Working from the premise that the stage performer's primary functions derive from celebrative rituals, this book describes the figure of the actor as anti-character in premodern popular theatre. Particularly in plays belonging to the popular, performative tradition, the actor simultaneously impersonated and subverted the character of the playtext. By doing so, he affirmed the ritual-celebrative authority of the performer and audience over the ideological authority of the written text. Included are close analyses of three major playtexts in performance: Aristophanes' "Frogs, " the medieval mystery plays, and Shakespeare's "As You Like It.

The introduction briefly lays out the basic theatrical theory underlying the phenomenon of actor as anti-character. The book then explores three paradigmatic figures: the god Dionysus, archetypal model of the comic actor; the Devil, as both farcical individual and wild demonic chorus, who brought carnival disruption to medieval religious drama; and the Elizabethan boy player of Rosalind in Shakespeare's "As You Like It" who, using the marketplace techniques of traditional popular performance, colluded with his rowdy audience to subvert a sophisticated character from a literary romance.

Dance music plays a central role in the cultural, social, religious, and family lives of the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Among the various genres popular in the capital city of Kinshasa, Congolese rumba occupies a special place and can be counted as one of the DRC’s most well-known cultural exports. The public image of rumba was historically dominated by male bandleaders, singers, and musicians. However, with the introduction of the danseuse (professional concert dancer) in the late 1970s, the role of women as cultural, moral, and economic actors came into public prominence and helped further raise Congolese rumba’s international profile. In Congo’s Dancers, Lesley Nicole Braun uses the prism of the Congolese danseuse to examine the politics of control and the ways in which notions of visibility, virtue, and socio-economic opportunity are interlinked in this urban African context. The work of the danseuse highlights the fact that public visibility is necessary to build the social networks required for economic independence, even as this visibility invites social opprobrium for women. The concert dancer therefore exemplifies many of the challenges that women face in Kinshasa as they navigate the public sphere, and she illustrates the gendered differences of local patronage politics that shape public morality. As an ethnographer, Braun had unusual access to the world she documents, having been invited to participate as a concert dancer herself.

During the Second World War, the popularity and importance of the cinema in Britain was at its peak. In this groundbreaking book, Richard Farmer provides a social and cultural history of cinemas and cinemagoing in Britain between 1939 and 1945, and explores the impact that the war had on the places in which British people watched films. Although promising the possibility of escape from the hardships and terrors of wartime life, the cinema was so intimately woven into the fabric of British society that it could not itself escape the war. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary sources, and on the memories of wartime cinemagoers, Cinemagoing in wartime Britain, 1939-45 is the first book to offer an in-depth exploration of the impact that phenomena such as the black out, the blitz, food rationing, evacuation and conscription had on both the exhibition industry and the experiences of the picturegoers themselves. -- .

Break out your favourite pencil and roll up your sleeves! The Save the Cat! (R) Beat Sheet Workbook provides key writing prompts and asks all the important questions-but you bring the story, filling out the pages that walk you step-by-step through the Save the Cat! process. The official hands-on companion to the best-selling Save the Cat! and Save the Cat! Writes for TV, this interactive workbook helps you dig deep into every aspect of your story. It's inspiring, easy to manage, and your guide to: * Idea and Concept Brainstorming - Unlock your idea engine with a series of exercises and prompts geared to help you find your best story idea. * Meaningful Themes - Explore yourself, matching your story to something that speaks to your soul and represents your tastes and personality. * Story Genre Identification - Nail down that pesky question of ""What is your story?"" with the Save the Cat! Story Genres. * Create Fully Developed Characters - Give life to main characters who have wants, needs, and flaws. Surround them with a supporting cast that provides opportunities for conflict and thematic tension. * The Save the Cat! Beat Sheet - Discover the tools and detailed exercises to give your story the structure to succeed

Discover the fascinating and secretive process of audience testing of Hollywood movies through these firsthand stories from famous filmmakers, studio heads, and stars. Audience-ology takes you to one of the most unknown places in Hollywood—a place where famous directors are reduced to tears and multi-millionaire actors to fits of rage. A place where dreams are made and fortunes are lost. From “the best in the business� (Sacha Baron Cohen), this book is the chronicle of how real people have written and rewritten America’s cinematic masterpieces by showing up, watching a rough cut of a new film, and giving their unfettered opinions so that directors and studios can salvage their blunders, or better yet, turn their movies into all-time classics. Each chapter informs an aspect or two of the test-screening process and then, through behind-the-scenes stories, illustrates how that particular aspect was carried out. Nicknamed “the doctor of audience-ology,� Kevin Goetz shares how he helped filmmakers and movie execs confront the misses and how he recommended ways to fix the blockbusters, as well as first-hand accounts from Ron Howard, Cameron Crowe, Ed Zwick, Renny Harlin, Jason Blum, and other Hollywood luminaries who brought you such films as La La Land, Chicago, Titanic, Wedding Crashers, Jaws, and Forrest Gump. Audience-ology explores one of the most important (and most underrated) steps in the filmmaking process with enough humor, drama, and surprise to entertain those with only a spectator’s interest in film, offering us a new look at movie history.

This book offers a new approach to filmic point of view by combining close analyses informed by the tools of narratology and philosophy with concepts derived from communication studies. Each chapter stages a conversation between two masterpieces of classical Hollywood cinema and one critical concept that can enrich our understanding of them: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936) are interpreted in relation to point of view; Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962) are considered with reference to the concept of distance; and Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948) and Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939) are explored through the lens of communication. Each encounter reveals new, exciting and mutually illuminating ways of appreciating not only these case studies, but also the critical concepts at stake. -- .

Clear the table, get out your colored pencils and experience the joy of coloring again when you color in the line art in the Today is Going to be a Great Day Coloring Book.

This inspirational coloring book for adults is chock full of kaleidoscopic patterns, wallpaper style designs, and delightful and whimsical inked drawings that beg to be filled with your colors.

The cover of the Today is Going to be a Great Day Coloring Book is black, and the lettering is white. The design reminds one of an old fashioned chalkboard. The book is bound in heavy-duty stock and features 128 perforated pages with 62 images to color.

Invite others to join you - the perforated pages make this a shareable pastime! Or buy a couple of copies of the Today is Going to be a Great Day Coloring Book and host a Bring-Your-Own-Pencils coloring party with your girlfriends. This Today is Going to be a Great Day Coloring Book also makes excellent Christmas or secret Santa gifts!

• Inspirational Coloring Book for Adults
• Printed on High-Quality Heavy Stock Paper
• 128 Pages Pages Printed on One Side
• Designed for Fun
• 62 Images to Color
• Includes Gift Tags, Bookmarks, and Cards to Color, Cut Out and Share
• Presentation Page for Gift-giving
• Some Images are Based on Scripture

This dip-in, flick-through, quick-fire resource book, part of the bestselling Drama Games series, offers 80 games and exercises to explore the fundamental concepts of clowning and physical comedy, encourage playfulness, curiosity and collaboration, and help develop performance material. These active and engaging games focus on a wide range of core skills, including: Building and strengthening connections through collaboration and ensemble work Developing physical and mental flexibility Using restrictions, problems and accidents to devise routines and scenes Using props to reveal thoughts and emotions and deepen relationships Throughout, the focus is on how to develop a playful mind and body, listen to and observe the world around you, and improve your ability to express yourself physically. This essential book is invaluable for actors, improvisers, comedians, directors and teachers looking to explore the principles of clowning to enrich performance skills, generate original material or bring a fresh approach to scripted work. 'The perfect companion for any director, this is the most imaginative and comprehensive book of theatre games I have seen' Cal McCrystal (comedy director for The Mighty Boosh, One Man, Two Guvnors and Paddington) Joe Dieffenbacher is a teacher, director, designer, author and actor known for his theatre, circus and cabaret performances under the name nakupelle. He has worked with companies and venues including Shakespeare's Globe, Disney and the Scottish National Opera, as well as co-creating sequences for the Closing Ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics.

A major task confronting today's scholars is the reclamation from near oblivion of a multitude of works of art, literature, music, scholarship, and other creative enterprises by eighteenth-century women. This fascinating collection provides a multifaceted approach to understanding the roles played by women as both creators of and subjects within works of art in the eighteenth century. A series of initial essays examines the biographical and historical conditions in which women of the times lived and worked. Some essays explore the attitudes of women themselves and how they perceived their roles, as well as their expectations expressed by male authors. Other essays focus on women's contributions to particular arts, notably poetry, the novel, music, and painting. A final section attends to research itself, reporting first on collaborative efforts to identify individual eighteenth-century women authors and discover trends in their writing. In addition, an alternative to the traditional scholarly methods course is provided in an example of the original research directed toward the rediscovery and understanding of the texts of Elizabeth Griffeth. This entertaining collection will foster new appreciation for the presence of women in the arts of the eighteenth century. An important contribution to women's studies, this volume is sure to be of special interest to students and scholars alike.

'What Ned hasn’t seen on a sports TV channel isn’t worth knowing about.' Gabby Logan 'From falling out with Mourinho to flying with Gerrard, this is a wonderful journey through football.' Henry Winter Square Peg, Round Ball is a candid, insightful reminiscence on a life in football. Although best known as ITV's commentator on the Tour de France, Ned Boulting has spent most of his professional life covering football. Follow Ned's journey from football supporter to reporter – from criss-crossing the country in a banger of a car hoping for a word or two from the latest big signing, to the glamour of the Champions League. Ned really has been there, done that, and got the Sky Sports jacket to prove it. Witnessing the shenanigans, the machinations and the idiocy of football at close quarters Ned shares his best stories with affection. Whether it's treading mud into Steven Gerrard's pristine white carpets, or nearly being pushed into oncoming traffic by a menacing Vinnie Jones, or being chased away from Roman Abramovich's house by some scary looking men on quadbikes – Ned has made a fool of himself to bring us the best tales from his experiences in 90s and 2000s football.

Over the past decade, attribution scholars have come to a consensus that Shakespeare wrote some of the additions printed in the 1602 quarto of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. This new development in textual studies has far-reaching consequences for established theatre-historical narratives. Accounting for Shakespeare's involvement in The Spanish Tragedy requires us to rethink the history of two major theatre companies, the Admiral's and the Chamberlain's Men, and to reread much of the documentary record of late Elizabethan theatre. Modelling what a theatre-historical response to new attributionist arguments might look like, the author offers an in-depth reinterpretation of Philip Henslowe's records of new plays, develops a novel account of how theatre companies copied and adapted plays in one another's repertories (including a reconsideration of the 'Ur-Hamlet' and the two Shrew plays), and reconstructs an early modern cluster of Hieronimo plays that also allows us to reimagine Ben Jonson's career as an actor.

Star Trek: Picard stars Patrick Stewart, reprising his role as Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The book explores each of the three separate season-long narratives, which tell the story of Picard in later years, as he is brought out of retirement on his family chateau to face old enemies such as the Borg, take command of a new starship, and ultimately reconcile with his past. New characters such as Doctor Jurati (Alison Pill), Cristóbal Rios (Santiago Cabrera), Soji (Isa Briones) and Elnor (Evan Evagora) feature alongside appearances by old enemies and friends, such as Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), the Borg Queen (Annie Wersching), Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg), Data (Brent Spiner), and Q (John de Lancie). Season 3 sees a full-scale Next Generation reunion, featuring Worf (Michael Dorn), Dr. Beverley Crusher (Gates McFadden), and Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton). Alongside interviews with showrunners, writers, cast, and crew, discussing concepts and character arcs, “Spotlight� features explore makeup, costumes, art, and visual effects. A final section features reflections on the much-beloved character from its original incarnation in Star Trek: Next Generation through to its final satisfying conclusion. This beautifully illustrated hardback, featuring behind-the-scenes and on-set photography, and a range of production art, is an in-depth exploration of a hugely popular and seminal Star Trek character.

The second installment in the intriguing journey of Guweiz, whose stunning art has earned him over 1 million followers on Instagram. Following on from his first book, Guweiz: The Art of Gu Zheng Wei, the artist now takes us deeper into his world of absorbing manga-style art, discussing the storytelling in his work and his evolution as an artist. Fans will discover new insights into the artist’s creative processes, with in-depth step-by-step tutorials and discussions around working full-time as a freelance artist. Guweiz will talk about how he has grown and changed as an artist since his first Art of book, offering a rare opportunity for readers to see a famous artist’s progression documented across the years in beautiful keepsake books.

Over the past two decades, national and supranational institutions and the mass media have played a central role in presenting the migrant struggle in a sensational way, spreading an unjustified moral panic and relegating migrants themselves to spaces of invisibility. Building on recent theoretical debates in migration studies around the so-called "autonomy of migration" - which sees people on the move as individuals with self-determination and agency - this book reframes migration in the Mediterranean, and specifically around the island of Lampedusa. In particular, the book explores how activist and art forms have become a platform for subverting the dominant narrative of migration and generating a vital form of political dissent, by revealing the contradictions and paradoxes of the securitarian regime that regulates immigration into Europe. The analysis focuses on works by, among others, Broomberg & Chanarin, Centre for Political Beauty, Forensic Architecture, Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, Isaac Julien, Tamara Kametani, Bouchra Khalili, Kalliopi Lemos, Zakaria Mohamed Ali, Maya Ramsay, Giacomo Sferlazzo, Aida Silvestri, Ai Weiwei, Lucy Woodand Dagmawi Yimer.

Although Michelangelo Antonioni became one of the icons of “modernist� cinema in the 1960s, his position in the pantheon of great directors has never been quite secure. Unlike his famous contemporaries, such asIngmar Bergman and Luchino Visconti, whose essential contribution to the art of cinema is hardly ever questioned, Antonioni’s work has been repeatedly denigrated from many angles for both aesthetic and political reasons. Though the historical importance of some of Antonioni’s films as an incarnation of certain attitudes and problems characteristic of the 1960s and 70s is not denied, they are often considered passé, artificial and boring. Contesting prevalent readings, which focus on existential and psychological motifs involving anxiety and the malady of sentiments, this book offers a re-evaluation of Antonioni’s most important films interpreted as political cinema engaged with issues which are still crucial in the 21st century. Far from being politically neutral, Antonioni’s oblique and “abstract� approach makes possible the prising open and devaluation of the morally and politically constrictive “organic� narrative structures. HIs approach overthrows the primacy of character and plot, on the one hand, by showing them to be emanations of the spectral materiality of capital, and, on the other hand, by allowing for an opening into the utopian dimension, implying engagement in the rethinking of our attachments to the world.

Rising to the Surface traces Lenny Henry's career through the 80s and 90s. The 16-year-old who won a talent competition, now has to navigate his way through the seas of professional comedy, learning his craft through sheer graft and hard work. We follow Lenny through a period of great creativity - prize-winning tv programmes, summer seasons across Britain, the starring role in a Hollywood film, and stand-up gigs in New York. But with each rise there is a fall, the most traumatic being the death of his mother. But by the end of the book he has been able to rise through a sea of troubles and breaks out to the surface to accept the Golden Rose of Montreaux for his work in television.

Leaders in business and art can gain a lot by listening to each other. In this book thirteen research-based cases demonstrate how software programmers, art curators, financial analysts, orchestra conductors, construction engineers and chefs, share aesthetic leadership talents that hold the key to transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Staging Britain's Past is the first study of the early modern performance of Britain's pre-Roman history. The mythic history of the founding of Britain by the Trojan exile Brute and the subsequent reign of his descendants was performed through texts such as Norton and Sackville’s Gorboduc, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Cymbeline, as well as civic pageants, court masques and royal entries such as Elizabeth I’s 1578 entry to Norwich. Gilchrist argues for the power of performed history to shape early modern conceptions of the past, ancestry, and national destiny, and demonstrates how the erosion of the Brutan histories marks a transformation in English self-understanding and identity. When published in 1608, Shakespeare’s King Lear claimed to be a “True Chronicle History�. Lear was said to have ruled Britain centuries before the Romans, a descendant of the mighty Trojan Brute who had conquered Britain and slaughtered its barbaric giants. But this was fake history. Shakespeare’s contemporaries were discovering that Brute and his descendants, once widely believed as proof of glorious ancient origins, were a mischievous medieval invention. Offering a comprehensive account of the extraordinary theatrical tradition that emerged from these Brutan histories and the reasons for that tradition’s disappearance, this study gathers all known evidence of the plays, pageants and masques portraying Britain’s ancient rulers. Staging Britain's Past reveals how the loss of England’s Trojan origins is reflected in plays and performances from Gorboduc’s powerful invocation of history to Cymbeline’s elegiac erosion of all notions of historical truth.