Andre and Madeleine have been in love for over fifty years. This weekend, as their daughters visit, something feels unusual. A bunch of flowers arrive, but who sent them? A woman from the past turns up, but who is she? And why does Andre feel like he isn't there at all? Christopher Hampton's translation of Florian Zeller's The Height of the Storm was first performed at Richmond Theatre, London, and opened in the West End at Wyndham's Theatre in October 2018.

In this book practitioner and researcher Louise Ann Wilson examines the expanding field of socially engaged scenography and promotes the development of scenography as a distinctive type of applied art and performance practice that seeks tangible, therapeutic, and transformative real-world outcomes. It is what Christopher Baugh calls 'scenography with purpose'. Using case studies drawn from the body of site-specific walking-performances she has created in the UK since 2011, Wilson demonstrates how she uses scenography to emplace challenging, marginalizing or 'missing' life-events into rural landscapes - creating a site of transformation - in which participants can reflect upon, re-image and re-imagine their relationship to their circumstances. Her work has addressed terminal illness and bereavement, infertility and childlessness by circumstance, and (im)mobility and memory. These works have been created on mountains, in caves, along coastlines and over beaches. Each case-study is supported by evidential material demonstrating the effects and outcomes of the performance being discussed. The book reveals Wilson's creative methodology, her application of three distinct strands of transdisciplinary research into the site/landscape, the subject/life-event, and with the people/participants affected by it. She explains the 7 'scenographic' principles she has developed, and which apply theories and aesthetics relating to land/scape art and walking and performance practices from Early Romanticism to the present day. They are underpinned by the concept of the feminine 'material' sublime, and informed by the attentive, autotopographic, therapeutic and highly scenographic use of walking and landscape found in the work of Dorothy Wordsworth and her female contemporaries. Case studies include Fissure (2011), Ghost Bird (2012), The Gathering (2014), Warnscale (2015), Mulliontide (2016), Dorothy's Room (2018) and Women's Walks to Remember: 'With memory I was there' (2018-2019).

En el preciso instante en el que Federico Garcia Lorca termino la redaccion de El publico, rubricaba, a su vez, uno de los mayores hitos de su produccion teatral. Consciente que su texto generaria una ruptura con la dramaturgia espanola del momento, la definio como "una pieza para no ser representada, y un poema para ser silbado." Sus palabras, sugerentes a la vez que enigmaticas, definian un texto complejo en su ejecucion, y no menos en su clasificacion. El debate sobre las influencias esteticas presentes en este texto lorquiano oscila, de forma sistematica, entre aquel sector de la critica que lo vincula a una estetica surrealista, o bien bajo la denominacion de "teatro imposible." Sin embargo, sobre la primera de las clasificaciones el propio autor fue muy tajante al respecto, negando cualquier tipo de vinculacion de su estetica con el Surrealismo. En este estudio y edicion critica El Publico emerge como un texto alejado de los etiquetajes convencionales. El texto lorquiano se nutre de fuentes tan diversas como Shakespeare, la dramaturgia aurea espanola y planteamientos esteticos muy alejados de la preceptiva teatral espanola y europea. Por primera vez en la edicion critica de El Publico se plantean nuevos cauces de investigacion, tan sugerentes como aquellas palabras de Garcia Lorca. Este analisis del texto lorquiano y, su edicion critica ha contado con la inestimable colaboracion y aportacion documental de la Fundacion Federico Garcia Lorca. Las fotografias y documentos que se aportan en esta edicion permitiran al lector acercarse a las circunstancias que rodearon a Federico Garcia Lorca durante su estancia en Nueva York y, como estas influyeron en la redaccion de El publico.

Theatre, Performance and Cognition introduces readers to the key debates, areas of research, and applications of the cognitive sciences to the humanities, and to theatre and performance in particular. It features the most exciting work being done at the intersection of theatre and cognitive science, containing both selected scientific studies that have been influential in the field, each introduced and contextualised by the editors, together with related scholarship from the field of theatre and performance that demonstrates some of the applications of the cognitive sciences to actor training, the rehearsal room and the realm of performance more generally. The three sections consider the principal areas of research and application in this interdisciplinary field, starting with a focus on language and meaning-making in which Shakespeare's work and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia are considered. In the second part which focuses on the body, chapters consider applications for actor and dance training, while the third part focuses on dynamic ecologies, of which the body is a part.

Exam Board: Pearson BTEC Academic Level: BTEC National Subject: Performing Arts First teaching: September 2016 First Exams: Summer 2017 For all four of the externally assessed units 1, 3, 5 and 7. Builds confidence with scaffolded practice questions. Unguided questions that allow students to test their own knowledge and skills in advance of assessment. Clear unit-by-unit correspondence between this Workbook and the Revision Guide and ActiveBook.

"Playing Culture" represents one of the corner stones in the model of the Theatrical Event, as developed by the Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). In this volume, thirteen scholars contribute to illuminate the significance and possibilities of playing within the framework of theatrical events. Playing is understood as an essential part of theatrical communication, from acting on stage to events far from theatre buildings. The playfulness characterizing academic traditions sets the tone in the introduction, illustrating the four sections of the book: Theories, Expansions, Politics and Conventions. The theoretical chapters depart from the classical Homo Ludens and offer a number of new perspectives on what play and playing implies in today's mediatized culture. The contributions to the second section on extensions, deal with playing in non-theatrical circumstances such as market places, passports and stock holders' meetings. The third section on the politics of playing focuses on wood-chopping women, saints and youngsters in South African townships - all demonstrating their social and political ambitions and purposes. The last section returns to the stage on which performers intend to represent, respectively, themselves, Bunraku puppets or the audience. Playing appears in many forms and in many places and constitutes a basic principle of theatre and performance. This book touches upon important theoretical implications of playing and offers a wide range of historical and contemporary examples. "Playing Culture - Conventions and Extensions of Performance" is the third book of the IFTR Working Group on The Theatrical Event. The first volume, entitled "Theatrical Events - Borders Dynamics Frames" was published in 2004, followed by "Festivalising Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture" in 2007. The present volume continues to expand the vision of the Theatrical Event as a theory and model for the study of playing, theatre, performance and mediated events.

In Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s) Katja Gvozdeva, Tatiana Korneeva, and Kirill Ospovat (eds.) focus on a fundamental question that transcends the disciplinary boundaries of theatre studies: how and to what extent did the convergence of dramatic theory, theatrical practice, and various modes of audience experience - among both theatregoers and readers of drama - contribute, during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, to the emergence of symbolic, social, and cultural space(s) we call 'public sphere(s)'? Developing a post-Habermasian understanding of the public sphere, the articles in this collection demonstrate that related, if diverging, conceptions of the 'public' existed in a variety of forms, locations, and cultures across early modern Europe - and in Asia.

This is the first volume to provide a detailed introduction to some of the main areas of research and practice in the interdisciplinary field of art and neuroscience. With contributions from neuroscientists, theatre scholars and artists from seven countries, it offers a rich and rigorous array of perspectives as a springboard to further exploration. Divided into four parts, each prefaced by an expert editorial introduction, it examines: * Theatre as a space of relationships: a neurocognitive perspective * The spectator's performative experience and 'embodied theatrology' * The complexity of theatre and human cognition * Interdisciplinary perspectives on applied performance Each part includes contributions from international pioneers of interdisciplinarity in theatre scholarship, and from neuroscientists of world-renown researching the physiology of action, the mirror neuron mechanism, action perception, space perception, empathy and intersubjectivity. While illustrating the remarkable growth of interest in the performing arts for cognitive neuroscience, this volume also reveals the extraordinary richness of exchange and debate born out of different approaches to the topics.

This edited collection focuses on performance practice and analysis that engages with medical and biomedical sciences. After locating the 'biologization' of theatre at the turn of the twentieth century, it examines a range of contemporary practices that respond to understandings of the human body as revealed by biomedical science. In bringing together a variety of analytical perspectives, the book draws on scholars, scientists, artists and practices that are at the forefront of current creative, scientific and academic research. Its exploration of the dynamics and exchange between performance and medicine will stimulate a widening of the debate around key issues such as subjectivity, patient narratives, identity, embodiment, agency, medical ethics, health and illness. In focusing on an interdisciplinary understanding of performance, the book examines the potential of performance and theatre to intervene in, shape, inform and extend vital debates around biomedical knowledge and practice in the contemporary moment.

Staging History unites essays by nine specialists in the field of late medieval and early Renaissance drama. Their focus is on English, Dutch and Humanist German drama, as well as on a modern Swiss adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry V. Featuring prominently in this book are plays by, among others, John Bale, Jacob Schoepper, Johannes Agricola and Jacob Duym. Special attention is also paid to the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and the Dutch abele spelen. So far this topic has not received wide attention within the world of medieval and early Renaissance studies. This exploration aims at arousing more interest in this field by scholars working on European drama from the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.

Alongside the works of the better-known classical Greek dramatists, the tragedies of Lucius Annaeus Seneca have exerted a profound influence over the dramaturgical development of European theatre. The Senecan Aesthetic surveys the multifarious ways in which Senecan tragedy has been staged, from the Renaissance up to the present day: plundered for neo-Latin declamation and seeping into the blood-soaked revenge tragedies of Shakespeare's contemporaries, seasoned with French neoclassical rigour, and inflated by Restoration flamboyance. In the mid-eighteenth century, the pincer movement of naturalism and philhellenism began to squeeze Seneca off the stage until August Wilhelm Schlegel's shrill denunciation silenced what he called its 'frigid bombast'. The Senecan aesthetic, repressed but still present, staged its return in the twentieth century in the work of Antonin Artaud, who regarded Seneca as 'the greatest tragedian of history'. This volume restores Seneca to a canonical position among the playwrights of antiquity, recognizing him as one of the most important, most revered, and most reviled, and in doing so reveals how theory, practice, and scholarship have always been interdependent and inseparable.

Applied Theatre: Women and the Criminal Justice System offers unprecedented access to international theatre and performance practice in carceral contexts and the material and political conditions that shape this work. Each of the twelve essays and interviews by international practitioners and scholars reveal a panoply of practice: from cross-arts projects shaped by autobiographical narratives through to fantasy-informed cabaret; from radio plays to film; from popular participatory performance to work staged in commercial theatres. Extracts of performance texts, developed with Clean Break theatre company, are interwoven through the collection. Television and film images of women in prison are repeatedly painted from a limited palette of stereotypes - 'bad girls', 'monsters', 'babes behind bars'. To attend to theatre with and about women with experience of the criminal justice system is to attend to intersectional injustices that shape women's criminalization and the personal and political implications of this. The theatre and performance practices in this collection disrupt, expand and reframe representational vocabularies of criminalized women for audiences within and beyond prison walls. They expose the role of incarceration as a mechanism of state punishment, the impact of neoliberalism on ideologies of punishment and the inequalities and violence that shape the lives of many incarcerated women. In a context where criminalized women are often dismissed as unreliable or untrustworthy, the collection engages with theatre practices which facilitate an economy of credibility, where women with experience of the criminal justice system are represented as expert witnesses.

Human sacrifice, a spirited heroine, a quest ending in a hairsbreadth escape, the touching reunion of long-lost siblings, and exquisite poetry-these features have historically made Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris one of the most influential of Greek tragedies. Yet, despite its influence and popularity in the ancient world, the play remains curiously under-investigated in both mainstream cultural studies and more specialized scholarship. With Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris, Edith Hall provides a much-needed cultural history of this play, giving as much weight to the impact of the play on subsequent Greek and Roman art and literature as on its manifestations since the discovery of the sole surviving medieval manuscript in the 1500s. The book argues that the reception of the play is bound up with its spectacular setting on the southern coast of the Crimean peninsula in what is now the Ukraine, a territory where world history has often been made. However, it also shows that the play's tragicomic tenor and escape plot have had a tangible influence on popular culture, from romantic fiction to Hollywood action films. The thirteen chapters illustrate how reactions to the play have evolved from the ancient admiration of Aristotle and Ovid, the Christian responses of Milton and Catherine the Great, the anthropological ritualists and theatrical Modernists including James Frazer and Isadora Duncan, to recent feminist and postcolonial dramatists from Mexico to Australia. Individual chapters are devoted to the most significant adaptations of the tragedy, Gluck's opera Iphigenie en Tauride and Goethe's verse drama Iphigenie auf Tauris. Richly illustrated and accessibly written, with all texts translated into English, Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris argues elegantly for a reappraisal of this Euripidean masterpiece.

A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams provides the essential guide to Williams' most studied and revived dramas. Authored by a team of leading scholars, it offers students a clear analysis and detailed commentary on four of Williams' plays: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. A consistent framework of analysis ensures that whether readers are wanting a summary of the play, a commentary on the themes or characters, or a discussion of the work in performance, they can readily find what they need to develop their understanding and aid their appreciation of Williams' artistry. A chronology of the writer's life and work helps to situate all his works in context and the introduction reinforces this by providing a clear overview of Williams' writing, its recurrent themes and concerns and how these are intertwined with his life and times. For each play the author provides a summary of the plot, followed by commentary on: * The context * Themes * Characters * Structure and language * The play in production (both on stage and screen adaptations) Questions for study, and notes on words and phrases in the text are also supplied to aid the reader. The wealth of authoritative and clear commentary on each play, together with further questions that encourage comparison across Williams' work and related plays by other leading writers, ensures that this is the clearest and fullest guide to Williams' greatest plays.

Nadezhda Ptushkina's plays reflect her keen interest in constructing multidimensional characters that reflect the myriad ways people are affected by today's turbulent world. Often writing strong female roles, she does not shy away from exploring the sometimes tragic implications that lie behind her comical, almost farcical scenes. Ptushkina questions the nature of love, and explores the boundaries between the spiritual and the base, the constructive and the destructive, that lie within every human being. Conflict between the sexes constitutes the core of Ptushkina's plays, in which she warns the audience against confusing sex and love. Ptushkina rejects any notion that men and women are the same, seeing gender differences rather than personality differences as the main source of tension between men and women. Her plays thus dwell on this 'battle of the sexes' and the resulting lack of respect for women that she sees in today's Russia.In this new translation, western readers have a chance to discover why Ptushkina's work holds such wide appeal in the Russian theatre.