This book provides a rich analysis of the discourses and figurations of "crisis masculinity" around the turn of the twenty-first century, working at the intersection of performance and cultural studies and looking at film, television, drama, performance art, visual art and street theatre.

Performing Cities is an edited volume of contributions by a range of internationally renowned academics and performance makers from across the globe, each one covering a particular city and examining it from the dynamic perspectives of performances occurring in cities and the city itself as performance.

This book addresses the lived challenges to teacher leadership. It illustrates an arts-based research approach that effectively highlights the broader context of relational dynamics between adults at school, using one-act plays to open up difficult conversations on complex issues. School leadership has, ostensibly, a performative dimension. Teacher leaders enact leadership from a more vulnerable platform than those with administrative positions, while they try to thrive in roles which are not always clear from their pre-service preparation. Early-career teachers are often not aware of the very real hazards that can accompany their initial foray into leadership. This book encourages creative thinking about how to enact the teacher role to better embed and advocate for a supportive and just system.

This book adopts a refreshing approach by examining Hokkien theatre in a region connected by maritime networks, notably southern Fujian, Taiwan, Kinmen and Singapore. It considers how regional theatre is shaped by broader socio-cultural and political contexts and the motivation to stay relevant in an era of modernisation and secularisation. Political domains are often marked out by land boundaries, but the sea concept denotes fluidity, allowing theatrical forms to spread across these 'land-bounded' societies and share a common language and culture. "This is an insightful theatrical study on the web of Chinese cultural networks in southern China and Singapore, and by extension, between China and Southeast Asia in the twentieth century and beyond. Using diverse sources in multiple languages and extensive field ethnography, this is a ground-breaking study which is both didactic and inspiring." - Lee Tong Soon, author of Chinese Street Opera in Singapore (University of Illinois, 2009). "Focusing on Hokkien theatre, this book offers new insights into how Chinese performing art responds to geographical, temporal, and social changes. Historical sources in different languages are widely used to give access to the cultural characteristics of Hokkien theatre, offering valuable ethnographic reports on the contemporary practices of Hokkien theatre in Taiwan, Kinmen, and Singapore. The book comments on the changing ritualistic significance of Hokkien theatre, and help us understand how societies remember the past of a performing tradition, and shape its present." - Luo Ai Mei, Co-Editor of A Preliminary Survey of the Cantonese Eight Song Cycles in South China: History and Sources (2016)

An insightful analysis of more than a dozen Chinese stage productions, Staging China illustrates how Chinese society is reflected by and even constructed through theatre. Scholars from around the globe explore wide-ranging topics including recent approaches to classical theatre, propaganda theatre, and the challenges of independent theatres.

American documentary theatre records the social issues that continue to shape the United States at the close of the twentieth century. This book provides an historical and critical survey of documentary theatre in the United States since John Reed's The Pageant of the Paterson Strike (1913). It defines documentary theatre as a dramatic representation of societal forces using a close reexamination of events, individuals, or situations. While documentary theatre reinvents itself from time to time, this study demonstrates that its constituent parts remain roughly the same. Because documentary theatre is rooted in oral traditions, it offers an alternative to conventional journalistic treatments of social history. Through a close look at the history of documentary theatre, the volume concludes that a new period of expression is presently underway in the United States. Numerous social issues have marked the growth of the United States, and many of these continue to shape contemporary American culture. While many of these issues have been treated in novels, they have also captured the attention of playwrights. Documentary theatre explores the issues and events at the very heart of society. But in spite of its significance, this dramatic form continues to escape, for the most part, the awareness of the theatre community and its public. This book is an historical and critical survey of documentary theatre in the United States since John Reed's The Pageant of the Paterson Strike (1913). It defines documentary theatre as a dramatic representation of societal forces using a close reexamination of events, individuals, or situations. By listing current and more distant examples of American documentary theatre, the book shows that the genre is richly steeped in the oral history tradition. Therefore, American documentary theatre is an alternative to conventional journalism. For the theatre practitioner, the volume provides valuable insight about the process of making a documentary play. For the investigative researcher, the book shows that documentary theatre possesses a non-Aristotelian dramatic structure, in contrast to the strictly narrative form generally found in conventional drama. Through an overview of numerous plays, the book observes that even though documentary theatre reinvents itself from time to time, its constituent parts remain roughly the same. It concludes that a new period of expression is presently underway in the United States, one that affirms that the theatre is a vital part of society and is as important as religion, education, and government.

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.

Why is it that in going to see plays we are also touched or moved by them, and is there more than metaphor involved in such claims? Considering these and other questions, this book examines a range of contemporary performance works in which performers and their audiences occupy a shared realm of feelings, in which the play is not always the thing.

'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.

Using nine recent theatrical and cinematic productions as case studies, it considers the productive contradictions and tensions that occur when contemporary actors perform the gender norms of previous cultures. It will be of interest to theatre practitioners as well as to students of early modern drama, of performance, and of gender studies.

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)

This is the first study to be entirely devoted to African literary drama in French, a major component of African theater. Beginning with a detailed analysis of its relationship to a variety of precolonial, but sometimes still contemporary, traditions of performance that constitute part of its roots, the author examines this drama in both its literary and theatrical dimensions. He discusses its development, themes and techniques up to and including contemporary theater. The book is divided into two sections: Part One offers a theoretical and historical background; Part Two analyzes key individual plays central to the repertoire, including two from the Caribbean. All quotations are translated into English.

Closely reading a range of performance work from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, "Naming Theatre" is a ground-breaking study of theater's growing obsession with technologies and effects of naming. How do theater-makers such as Ping Chong, Anne Bogart, Suzan-Lori Parks, Forced Entertainment, Lightwork, Ridiculusmus, Theodora Skipitares, Paula Vogel, and Riot Group intervene in naming practices across domains such as medicine, political activism, philosophy, horror films, television and print journalism, anthropology, advertising and brand development, semiotics, military training, and genetics?

From the Hamlet acted on a galleon off Africa to the countless outdoor productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream that now defy each English summer, Shakespeare and Amateur Performance explores the unsung achievements of those outside the theatrical profession who have been determined to do Shakespeare themselves. Based on extensive research in previously unexplored archives, this generously illustrated and lively work of theater history enriches our understanding of how and why Shakespeare's plays have mattered to generations of rude mechanicals and aristocratic dilettantes alike: from the days of the Theaters Royal to those of the Little Theater Movement, from the pioneering Winter's Tale performed in eighteenth-century Salisbury to the Merchant of Venice performed by Allied prisoners for their Nazi captors, and from the how-to book which transforms Mercutio into Yankee Doodle to the Napoleonic counterspy who used Richard III as a tool of surveillance.

This companion volume to American Theatre Companies, 1749-1887 (Greenwood Press, 1986) is an indispensable guide to an aspect of American theatre covered by no other reference work. Salient facts about resident acting companies of the period in the United States are presented in an easy-to-use format. Information from hundreds of published and unpublished sources relating to the dates, places, personnel, policies, and repertories of the most durable theatrical groups is encapsulated and arranged for easy access. Each entry includes dates and locations of the company's operations, names of managers with information about their artistic and business practices, as well as facts about key performers, designers, technicians, and other support personnel. An added dimension is provided in the analysis of each group's repertory and assessment of its commercial and artistic achievement. A bibliography of published sources used in the entry, as well as a guide to archival resources for further study are included.

In Staging Politics and Gender , Cecilia Beach examines the political and feminist plays of French playwrights who have largely been overlooked until now. Beach highlights the importance of theatrical endeavors which women perceived as a powerful way to promote political opinions. The author analyzes the work of Louise Michel, Nelly Roussel, Marie Leneru, Vera Starkoff, and Madeline Pelletier and discusses anarchist theatre and forms of social protest theatre at the turn of the century.

"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.

On an April evening in 1934, on the River Arno in Florence, an air squadron, an infantry, a cavalry brigade, fifty trucks, four field and machine gun batteries, ten field radio stations, and six photoelectric units presented a piece of theatre. The mass spectacle, 18 BL involved over two thousand amateur actors and was performed before an audience of twenty thousand. 18 BL is one of eleven extraordinary essays collected together for the first time. The essays have been selected and edited from a wide range of publications dating from the 1940s to the 1990s. The authors are academics, cultural historians, and theatre practitioners - some with direct experience of the harsh conditions of Europe during the war. Each author critically assesses the function of theatre in times of world crisis, exploring themes of Fascist aesthetic propaganda in Italy and Germany, of theatre re-education programmes in the Gulags of Russia, of cultural "sustenance" for the troops at the front and interned German refugees in the UK, or cabaret shows as a currency for survival in Jewish concentration camps.

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?

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"--

Gao Xingjian has been lauded in many countries for his inventive use of Chinese culture in his paintings, plays, and cinema. In spite of this attempt to locate the aesthetics of his work within a Chinese frame, Gao denies that his current work participates in any notion of Chinese. However, Gao's work consciously draws on many aesthetic forms from both Chinese and French theatrical traditions. Absurdism and jingju (commonly known as Beijing Opera in American English) are the two immediate forms apparent in Gao's dramaturgy. This book traces the development of these forms and how the relate and interact in the French language plays of the Nobel Laureate. Gao Xingjian, through the unique blending and borrowing of these forms, creates an aesthetic of transcultural identity. Coulter approaches Gao's work from a cultural studies point of view, offering a new perspective on the work of this significant artist and his insistence that identity is a personal apolitical conception born in movement and flight.

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.