This book examines the prolific and widely-attended popular theater boom of the genero chico criollo in the context of Argentina's modernization. Victoria Lynn Garrett examines how selected plays mediated the impact of economic liberalism, technological changes, new competing and contradictory gender roles, intense labor union activity, and the foreign/nativist dichotomy. Popular theaters served as spaces for cultural agency by portraying conventional and innovative performances of daily life. This dramatic corpus was a critical mass cultural medium that allowed audiences to evaluate the dominant fictions of liberal modernity, to critique Argentina's purportedly democratic culture, and to imagine alternative performances of everyday life in accordance with their realities. Through a fresh look at the relationship among politics, economics, popular culture, and performance in Argentina's modernization period, the book uncovers largely overlooked articulations of popular-class identities and desires for greater inclusion that would drive social and political struggles to this day.

The purpose of this Handbook is to provide students with an overview of key developments in queer and trans feminist theories and their significance to the field of contemporary performance studies. It presents new insights highlighting the ways in which rigid or punishing notions of gender, sexuality and race continue to flourish in systems of knowledge, faith and power which are relevant to a new generation of queer and trans feminist performers today. The guiding question for the Handbook is: How do queer and trans feminist theories enhance our understanding of developments in feminist performance today, and will this discussion give rise to new ways of theorizing contemporary performance? As such, the volume will survey a new generation of performers and theorists, as well as senior scholars, who engage and redefine the limits of performance. The chapters will demonstrate how intersectional, queer and trans feminist theoretical tools support new analyses of performance with a global focus. The primary audience will be students of theatre/ performance studies as well as queer /gender studies. The volume's contents suggest close links between the formation of queer feminist identities alongside recent key political developments with transnational resonances. Furthermore, the emergence of new queer and trans feminist epistemologies prompts a reorientation regarding performance and identities in a 21st-century context.

Paul Kirby and Adriana Kelder have spent their lives in the theatre. In the late sixties, the couple who would later be called the Bonnie and Clyde of Canadian theater, helped run an alternative newspaper in Montreal. Charges of obscenity and sedition lead to their going on the lam and becoming the only known Canadian fugitives to flee to the U.S. during the Vietnam War.

This book assembles texts by renowned academics and theatre artists who were professionally active during the wars in former Yugoslavia. It examines examples of how various forms of theatre and performance reacted to the conflicts in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, and Kosovo while they were ongoing. It explores state-funded National Theatre activities between escapism and denial, the theatre aesthetics of protest and resistance, and symptomatic shifts and transformations in the production of theatre under wartime circumstances, both in theory and in practice. In addition, it looks beyond the period of conflict itself, examining the aftermath of war in contemporary theatre and performance, such as by considering Ivan Vidic's war trauma plays, the art campaigns of the international feminist organization Women in Black, and Peter Handke's play Voyage by Dugout. The introduction explores correlations between the contributions and initiates a reflection on the further development of the research field. Overall, the volume provides new perspectives and previously unpublished research in the fields of theory and historiography of theatre, as well as Southeast European Studies.

This unique anthology presents the important historical essays on tragedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span, it traces the development of theories and philosophies of tragedy, enabling readers to consider the ways in which different varieties of environmentalist, feminist, leftist and postcolonial thought have transformed the status of tragedy, and the idea of the tragic, for recent generations of artists, critics and thinkers. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and 21st century theorists. Ideas of tragedy and the tragic have been central to the understanding of culture for the past two millennia. Writers and thinkers from Plato through to Martha Nussbaum have analyzed the genre of tragedy to probe the most fundamental of questions about ethics, pleasure and responsibility in the world. Does tragedy demand that we enjoy witnessing the pain of others? Does it suggest that suffering is inevitable? Is human sexuality tragic? Is tragedy even possible in a world of rolling news on a digitally connected planet, where atrocity and trauma from around the globe are matters of daily information? In order to illustrate the different ways that writers have approached the answers to such questions, this Reader collects together a comprehensive selection of canonical writings on tragedy from antiquity to the present day arranged in six sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts.

This book is about the centrality of movement, movement perception, and kinesthetic experience to theatrical spectatorship. Drawing upon phenomenological accounts of movement experience and the insights of cognitive science, neuroscience, acting theory, dance theory, philosophy of mind, and linguistics, it considers how we inhabit the movements of others and how these movements inhabit us. Individual chapters explore the dynamics of movement and animation, action and intentionality, kinesthetic resonance (or mirroring), language, speech, and empathy. In one of its most important contributions to the study of theatre, performance, and spectatorship, this book foregrounds otherness, divergence, and disability in its account of movement perception. The discussions of this and other issues are accompanied by detailed analysis of theatre, puppetry, and dance performances.

Four hundred years after Shakespeare's death, it is difficult to imagine a time when he was not considered a genius. But those 400 years have seen his plays banished and bowdlerized, faked and forged, traded and translated, re-mixed and re-cast. Shakespeare's story is not one of a steady rise to fame; it is a tale of set-backs and sea-changes that have made him the cultural icon he is today. This revealing new book accompanies an innovative exhibition at the British Library that will take readers on a journey through more than 400 years of performance. It will focus on ten moments in history that have changed the way we see Shakespeare, from the very first production of Hamlet to a digital-age deconstruction. Each performance holds up a mirror to the era in which it was performed. The first stage appearance by a woman in 1660 and a black actor playing Othello in 1825 were landmarks for society as well as for Shakespeare's reputation. The book will also explore productions as diverse as Peter Brook's legendary A Midsummer Night's Dream, Mark Rylance's 'Original Practices' Twelfth Night, and a Shakespeare forgery staged at Drury Lane in 1796, among many others.Over 100 illustrations include the only surviving playscript in Shakespeare's hand, an authentic Shakespeare signature, and rare printed editions including the First Folio. These - and other treasures from the British Library's manuscript and rare book collections - will feature alongside film stills, costumes, paintings and production photographs.In this book ten leading experts take a fresh look at Shakespeare, reminding us that the playwright's iconic status has been constructed over the centuries in a process that continues across the world today.

This book considers how Samuel Beckett's critical essays, dialogues and reflections drew together longstanding philosophical discourses about the nature of representation, and fostered crucial, yet overlooked, connections between these discourses and his fiction and poetry. It also pays attention to Beckett's writing for little-magazines in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, before going on to consider how the style of Beckett's late prose recalls and develops figures and themes in his critical writing. By providing a long-overdue assessment of Beckett's work as a critic, this study shows how Beckett developed a new aesthetic in knowing dialogue with ideas including phenomenology, Kandinsky's theories of abstraction, and avant-garde movements such as Surrealism. This book will be illuminating for students and researchers interested not just in Beckett, but in literary modernism, the avant-garde, European visual culture and philosophy.

Holiday Cheer from the Antebellum South Columbia, South Carolina. December 24, 1862. It is the week of the "Christmas Raid of Kentucky" and the height of the war among the states. The chill in the air carries hickory-scented plumes of smoke upward from colonial chimneys. Within Antebellum homes, Confederate soldiers cuddle-up with southern belles beneath mistletoe and share mint jelly, ambrosia, and chestnuts from the hearth. Ebenezer Scrooge, wealthy plantation owner, will have none of it. That is, until the miserly curmudgeon is haunted by the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Future and forced to review his wasted life of misanthropy. Never straying in message from Charles Dickens' novella, Chris Cook has set the Christmas classic in the American Civil War, a time of strife and struggle not unlike the pain and poverty that belied 1830's Dickensian London. Also included is a delightful companion piece to the play. CONFEDERATE BILL, Memoir of a Civil War Veteran is the real-life autobiography by Cook's great, great grandfather, William E. Trahern. Published for the first time ever, it is an important piece of history, documenting the adventures and vagaries of a young rebel soldier. Both stories are southern-fried treats "Yule " love em

This book opens up "Twelfth Night" as a play to see and hear, provides useful contextual and source material, and considers the critical and theatrical reception over four centuries. A detailed performance commentary brings to life the many moods of Shakespeare's subtle but robust humor. Students are encouraged to imagine the theatrical challenges of Shakespeare's Illyria afresh for themselves, as well as the thought, creative responses and wonder it has provoked.

Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media studies the performative nature of evil characters, acts and emotions across intersecting genres, disciplines and historical eras. This collection brings together scholars and artists with different institutional standings, cultural backgrounds and (inter)disciplinary interests with the aim of energizing the ongoing discussion of the generic and thematic issues related to the representation of villainy and evil in literature and media. The volume covers medieval literature to contemporary literature and also examines important aspects of evil in literature such as social and political identity, the gothic and systemic evil practices. In addition to literature, the book considers examples of villainy in film, TV and media, revealing that performance, performative control and maneuverability are the common characteristics of villains across the different literary and filmic genres and eras studied in the volume.

This book analyses the work of applied theatre practitioners using a new framework of 'responsivity' to make visible their unique expertise. In-depth investigation of practice combines with theorisation to provide a fresh view of the work of artists and facilitators. Case studies are drawn from community contexts: with women, mental health service users, refugees, adults with a learning disability, older people in care, and young people in school. Common skills and qualities are given a vocabulary to help define applied theatre work, such as awareness, anticipation, adaptation, attunement, and responsiveness. The Applied Theatre Artist is of scholarly, practical, and educational interest. The book offers detailed analysis of how skilled theatre artists make in-action decisions within socially engaged participatory projects. Rich description of in-session activity reveals what workshop facilitators actually do and how they think, offering a rare focus in applied theatre.

On the 31st of October 1964 a very British institution took its final bow. That was the night of the Windmill's farewell performance and when the curtain fell for the last time on London's world famous little theatre, and the stage door locked shut behind its keeper, the Windmill's heart stopped beating. All that was left was the lingering smell of a good cigar, the ghost of a fan dancer, the last faint echoes of laughter and applause, and then darkness. After 32 years the Windmill had breathed its last breath. Or had it? No one could have predicted that half a century later, in the year 2014, the world would still remember with affection the Windmill Theatre with its famous comedians and its legendary Windmill Girls. Fifty years on, in the public's heart, this particular British institution "Never Closed."This full colour hardback special edition book commemorates the Windmill on the fifty year anniversary of the theatre's closure. With over 600 illustrations (photographs and ephemera), stories and contributions from ex Windmillite Barry Cryer OBE, Windmill girls and boys who danced on through the blitz and many more, this book will remind those who were there of the phenomenon that was the Windmill, and give those who weren't the feeling of having visited the theatre that famously never closed.

The first comprehensive publication on the subject, this book investigates interactions between racial thinking and the stage in the modern and contemporary world, with 25 essays on case studies that will shed light on areas previously neglected by criticism while providing fresh perspectives on already-investigated contexts. Examining performances from Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Africa, China, Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacifi c islands, this collection ultimately frames the history of racial narratives on stage in a global context, resetting understandings of race in public discourse.

This book strives to unmask the racial inequity at the root of the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the US Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). This book focuses on physical culture - systematic, non-competitive exercise performed under the direction of an expert - because tracing how people practiced physical culture in the Progressive Era, especially middle- and upper-class white women, reveals how modes of popular performance, institutional regulation, and ideologies of individualism and motherhood combined to sublimate whiteness beneath the veneer of liberal progressivism and reform. The sites in this book give the fullest picture of the different strata of physical culture for white women during that time and demonstrate the unracialization of whiteness through physical culture practices. By illuminating the ways in which whiteness in the US became a default identity category absorbed into the "universal" ideals of culture, arts, and sciences, the author shows how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions, audience, and promised profitability. Finally, the chapters reveal troubling connections between the daily habits physical culturists promoted and the eugenics movement's drive towards more reproductively efficient white bodies. By examining these written, visual, and embodied texts, the author insists on a closer scrutiny of the implicit whiteness of physical culture and forwards it as a crucial site of analysis for performance scholars interested in how corporeality is marshaled by and able to contest local and global systems of power.

Hamlet is considered the greatest of Shakespeare's works, unsurpassed in richness and levels of meaning; it probes into the deepest human emotions. Haunted by his father's ghost, Hamlet sets out to avenge his death. But, has he heard his father or the voice of madness welling up from his mourning heart? The father's ghost accuses his brother Claudius, who has assumed the throne and married his wife Queen Gertrude, of murder. Unable to trust anyone anymore, Hamlet is consumed by his mission, shunning those who love him, even killing the eavesdropping Polonius, thinking him to be Claudius. This sets into motion events that threaten the stability of the whole kingdom. A story of truth, betrayal, family, loyalty and fate it has been unfailingly popular since it was first performed. Hamlet speaks to each generation of its own yearnings and problems.

Written to provide information on all price ranges of equipment to everyone from the beginner to the experienced home theater owner, Build Your Own Home Theater has been completely updated for today's audience. This new edition contains valuable consumer information on the latest digital home theater components and technology, including digital surround sound receivers, DVD players, digital television & HDTV, digital satellites (DBS), digital camcorders, and digital hard-drive video recorders. It also features easy-to-understand explanations of surround sound technology and set ups including Dolbya Digital, THX Surround EXTM, and DTS-ESTM.
If you are interested in audio, video, and home theater technologies, this book will give you the information you need to choose the right components, hook the pieces together, and create a fabulous theater experience right in your own living room. When the first edition of Build Your Own Home Theater was published, decent home theater systems were primarily only affordable for wealthier consumers. Now, several years later, the technology is accessible to millions of homes as products such as wide-screen televisions, digital surround sound audio, DVD Video and Audio Players, and digital satellite systems have become commonplace. Though most people don't have actual home theater set-ups in their living rooms, more and more consumers are trying to combine components they already own with new high-tech components to create an affordable home theater experience. Complete with important home theater Web site addresses and resources, Build Your Own Home Theater, Second Edition is a comprehensive, current, and well-researched text. Beginners to advanced home theater consumers, Videophiles, technicians, engineers, and electronics hobbyists from all walks of life will especially find it invaluable.

*"Dolby" and the double-D symbol are registered trademarks and "Surround Sound EX" is a trademark of Dolby Laboratories.
THX and Lucasfilm are (c) Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All rights are reserved. Used under authorization. DTS and DTS-ES are trademarks of Digital Theater Systems, Inc.
Covers all of the hot digital technologies and how to tie them together into one amazing home theater experience for budgets from $1,500 to $15,000.
New edition includes cutting edge technology from Digital Surround Sound to High Definition and Digital Television, DVD, Video Hard-Drives, Digital Satellites, and much more."

The creator of Story Theater, the original director of Second City, and one of the greatest popularizers of improvisational theater, Paul Sills has assembled some of his favorite adaptations from world literature. Includes: The Blue Light and Other Stories, A Christmas Carol (Dickens), Stories of God, Rumi.

Based on extensive archival research, this open access book examines the poetics and politics of the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) over the first three decades of its existence, discussing some of its remarkable productions in the comparative contexts of avant-garde theatre, Hollywood cinema, popular culture, and the development of Irish-language theatre, respectively. The overarching objective is to consider the output of the Gate in terms of cultural convergence - the dynamics of exchange, interaction, and acculturation that reveal the workings of transnational infrastructures.