A famous artist invites her old friends to her luxurious new home. For one night only, the group is back together. But celebrations come to an abrupt end when the host suffers an horrific accident. As the victim lies in a coma, an almost unthinkable plan starts to take shape: could her suffering be their next work of art? Pool (No Water) is a visceral and shocking new play about the fragility of friendship and the jealousy and resentment inspired by success.

Bringing together eminent scholars and emerging critics who offer a range of perspectives and critical methods, this collection sets a new standard in Beddoes criticism. In line with the goals of Ashgate's Research Companion series, the editors and contributors provide an overview of Beddoes's criticism and identify significant new directions in Beddoes studies. These include exploring Beddoes's German context, only recently a site of critical attention; reading Beddoes's plays in light of gender theory; and reassessing Beddoes's use of dramatic genre in the context of recent work by theatre historians. Rounding out the volume are essays devoted to key areas in Beddoes's scholarship such as nineteenth-century medical theories, psychoanalytic myth, and Romantic ventriloquism. This collection makes the case for Beddoes's centrality to contemporary debates about nineteenth-century literary culture and its contexts and his influence on Modernist conceptions of literature.

"Staging Stigma "is a captivating excursion into the bizarre world of the American freak show. Chemers critically examines several key moments of a performance tradition in which the truth is often stranger than the fiction. Grounded in meticulous historical research and cultural criticism, Chemers' analysis reveals untold stories of freaks that will change the way we understand both performance and disability in America. This book is a must-have for serious students of freakery or anyone who is curious about the hidden side of American theatrical history.

As a concise study of the American theatre, this work explores the past and present by looking at major aspects of theatregoing in America over the past 250 years. Diverse topics include plays On and Off Broadway, ticket prices, critics, playwrights, awards, musicals, actors, theatre groups and organizations, and theatre publications. The Almanac is both a reference work and a very personal browsing book. It is lively and highly readable, yet scholarly with commentary, suggestions for further reading, and a thorough index. This work will be of interest to scholars, students, and theatregoers in general. The Almanac provides an interesting collection of facts, presents personal commentary on trends in theatre, puts contemporary theatre in the context of the past, and serves as both a browsing book and a reference work. Material is presented by subject matter. The range is very wide, but the book often focuses on details, interesting trivia, and little-known facts. Like an eccentric collector who arranges his personal museum of art in his own unique way, The Theatregoers Almanac takes the reader on a personal and distinctive tour of the American theatre.

Black Neo-Victoriana is the first book-length study on contemporary re-imaginations of Blackness in the long nineteenth century. Located at the intersections of postcolonial studies, Black studies, and neo-Victorian criticism, this interdisciplinary collection engages with the global trend to reimagine and rewrite Black Victorian subjectivities that have been continually marginalised in both historical and cultural discourses. Contributions cover a range of media, from novels and drama to film, television and material culture, and draw upon cultural formations such as Black fandom, Black dandyism, or steamfunk. The book evidences how neo-Victorian studies benefits from reading re-imaginations of the long nineteenth century vis-a-vis Black epistemologies, which unhinge neo-Victorianism's dominant spatial and temporal axes and reroute them to conceive of the (neo-)Victorian through Blackness.

Site-specific performance - acts of theatre and performative events at landscape locations, in village streets, in urban situations. In houses, chapels, barns, disused factories, railway stations; on hillsides, in forest clearings, underwater. At the scale of civil engineering; as intimate as a guided walk.
Leading theatre artist and scholar Mike Pearson draws upon thirty years practical experience, proposing original approaches to the creation and study of performance outside the auditorium. In this book he suggests organizing principles, innovative strategies, methods and exercises for making theatre in a variety of contexts and locations, and through examples, case studies and projects develops distinctive theoretical insights into the relationship of site and performance, scenario and scenography. This book encourages practical initiatives in the conception, devising and staging of performances, while also recommending effective models for its critical appreciation.

Children have been exploited as performers and wooed energetically as consumers throughout history. These essays offer scholarly investigations into the employment and participation of children in the entertainment industry with examples drawn from historical and contemporary contexts.

Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance is the first monograph to provide an in-depth study of the implications of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy for theatre and performance. Engaging with a wide range of interdisciplinary practitioners including Goat Island, Butoh, Artaud, John Cage, the Living Theatre, Robert Wilson and Allan Kaprow, as well as with the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari, Henri Bergson and Francois Laruelle, the book conceives performance as a way of thinking 'immanence': the open and endlessly creative whole of which all things are a part.
Theatres of Immanence builds upon Deleuze's emphasis on immanence, affect, change and movement to provide new approaches to five key topics in theatre and performance: 1) authorship and collaboration, 2) voice and language, 3) animals in performance, 4) audience participation and 5) time or duration. The book provides an accessible introduction to Deleuze's ideas and draws attention to the ethical dimensions of performance, asking: 'what good is theatre, and particularly immanent theatre, anyway?'

What work did physically disabled characters do for the early modern theatre? Through a consideration of a range of plays, including Doctor Faustus and Richard III, Genevieve Love argues that the figure of the physically disabled prosthetic body in early modern English theatre mediates a set of related 'likeness problems' that structure the theatrical, textual, and critical lives of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The figure of disability stands for the relationship between actor and character: prosthetic disabled characters with names such as Cripple and Stump capture the simultaneous presence of thefictional and the material, embodied world of the theatre. When the figure of the disabled body exits the stage, it also mediates a second problem of likeness, between plays in their performed and textual forms. While supposedly imperfect textual versions of plays have been characterized as 'lame', the dynamic movement of prosthetic disabled characters in the theatre expands the figural role which disability performs in the relationship between plays on the stage and on the page. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability reveals how attention to physical disability enriches our understanding of early modern ideas about how theatre works, while illuminating in turn how theatre offers a reframing of disability as metaphor.

This text examines the life and art of those contemporary artists who by force or by choice find themselves on other shores. It argues that the exilic challenge enables the emigre artist to (re)establish new artistic devices, new laws and a new language of communication in both his everyday life and his artistic work.

Chronicling over forty years of critical changes in African-American expressive and popular culture, covering diverse forms of music, dance, and comedy, the Regal Theater (1928-1968) was the largest and most architecturally splendid movie-stage-show venue ever constructed for a black community. In this history of that theater, Clovis E. Semmes reveals the political, economic, and business realities of cultural production and the institutional inequalities that circumscribed black life.

London's West End has a rich and unique collection of theatres, ranging in date from early the early 19th century to the end of the 20th;more than fifty are located within an area of two square miles. This book celebrates the working buildings at the heart of the British theatrical industry. Focusing on the theatres in the West End, it looks at their architecture and history as well as examining what it is that constitutes a West End Theatre. The exquisite photographs in the book lead the reader on a tour - taking in the front -of -house areas, the auditoria and the backstage spaces - of some of London's most famous theatres. From the Palladium to the Lyceum, it offers glimpses of those areas not normally seen by the public, Such as rehearsal spaces, dressing rooms, backstage areas and even a Royal reception room. In doing so, it enters the private realms of the theatre technicians and actors, and brings to light the theatre's hidden world.

"Memory in Play" makes evident that memory, though critically neglected, is as significant as race, gender, and class as a feature of dramatic character construction. Favorini skillfully argues that dramatic models of memory need to be reckoned along with the constructions of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience in order to render a full account of the history of memory. Through this lens, the work of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Goethe, Ibsen, and Strindberg, as well as such pillars of twentieth-century drama as Pirandello, O'Neill, Wilder, Sherwood, Williams, Miller, Anouilh, Beckett, Pinter, Friel, Shepard, Kennedy, and Wilson are explored. By offering a vantage point for recognizing how dramatists have contributed to the conception of memory alongside other "memographers," irrespective of discipline, a lingua franca emerges for discussing a phenomenon studied from the perspectives of so many theoretical bases.

Yoshi Oida is completely unique. A Japanese actor and director who has worked mainly in the West as a member of Peter Brook's theatre company in Paris, he blends the Oriental tradition of supreme and studied control with the Western performer's need to characterize and expose depths of emotion.
In this practical and captivating study of the actor's art, Yoshi Oida provides performers with all the simple tools which help place the technique of acting behind a cloak of invisibility. Throughout, Lorna Marshall provides a running commentary on Oida's work and methods which helps the reader understand the achievement of this singular artist. A brilliant book, "The Invisible Actor" is filled with abundant insights to help actors perfect their craft.

The problem of language constituted the most contentious subject of the philosophies and human sciences in the twentieth-century and drove what came to be known as the "linguistic turn" to Western thought. Phenomenology, linguistics, analytic philosophy, speech act theory, anthropology, psychology, poststructuralism, media studies, and ordinary language philosophy-all addressed language as the primary vehicle of human thought and communication, and queried whether any accurate linguistic representation of reality were possible. The sound of the human voice lay at the center of the debate. The central question raised by Husserl's phenomenology and de Saussure's linguistics, and discussed throughout the century, concerned whether the sounds of the voice were intrinsic to meaning or were simply relative. In a related phenomenon, vocal experimentation marked the twentieth-century avant garde, which included the nonsense verbal texts of Dada; the electronic mediations of Samuel Beckett and Peter Handke; and the playful, ironic, and confrontational performances of Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, and the Wooster Group. The experiments mirrored the fixation with voice and language as expressed in the philosophies and sciences. Yet despite the centrality of the voice for the philosophy of language, linguistic study, and performance, no book-length study before now has focused solely on vocal expression. The voice ranks with gesture as one of two media of communication available to every fully able-bodied human being, and yet theatre studies tends to take a visual approach to its objects of critique: the body, the dramatic text, and the mise-en-scene. Because the voice registers as a crucial media of expression in the theatre, theatre studies also can provide valuable contributions to the discussion of voice and language undertaken in other disciplines. The theatre as a social and public art form reveals a great deal about what we think and feel in regards to our communications with each other. This is the first book of theatre studies to identify and articulate theories of voice as expressed in the philosophies, human sciences, and physical sciences of the twentieth century. It also identifies parallels between the theories and the vocal practices of twentieth-century performances that shared similar concerns with issues of language and mediation. This book adopts as a central premise that the introduction and proliferation of electronic forms of communication stimulated the interest in voice and language in the scholarly discourses of the twentieth century and stimulated as well the fascination with the sounds of the voice as expressed in the twentieth-century avant garde. Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century is the only book of theatre and performance studies to address the sounds of the human voice and as such ranks as an invaluable addition to all theatre, philosophy, performance studies, communications, and cultural studies collections.

Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific is an analysis of the theatrical imaginative as it manifests in theatre and performance in Australia, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore. The sites encompass marked differences in language, performance, history and politics, and variations in the solidity and volatility of their imagined worlds. Recognizing these differences, the book explores contrasts in each nation as it identifies with the region and the cultural interconnections that support a regional identity. While the four nations demonstrate degrees of ambivalence and connection to the Asia-Pacific as a region, the project argues that relations to modernity and globalization are less nation-specific. The project articulates a regional configuration of modernity which is multiple, contradictory but nonetheless regional. Each nation has in common the imperative to reconcile with and adapt to European modernity in a way that renders global modernity multiple rather than singular.

Within the study of drama, the question of how to relate text and performance-and what interpretive tools are best suited to analyzing them-is a longstanding and contentious one. Most scholars agree that reading a printed play is a means of dramatic realization absolutely unlike live performance, but everything else beyond this premise is contestable: how much authority to assign to playwrights, the extent to which texts and readings determine performance, and the capability of printed plays to communicate the possibilities of performance. Without denying that printed plays distort and fragment performance practice, this book negotiates an intractable debate by shifting attention to the ways in which these inevitable distortions can nevertheless enrich a reader's awareness of a play's performance potentialities. As author J. Gavin Paul demonstrates, printed plays can be more meaningfully engaged with actual performance than is typically assumed, via specific editorial principles and strategies. Focusing on the long history of Shakespearean editing, he develops the concept of the performancescape: a textual representation of performance potential that gives relative shape and stability to what is dynamic and multifarious.

This book rethinks historical and contemporary theatre, performance, and cultural events by scrutinizing and theorizing the objects and things that activate stages, venues, environments, and archives.

A primary focus of this book is on the impact of time and memory as they intersect and constitute the spaces of theatre. These spaces include more traditional sites of theatre, such as those involving stages and curtains, actors and audiences, as well as those other theatres or spaces of performance that range from performance and installation art, to the performance of a string quartet, and from the writing of performance, to the performance of writing. What unites them is the presence of time as the constant and corrosive agent of theatrical absence, a vanishing site that finally affirms these theatres as theatres of thought, as spaces of thoughtful and mirroring reflection.

With such time in mind, attention is directed toward theatre's own blurred and porous boundaries and, implicitly, that most conventional theatrical form, the proscenium itself, evoking questions such as: where does the performance begin and where does it end? Who is watching and who is being watched? And what, as time takes its toll, is there to be seen at all? For it is from this demarcating line of representation that - like a 'line in the sand' - such spaces of thought, theatrical or not, largely determine where the various forms of representation begin and end, where time is told of others, and where time is finally told of each of us.

Explores ways undergraduate theatre programs can play a significant role in accomplishing the aims and learning outcomes of a contemporary liberal education. Kindelan argues that theatre's signature pedagogy helps all undergraduates become actively engaged in developing critical and value-focused skills through inquiry- and problem-based learning strategies (learning communities, capstone courses, undergraduate research, and service learning).