This book details the Irish socialistic tracks pursued by Bernard Shaw and Sean O'Casey, mostly after 1916, that were arguably impacted by the executed James Connolly. The historical context is carefully unearthed, stretching from its 1894 roots via W. B. Yeats' dream of Shaw as a menacing, yet grinning sewing machine, to Shaw's and O'Casey's 1928 masterworks. In the process, Shaw's War Issues for Irishmen, Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress, The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, Saint Joan, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, and O'Casey's The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, and The Silver Tassie are reconsidered, revealing previously undiscovered textures to the masterworks. All of which provides a rethinking, a reconsideration of Ireland's great drama of the 1920s, as well as furthering the knowledge of Shaw, O'Casey, and Connolly.

Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960), poet, novelist, playwright and composer would become one of the literary giants of the twentieth century. The father of magic realism in Italy, he was associated with the futurist avant-garde and then launched his own influential literary movement, Novecento. Editor and creator of various journals, he collaborated with some of the greatest writers of his day, from James Joyce to Luigi Pirandello. Bontempelli was a prominent fascist intellectual and largely for this reason is today a controversial, little studied and seldom translated writer. Patricia Gaborik strikes out at this problem by presenting here an extensive introduction on the thought and legacy of this figure and complete translations of three of his major plays: "Watching the Moon" (1916), "Stormcloud" (1935) and "Cinderella" (1942). Bontempelli's sense of theatricality was unparalleled, his characters are bewitching, and Gaborik's translations privilege both readability and playability, offering these plays the chance for a robust, English-language life not only on page but also on stage. In 1953, Bontempelli was awarded the Strega Prize, Italy's most prestigious literary award. "Watching the Moon" is a densely layered response to the era's avant-gardism, with traces of symbolism, expressionism and futurism. It presents the story of a woman who travels to the literal ends of the earth in an attempt to rescue her (dead) daughter, whom she believes has been kidnapped by the moon. "Stormcloud," where a nimbus is responsible for misery and destruction, points fingers at individual behaviors and especially at personal egotism in the face of love and death. It is a strange and compelling exemplar of magic realism for the stage. "Cinderella," fearless, radical and subversive, adds to Bontempelli's slate of strong and complex female characters, still sometimes a rare commodity on the stage. First English translation. Introduction, notes, select bibliography, illustrated. 198 pages.

Designing Presence offers a unique insight into the training that has helped people around the world to cultivate more presence in both professional and personal settings. It explains the research behind the method of Towards Vivencia, shares stories of how it has been implemented and offers practical exercises to apply it in any context. Presence is something that is often talked about but is difficult to pin down. We have all experienced moments when we felt one with what we are doing and with our environment. However, this feeling is usually fleeting and we don't know when or how we will experience it again. Towards Vivencia is the first methodology of its kind to train performers to locate and replicate that specific state of consciousness associated with presence and peak performance. Based on over 20 years of experience, combined with research in anthropology, philosophy and the latest advances in neuroscience, Towards Vivencia enables performers to become fully engaged with their experience in order to operate at their highest possible level. This book aims to equip readers with the ability to actively design their experiences and create lasting changes not only in how they approach performance but also how they approach their everyday lives.

In the Anthropocene, icy environments have taken on a new centrality and emotional valency. This book examines the diverse ways in which ice and humans have performed with and alongside each other over the last few centuries, so as to better understand our entangled futures. Icescapes - glaciers, bergs, floes, ice shelves - are places of paradox. Solid and weighty, they are nonetheless always on the move, unstable, untrustworthy, liable to collapse, overturn, or melt. Icescapes have featured - indeed, starred - in conventional theatrical performances since at least the eighteenth century. More recently, the performing arts - site-specific or otherwise - have provoked a different set of considerations of human interactions with these non-human objects, particularly as concerns over anthropogenic warming have mounted. The performances analysed in the book range from the theatrical to the everyday, from the historical to the contemporary, from low-latitude events in interior spaces to embodied encounters with the frozen environment.

Contemporary theatre is going through a period of unparalleled excitement and challenge. Terms like 'postmodern' and 'postdramatic' have their own contested and defended histories, while notions of truth in verbatim theatre are open to serious critical challenge. Theatre writing can result in no words being spoken and nothing appearing on the page, and productions are stretching the boundaries of space, place and context like never before. This revised and significantly expanded edition of New Performance/New Writing explores immersive and solo theatre, autoethnography, applied drama, performance writing, plot, story, narrative and devising. It presents an invaluable response to questions that arise from new theatre, prompting active reading that enhances classroom and workshop learning, and improves productivity in rehearsal. Each chapter explores a key aspect of theatre study, while an extensive timeline of theatre events gives a broad overview of its evolution. Case studies on practitioners as diverse as Kneehigh, Punchdrunk, Mark Ravenhill and Forced Entertainment are scattered throughout the book, along with detailed suggestions for workshops, which encourage readers to test some of the book's ideas in practice.

The world of theatre criticism is rapidly changing in its form, function and modes of operation in the twenty-first century. The dominance of the internet has led to a growing trend of selfappointed theatre critics and bloggers who are changing the focus and purpose of the discussion around live performance. Even though the blogosphere has garnered suspicion and hostility from some mainstream newspaper critics, it has also provided significant intellectual and ideological challenges to the increasingly conservative profile of the professional critic. This book features 16 commissioned contributions from scholars, arts journalists and bloggers, as well as a small selection of innovative critical practice. Authors from Australia, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Russia, the UK and the US share their perspectives on relevant historical, theoretical and political contexts influencing the development of the discipline, as well as specific aspects of the contemporary practices and genres of theatre criticism. The book features an introductory essay by its editor, Duska Radosavljevic.

It's not what you think. You may have heard Casanova's legend, but have you heard his heart? Could you read between the lines of the playwright who wrote the play Casanova and why he assumes that role of his character given the power of Cupid's bow and arrow? But he is just like you and I. After all, we all use the power of the bow and arrow in some form, whether through beauty, power, or wit. And we use that power to some extent to shapes love's stage. Admittedly, some are better than others. And of course, our intentions are good. Well, at least we try most of the time. But unfortunately there are desires and motivations which we know not of, and nor do we know where they are from. In fact, we just don't know ourselves. If you were given all the power of the bow and arrow, how would you act? Is there any guarantee that your aim would be any better than the blind whims of Cupid? Especially in a world where love loves to hide, mask itself in indifference and most of all, act. We will quickly learn that the real story is what is happening behind the stage, under the stage, in the earth deep below the stage, over the stage, behind the pen, inside the heart, in the heavens, and in that place so distant and so far back-a place called home. This is a story dictated by characters with no roles, stars with no spoken parts, no cameos, and no love shared at all. Something happened that moved Casanova's heart. It moved the characters on the stage, and it is about to move the heavens. It seems today that the earth is shaking and the ground is moving, and it is getting more frequent. You had better check your foundations like Casanova did. If our house is unsteady, perhaps we might want to checkhere, and it might just heal the world.

I would like to dedicate the book to the memory of Allison Miller Ferguson and Bryant Ferguson II. I would like to thank My Lovely Wife Latoya Ferguson, My mother Mae Ferguson, My sisters Karon Hall and Janet Ferguson, My Neice Aisha Ferguson and Henry Chancellor. My Daughters Jazmine and Janyah. My best Friend Lee Bostic his wife Felica Bostic and Scott Williams.

"Dukore's style is fluid and his wit delightful. I learned a tremendous amount, as will most readers, and Bernard Shaw and the Censors will doubtless be the last word on the topic." - Michel Pharand, former editor of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies and author of Bernard Shaw and the French (2001). "This book shows us a new side of Shaw and his complicated relationships to the powerful mechanisms of stage and screen censorship in the long twentieth century." - - Lauren Arrington, Professor of English, Maynooth University, Ireland A fresh view of Shaw versus stage and screen censors, this book describes Shaw as fighter and failure, whose battles against censorship - of his plays and those of others, of his works for the screen and those of others - he sometimes won but usually lost. We forget usually, because ultimately he prevailed and because his witty reports of defeats are so buoyant, they seem to describe triumphs. We think of him as a celebrity, not an outsider; as a classic, not one of the avant-garde, of which Victorians and Edwardians were intolerant; as ahead of his time, not of it, when he was called "disgusting," "immoral", and "degenerate." Yet it took over three decades and a world war before British censors permitted a public performance of Mrs Warren's Profession. We remember him as an Academy Award winner for Pygmalion, not as an author whose dialogue censors required deletions for showings in the United States. Scrutinizing the powerful stage and cinema censorship in Britain and America, this book focuses on one of its most notable campaigners against them in the last century.

Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd is an innovative collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of theatre, performance and eco-criticism, which reconfigures absurdist theatre through the optics of ecology and environment. As well as offering strikingly new interpretations of the work of canonical playwrights such as Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Adamov, Albee, Kafka, Pinter, Shepard and Churchill, the book playfully mimics the structure of Martin Esslin's classic text The Theatre of the Absurd, which is commonly recognised as one of the most important scholarly publications of the 20th century. By reading absurdist drama, for the first time, as an emergent form of ecological theatre, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd interrogates afresh the very meaning of absurdism for 21st-century audiences, while at the same time making a significant contribution to the development of theatre and performance studies as a whole. The collection's interdisciplinary approach, accessibility, and ecological focus will appeal to students and academics in a number of different fields, including theatre, performance, English, French, geography and philosophy. It will also have a major impact on the new cross disciplinary paradigm of eco-criticism.

To Die Upon a Kiss-- Othello is Shakespeare's great tragic play of love, trust, and deceit. Iago, an officer of the watch, sets out to destroy Othello by convincing him that his young bride, Desdemona, has betrayed him and is secretly in love with another man. What sense had I of her stol'n hours of lust? I saw't not, thought it not, it harm'd not me; I slept the next night well, was free and merry; I found not Cassio's kisses on her lips. He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stol'n, Let him not know't and he's not robb'd at all.

Aloha"" is at once the most significant and the most misunderstood word in the Indigenous Hawaiian lexicon. For Kanaka Maoli people, the concept of ""aloha"" is a representation and articulation of their identity, despite its misappropriation and commandeering by non-Native audiences in the form of things like the ""hula girl"" of popular culture. Considering the way aloha is embodied, performed, and interpreted in Native Hawaiian literature, music, plays, dance, drag performance, and even ghost tours from the twentieth century to the present, Stephanie Nohelani Teves shows that misunderstanding of the concept by non-Native audiences has not prevented the Kanaka Maoli from using it to create and empower community and articulate its distinct Indigenous meaning. While Native Hawaiian artists, activists, scholars, and other performers have labored to educate diverse publics about the complexity of Indigenous Hawaiian identity, ongoing acts of violence against Indigenous communities have undermined these efforts. In this multidisciplinary work, Teves argues that Indigenous peoples must continue to embrace the performance of their identities in the face of this violence in order to challenge settler-colonialism and its efforts to contain and commodify Hawaiian Indigeneity.

This book takes Roland Barthes's famous proclamation of 'The Death of the Author' as a starting point to investigate concepts of authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance. By offering a new understanding of 'the author' as neither a source of unquestioned authority nor an obsolete construct, but rather as a performative figure, the book illuminates wide-ranging aesthetic and political aspects of 'authorial death' by asking: how is the author constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality? And what are the politics and ethics of these constructions?

This title offers informative critical introduction to Beckett's "Waiting for Godot", one of the most commonly studied modern plays."Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot" is not only an indisputably important and influential dramatic text - it is also one of the most significant western cultural landmarks of the twentieth century. Originally written in French, the play first amazed and appalled Parisian theatre-goers and critics before receiving a harshly dismissive initial critical response in Britain in 1955. Its influence since then on the international stage has been significant, impacting on generations of actors, directors and audiences.This guide provides a comprehensive critical introduction to "Waiting for Godot" from the controversial first performances to recent productions."Continuum Modern Theatre Guides" offer concise, accessible and informed introductions to the key plays of modern times. Each book is carefully structured to offer a systematic study of the play in its biographical, historical, social and political context, an in-depth study of the text, an overview of the work's production history including screen adaptations, and practical workshopping exercises. They also include a timeline and suggestions for further reading which highlight key critical approaches. This will enable students to develop their understanding of playwrights and theatre-makers, as well as inspiring them to broaden their studies.

How do names attach themselves to particular objects and people and does this connection mean anything? This is a question which goes as far back as Plato and can still be seen in contemporary society with books of Names to Give Your Baby or Reader's Digest columns of apt names and professions. For the Renaissance the vexed question of naming was a subset of the larger but equally vexed subject of language: is language arbitrary and conventional (it is simply an agreed label for a pre-existing entity) or is it motivated (it creates the entity which it names)? Shakespeare's Names is a book for language-lovers. Laurie Maguire's witty and learned study examines names, their origins, cultural attitudes to them, and naming practices across centuries and continents, exploring what it means for Shakespeare's characters to bear the names they do. She approaches her subject through close analysis of the associations and use of names in a range of Shakespeare plays, and in a range of performances. The focus is Shakespeare, and in particular six key plays: Romeo and Juliet, Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, All's Well that Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida. But the book also shows what Shakespeare inherited and where the topic developed after him. Thus the discussion includes myth, the Bible, Greek literature, psychological analysis, literary theory, social anthropology, etymology, baptismal trends, puns, different cultures' and periods' social practice as regards the bestowing and interpreting of names, and English literature in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; the reader will also find material from contemporary journalism, film, and cartoons.