which takes practice as well as information about what the fit standards are for different types of garments. Filled with detailed step-by-step illustrations, this book provides all the knowledge readers will need in order to achieve the perfect fit for their costumes, including: How costumes can support actors onstage when they fit correctly. How to take measurements and how to assess them. How to conduct a fitting and what materials are needed. How to resolve a number of issues that may arise during a fitting. How to fit a mock-up test garment in preparation for building a costume from scratch. How to adjust a garment or mock-up to fit better. Chapters 8-14 also explore different categories of garments and discuss how to check them against the wearer's measurements before trying them on, what the standards of fit are for each category, and how to fit an existing garment. This is an essential guide for students of Costume Design courses and professional costume designers of any experience level.

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 book theorizes auteur Robert Lepage's scenography-based approach to adapting canonical texts. Lepage's technique is defined here as 'scenographic dramaturgy', a process and product that de-privileges dramatic text and relies instead on evocative, visual performance and intercultural collaboration to re-envision extant plays and operas. Following a detailed analysis of Lepage's adaptive process and its place in the continuum of scenic writing and auteur theatre, this book features four case studies charting the role of Lepage's scenographic dramaturgy in re-'writing' extant texts, including Shakespeare's Tempest on Huron-Wendat territory, Stravinsky's Nightingale in a twenty-seven ton pool, and Wagner's Ring cycle via the infamous, sixteen-million-dollar Metropolitan Opera production. The final case study offers the first interrogation of Lepage's twenty-first century 'auto-adaptations' of his own seminal texts, The Dragons' Trilogy and Needles & Opium. Though aimed at academic readers, this book will also appeal to practitioners given its focus on performance-making, adaptation and intercultural collaboration.

This book reflects the changes in technology and educational trends (cross-disciplinary learning, entrepreneurship, first-year learning programs, critical writing requirements, course assessment, among others) that have pushed theatre educators to innovate, question, and experiment with new teaching strategies. The text focuses upon a firm practice-based approach that also reflects research in the field, offering innovative and proven methods that theatre educators may use to actively engage students and encourage student success. The sixteen essays in this volume are divided into five sections: Teaching with Digital Technology, Teaching in Response to Educational Trends, Teaching New Directions in Performance, Teaching Beyond the Traditional, and Teaching Collaboratively or Across Disciplines. Study of this book will provoke readers to question both teaching methods and curricula as they consider the ever-shifting arts landscape and the potential careers for theatre graduates.

This book examines the meanings, uses, and agency of voice, noise, sound, and sound technologies across Asia. Including a series of wide-ranging and interdisciplinary case studies, the book reveals sound as central to the experience of modernity in Asia and as essential to the understanding of the historical processes of cultural, social, political, and economic transformation throughout the long twentieth century. Presenting a broad range of topics - from the changing sounds of the Kyoto kimono making industry to radio in late colonial India - the book explores how the study of Asian sound cultures offers greater insight into historical accounts of local and global transformation. Challenging us to rethink and reassemble important categories in sound studies, this book will be a vital resource for students and scholars of sound studies, Asian studies, history, postcolonial studies, and media studies.

A seminal text on what live performance is, what it means, and how it can be theorised. Its second edition is required reading on many theatre and performance studies courses. Uniquely controversial on a subject which continues to be topical. Thoroughly updated to take into account changes in media, scholarship and digital technologies.

Immersion and Participation in Punchdrunk's Theatrical Worlds is a detailed account of the company's award-winning productions and their historical context. Examining Punchdrunk's role as pioneers of immersive theatre in the UK through a range of their productions including Sleep No More and The Drowned Man besides theatrical works such as Faust, The Duchess of Malfi and Kabeiroi, and cross-platform productions like The Moon Slave, The Borough and The Oracles, the book presents an original framework for understanding immersion in theatrical and mixed reality experiences. Central to the book is a study of how immersive experience is produced in interaction with physical and digital scenography for participatory audiences. Through ethnographies of the company, their designers, actors, producers and audiences, the book interrogates the relationship between the aesthetics of interaction and the experience of immersion in Punchdrunk's work. The theoretical framework that the book introduces affords analyses of material cultures and the influence of technology on interaction design in theatre and beyond, and offers a blueprint for next-generation immersive design and scenography for interactive multimedia environments.

The economic crisis in Argentina in 2001-2002 that spilled over into Uruguay causing fiscal and political problems is the starting point for my research on space and theater, and it demonstrates why we must look at the River Plate in both global and local ways. Connections among monetary policies, industries, and legal, social, and political movements mean that national spaces like Uruguay's are fraught with tensions that come from both within and outside of borders. Recent economic crises like the one that is occurring in Greece, further demonstrate how nation states and trade blocks must constantly negotiate power as they toggle between national and international pressures. Nation states are being prompted to reconceive perspectives on governance that fall away from the parameters of Westphalian autonomy and reconcile their views with trends that instead require thinking about power as a network with shifting centers. The introduction launches the study by addressing these political and economic trends, the spatial turn in theater and performance studies, the rise of multiculturalism, and also examines the Uruguayan historical context of the post-dictatorship and impunity laws that pit national sovereignty against international human rights laws. These crises are enacted on the Uruguayan stage and contextualized through networks and spatial topographies, intertextualties on the page, explorations of history and memory, and ultimately notions of identity in four areas: the postdramatic and economic realm (chapter one: Peveroni), cultural geography and pyschogeography (chapter two: Morena), midrash and questions of human rights and growing fascist trends (chapter three: Sanguinetti), and finally in mapmaking on the stage through mise-en-perf/performise and "wayfinding" through sites of contested power (chapter four: Calderon). The concluding chapter (Blanco) looks at the reinterpretation of Greek tragedy as a commentary on the messy process of democratization. Here, access to the polis and power are problematized through the lens of international sex trafficking and gendered roles that exclude portions of the populace from participation in the process of self-governance.

Love's Victory by Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1651) is the first romantic comedy written in English by a woman. The Revels Plays publishes for the first time a fully-authorised, modern spelling edition of the Penshurst manuscript, the only copy of the play containing all five acts, handwritten by Wroth and privately owned by the Viscount De L'Isle. Edited by Alison Findlay, Philip Sidney and Michael G. Brennan, their critical introduction provides details of Wroth's remarkable life and work as a member of the Sidney family, tracing connections between Love's Victory, her prose and poetry and her family's extensive writings. The editors introduce readers to the influence of court drama on Love's Victory and offer a new account of the play's stage history in productions from 1999-2018. Extensive commentary notes guiding the modern reader include explanatory glosses, literary references and staging information. -- .

The book is written by two highly experienced adaptors and translators from American regional and commercial theatre. The book takes into account the structural and artistic differences between adapting from different media into theatre (from film to theatre, from novel to theatre, etc). The book features interviews with a range of theatre practitioners versed in all aspects of writing and teaching translation and adaptation.

Shakespeare and Tourism provides a dialogical mapping of Shakespeare studies and touristic theory through a collection of essays by scholars on a wide range of material. This volume examines how Shakespeare tourism has evolved since its inception, and how the phenomenon has been influenced and redefined by performance studies, the prevalence of the World Wide Web, developments in technology, and the globalization of Shakespearean performance. Current scholarship recognizes Shakespearean tourism as a thriving international industry, the result of centuries of efforts to attribute meanings associated with the playwright's biography and literary prestige to sites for artistic pilgrimage and the consumption of cultural heritage. Through bringing Shakespeare and tourism studies into more explicit contact, this collection provides readers with a broad base for comparisons across time and location, and thereby encourages a thorough reconsideration of how we understand both fields.

This shortform book tells the research story of cultural management, helping scholars to analyse and combine theoretical models into an approach of their own. Cultural management emerged and developed out of the field of arts management in the 1980s, which imported managerial techniques and assumptions from mainstream commercial business into the arts. In the late 1990s, the field integrated entrepreneurial approaches to management in the creative industries before adapting to a new model, based on user experiences and co-creation. These historical phases are theorised respectively as cultural management 1.0, cultural management 2.0 and cultural management 3.0. Yet they also overlap. Bringing together theories of management and creativity, this book enables scholars to get a grip on the underlying assumptions and conditions which lie behind an eclectic and evolving field. The author, an established expert in this field, empowers scholars and reflective practitioners to develop their own approach to cultural management, drawing on the available approaches, and to recognise that successful cultural management is contingent on understanding the context (organisational and personal) within which these models will be applied.

Over the last decade a number of prison theatre programs have developed to rehabilitate inmates by having them perform Shakespearean adaptations. This book focuses on how prison theatre today reveals certain elements of the early modern theatre that were themselves responses to cataclysmic changes in theological doctrine and religious practice.

Italian Futurist Theatre provides an overview of the theatrical activities of the Italian Futurist movement, headed by F. T. Marinetti. It analyses the theory and practice of Futurist performance, covers the theatre work of all leading artists and writers of the movement, and discusses the main aims and achievements of their theatrical experiments. The main focus of the study is directed towards reconstructing the performance history of Futurist theatre. But it also incorporates aspects of dramatic writing, stage and costume design, theatre architecture, dance and opera, and is heavily illustrated.

Art, politics, Asian, LGBT, Queer, China, Storytelling, Theatre, Performance

Mothering Performance is a combination of scholarly essays and creative responses which focus on maternal performance and its applications from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. This collection extends the concept and action of 'performance' and connects it to the idea of 'mothering' as activity. Mothering, as a form of doing, is a site of never-ending political and personal production; it is situated in a specific place, and it is undertaken by specific bodies, marked by experience and context. The authors explore the potential of a maternal sensibility to move us towards maternal action that is explicitly political, ethical, and in relation to our others. Presented in three sections, Exchange, Practice, and Solidarity, the book includes international contributions from scholars and artists covering topics including ecology, migration, race, class, history, incarceration, mental health, domestic violence, intergenerational exchange, childcare, and peacebuilding. The collection gathers diverse maternal performance practices and methodologies which address aesthetics, dramaturgy, activism, pregnancy, everyday mothering, and menopause. The book is a great read for artists, maternal health and care professionals, and scholars. Researchers with an interest in feminist performance and motherhood, within the disciplines of performance studies, maternal studies, and women's studies, and all those who wish to gain a deeper understanding of maternal experience, will find much of interest. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Funded by University of South Wales

This book - Investigates theories and practices shaped by a performance's relationship to the archive; - Examine how the changing nature of performance practices has made it imperative to understand how the archive and archival practices could add to the performance work; - Will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of performance studies, media and culture studies, studies of technology and art as also literature and literary criticism.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a prolific playwright with more than thirty plays to his credit. He is also known for his life-long, passionate engagement with theatre, first at Jorasanko and then at Santiniketan, in multiple roles as actor, director, singer, musician. However, during his own life-time and even after his demise, his experimental plays have proved challenging for directors to stage. Time and again they have been written off as unstageable by prominent theatre makers. Further complications have arisen from the presence of a spectre of authority around Tagore and his plays often promoted by Visva-Bharati, the institution he founded and which held the copyright of his works till 2001. This book travels through time and space intending to untangle the enigma presented by Tagore's plays. The book on one hand immerses itself into the archive of Tagore's plays and his dramaturgy of them in order to problematize the ways in which they have been interpreted. On the other, it also engages with productions of Tagore's plays during and after his life-time to understand the challenges directors have faced while staging them and the strategies they have embraced to circumvent them. While performing a subjective critical reading of the Tagore theatre-archive, an underlying objective of the book remains to understand the very concept of the archive, as it manifests itself in contemporary dramatic theatre.

This book challenges widespread and largely negative assumptions about Italian postmodernism and postmodernism in general. It considers contemporary Italian culture as a particularly interesting testing-ground for pluriform struggles of an ethical or political kind, struggles which build upon, whilst rejecting the essentialist assumptions behind, conventional notions of artistic commitment, or impegno. Drawing on a variety of cultural fields and artistic media - from cinema to the literary genres of autobiography, romance and the giallo; from feminism to pensiero debole; from theatrical performance to shared practices of cultural memory - the volume charts instances of ethical commitment and emancipatory social and political intervention in Italian culture within a post-ideological and post-hegemonic framework, siding with a more constructive and less 'apocalyptic' analysis of the cultural climate of the past two decades in Italy. This balancing act is described by the contributors as 'postmodern impegno'. The authors, artists and thinkers discussed in the essays include, among others, Eraldo Affinati, Adriana Cavarero, Marco Tullio Giordana, Carlo Lucarelli, Nanni Moretti, Marco Paolini, Roberto Saviano, Gianni Vattimo and Antonio Tabucchi. Questo libro mette in discussione la diffusa posizione critica che tende a svalutare l'esperienza culturale della postmodernita e del postmodernismo in Italia. Il contesto italiano contemporaneo e di fatto un esempio quanto mai interessante e sintomatico per il definirsi di forme plurali e non monologiche di impegno politico-culturale, che pur rifiutando forme di assolutismo o essenzialismo epistemico o ideologico, mantengono fede a una consolidata tradizione di engagement artistico. Partendo dall'analisi di vari generi e strategie discorsive - cinema, teatro, filosofia, letteratura di genere (romance, giallo, autobiografia) o di denuncia - e di vari autori - Eraldo Affinati, Adriana Cavarero, Marco Tullio Giordana, Carlo Lucarelli, Nanni Moretti, Marco Paolini, Roberto Saviano, Antonio Tabucchi, Gianni Vattimo, e altri - questo volume raccoglie e analizza esempi di impegno etico e di intervento socio-politico all'interno di una prospettiva post-ideologica e post-egemonica, proponendo una visione piu costruttiva e meno "apocalittica" del clima culturale generale degli ultimi vent'anni in Italia.

Urban Sensographies views the human body as a highly nuanced sensor to explore how various performance-based methods can be implemented to gather usable 'felt data' about the environment of the city as the basis for creating embodied mappings. The contributors to this fascinating volume seek to draw conclusions about the constitution, character and morphology of urban space as public, habitable and sustainable by monitoring the reactions of the human body as a form of urban sensor. This co-authored book is centrally concerned, as a symptom of the degree to which cities are evolving in the 21st century, to examine the effects of this change on the practices and behaviours of urban dwellers. This takes into account such factors as: defensible, retail and consumer space; legacies of modernist design in the built environment; the effects of surveillance technologies, motorised traffic and smart phone use; the integration of 'wild' as well as 'domesticated' nature in urban planning and living; and the effects of urban pollution on the earth's climate. Drawing on three years of funded practical research carried out by a multi-medial team of researchers and artists, this book analyses the presence and movement of the human body in urban space, which is essential reading for academics and practitioners in the fields of dance, film, visual art, sound technology, digital media and performance studies.

Theatre Institutions in Crisis examines how theatre in Europe is beset by a crisis on an institutional level and the pressing need for robust research into the complex configuration of factors at work that are leading to significant shifts in the way theatre is understood, organised, delivered, and received. Balme and Fisher bring together scholars from different disciplines and countries across Europe to examine what factors can be said to be most common to the institutional crisis of European theatre today. The methods employed are drawn from systems theory, social-scientific approaches, economics and statistics, theatre and performance, and other interpretative approaches (hermeneutics), and labour studies. This book will be of great interest to researchers, students, and practitioners working in the fields of performance and theatre studies. It will be particularly relevant to researchers with a particular interest in European theatre and its networks.

This state-of-the-art volume covers recent developments in research on audio description, the professional practice dedicated to making audiovisual products, artistic artefacts and performances accessible to those with supplementary visual and cognitive needs. Harnessing the power of the spoken word, the projects covered in this book illustrate the value of audiovisual content descriptions not only in relation to the role of breaking down physical, cognitive and emotional barriers to entertainment, but also in informing broader media practices such as video archive retrieval, video gaming development and application software creation. The first section maps out the field, discusses key concepts in relation to new developments and illustrates their application; the second part focuses on new audiences for AD, whilst the third part covers the impact of new technologies. Throughout this book contributors focus on methodological innovation, regarding audio description as an opportunity to engage in multi-dimensional linguistic and user-experience analysis, as it intersects with and contributes to a range of other research disciplines. This book is key reading for researchers, advanced students and practitioners of audiovisual translation, media, film and performance studies, as well as those in related fields including cognition, narratology, computer vision and artificial intelligence.

Concise guide useful for students, researchers and practitioners. Marginalized topic from a research perspective. Includes formal theory and case studies in art history.