This gratifying study of a phenomenon that has imprinted itself upon the folklore of big--city life, is a joyful book focusing upon the street performers in Washington Square Park in New York City.

While documenting the complex expressions of street performance in a specific outdoor environment over a period of four years, "Drawing a Circle in a Square" gives a broad examination to the relationship between outdoor performance and urban culture.

In this book we learn that most American cities prohibit street performance, charging such entertainers with vagrancy or soliciting, the performer--joyfully, cautiously, heroically--persists.

On sidewalks throughout the country, in theaters reduced to their barest essentials, the performer juggles, blows fire, performs magic, and tells jokes, appealing both to our sense of humor and to our longing for a moment of spontaneity in our city--structured lives.

"Drawing a Circle in a Square" is the first scholarly documentation and analysis of street performance. Based primarily upon original research, it makes a contribution that is as much toward a particular subject. Promoting the study of performance as an important and valuable vehicle for inter-disciplinary research and thought, it is a model of the kinds of research being developed in the emerging field of performance studies.

Mime the Gap: Techniques in Mime and Movement explores the physicality of movement in storytelling, offering new ideas about acting and performance, whilst encouraging a contemporary resurgence of this traditional performance art. With detailed, step-by-step instructions of basic to advanced mime illusions, the book addresses the key areas of physicality, including when to move and when not to move, making the invisible 'visible' and the fundamental principles of physical articulation. Additional topics include how to use the elements of Fire, Earth, Water and Air for physical characterization; techniques for performing classic mime routines, such as the Glass Box and the Moonwalk; how to mime with props and objects, both visible and invisible; using breath, posture and gesture to enhance performance and perceptions, and finally, creating and producing an authentic performance. Offering numerous exercises suitable for solo or group work, this new book will help you to explore and develop your physicality and build an awareness of how to apply it to a performance.

The approximate running time is 30 minutes. This internationally known mime artist explains and demonstrates the principles of three mime forms: Illusion Pantomime, Corporeal Mime, and Mime With Masks. Performing with another mime, Dr Gilbert demonstrates the action of opposing forces, positive and negative space, and how to transpose one reality into another. Using an illusion pantomime, "The Wall" he explains energy and resistance, points in space, and respect for shape and form.

Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief explores the integration and interaction of mimetic theatricality and representational media in twentieth- and twenty-first-century performance. It brings together carefully chosen sites of performance - including live broadcasts of theatrical productions, reality television, and alternate-reality gaming - in which mediatization and mimesis compete and collude to represent the real to audiences. Lindsay Brandon Hunter reads such performances as forcing confrontation between notions of authenticity, sincerity, and spontaneity and their various others: the fake, the feigned, the staged, or the rehearsed.Each site examined in Playing Real purports to show audiences something real-real theater, real housewives, real alternative scenarios-which is simultaneously visible as overtly constructed, adulterated by artifice and artificiality. The integration of mediatization and theatricality in these performances, Hunter argues, exploits the proclivities of both to conjure the real even as they risk corrupting the perception of authenticity by imbricating it with artifice and overt manipulation. Although the performances analyzed obscure boundaries separating actual from virtual, genuine from artificial, and truth from fiction, Hunter rejects the notion that these productions imperil the 'real.' She insists on uncertainty as a fertile site for productive and pleasurable mischief-including relationships to realness and authenticity among both audience and participants.

This is the first definitive history of African-American theatre. The text embraces a wide geography investigating companies from coast to coast as well as the anglophone Caribbean and African-American companies touring Europe, Australia, and Africa. This history represents a catholicity of styles - from African ritual born out of slavery to European forms, from amateur to professional. It covers nearly two and a half centuries of black performance and production with issues of gender, class, and race ever in attendance. The volume encompasses aspects of performance such as minstrel, vaudeville, cabaret acts, musicals and opera. Shows by white playwrights that used black casts, particularly in music and dance, are included, as are productions of western classics and a host of Shakespeare plays. The breadth and vitality of black theatre history, from the individual performance to large-scale company productions, from political nationalism to integration, is conveyed in this volume.

J. H. Hordern provides a text (based on Kassel and Austin's Poetae Comici Graeci text but with significant additions), translation, and detailed commentary on the surviving fragments of Sophron's mimes. The commentary deals with both literary and linguistic questions, but focuses particularly on Sophron's relationship with earlier traditions (for example, iambus) and his influence on later literature (for example, the work of Theocritus). A substantial introduction furnishes an overview of the biographical evidence, and discusses the vexed question of audience and performance, arguing that the mimes were essentially symposiac entertainment rather than stage performances. There is detailed discussion of Sophron's dialect and lexicon, the textual tradition, and his impact on post-classical literature.