Traditions of folk drama exist throughout the world, ranging from simple forms that involve few people, rudimentary texts, and crude performance practices, to complex forms involving entire towns, highly elaborated texts, and performance practices that have developed over hundreds of years. Yet folk drama lacks, to this day, a full-length study from the perspectives of either folkloristics or drama studies. This work seeks to fill that lack by undertaking a bi-disciplinary study of the idea of folk drama, drawing on examples from around the world, including Yangge (China), Ta'ziyeh (Iran), Bhavai (India), Karagoz (Turkey), Apidan (Nigeria), and the Mummers' Play (England). It examines the meanings of "folk" and "drama," the significance of ritual and performance in folk drama, the frequently encountered problem of Eurocentric bias, the conventional tripartite division of drama into elite, popular, and folk categories, the need for a methodology capable of describing all aspects of folk drama performance, and the taxonomic place of folk drama in both folkloristics and drama studies. On the basis of this examination, Rethinking Folk Drama establishes a new basis for understanding the ubiquity and variety of folk drama.

Justice, Women, and Power in English Renaissance Drama is a collection of essays that explores the relationship of gender and justice as represented in English Renaissance drama. Many of the essays are concerned with interrogating the ways that women relied upon and/or reacted to the legal (and overarching political) systems in early modern England. Other essays examine issues involving the role of narrative, evidence, and gendered expectations about justice in the plays of this time period. An implicit concern of these essays is whether women were empowered or disempowered in this interaction with the legal/political system.

The careers, directing accomplishments, ideas, and techniques of six distinguished directors of the European stage--each considered a master of the art--are surveyed in depth by author Samuel L. Leiter in this groundbreaking study. Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Max Reinhardt, Jacques Copeau, Bertolt Brecht, and Jean-Louis Barrault, representative of the broad spectrum of directorial art as it has developed in this century, are examined in six exhaustively detailed, yet compact chapters. In Leiter's informative introduction, salient aspects of the director's art exemplified by these innovators are identified and examined: choice of repertory from the intellectually provocative to the escapist; stylistic attitudes toward production from Stanislavsky's "spiritual naturalism" to Meyerhold's biomechanics and constructivism; rehearsal methods from the dictatorial to the openly collaborative; and a continuing fascination with the shape and function of the performance space. Many of the directors emerge as multifaceted hommes de theatre--writing, directing, acting, designing sets and lighting, and producing. The theoretical writings of the majority of these great directors have become the foundation for Western theatre thought in our time. Each chapter contains capsule descriptions of the landmark productions of the individual director and the volume concludes with a section of brief chronologies for each person and a select bibliography. A single director is the subject of each of the six chapters, which are organized into numerous subsections that discuss the individual's career, his overarching conceptions of theatre art and directing, and finally his actual working methods.Almost every chapter has information on a director's repertory, major productions, theoretical concerns, techniques of working with actors, playwrights, designers, and composers, casting methods, production preparations, and rehearsal processes. Taken as a whole, these chapters reveal the wide divergence of directorial styles and techniques and the multiplicity of approaches open to exponents of the art. The separate chronologies and select bibliography are especially helpful. Students of stage directing and their teachers, active professionals in the field, and literate general readers who seek a broader understanding of twentieth century theatre and stage direction will find this a handy and invaluable resources. This work could be profitably used as a text or supplementary reading for classes in stage directing and is a companion to Leiter's From Belasco to Brook: Representative Directors of the English-Speaking Stage (Greenwood Press, 1991).

This book explores the intersection between apophaticism - negative theology - and performance. While apophaticism in literature and critical theory may have had its heyday in the heady debates about negative theology and deconstruction in the 1990s, negative ways of knowing and speaking have continued to structure conversations in theatre and performance studies around issues of embodiment, the non- and post-human, objects, archives, the ethics of otherness in intercultural research, and the unreadable and inaccessible in the work of minority artists. A great part of the history of apophaticism lies in mystic literature. With the rise of the New Age movement, which claimed historical mysticism as part of its genealogy, apophaticism has often been sidelined as spirituality rather than serious study. This book argues that the apophatic continues to exert a strong influence on the discourse and culture of Western literature and especially performance, and that by reassessing this ancient form of negative epistemology, artists, scholars, students, and teachers alike can more deeply engage forms of unknowing through what cannot be said and cannot be represented in language, on the stage, and in every aspect of social life.

Directing for Community Theatre is a primer for the amateur director working in community theatre. With an emphasis on preparedness, this book gives the amateur director the tools and techniques needed to effectively work on a community theatre production. Covering play analysis, blocking, staging, communication, and working with actors, designers, and other theatre personnel, this how-to book is designed to have the community theatre director up and running quickly, with full knowledge of how to direct a show. The book also contains sample forms and guidelines, including acting analysis, character analysis, rehearsal schedule, audition form, prop list, and blocking pans. Directing for Community Theatre is written for the community theatre participant who is interested, or already cast, in the role of the director.

Through a collection of original essays and case studies, this innovative book explores theory as an accessible, although complex, tool for theatre practitioners and students. These chapters invite readers to (re)imagine theory as a site of possibility or framework that can shape theatre making, emerge from practice, and foster new ways of seeing, creating, and reflecting. Focusing on the productive tensions and issues that surround creative practice and intellectual processes, the contributing authors present central concepts and questions that frame the role of theory in the theatre. Ultimately, this diverse and exciting collection offers inspiring ideas, raises new questions, and introduces ways to build theoretically-minded, dynamic production work.

Surprisingly little has been published on the questions of what theatre actually is and what participants in theatre derive from the experience. This book investigates theatre as a means of social connection. It begins by establishing a context drawn from contemporary research in public health, sociology, and political science on the decline of personal interactions, civic organizations, and the network of organizations that create "social capital." It then offers theatre participation as a means of overcoming the growing alienation of a technological society. Theatre and the Good examines the roots of theatre from an anthropological perspective, as well as theatre's capacity for liberation, using models of theatre in prison, dramatherapy, and a spiritual opening felt by many who have participated in performance and which has previously been only fractionally described. The book argues that the ancient needs for which theatre arose are still relevant and that theatre is a much needed and effective pathway to meaning. This book enters into the discussion of "performance" and, using terms accessible to any educated person, links that discussion to matters of social science, literature, philosophy and religious studies. An interdisciplinary study, Theatre and the Good will be of interest to theatre practitioners as well as academics in theatre, performance studies, sociology, philosophy, religious studies, and literature.

From a South African Passion Play to Turkish Sufi tourism, from contemporary street preaching in America to public Hindu rites in India, from cloistered prayer in 17th century France to the queer politics of 'the closet' today, Performing Religion in Public brings together an international array of voices that grapple with the important role of religious performance in our secular public lives. Because traditional notions of the public sphere have emphasized rational discourse in a secular setting, religion has often been excluded. But religious life is not impersonal argument; rather, it is passionately performed, crossing boundaries between public and private, the personal and the political, and claiming a significant role in modern democracies, from everyday cultural interactions to political advocacy. By focusing on the performative nature of both religion and publics, this timely volume offers a fresh and fruitful re-conception of the relationship between religion and the public sphere.

This book offers a unique and much-needed interrogation of the broader questions surrounding international performance research which are pertinent to the present and the future of Theatre and Performance studies. Marking the completion of eight years of the Erasmus Mundus MA Programme in International Performance Research (MAIPR) - a programme run jointly by the universities of Warwick (UK), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Helsinki/Tampere (Finland), Arts in Belgrade (Serbia), and Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) - the essays in this volume take stock of the achievements, insights and challenges of what international performance research is or ought to be about. By reflecting on the discipline of Performance Studies using the MAIPR programme as a case study in point, the volume addresses the broader question of the critical link between the discipline of Performance Studies and humanities education in general, examining their interactions in the contemporary university in the context of globalisation.

Looking at the emergent industries of spectacle practices in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mass culture, "Spectacle Culture and American Identity" investigates the immersive energies of American landscape and history as a fluid scene space. The changing dynamics of the American experience are viewed in relation to the ways entertainment technologies flourishing in spectacle attractions communicate iconic sites and scenes. Arguing the ways in which spectacle immersion enacts an on-going civilian dialogue with landscape, Tenneriello uses a series of case studies featuring panoramas, multimedia performance, theatrical spectacles, exhibition sites, and museum dioramas to trace the country's movement from agrarian to multinational economies.

Is William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon the true author of the poems and plays attributed to him? This book once and for all silences those critics who say he isn't. It takes particular aim at those who champion Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, whose crest was a wild blue boar.

Who are these heretics who would strip Shakespeare of his laurels and drape them on a "nobler" brow? Foremost are John Thomas Looney, the Charlton Ogburn family and the latter-day anti-Stratfordians Richard Whalen, John Michell, David McCullough, Lewis H. Lapham, Mark Anderson and others.

Using their own words against them, this book meticulously examines the claims of these Naysayers and destroys them.

In addition, you'll learn about Shakespeare's early decline and fall as a literary giant; why so little is known of Shakespeare's life; and why his closest colleagues, Ben Jonson and the Shakespeare Folio editors, Heminges and Condell, have been branded fools or liars.

Whether you are a teacher, student or simply someone interested in one of the foremost literary questions of the day, it's important to read "Spearing the Wild Blue Boar."

'Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899-1949' offers a theoretically innovative reconsideration of drama produced in the Irish Renaissance, as well as an engagement with non-canonical drama in the under-researched period 1926-1949.

Theatre is a uniquely powerful site for the kind of thinking called for by the crises of climate change. The growing scientific and public consensus about the many looming crises following from climate change is matched by an increasing interest, on the part of artists and scholars, to identify creative strategies and practices capable of mounting adequate and appropriate responses to those crises. Encompassing academic research, theatre work-shopping, playwriting, dramaturgy, and theoretical writing, this book offers a practical, theoretical, and critical engagement with the urgent issue of making art in the age of climate change.

This book explores a range of contemporary performance practices that engage spectators physically and emotionally through active engagement and critical involvement. It considers how risk has been re-configured, re-presented and re-packaged for new audiences with a thirst for performances that promote, encourage and embrace risky encounters in a variety of forms. The collection brings together established voices on performance and risk research and draws them into conversation with next generation academic-practitioners in a dynamic reappraisal of what it means to risk oneself through the act of making and participating in performance practice. It takes into account the work of other performance scholars for whom risk and precarity are central concerns, but seeks to move the debate forwards in response to a rapidly changing world where risk is higher on the political, economic and cultural agenda than ever before.

This book serves as analysis of the aesthetics of materiality in the multifaceted work of Antonin Artaud, one of Twentieth-Century France's most provocative and influential figures, spanning literature, performance, art, cinema, media and critical theory.

Between the trials of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s and the beginnings of legal reforms in the 1960s, the West End stage was dominated by the work of gay playwrights. Many of their plays, such as Private Lives, Blithe Spirit and The Deep Blue Sea are established classics and continue to inform our culture. In this fascinating book, covering both familiar and lesser-known works, Sean O'Connor examines the legacy of Wilde as a playwright and as a gay man, and explores in the works of Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan the resonance of Wilde's agenda for tolerance and his creed of individuality. O'Connor contextualises these plays against the enormous social and historical changes of the twentieth century. He also examines the legal restrictions which regulated the personal lives of these writers and required them to evolve sophisticated strategies in order to express on stage, albeit obliquely, their dilemmas as gay men. From the delicate homoerotic frissons of Rattigan's early comedies to Coward's defiantly pro-sex stance, Straight Acting is a provocative and witty insight into the subtly subversive tactics of gay writers working in that apparently most conservative of forms, the 'well-made play'.

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre is recognised worldwide as both a monument to and significant producer of the dramatic art of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. But it has established a reputation too for commissioning innovative and distinctive new plays that respond to the unique characteristics and identity of the theatre. This is the first book to focus on the new drama commissioned and produced at the Globe, to analyse how the specific qualities of the venue have shaped those works and to assess the influences of both past and present in the work staged. The author argues that far from being simply a monument to the past, the reconstructed theatre fosters creativity in the present, creativity that must respond to the theatre's characteristic architecture, the complex set of cultural references it carries and the heterogeneous audience it attracts. Just like the reconstructed 'wooden O', the Globe's new plays highlight the relevance of the past for the present and give the spectators a prominent position. In examining the score of new plays it has produced since 1995 the author considers how they illuminate issues of staging, space, spectators, identity and history - issues that are key to an understanding of much contemporary theatre. Howard Brenton's In Extremis and Anne Boleyn receive detailed consideration, as examples of richly productive connection between the playwright's creativity and the theatre's potential. For readers interested in new writing for the stage and in the work of one of London's totemic theatre spaces, New Playwriting at Shakespeare's Globe offers a fascinating study of the fruitful influences of both past and present in today's theatre.

Modern theater is a field marked by competing, and often contradictory, impulses and developments. A critique of certain types of theatre is a productive force within modernism and a force that led to the most successful reforms of modern theatre and drama. This exciting collection of essays in Palgrave's "Performance Interventions" series rethinks the historical formations and functions of antitheatricality within modern drama, opera, literature, film, and art.

Using the tools of performance studies, gender theory, and cultural history, Brenda Foley explores the striking similarities between beauty pageantry and striptease. For example, women in both project a 'normal' femininity and adhere to a strict hierarchy (Miss America contestants look down upon Miss Universe contestants, while theatrical 'burlesque artists' saw themselves as far above mere carnival strippers). Undressed for Success collects extensive primary source research - newspapers, journals, trade publications, photography collections, press releases, memoirs, and interviews with both strippers and pageant contestants - and employs a wide array of gender, feminist, and performance theory to analyze them.

Because of its contemporary coverage, this volume is particularly interesting and useful. . . . Reference collections that deal with theater questions could find it a good source even without its two predecessor volumes, but the set as a whole is recommended. "Choice"

An outstanding reference collection is completed with the publication of DurhaM's "American Theatre Companies, 1931-1986," an indispensable guide to an aspect of American theatre not covered elsewhere. The American theatre has undergone a process of decentralization and the focus has shifted from Broadway, once the proving ground for all nationally known theatre talent, to fine regional theatres across the nation. This volume surveys the fifty-year period in which this transformation occurred. The work consists of seventy-eight entries that profile a wide range of types of theatre companies including art theatres, units of the Federal Theatre project, workers' theatre, experimental theatre groups, ethnic theatre groups, children's theatre companies, and regional repertory companies, large and small. The Profiles section contains information-packed narratives from both published and unpublished sources that describe, analyze, and evaluate management policies, facilities, personnel, and repertories of these organizations. Each entry contains an extensive list of key personnel, including managers, designers, actors, and actresses, as well as plays that company produced. A bibliography of sources and a guide to archival resources for further study follows each entry. Two additional appendices are devoted to chronological and state-by-state listings of theatre companies. The volume concludes with an index of personal names and play titles.

This important resource should be a part of every university's reference collection. It will be consulted by students and scholars of theatre and drama, American history, American popular culture, and American social and cultural history, as will its companion volumes "American Theatre Companies, 1749-1887" (Greenwood Press, 1986) and "American Theatre Companies, 1888-1930" (Greenwood Press, 1987).

David Garrick played over 90 roles on the British stage as well as writing plays, songs, and innumerable letters. As a theatrical manager he watched over the Drury Lane theater for 29 seasons.

In this dynamic collection a team of experts map the development of Live Art culturally, thematically and historically. Supported with examples from around the world, the text engages with a number of key practices, asking what these practices do and how they can be contextualized and understood.

Theatre has often found itself at the centre of recent debates over censorship and the arts, as a result of coverage of events such as the protests against the play "Behzti" and the controversy over "Jerry Springer: The Opera." This book offers the first sustained study of censorship of the British stage from 1968 into the twenty-first century.