Theatre and Performance in East Africa looks at indigenous performances to unearth the aesthetic principles, sensibilities and critical framework that underpin African performance and theatre. The book develops new paradigms for thinking about African performance in general through the construction of a critical framework that addresses questions concerning performance particularities and coherences, challenging previous understandings. To this end, it establishes a common critical and theoretical framework for indigenous performance using case studies from East Africa that are also reflected elsewhere in the continent. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and performance, especially those with an interest in the close relationship between theatre and performance with culture.

This book addresses the mind-body dichotomy in movement and dance. This book includes a description of the often-forgotten kinesthetic sense, body awareness, somatic practices, body-based way of thinking, mental imagery, nonverbal communication, human empathy, and symbol systems, what occurs in the brain during learning, and why and how movement and dance should be part of school curricula. This exploration arguers that becoming more aware of bodily sensations serves as a basis for knowing, communicating, learning, and teaching through movement and dance. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students interested in teaching methodology and for courses in physical education, dance, and education.

Politics as Public Art presents a keystone collection that pursues new frameworks for a critical understanding of the relationship between public art and protest movements through the utilization of socially engaged and choreopolitical approaches. This anthology draws from a unique combination of interdisciplinary scholarship and activism where it integrates geographically rich perspectives from political and grassroots community contexts spanning the United States, Europe, Australia, and Southeastern Africa. The volume questions, and reimagines, not only how public art practice can be integral to politics, including forms of surveillance and control of bodily movement. It also probes into how political participation itself can be construed as a form of public artmaking for radical social change and just worlds. This collection advocates for scholar-activist inquiry into how socially engaged public art practices can pave the way for thinking through-and working toward-championing more inclusive futures and, as such, choreographing greater intersectional justice. This book provides a wide appeal to audiences across humanities and social science scholarship, arts practice, and activism seeking conceptual and empirically informed tools for moving from public art and choreopolitical theory into modes of praxis: critical reflection and action.

This volume explores the relationship between the emphasis on performance in Elizabethan humanist education and the flourishing of literary brilliance around the turn of the sixteenth century. This study asks us what lessons we can learn today from Shakespeare's Latin grammar school. What were the cognitive benefits of an education so deeply rooted in what Demosthenes and Quintilian called "actio"-acting? Because of the vast difference between educational practice then and now, we have not often followed one essential thread: the focus on performance. This study examines the connections relevant to the education offered in schools today. This book will be of great interest to teachers, scholars, and administrators in performing arts and education.

Les Waters is a master director who has worked with many of the most important American theatre artists of the 21st century. A thorough examination of his creative practice and body of work amounts to a picture of American theatre in our time. While collaboration is promoted and celebrated in practical theatre courses and professional training programs far and wide, this book offers concrete and situation-specific examples of how accomplished theatre artists have grapple with the challenges of creating together. The book features writing from the full spectrum of professional disciplines (actors, designers, stage managers, and dramaturgs, as well as directors and playwrights).

Written by a scholar of satire and politics, Trump Was a Joke explains why satire is an exceptional foil for absurd political times and why it did a particularly good job of making sense of Trump. Covering a range of comedic interventions, it analyzes why political satire is surprisingly effective at keeping us sane when politics is making us crazy. Its goal is to highlight the unique power of political satire to encourage critical thinking, foster civic action, and further rational debate in moments of political hubris and hysteria. The book has been endorsed by Bassem Youssef, referred to as the Jon Stewart of Egypt, and Srdja Popovic, author of Blueprint for Revolution, who used satirical activism to bring down Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. With a foreword by award-winning filmmaker, satirist and activist Michael Moore, this study will be of interest to readers who follow politics and enjoy political comedy and will appeal to the communications, comedy studies, media studies, political science, rhetoric, cultural studies, and American studies markets.

In Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers, Bree Hadley examines the performance practices of disabled artists in the US, UK, Europe and Australasia who re-engage, re-enact and re-envisage the stereotyping they are subject to in the very public spaces and places where this stereotyping typically plays out.

Western Theatre in Global Contexts explores the junctures, tensions, and discoveries that occur when teaching Western theatrical practices or directing English-language plays in countries that do not share Western theatre histories or in which English is the non-dominant language. This edited volume examines pedagogical discoveries and teaching methods, how to produce specific plays and musicals, and how students who explore Western practices in non-Western places contribute to the art form. Offering on-the-ground perspectives of teaching and working outside of North American and Europe, the book analyzes the importance of paying attention to the local context when developing theatrical practice and education. It also explores how educators and artists who make deep connections in the local culture can facilitate ethical accessibility to Western models of performance for students, practitioners and audiences. Western Theatre in Global Contexts is an excellent resource for scholars, artists, and teachers that are working abroad or on intercultural projects in theatre, education and the arts.

This book responds to recent debates on cultural participation and the relevancy of music composed today with the first large-scale audience experience study on contemporary classical music. Through analysing how existing audience members experience live contemporary classical music, this book seeks to make data-informed contributions to future discussions on audience diversity and accessibility. The author takes a multidimensional view of audience experience, looking at how sociodemographic factors and the frames of social context and concert format shape aesthetic responses and experiences in the concert hall. The book presents quantitative and qualitative audience data collected at twelve concerts in ten different European countries, analysing general trends alongside case studies. It also offers the first large-scale comparisons between the concert experiences and tastes of contemporary classical and classical music audiences. Contemporary classical music is critically discussed as a 'high art subculture' rife with contradictions and conflicts around its cultural value. This book sheds light on how audiences negotiate the tensions between experimentalism and accessibility that currently define this genre. It provides insights relevant to academics from audience research in the performing arts and from musicology, as well as to institutions, practitioners, and artists.

Affective Movements, Methods and Pedagogies invites readers to think with affect about performance, pedagogies and their inherent activist, embodied and collective natures. It works across multiple spheres to help readers understand how to deploy affective approaches rather than to simply think with affect theory about traditional methods. The book is structured and curated across three main thematic sections: affective movements, methods and pedagogies, each of which treats the core explorations of affect and performance through a different perspective. It is concerned with the ways performance and theatrical methods work with and through a theoretics of affect. The sixteen chapters include work that models theoretical practices in writing, and demonstrates how theorising affect and its methods is itself a performative practice. The contributors offer rich examples from diverse geopolitical as well as disciplinary contexts, innovative methods, and finally, intersectional theoretics. This collection will be of interest to higher education students exploring methodologies, and academic researchers and teachers in the fields of performance studies, communication, critical studies, sociology and the arts.

In Eco-Performance, Art, and Spatial Justice in the US, Courtney B. Ryan traces how urban artists in the US from the 1970s until today contend with environmental domestication and spatial injustice through performance. In theater, art, film, and digital media, the artists featured in this book perform everyday, spatialized micro-acts to contest the mutual containment of urbanites and nonhuman nature. Whether it is plant artist Vaughn Bell going for a city stroll in her personal biosphere, photographer Naima Green photographing Black urbanites in lush New York City parks, guerrilla gardeners launching seed bombs into abandoned city lots, or a satirical tweeter parodying BP's response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the subjects in this book challenge deeply engrained Western directives to domesticate nonhuman nature. In examining how urban eco-artists perform alternate ecologies that celebrate the interconnectedness of marginalized human, vegetal, and aquatic life, Ryan suggests that small environmental performances can expose spatial injustice and increase spatial mobility. Bringing a performance perspective to the environmental humanities, this interdisciplinary text offers readers stymied by the global climate crisis a way forward. It will appeal to a wide range of students and academics in performance, media studies, urban geography, and environmental studies.

This is a very readable, useful and above all, deeply historical account of some of the defining tropes in art history and performance today. Written by world renowned feminist art historian, Amelia Jones, this genealogy is a key work bridging art historical and performance studies approaches. Each chapter includes 'Ruptures' - bursts of intimately written accounts of experiences of performance (and related interludes) - which help make the content accessible.

Boxing and Performance is the first substantial piece of work to place the lived experience of female and male boxers in dialogue with one another. Crews and Lennox critically reflect on their ethnographic experiences of boxing and their reading of the cultural representations of the sport. They conceive of the project as an extended sparring session. This book offers a unique perspective on boxing in/as performance and boxing in/as culture. It explores how the connections between boxing and performance address ideas about bodies, relationships, intimacy, and combat. It challenges and renegotiates oft-repeated narratives used to make meaning about boxing. This volume examines questions of visibility, voice, and agency and will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of performance and media, and sport and social studies.

A fresh approach to the theatre text for the Twenty First Century, including recent developments in the fields of technology, publishing and theatre-making. Intended for scholars and upper-level students of theatre studies and performance studies. Gives a much fresher and more comprehensive perspective than previous work in this area, particularly in regard to topics like technology and digital performance.

A Sourcebook of Performance Labor presents the views and experiences of collaborators in other artists' works. This book reorients well-known works of contemporary performance and social practice around the workers who have shaped, enacted, and supported them. It emerges from perspectives on maintenance, care, affective labor, and the knowledges created and preserved through gesture and intersubjectivity. This compilation of interviews is filled with the voices of collaborators in notable works attributed to established contemporary artists, including Francis Alys, Tania Bruguera, Suzanne Lacy, Ernesto Pujol, Asad Raza, Dread Scott, and Tino Sehgal. In the spirit of the artworks under discussion, this book reinvests in the possibilities for art as a collective effort to explore new ways of finding ourselves in others and others in ourselves. The Sourcebook collection is a contribution for further theorizing a largely unaddressed perspective in contemporary art. This collection will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance studies and art history.

A broad-ranging guide to the process, collaborations and lasting influences of one of Europe's leading Twentieth Century actor trainers. Written for students and scholars of Theatre Studies, particularly acting, directing, European theatre and 20th Century theatre. By far the most comprehensive and up to date setting out of Meyerhold's role in theatre.

All societies are, by their very nature, dramatic. They present themselves, especially for those who want to look back in time, as a fascinating and confusing whole of theatrical events and constructions. Sometimes the theatre itself succeeds in capturing that fascination and confusion. This book describes the dramatic society in the form of case studies that link politics, history and culture. The Dramatic Society uses selected plays to examine specific moments in history. Its range of subjects are extremely diverse, including Medea as an icon of terrorism, a choreography based upon Shakespeare's As You Like It, horror movies about the German unification, a truth commission dealing with "human zoos", and the reconstruction of Ai Weiwei's troubles with the tax authorities. This collection of insightful essays deals with theatrical performances - including happenings, installations and movies - of the past fifty years, with every chapter attempting to link artistic events with politics and political theory, from Hannah Arendt to Slavoj Zizek. This is a revealing assessment of the ways in which drama and politics become intertwined, offering crucial insights for scholars and students of theatre studies, performance studies, contemporary politics and cultural studies.

"I am Jugoslovenka" argues that queer-feminist artistic and political resistance were paradoxically enabled by socialist Yugoslavia's unique history of patriarchy and women's emancipation. Spanning performance and conceptual art, video works, film and pop music, lesbian activism and press photos of female snipers in the Yugoslav wars, the book analyses feminist resistance in a range of performative actions that manifest the radical embodiment of Yugoslavia's anti-fascist, transnational and feminist legacies. It covers celebrated and lesser-known artists from the 1970s to today, including Marina Abramovic, Sanja Ivekovic, Vlasta Delimar, Tanja Ostojic, Selma Selman and Helena Janecic, along with music legends Lepa Brena and Esma Redzepova. "I am Jugoslovenka" tells a unique story of women's resistance through the intersection of feminism, socialism and nationalism in East European visual culture. -- .

Theatre, History, Criticism, Soviet Union, Russia, Western countries, Drama, Asian,

All societies are, by their very nature, dramatic. They present themselves, especially for those who want to look back in time, as a fascinating and confusing whole of theatrical events and constructions. Sometimes the theatre itself succeeds in capturing that fascination and confusion. This book describes the dramatic society in the form of case studies that link politics, history and culture. The Dramatic Society uses selected plays to examine specific moments in history. Its range of subjects are extremely diverse, including Medea as an icon of terrorism, a choreography based upon Shakespeare's As You Like It, horror movies about the German unification, a truth commission dealing with "human zoos", and the reconstruction of Ai Weiwei's troubles with the tax authorities. This collection of insightful essays deals with theatrical performances - including happenings, installations and movies - of the past fifty years, with every chapter attempting to link artistic events with politics and political theory, from Hannah Arendt to Slavoj Zizek. This is a revealing assessment of the ways in which drama and politics become intertwined, offering crucial insights for scholars and students of theatre studies, performance studies, contemporary politics and cultural studies.

The book is a biographical study establishing Ernie McClintock as a leading figure of the Black Theatre Movement In this contemporary moment in education and political consciousness, McClintock's biography and the impact on the Black Arts Movement will resonate with undergraduate students and serve as a powerful case study for theatre professors to integrate into their course curriculum. Contributes to the growing discourse of Black Arts Movement scholarship, Black acting theory, and queer studies.

Twenty-five years after the publication of A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, the distinguished critic and arts historian Richard Kostelanetz returns to his favorite subject for a third edition. Rewriting earlier entries, adding hundreds of new ones, Kostelanetz provides intelligence and information unavailable anywhere else, no less in print than online, about a wealth of subjects and individuals. Focused upon what is truly innovative and excellent, he ranges widely with insight and surprise, including appreciations of artistic athletes such as Muhammad Ali, Johan Cruyff, and the Harlem Globetrotters and such collective creations as Las Vegas and his native New York City. Continuing the traditions of cheeky high-style Dictionarysts, honoring Samuel Johnson and Nicolas Slonimsky (both with individual entries), Kostelanetz offers a "reference book" to be enjoyed not only in bits and chunks, but continuously as one of the dozen books someone would take if they planned to be stranded on a desert isle.

In Eco-Performance, Art, and Spatial Justice in the US, Courtney B. Ryan traces how urban artists in the US from the 1970s until today contend with environmental domestication and spatial injustice through performance. In theater, art, film, and digital media, the artists featured in this book perform everyday, spatialized micro-acts to contest the mutual containment of urbanites and nonhuman nature. Whether it is plant artist Vaughn Bell going for a city stroll in her personal biosphere, photographer Naima Green photographing Black urbanites in lush New York City parks, guerrilla gardeners launching seed bombs into abandoned city lots, or a satirical tweeter parodying BP's response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the subjects in this book challenge deeply engrained Western directives to domesticate nonhuman nature. In examining how urban eco-artists perform alternate ecologies that celebrate the interconnectedness of marginalized human, vegetal, and aquatic life, Ryan suggests that small environmental performances can expose spatial injustice and increase spatial mobility. Bringing a performance perspective to the environmental humanities, this interdisciplinary text offers readers stymied by the global climate crisis a way forward. It will appeal to a wide range of students and academics in performance, media studies, urban geography, and environmental studies.