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.

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.

This book offers a new mythic perspective on the secret of the allure and survival of a current-archaic institution-the Western theatre-in an era of diverse technological media. Central to the theory is the spectaculum-a stage "world" that mirrors a monotheistic cosmic order. Tova Gamliel here not only alerts the reader to the possibility of the spectaculum's existence, but also illuminates its various structural dimensions: the cosmological, ritual, and sociological. Its cosmo-logical meaning is a Judeo-Christian monotheistic consciousness of non-randomness, an exemplary order of the world that the senses perceive. The ritual meaning denotes the centrality of the spectaculum, as the theatre repeatedly reenacts the mythical and paradigmatic event of Biblical revelation. Its social meaning concerns any charismatic social theory that is anchored in the epitomic structure of social sovereignty-stage and audience-that the Western theatre advances in an era characterized by hypermedia.

Three bright urbanites want to make their mark on the world. Paul, a master of irony and distance, is a hardworking filmmaker on the rise. His girlfriend, Karen, a grad student, must get on with her thesis or find a life outside of academia. Dave, a lifelong buddy whose brilliance is being consumed by increasingly severe episodes of manic depression, is camping on Paul's couch. Paul and Karen decide to turn Dave into a documentary. The camera is on twenty-four hours a day, capturing up-close images of his jags and torpors and their responses. How far will love, friendship, and ambition take this hip trio?

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.

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.

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.

Acting Together, Volume ll, continues from where the first volume ends documenting exemplary peacebuilding performances in regions marked by social exclusion structural violence and dislocation. Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict is a two-volume work describing peacebuilding performances in regions beset by violence and internal conflicts. Volume I, Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence, emphasizes the role theatre and ritual play both in the midst and in the aftermath of direct violence, while Volume II: Building Just and Inclusive Communities, focuses on the transformative power of performance in regions fractured by "subtler" forms of structural violence and social exclusion. Volume I: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence focuses on the role theatre and ritual play both in the midst and in the aftermath of violence. The performances highlighted in this volume nourish and restore capacities for expression, communication, and transformative action, and creatively support communities in grappling with conflicting moral imperatives surrounding questions of justice, memory, resistance, and identity. The individual chapters, written by scholars, conflict resolution practitioners, and artists who work directly with the communities involved, offer vivid firsthand accounts and analyses of traditional and nontraditional performances in Serbia, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Israel, Argentina, Peru, India, Cambodia, Australia, and the United States. Complemented by a website of related materials, a documentary film, Acting Together on the World Stage, that features clips and interviews with the curators and artists, and a toolkit, or "Tools for Continuing the Conversation," that is included with the documentary as a second disc, this book will inform and inspire socially engaged artists, cultural workers, peacebuilding scholars and practitioners, human rights activists, students of peace and justice studies, and whoever wishes to better understand conflict and the power of art to bring about social change. The Acting Together project is born of a collaboration between Theatre Without Borders and the Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts at the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University. The two volumes are edited by Cynthia E. Cohen, director of the aforementioned program and a leading figure in creative approaches to coexistence and reconciliation; Roberto Gutierrez Varea, an award-winning director and associate professor at the University of San Francisco; and Polly O. Walker, director of Partners in Peace, an NGO based in Brisbane, Australia.

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 first ever full-length study of the Royal Court Theatre's International Department, covering the theatre's unique programming of international plays and seasons, its London-based residences for writers from overseas, and the legacies of workshops conducted in more than 30 countries.

"Comedy Matters" traces the long tradition of the expansive comic embrace of cultural difference and diversity that manages to survive even in some of mankind's darkest moments. Demastes argues that comedy has a hard-nosed, pragmatic dimension that can be mobilized against belligerent cultural forces. Drawing from the works of Shakespeare, Stoppard, and a number of other comic masters, "Comedy Matters" demonstrates how comedy continues to work against cultural regimentation by striving to re-calibrate our decision-making processes and challenging the stultifying rigidity of human economy in the broadest sense of the term.

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.

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.

"Hoem's ethnography is sure-footed, subtle and comprehensive, and has the additional virtue of being backed by a considerable body of primary texts.a valuable contribution to the understanding of Tokelau culture in its various manifestations as well as of some of the processes by which social changes are continuously negotiated." . The Journal of the Polynesian Society ""The book is .rich in discussions of Pacific anthropologists and theories of space and migration, but I feel that it stands out as a deeply humane and informative ethnography of the Tokelau people and their self-presentation in the modern Pacific."" . JRAI The Argonauts in the Pacific, famous through Malinowski's work, have not been exempt from general historical developments in the world around them. By focusing on two plays performed by the Tokelau Te Ata, a theater group, the author reveals the self-perceptions of the Tokelau and highlights the dynamic relationship between issues of representation and political processes such as nation building, infrastructural changes and increased regional migration. It is through an analysis of communicative practices, which the author carried out in the home atolls and in the diasporic communities in New Zealand, that we arrive at a proper understanding of how global processes affect local institutions and everyday interaction. Ingjerd Hoem is Head of the Institute for Pacific Archaeology and Cultural History, Kon-Tiki Museum.

From oral culture, through the advent of literacy, to the introduction of printing, to the development of electronic media, communication structures have radically altered culture in profound ways. As the first book to take a critical realist approach to culture, "Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism" examines theatre and its history through the interaction of society's structures, agents, and discourses. Tobin Nellhaus shows that communication structure--a culture's use and development of speech, handwriting, printing, and electronics--explains much about why, when, and how theatre has transformed.

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.

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.

A cinema without cameras, without actors, without screen frames and without narratives almost seems like an antithetical impossibility of what is usually expected from a cinematic spectacle. This book defines an emergent field of post-cinematic theatre and performance, challenging our assumptions and expectations about theatre and film.

"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.

How do theatre and performance transmit and dispute ideologies of neoliberalism? The essays in this anthology examine the mechanisms and rhetorics of contemporary multinational and transnational organizations, artists, and communities that produce theatre and performance for global audiences.

The Irish Renaissance encompassed one of the western world's most powerful dramatic movements. But most lists of productions have only included certain premieres, while ignoring all revivals and the productions of lesser-known theatres. This reference is a comprehensive list of all theatrical productions of the early modern Irish dramatic movement, including all premieres and revivals. The volume includes productions from the 1899 founding of the Irish Literary Theatre through the April 1916 Easter Rising, when British martial law significantly altered the course of Irish drama.

Entries are provided for more than 1,000 productions, with each entry offering the play's title, author, producing organization, building, city, and dates of performance. The entries are grouped in chapters devoted to particular years and are arranged chronologically within each chapter. The chronological arrangement of the entries reveals the development of Irish theatre, while an extensive index allows alphabetical access to the contents. By including entries for all productions, the volume indicates that many plays that are now neglected were produced numerous times and were central to the drama of the period. This work will force scholars to reconsider the major plays of the period, due to the record of their revivals, and the importance of many neglected plays will now have to be reassessed.

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.