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.

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.

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.

Disability and Music Performance examines discriminatory social practices in music conservatoria, orchestras, music festivals and music competitions, which limit disabled people's access to music performance at a professional level. Of particular interest are the disabling barriers that musicians with an intellectual, physical, sensory or neurological disability-or an acquired brain injury-encounter in the world of Western classical music, both as students and as professional performers. This book collects data in the form of semi-structured interviews and video and audio recordings to explore the voice, concerns and suggestions expressed by musicians with disabilities. It examines their perceptions of both inclusive and discriminatory practices in music institutions as well as the representation of, and audio-visual recordings by, key musical figures with disabilities. Its findings aim to contribute to the wellbeing of musicians with impairments by challenging disabling social practices that see them as inferior. This publication offers performers, teachers and researchers new perspectives for exploring some of the most common social dynamics in encounters between normative audiences, musicians and music critics, and musicians with disabilities. It invites the reader to recognise disability as a rightful identity category in music performance and to dismantle the disabling barriers that limit the participation of disabled people in music-making.

Cross-gender performance was an integral part of Shakespearean theatre: from boys portraying his female characters, to those characters disguising themselves as men within the story. This book examines contemporary trends in staging cross-gender performances of Shakespeare in the UK and USA. Terri Power surveys the field of gender in performance through an intersectional feminist and queer theoretical lens. In depth discussions of key productions reveal processes adapted by companies for their performances. The book also looks at how contemporary performance responds to new cultural politics of gender and creates a critical language for understanding that within Shakespeare. This book features: - First-hand interviews with professional artists - Case studies of individual performances - A practical workshop section with innovative exercises

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.

This revelatory study explores how Scottish history plays, especially since the 1930s, raise issues of ideology, national identity, historiography, mythology, gender and especially Scottish language. Covering topics up to the end of World War Two, the book addresses the work of many key figures from the last century of Scottish theatre, including Robert McLellan and his contemporaries, and also Hector MacMillan, Stewart Conn, John McGrath, Donald Campbell, Bill Bryden, Sue Glover, Liz Lochhead, Jo Clifford, Peter Arnott, David Greig, Rona Munro and others often neglected or misunderstood. Setting these writers' achievements in the context of their Scottish and European predecessors, Ian Brown offers fresh insights into key aspects of Scottish theatre. As such, this represents the first study to offer an overarching view of historical representation on Scottish stages, exploring the nature of 'history' and 'myth' and relating these afresh to how dramatists use - and subvert - them. Engaging and accessible, this innovative book will attract scholars and students interested in history, ideology, mythology, theatre politics and explorations of national and gender identity.

***Listed in THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION's Weekly Book List, July 11, 2011***

Identifying an apprehension about the nature and constitution of urbanism in North American plays, "Urban Drama" examines how cities like New York City and Los Angeles became focal points for identity politics and social justice at the end of the twentieth century. In plays as different as Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," Anna Deavere Smith's "Twilight Los Angeles, 1992," and David Henry Hwang's "FOB," these concerns became spatialized against the urban environment, suggesting a shift of consciousness toward what critical geography has argued: The social is always spatial. "Urban Drama" interrogates how this shift informs playwriting in the 1980s and 1990s and inspires new modes of dramatic representation.

The Costume Supervisor's Toolkit explores the responsibilities of a Costume Supervisor within a theatrical, opera or dance production company. Rebecca Pride provides an insight into all manner of processes, beginning with a definition of the role, and offers explanations of the timeline from the first design meetings, leading all the way up to managing fittings and final rehearsals. This how-to guide outlines best working practices, including building a team and creating a Costume Bible, whilst also providing helpful resources such as sizing guides, a list of useful addresses, and case studies from renowned theatrical organizations.

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.

A History of Equestrian Drama in the United States documents the history of equestrian drama in the United States and clarifies the multi-faceted significance of the form and of the related stage machinery developed to produce hippodramas. The development of equestrian drama is traced from its origins and influences in the sixteenth century, through the height of the form's popularity at the turn of the twentieth century. Analysis of the historical significance of the genre within the larger context of U.S. theatre, the elucidation of the importance of the horse to theatre, and an evaluation of the lasting impact on theatre technology are also included.

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).

This book brings together experts across disciplines to examine the connection between digital technologies and human movement, and to consider the creative and artistic possibilities of technologized human motion.

Performance Affects explores performance projects in disaster and war zones to argue that joy, beauty and celebration should be the inspiration for the politics of community-based or participatory performance practice, seeking to realign the field of Applied Theatre away from effects towards an affective role, connected to sensations of pleasure.

'Other' Spanish theatres challenges established opinions on modern Iberian theatre by considering the roles of contrasting figures and companies who have impacted upon both the practice and the perception of Spanish and European stages. In questioning the primacy of the dramatist, this pioneering study offers a new interpretation of a nation's theatrical culture that has been viewed primarily through the prisms of a select number of playwrights. Accordingly many of the conclusions reached are new ones, and the case, for acknowledging the wide influence of Spanish practitioners on theatre in Europe and the Americas is made in persuasive terms. Through a bold documentation and interrogation of key productions and their reception both at home and abroad, 'Other' Spanish theatres focuses on the doing of performance, asking provocative questions around how performances are tested against the texts that remain. In a broad and detailed study Delgado selects six case studies which map out alternative readings of a nation's theatrical innovation through the twentieth century: muse and mentor to Federico Garcia Lorca, Margarita Xirgu; theatrical innovator and influence on Orson Welles, Enrique Rambal; tragedienne Maria Casares feted by George Craig Camus, Genet and Cocteau; actress, producer and director Nuria Espert; international director Lluis Pasqual and Catalan performance company La Cubana. -- .

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.

Alison Oddey takes us on a spectator's journey engaging with art forms that cross boundaries of categorization. She questions the role of the spectator and director, including interviews with Deborah Warner; the nature of art works and performance with artists Heather Ackroyd, Dan Harvey and Graeme Miller. She provocatively demonstrates the spectator as centre of the artistic experience, a new kind of making theatre-art, revealing its spirit and nature; searching for space and contemplation in a hectic Twenty-First century landscape.

Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference reveals the relationship between racial discrimination and the struggle for upward social mobility in the early modern world. Reading Shakespeare's plays alongside contemporaneous conduct literature - how-to books on self-improvement - this book demonstrates the ways that the pursuit of personal improvement was accomplished by the simultaneous stigmatization of particular kinds of difference. The widespread belief that one could better, or cultivate, oneself through proper conduct was coupled with an equally widespread belief that certain markers (including but not limited to "blackness"), indicated an inability to conduct oneself properly, laying the foundation for what we now call "racism." A careful reading of Shakespeare's plays reveals a recurring critique of the conduct system voiced, for example, by malcontents and social climbers like Iago and Caliban, and embodied in the struggles of earnest strivers like Othello, Bottom, Dromio of Ephesus, and Dromio of Syracuse, whose bodies are bruised, pinched, blackened, and otherwise indelibly marked as uncultivatable. By approaching race through the discourse of conduct, this volume not only exposes the epistemic violence toward stigmatized others that lies at the heart of self-cultivation, but also contributes to the broader definition of race that has emerged in recent studies of cross-cultural encounter, colonialism, and the global early modern world.

From his first unscripted appearance on an Off-Broadway stage in the revolutionary 1960s to the frontpage news of his death from AIDS in 1987 at age 44 Charles Ludlam embodied a and helped to engender a the upheavals of his time. The astonishing life and legacy of this force to be reckoned with are at last revealed in ERIDICULOUS!E a literary biography of an American comic genius. After founding the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1967 Ludlam sustained an ever-shifting troupe of bohemian players through two decades of perennially daunting circumstances by writing 29 plays a plays that he starred in and directed as well. While Ludlam's work has become increasingly popular at regional theatres on college campuses and on stages throughout the world his gender-bending theories and wide-ranging cultural impact have reached far beyond Bette Midler the original cast members of ESaturday Night LiveE and the countless other artists he influenced during his abbreviated lifetime. Like his early plays Ludlam's life was rife with the sex drugs and creative experimentation that characterized the freewheeling '60s and '70s. Based on a decade of research and interviews with more than 150 people who knew or worked with Ludlam a including all of the major players in his troupe and seven of his lovers a ERIDICULOUS!E recreates the dramatic life of an inimitable and subversive theatrical master with you-are-there intensity.THWinner of the LAMBDA Literary Award for Biography and the Theatre Library Association Award for Outstanding Theatre Book of the YearTH David Kaufman makes a persuasive case for Ludlam's being a genius ... As a record of Ludlam's life and the theatrical world in which he was both guru and grandmaster this book is informed and passionate. THa Mel Gussow EThe New York TimesETH A fascinating portrait of an authentic stage genius and the New York avant-garde scene in which he toiled with such demented and dedicated diligence. THa PlaybillTH The phenom who inspired everyone from Bette Midler and Madeline Kahn to Tony Kushner and Paul Rudnick was no box of chocolates a which as reading experiences go makes his story all the sweeter. THa EVanity FairETH This is one helluva piece of work. THa Marilyn Stasio Variety.com

In this book, Shelby Chan examines the relationship between theatre translation and identity construction against the sociocultural background that has led to the popularity of translated theatre in Hong Kong. A statistical analysis of the development of translated theatre is presented, establishing a correlation between its popularity and major socio-political trends. When the idea of home, often assumed to be the basis for identity, becomes blurred for historical, political and sociocultural reasons, people may come to feel "homeless" and compelled to look for alternative means to develop the Self. In theatre translation, Hongkongers have found a source of inspiration to nurture their identity and expand their "home" territory. By exploring the translation strategies of various theatre practitioners in Hong Kong, the book also analyses a number of foreign plays and their stage renditions. The focus is not only on the textual and discursive transfers but also on the different ways in which the people of Hong Kong perceive their identity in the performances.