How is performer-object interaction enacted and perceived in the theatre? How thereby are varieties of 'meaning' also enacted and perceived? Using cognitive theory and ecological ontology, Paavolainen investigates how the interplay of actors and objects affords a degree of enjoyment and understanding, whether or not the viewer speaks the language.

"This wise volume, written by a veteran director and observer of premodern plays, offers good advice for neophyte and experienced directors." Choice

This text proposes a new way to consider theatre and performance that claims a special relationship to reality, truth and authenticity. It documents innovations in devising and staging theatre and performance that takes reality as its subject, cultural shifts that have generated theatre of the real, some of its problems and some possibilities.

This book examines experimental Irish theatre that ran counter to the naturalistic 'peasant' drama synonymous with Irish playwriting. Focusing on four marginalised playwrights after Yeats, it charts a tradition linking the experimentation of the early Irish theatre movement with the innovation of contemporary Irish and international drama.

The last 15 years has seen an explosion of studies that use cognitive science to understand theatre, whilst at the same time theatre-makers are using their artistic practice to address research question. This book looks at the current discourse around these emerging fields.

Combining the charms of the country with the convenience of the city and delivering a healthy dose of both entertainment and education, American pleasure gardens were ubiquitous between the Revolution and the Civil War. Patrons of these entertainment venues would have expected to see plays, concerts, fairs, mechanical and artistic exhibits, fireworks, volcanic eruptions, and - perhaps more crucially - they would have expected to see and be seen. As outdoor entertainment venues in American cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pleasure gardens presented citizens with public spaces where they could explore what it meant to be American. The very nature of American pleasure gardens provided an effective location for the exploration of and experimentation with American identities, due to their nature as simultaneously rural and urban, modern and nostalgic, British and American, white and racialized, and democratic and class-conscious. Stubbs examines how these once popular venues helped form American identity using nation, class, race, and the agrarian ideal as touchstones and argues the gardens allowed for the exploration of what it meant to be American through performance, both on and off the stage.

Continuing a tradition that dates back to 1920, this beloved annual honors 10 new plays and musicals and three regional plays cited in the Harold and Mimi Steinberg New Play Awards and Citations competition. As always, "The Best Plays Theater Yearbook" includes a comprehensive collection of facts and figures about the year in United States theatre."The Best Plays of 2006-2007" where chosen from Broadway, Off Broadway, and Off Off Broadway productions of new plays that opened between June 1, 2006 and May 31, 2007. Essays, noted below, celebrate each one.The plays are: "Blackbird", by David Harrower (essay by David Cote); "The Clean House", by Sarah Ruhl (essay by Anne Marie Welsh); "The Coast of Utopia", by Tom Stoppard (essay by Charles Wright); "Dying City", by Christopher Shinn (essay by Charles Isherwood); "Frost/Nixon", by Peter Morgan (essay by Charles McNulty); "The Pain and the Itch", by Bruce Norris (essay by John Istel); "Passing Strange", by Stew and Heidl Rodewald (essay by Alisa Solomon); "Radio Gold", by August Wilson (essay by Christopher Rawson); "The Scene", by Theresa Rebeck (essay by Chris Jones); and "Spring Awakening", by Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik (essay by Michael Feingold. )

Based on her award-winning blog, "The Feminist Spectator," Jill Dolan presents a lively feminist perspective in reviews and essays on a variety of theatre productions, films and television series--from The Social Network and Homeland to Split Britches' Lost Lounge.
Demonstrating the importance of critiquing mainstream culture through a feminist lens, Dolan also offers invaluable advice on how to develop feminist critical thinking and writing skills. This is an essential read for budding critics and any avid spectator of the stage and screen.

This book traces three tumultuous decades of avant-garde theatre in the U.S. It begins with the Living Theatre, and explores diverse ensembles such as The Open Theatre, The Performance Group, and Bread and Puppet Theatre. It also looks at the women's theatre movement, and examines the work of Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman and more. There are sections devoted to ritual concepts, theatre in the streets, radical participation of the spectator, workshops in prisons, spectacles such as the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, and much more. This giant colloquium involves the people who changed the face of theatre from the '60s onward. Filled with photos, drawings, private notes and fliers, it is part ongoing history, part document, part journal, part complaint and part blessing.

The work of an acclaimed critic and director, this book breaks new ground by describing how the rehearsal process highlights the principal theatrical issues of Shakespeare's late plays: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. Drawing on his extensive experience with the rehearsal and performance at Stratford, Ontario in 1986, and at the National Theatre in 1988, Warren demonstrates how rehearsal creates extreme contrasts of mood and action, places intense personal crises in a wider political framework, and inspires spiritual journeys in the actors. Addressing many aspects of production--acting, direction, design, lighting, music, and audience response--this work will be important to all those involved with Shakespearean drama and its performance.

The global reception of Samuel Beckett raises numerous questions: in which areas of the world was Beckett first translated? Why were Beckett texts sometimes slow to penetrate certain cultures? How were national literatures impacted by Beckett's oeuvre? Translating Samuel Beckett around the World brings together leading researchers in Beckett studies to discuss these questions and explore the fate of Beckett in their own societies and national languages. The current text provides ample coverage of the presence of Beckett in geographical contexts normally ignored by literary criticism, and reveals unknown aspects of the 1969 Nobel Prize winner interacting with translators of his work in a number of different countries.

This book discusses Irish Passion plays (plays that rewrite or parody the story of the Passion of Christ) in modern Irish drama from the Irish Literary Revival to the present day. It offers innovative readings of such canonical plays as J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, W. B. Yeats's Calvary, Brendan Behan's The Hostage, Samuel Beckett's Endgame, Brian Friel's Faith Healer and Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire, as well as of less well-known plays by Padraic Pearse, Lady Gregory, G. B. Shaw, Sean O'Casey, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett and David Lloyd. Challenging revisionist readings of the rhetoric of "blood sacrifice" and martyrdom in the Irish Republican tradition, it argues that the Passion play is a powerful political genre which centres on the staged death of the (usually male) protagonist, and makes visible the usually invisible violence perpetrated both by colonial power and by the postcolonial state in the name of modernity.

This volume focuses on the theatre history of Asian countries, and discusses the specific context of theatre modernization in Asia. While Asian theatre is one of the primary interests within theatre scholarship in the world today, knowledge of Asian theatre history is very limited and often surprisingly incorrect. Therefore, this volume addresses a major gap in contemporary theatre studies. The volume discusses the conflict between tradition and modernity in theatre, suggesting that the problems of modernity are closely related to the idea of tradition. Although Asian countries preserved the traditional form and values of their respective theatres, they had to also confront the newly introduced values or mechanisms of European modernity. Several papers in this volume therefore provide critical surveys of the history of theatre modernization in Asian countries or regions-Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, India Malaysia, Singapore, and Uyghur. Other papers focus on specific case studies of the history of modernization, discussing contemporary Taiwanese performances, translations of modern French comedy into Chinese, the modernization of Chinese Xiqu, modern Okinawan plays, Malaysian traditional performances, Korean national theatre, and Japanese plays during World War II. Renowned academics and theatre critics have contributed to this volume, making it a valuable resource for researchers and students of theatre studies, literature, and cultural studies.

This book investigates the implications of technology on identity in embodied performance; the discussion within it forms a forum of debate exploring the interrelationship of and between identities in performance practices, informed by new technologies. This collection considers how identity is formed, de-formed, constructed, deconstructed, blurred and celebrated within diverse approaches to technological performance practices.Digital practices as experimental artworks and performances both serve as critique and have an indirect affect on the social and political. The discussions included in this collection highlight how a redefinition of the latter term comes about in as much as they question the very nature of our accepted ideas and belief systems regarding new technologies. These essays demonstrate how embodied technological practice, as with all avant-garde art, presents itself and any analysis applied to it as an experimental extension of the socio-political and cultural experience of an epoch.

A group of resourceful kids start "solution-seekers.com," a website where "cybervisitors" can get answers to questions that trouble them. But when one questioner asks the true meaning of Christmas, the kids seek to unravel the mystery by journeying back through the prophecies of the Old Testament. What they find is a series of "S" words that reveal a "spectacular story " With creative characters, humorous dialogue and great music, The "S" Files is a children's Christmas musical your kids will love performing.

This collection of scholarly essays offers a new understanding of local and global myths that have been constructed around Shakespeare in theatre, cinema, and television from the nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on a definition of myth as a powerful ideological narrative, Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance examines historical, political, and cultural conditions of Shakespearean performances in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. The first part of this volume offers a theoretical introduction to Shakespeare as myth from a twenty-first century perspective. The second part critically evaluates myths of linguistic transcendence, authenticity, and universality within broader European, neo-liberal, and post-colonial contexts. The study of local identities and global icons in the third part uncovers dynamic relationships between regional, national, and transnational myths of Shakespeare. The fourth part revises persistent narratives concerning a political potential of Shakespeare's plays in communist and post-communist countries. Finally, part five explores the influence of commercial and popular culture on Shakespeare myths. Michael Dobson's Afterword concludes the volume by locating Shakespeare within classical mythology and contemporary concerns.

Following an outline history of the monologue as an independent genre in the theater of Latin America, this bibliography incorporates all published and unpublished, staged and unstaged monologue pieces written in Latin America. The bibliographical entries are grouped in three chronological periods reflecting the fundamentally distinct nature of the monolgue during each of its periods of development. Within each grouping, the plays are listed alphabetically by author under an alphabetical roster of country headings. Each playwright's years of birth and death are given, if known, as well as the country of origin if that differs from the geographical category into which the dramatist has been placed. All known editions of the monologues are included. For unpublished works, an abbreviated reference source is given. Each title is followed by the generic description applied to the work by the author or publisher, or by reviewers or historians in the case of unpublished pieces. The secondary bibliography lists works which deal with the monologue as a literary genre.

Sound experimentation by avant-garde theatre artists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is an important but largely ignored aspect of theatre history. In this book, Curtin shows how attention to this activity enhances our understanding of artistic practice (modernism) and historical circumstance (modernity) and considers how avant-gardists staged sonic modernity by exploring its conceptual and communicative possibilities as well as its experiential realities. He critically examines avant-garde theatre through a composite analysis of dramatic texts, historical productions, sound recordings, philosophical speculations, and social movements.

Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance is an edited collection designed to address a diverse set of critical responses to and practical interrogations of the notion of being intimate in emergent and hybrid performance practices, aiming to elicit connectivity and provoke debate about the potency, nature and agency of intimacy in contemporary performance.Lauren Berlant suggests that 'intimacy (...) involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared' (2000, p. 1). Sensing intimacy in performance relocates registers of affect from the private experience to the public sphere. Within the current climate of intense global political, social and financial insecurity and unrest, at a time infused with both hope and fear, artists appear to be demonstrating a desire for intimacy and closeness with the Other. Those public figurings of intimacy - staged through contemporary performance, visual culture and digital art practices - become the cultural fuel which, when placed alongside political potentialities, can ignite debates and provocations such as those contained herein.

This book is the first study of popular theatre in France from left to right, exploring how theatre shapes political acts, ideals, and communities in the modern world. As the French found innovative ways of imagining culture and politics in the age of the masses, popular theatre became central to the republican project of using art to create citizens, using secular spaces for the experience of civic communion. But while state projects often faltered in finding playwrights, locations, and audiences, popular theatre flourished on the political and geographical peripheries. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book illuminates lost worlds of political conviviality, from anarchist communes and clandestine agit-prop drama to royalist street politics and right-wing mass spectacle. It reveals new connections between French initiatives and their European counterparts, and demonstrates the enduring strength of radical communities in shaping political ideals and engagement.

With a companion website that includes short online film episodes, this book proposes expansive ways of deconstructing and re-constituting sexuality and gender and thus more embodied and ethical ways of 'doing' life, and offers an understanding and critique of embodiment through an integration of performance, psychotherapy and feminist philosophy.

Combine Kafka's eerie vision with a soulless world run by computers and the result is this comic nightmare of a play. Strand's play - revolving around a bug in the system - premiered at the Actor's Theatre in Louisville Humana Festival, and has been produced by other theatres across the country.