The field of performance studies analyses the production and impact of on-stage performance, such as in a theatre or circus, and off-stage performance, such as cultural rituals and political protests. Performance Studies: Key Words, Concepts and Theories introduces students to 34 key topics seen as paramount to the future of performance studies in a series of short, engaging essays by an international team of distinguished scholars. Each essay contributes to the wide-ranging, adventurous and conscientious nature that makes performance studies such an innovative, valuable and exciting field.

Weaving together careful readings of plays and reviews, memoirs and interviews, biographies, and critical essays, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan traces the emergence of the first generation of modern actresses in Japan, a nation in which male actors had long dominated the public stage. What emerges is a colorful and complex picture of modern Japanese gender, theater, and nationhood. Using the lives and careers of two dominant actresses from the Meiji and Taisho eras, Ayako Kano reveals the fantasies, fears, and impact that women on stage created in Japan as it entered the 20th century.

"The role of the audience takes on new importance when performance is reconceived as a dialectical activity. The essays in this collection examine the relationship between dramatic performance and audience in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. That relationship is complicated by multiple conceptions of the audience: playwrights imagine their audiences; actors address them; the audience actually attending the play is yet another entity. The authors combine theatre history and cultural analysis with examinations of plays and productions to explore how those involved in early modern productions conceived of their audience, how audiences shaped the dramas they watched, and even how the roles of actor and audience member sometimes merged"--

Shakespeare was a master of language, his sayings have become part of everyday speech, and his plays endure, in part, because of the beauty of his verse. Shakespeare's language, however, poses special difficulties for modern actors because many of his words seem unusual or difficult to pronounce, he employs rhetorical devices throughout his works, and he carefully uses rhythm to convey sense.

The relation of the modern actor to the Shakespearean text, the importance of understanding the nuances of his language, and the fundamentals of grammar are all thoroughly examined in this volume. Its heart is a detailed consideration of the iambic code, the metrical system that Shakespeare used to give so much power to his verse. O'Dell also examines the importance of formal rhetoric in Elizabethan England and Shakespeare's artful use of rhetorical devices in his plays. As a practical reference guide, this volume keeps in mind the particular needs of theater professionals.

What is special, distinct, modern about modernity?

In How the World Became a Stage, William Egginton argues that the experience of modernity is fundamentally spatial rather than subjective and proposes replacing the vocabulary of subjectivity with the concepts of presence and theatricality. Following a Heideggerian injunctive to search for the roots of epochal change not in philosophies so much as in basic skills and practices, he describes the spatiality of modernity on the basis of a close historical analysis of the practices of spectacle from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, paying particular attention to stage practices in France and Spain. He recounts how the space in which the world is disclosed changed from the full, magically charged space of presence to the empty, fungible, and theatrical space of the stage.

This collection of essays on politics, the performing arts, and various forms of activist performance uses the framework of performance studies to explore the engagements of political resistance, public practice and performance media. It places these engagements on various scales of performance production within local, national and transnational structures of neoliberal and liberal government and power. Performance has always been a way of articulating the conditions of contemporary society, and of pointing through the body of the performance to ways of defining, understanding and changing those conditions. Throughout these essays performance takes place in the environments of heightened everyday action, the aesthetic and cultural activity of the performing arts, and in the activist performance of political commitment. These trajectories in performance studies delineate the way people identify themselves and communicate with one another, both in attempts to change the structures of governance they experience, and vitally, alongside those structures.

Theatre has always been a site for selling outrage and sensation, a place where public reputations are made and destroyed in spectacular ways. This is the first book to investigate the construction and production of celebrity in the British theatre. These exciting essays explore aspects of fame, notoriety and transgression in a wide range of performers and playwrights including David Garrick, Oscar Wilde, Ellen Terry, Laurence Olivier and Sarah Kane. This pioneering volume examines the ingenious ways in which these stars have negotiated their own fame. The essays also analyze the complex relationships between discourses of celebrity and questions of gender, spectatorship and the operation of cultural markets.

"Street Scenes" offers a theory of late medieval acting and performance through a fresh and original reading of the "Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge." The performance theory perspective employed here, along with the examination of actor/character dialectics, paves the way to understanding both religious theatre and the complexity of late medieval theatricalities. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi demonstrates the existence of a late medieval discourse about the double appeal of theatre performance: an artistic medium enacting sacred history while simultaneously referring to the present lives of its creators and spectators.

A major study of the work of one of Britain's best-known dramatists Peter Barnes was one of the UK's most significant, prolific and enduring playwrights. This book offers a major critical appraisal of the canon of Barnes' work, including a detailed study of his best-known plays, The Ruling Class, Bewitched, Laughter!, Red Noses, and Dreaming, as well as a selection of his television and radio plays which illuminate his thematic concerns, and offer key insights into his dramatic methods. Through this examination, Brian Woolland shows that many of Barnes' plays have remarkable contemporary relevance, and are formally far more innovative than has hitherto been recognised. Woolland analyses the ways in which Barnes uses and subverts theatrical traditions, and relates his work to relevant critical contexts: theatrical, critical and socio-political. Deservedly, Barnes' use of comedy is given special attention. It is a sad truth that Barnes' great talents have not always been acknowledged by the theatrical establishment. In this exciting study, Barnes finally gets the recognition he deserves, as one of the most original, daring and exuberant dramatists of his generation.

Lincoln, Rumi, Shams and Rabi'a in one volume? How is that possible? While three are Sufis, even Rumi and Shams are separated by a gulf of 400 years from Rabi'a. As for Rabi'a, she was at different times in her life, an orphan, a slave and a prostitute. And Lincoln? On top of another 500 years, the great statesman belongs to an entirely different civilization and religion. Where's the connection? "To the spiritual seeker, " Kehl and Walker contend,"The connection ... is unmistakable. Christ said "I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me." Sincere aspirants on the Spiritual Path recognize Masters; it can be no other way, as they are striving after the same reality." Lincoln, Rumi and Rabi'a are "linked by their unwavering pursuit of Spiritual Truth through Self Knowledge." The proof will be in the reading: In these three remarkable drama produced and performed during the fall and summer months of 2010 and 2011 the authors encourage readers to "search out the connections-rather than notice any supposed differences." 192 pages.

Marking the 100-year anniversary of women's suffrage, Leslie Hill provides a fascinating survey of the history of first wave feminism in British theatre, from the London premiere of Ibsen's A Doll's House in 1889 through the militant suffrage movement. Hill's approachable overview explores some of the pivotal ways in which theatre makers both engaged with and influenced feminist discourse on topics such as sexual agency, reproductive rights, marriage equality, financial independence and suffrage. Clear and concise, this is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Theatre and Performance Studies taking courses on Women in Theatre and Performance, Staging Feminism, Early Feminist Theatre, Theatre and Suffrage, Gender and Theatre, Political Theatre and Performance Historiography. This text will also appeal to scholars, lecturers, and Literature students.

This series of three volumes provides a groundbreaking study of the work of many of the most innovative and important British theatre companies from 1965 to 2014. Each volume provides a survey of the political and cultural context, an extensive survey of the variety of theatre companies from the period, and detailed case studies of six of the most important companies. Volume Three, 1995-2014, charts the expansion of the sector in the era of Lottery funding and traces the resistant influences of earlier movements in the emergence of new companies and an independent theatre ecology that seeks to reconfigure the mainstream. Leading academics provide case studies of six of the most important companies, including: * Mind the Gap, by Dave Calvert (University of Huddersfield, UK) * Blast Theory, by Maria Chatzichristodoulou (University of Hull, UK) * Suspect Culture, by Clare Wallace (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic) * Punchdrunk, by Josephine Machon (Middlesex University, UK) * Kneehigh, by Duska Radosavljevic (University of Kent, UK) * Stan's Cafe, by Marissia Fragkou (Canterbury Christ Church University, UK)

Neo-Victorian Villains is the first edited collection to examine the afterlives of such Victorian villains as Dracula, Svengali, Dorian Gray and Jekyll and Hyde, exploring their representation in neo-Victorian drama and fiction. In addition, Neo-Victorian Villains examines a number of supposedly villainous types, from the spirit medium and the femme fatale to the imperial 'native' and the ventriloquist, and traces their development from Victorian times today. Chapters analyse recent theatre, films and television - from Ripper Street to Marvel superhero movies - as well as classic Hollywood depictions of Victorian villains. In a wide-ranging opening chapter, Benjamin Poore assesses the legacy of nineteenth-century ideas of villains and villainy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contributors are: Sarah Artt, Guy Barefoot, Jonathan Buckmaster, David Bullen, Helen Davies, Robert Dean, Marion Gibson, Richard Hand, Emma James, Mark Jones, Emma V. Miller, Claire O'Callaghan, Christina Parker-Flynn, Frances Pheasant-Kelly, Natalie Russell, Gillian Piggott, Benjamin Poore and Rob Welch.

'Once upon a time, the London theatre was a charming mirror held up to cosiness. Then came Joan Littlewood, smashing the glass, blasting the walls, letting the wind of life blow in a rough, but ready, world. Today, we remember this irresistible force with love and gratitude.' (Peter Brook) Along with Peter Brook, Joan Littlewood, affectionately termed 'The Mother of Modern Theatre', has come to be known as the most galvanising director of mid-twentieth-century Britain, as well as a founder of so many of the practices of contemporary theatre. The best-known work of Littlewood's company, Theatre Workshop, included the development and premieres of Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, Brendan Behan's The Hostage and The Quare Fellow, and the seminal Oh What A Lovely War. This autobiography, originally published in 1994, offers an unparalleled first-hand account of Littlewood's extraordinary life and career, from illegitimate child in south-east London to one of the most influential directors and practitioners of our times. It is published along with an introduction by Philip Hedley CBE, previously Artistic Director of Theatre Royal Stratford East and Assistant Director to Joan Littlewood.

"Interrogating America" looks at American culture and politics from the lens of American theatre and drama, drawing from specialists in the field of theatre to reflect upon the role of theatre in the creation of the American cultural and political milieu. The essays confront such iconic concepts as the American Dream and the American Melting Pot, addressing issues such as American enfranchisement and historical limitations placed on the idea of inclusion based on class, race, and gender. Together, the essays create a portrait of the dynamic give-and-take that is central to the idea of Americanness and America itself.

Why is folly essential to the functioning of a healthy society? Why is theatre a natural home for madness? The answers take the reader on a journey embracing Shakespeare and Jonson, Brecht and Beckett, Buchner and Boal. From Falstaff to Fo via Figaro, this study examines the art of telling truth to power and surviving long enough to have a laugh.

Collaboration between artists has been practised for centuries, yet over recent decades the act of collaborating has taken different meanings. This publication examines cultural, philosophical and political issues tied to specific instances of collaborative practice in the performing arts. Leading scholars and practitioners review historical developments of collaborative practice and reveal what it means to work together in creative contexts at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Key questions addressed include how artists are developing new ways of working together in response to contemporary economic trends, the significance of collaborating across culture and what opportunities are apparent when co-working between genres and disciplines. Noyale Colin and Stefanie Sachsenmaier present these perspectives in three thematic sections which interrogate the premises of collective intentions, the working strategies of current practitioners, as well as the role of failure and compromise in collaborative modes of creative work. This volume is an invaluable resource for scholars, practitioners and those interested in contemporary artistic methods of working.

This groundbreaking text examines how artists on stage consciously perform age and aging. From Shakespeare to Beckett, dialogue and stage directions reveal varying understandings of age. "Staging Age "explores how performers respond to audience expectations, offering conscious--and unconscious--portrayals of the spectrum of age to their audiences. This essay collection is the first to address issues of age and performance in a variety of media, including theatre, film, and dance.

The Harlem Renaissance, from 1910 to 1927, was the time when Harlem came alive with theater, drama, sports, dance, and politics. Looking at events as diverse as the prizefight between Jack Johnson and Jim “White Hope” Jeffries, the choreography of Aida Walker and Ethel Waters, the writing of Zora Neale Hurston and the musicals of the period, Krasner paints a vibrant portrait of those years. This was the time when the residents of northern Manhattan were leading their downtown counterparts at the vanguard of artistic ferment while at the same time playing a pivotal role in the evolution of Black Nationalism. This is a thrilling piece of work, a classic destined to become the standard work on the Harlem Renaissance for years to come.

The seven acts of the drama The First Day are set in the Kingdom of the Great Spirit as this Kingdom might have been imagined by Crazy Horse, the legendary war chief of the Lakota Sioux who was assassinated by the U.S. government in 1877, after he had surrendered. The action occurs on January 5, 1960 when Crazy Horse welcomes the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus to the Kingdom. Camus had been killed in an automobile accident the night before. Following introductions, the two begin a walk that lasts from dawn to dusk and traverses a variety of landscapes. Periodically they stop to converse with others in the Kingdom. These include Native Americans Chief Joseph and Chief Seattle, Jesus, and the poets Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Federico Garcia Lorca. Walt Whitman is accompanied by a young friend named Jimmy, and Jesus finds himself leading a band of some twenty children. The travelers discuss various subjects, personal, historical and philosophical. Their principal interest, however, is the mysterious Almighty Power whose grace makes possible their eternal life. Considering this mystery, they also discuss justice and injustice among mortals, why men who struggled to do good often suffered at the hands of those who did evil, and whether poets and poetry are an influence for good in the affairs of mortals. At the end of the day, having bid good day to their fellow travelers and sitting on a mountain ledge overlooking expansive valleys as the night sky is illuminated by an astounding show of lights, Crazy Horse and Camus are joined by Socrates. Socrates explains why it is no evil on Earth can ultimately hurt a virtuous person and how it is the Almighty is revealed to humans during their mortal lives.

A far-reaching examination of exoticism, cultural internationalism and modernism's encounters with Indonesian tradition, "Performing Otherness "examines how Indonesia entered world stages through imperialism as an antimodern phantasm and through nationalism became a means of intercultural communication and cultural diplomacy.

For anyone interested in drama, " Playwrights on Playwriting: From Ibsen to Ionesco " offers revealing and astute insights on modern theater and the creation of plays. The book gathers the opinions and theories of the greatest names in the past 200 years of drama, among them Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Federico Garcia Lorca, Eugene O'Neill, Bertolt Brecht, Tenessee Williams, Sean O'Casey, and Arthur Miller, to name a few. In the first part of the book, "Credos and Concepts," the playwrights offer their differing philosophies on the dynamics of theatrical performance and the changes in drama since Aristotle. In the second part, "Creations," the same dramatists look at specific plays of their own, commenting on their intended goals and the works' overall success. A unique and enlightening collection, Playwrights on Playwriting is an essential resource for the enthusiast of theater.