Unparalleled insights from some of the world's foremost practitioners of clowning. The Origins/Influences/Technique/Philosophy structure allows direct comparisons between varied figures. An opening history of clowning puts the interviews and their findings into context.

Unparalleled insights from some of the world's foremost practitioners of clowning. The Origins/Influences/Technique/Philosophy structure allows direct comparisons between varied figures. An opening history of clowning puts the interviews and their findings into context.

A guide to the contemporary London stage as well as an argument about its future, the book walks readers through the city's performance spaces following the Brexit vote. Austerity-era London theatre is suffused with the belief that private ownership defines full citizenship, its perspective narrowing to what an affluent audience might find relatable. From pub theatres to the National, Michael Meeuwis reveals how what gets put on in London interacts with the daily life of the neighbourhoods in which they are set. This study addresses global theatregoers, as well as students and scholars across theatre and performance studies-particularly those interested in UK culture after Brexit, urban geography, class, and theatrical economics.

Theatre Institutions in Crisis examines how theatre in Europe is beset by a crisis on an institutional level and the pressing need for robust research into the complex configuration of factors at work that are leading to significant shifts in the way theatre is understood, organised, delivered, and received. Balme and Fisher bring together scholars from different disciplines and countries across Europe to examine what factors can be said to be most common to the institutional crisis of European theatre today. The methods employed are drawn from systems theory, social-scientific approaches, economics and statistics, theatre and performance, and other interpretative approaches (hermeneutics), and labour studies. This book will be of great interest to researchers, students, and practitioners working in the fields of performance and theatre studies. It will be particularly relevant to researchers with a particular interest in European theatre and its networks.

Digital art practitioners work under the constant threat of a medium - the digital - that objectifies the self and depersonalises artistic identities. If digital technology is a pharmakon in that it can be either cure or poison, with regard to digital art practices the digital may have in fact worked as a placebo that has allowed us to push back the date in which the crisis between digital and art will be given serious thought. This book is hence concerned with an analysis of such a relationship and proposes their rethinking in terms of an ethico-phenomenological practice informed by an in-depth understanding of the digital medium. Giuseppe Torre engages with underground cultures such as Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and its ties with art discourse. The discussion is informed by various philosophical discourses and media theories, with a focus on how such ideas connect back to the existing literature in performance studies. Replete with examples of artwork and practices, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and performance studies, art and technology.

The Routledge Companion to Applied Performance provides an in-depth, far-reaching and provocative consideration of how scholars and artists negotiate the theoretical, historical and practical politics of applied performance, both in the academy and beyond. These volumes offer insights from within and beyond the sphere of English-speaking scholarship, curated by regional experts in applied performance. The reader will gain an understanding of some of the dominant preoccupations of performance in specified regions, enhanced by contextual framing. From the dis(h)arming of the human body through dance in Colombia to clowning with dementia in Australia, via challenges to violent nationalism in the Balkans, transgender performance in Pakistan and resistance rap in Kashmir, the essays, interviews and scripts are eloquent testimony to the courage and hope of people who believe in the power of art to renew the human spirit. Students, academics, practitioners, policy-makers, cultural anthropologists and activists will benefit from the opportunities to forge new networks and develop in-depth comparative research offered by this bold, global project.

The Art of Experience provides an interdisciplinary analysis of selected plays from Ireland's premier female playwright, Marina Carr. Dagmara Gizlo explores the transformative impact of a theatrical experience in which interdisciplinary boundaries must be crossed. This book demonstrates that theatre is therapeutic and therapy is theatrical. The role of emotions, cognitions, and empathy in the theatrical experience is investigated throughout. Dagmara Gizlo utilises the methodological tools stemming from modern empirically grounded psychology (such as cognitive-behavioural therapy or CBT) to the study of theatre's transformative potential. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, performance, and literature, and will be a fascinating read for those at the intersection of cognitive studies and the humanities.

Partners of the Imagination is the first in-depth study of the work of John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy, partners in writing and cultural and political campaigns. Beginning in the 1950s, Arden and D'Arcy created a series of hugely admired plays performed at Britain's major theatres. Political activists, they worked tirelessly in the peace movement and the Northern Ireland 'Troubles', during which D'Arcy was gaoled. She is also a veteran of the Greenham Common Women's Peace camp. Their later work included Booker-listed novels, prize-winning stories, essays and radio plays, and D'Arcy founded and ran a Woman's Pirate Radio station. Raymond Williams described Arden as 'the most genuinely innovative' of the playwrights of his generation, and Chambers and Prior claimed that 'The Non-Stop Connolly Show', D'Arcy and Arden's six-play epic, 'has fair claim to being one of the finest pieces of post-war drama in the English language'. This study explores the connections between art and life, and between the responsibilities of the writer and the citizen. Importantly, it also evaluates the range of literary works (plays, poetry, novels, essays, polemics) created by these writers, both as literature and drama, and as controversialist activity in its own right. This work is a landmark examination of two hugely respected radical writers.

Relevance and Marginalisation in Scandinavian and European Performing Arts 1770-1860: Questioning Canons reveals how various cultural processes have influenced what has been included, and what has been marginalised from canons of European music, dance, and theatre around the turn of the nineteenth century and the following decades. This collection of essays includes discussion of the piano repertory for young ladies in England; canonisation of the French minuet; marginalisation of the popular German dramatist Kotzebue from the dramatic canon; dance repertory and social life in Christiania (Oslo); informal cultural activities in Trondheim; repertory of Norwegian musical clocks; female itinerant performers in the Nordic sphere; preconditions, dissemination, and popularity of equestrian drama; marginalisation and amateur staging of a Singspiel by the renowned Danish playwright Oehlenschlager, also with perspectives on the music and its composers; and the perceived relevance of Henrik Ibsen's staged theatre repertory and early dramas. By questioning established notions about canon, marginalisation, and relevance within the performing arts in the period 1770-1860, this book asserts itself as an intriguing text both to the culturally interested public and to scholars and students of musicology, dance research, and theatre studies.

If today students of social theory read Jurgen Habermas, Michael Foucault and Anthony Giddens, then proper regard to the question of culture means that they should also read Raymond Williams, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zizek. The second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Social and Cultural Theory is fully revised and updated to provide students, teachers and researchers with a comprehensive, critical guide to the major traditions of thought in social and cultural theory, as well as tracing the complex intellectual connections between these distinct but related approaches to understanding society and culture. The Handbook, edited by acclaimed sociologist Anthony Elliott, develops a powerful argument for bringing together social and cultural theory more systematically than ever before. Key social and cultural theories, ranging from classical approaches to postmodern, psychoanalytic and post-feminist approaches, are drawn together and critically appraised. There are also new chapters on mobilities and migrations, as well as posthumanism. The Handbook, written in a clear and direct style will appeal to a wide audience of students and scholars. The extensive references and sources will direct students to areas of further study.

Replete with interviews with key practitioners (both in the book and online) will give up-to-date information on the techniques, forms and concepts used by leading figures in contemporary Live Visuals.

In What a Body Can Do, Ben Spatz develops, for the first time, a rigorous theory of embodied technique as knowledge. He argues that viewing technique as both training and research has much to offer current debates over the role of practice in the university, including the debates around "practice as research." Drawing on critical perspectives from the sociology of knowledge, phenomenology, dance studies, enactive cognition, and other areas, Spatz argues that technique is a major area of historical and ongoing research in physical culture, performing arts, and everyday life.

The Body in Sound, Music and Performance brings together cutting-edge contributions from women working on and researching contemporary sound practice. This highly interdisciplinary book features a host of international contributors and places emphasis on developments beyond the western world, including movements growing across Latin America. Within the book, the body is situated as both the site and centre for knowledge making and creative production. Chapters explore how insightful theoretical analysis, new methods, innovative practises, and sometimes within the socio-cultural conditions of racism, sexism and classicism, the body can rise above, reshape and deconstruct understood ideas about performance practices, composition, and listening/sensing. This book will be of interest to both practitioners and researchers in the fields of sonic arts, sound design, music, acoustics and performance.

This volume brings together performance texts from nine productions by the experimental theatre company Lightwork and one playtext from Lightwork's precursor company Academy Productions, presented between 1997 and 2011. Lightwork specialized in collaboratively created and multimedia performance. The company also experimented with several performance forms that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, including verbatim and site-specific approaches. Because of this, the texts cover a range of forms and formats - scripted plays such as Here's What I Did With My Body One Day by Dan Rebellato and Blavatsky by Clare Bayley; multimedia adaptations of classical myths such as Back At You (based on the story of Echo and Narcissus) and Once I was Dead (based on the story of Daedalus and Icarus); site-specific experiments such as The Good Actor, which took place in various spaces across Hoxton Hall, a Victorian theatre in London's East End; and the use of verbatim witness testimony from the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, War Crimes section in Sarajevo Story. The defining aspect of the Lightwork aesthetic is that multimedia and scenographic experimentation does not come at the expense of the mainstays of dramatic theatre: character, story and emotional resonance. What lies at the heart of the Lightwork shows you will encounter here are human-scale stories: relationships between lovers or family members, confrontations with the past (both as personal and as cultural history) and, in many cases, matters of life or death that entail wrestling with causality, consequence and fate. The twelve-year span covered by this work reflects a period in British performance practice when the interrelation of page and stage, process and production, text and 'non-text', were being radically rethought. In the collaborative and processual theatre making that Lightwork exemplifies, the text may be one element among many and is more likely to be the outcome of the process than its precursor. How do such playtexts (or performance texts) differ from those that are conceived and scripted by a single desk-based playwright in advance of the rehearsal? What gaps are left when the work of many hands is channelled through the pen (or keyboard) of one among them? The texts featured in this volume represent a number of answers to these questions about the nature of writing for the stage. The performance texts are each preceded (and sometime followed) by short essays written by some of the many people who have been involved in productions by Lightwork, including established academics and theatre practitioners: David Annen, Clare Bayley, Gregg Fisher, Sarah Gorman, Andy Lavender, Aneta Mancewicz, Bella Merlin, Alex Mermikides, Jo Parker, Dan Rebellato, and Ayse Tashkiran. Their contributions reflect the collaborative nature of the company and the respect that it accorded the various disciplinary perspectives that make up a theatre company. There are sections on scenography, sound design and technical operation, as well as on those crafts that might more usually draw attention: directing, writing and acting. These contributions offer an insight into the collaborative, multi-layered and sometimes messy business of their creation from an individual maker's or spectator's point of view. This book will be invaluable for those who are making, studying or researching performance in the twenty-first century, and an essential resource for the rehearsal room. Primary readership will include researchers, educators, students and practitioners interested in creative practice, theatre-making, integrated design and performance, and contemporary theatre. It will be an important resource for those on theatre and performance courses at all levels, as well as acting, theatre and performance design, dramaturgy and direction courses, creative writing courses and media arts programmes. It will have appeal for general readers interested in new texts and processes in theatre and performance, and individual texts are likely to be of interest to specialist researchers working in related fields - for example performance and the occult (Blavatsky), performance and conflict (Sarajevo Story).

1. The last specialised study of Deburau (the most famous and influential mime actor of all time) in French or English was the biography by Tristan Remy in 1954, Jean-Gaspard Deburau. 2. This book is very wide-ranging: starting with Deburau's Pierrot figure, it discusses nineteenth-century theatre, novels, poetry, society, and twentieth-century echoes in cinema and modern mime. 3. Readers who think they know who and what 'Pierrot' is (and was) will be surprised by what they find in this book; for example, his relation to colonialism and race. 4. There are 26 figures in the book, all of them discussed in depth. 5. Deburau is well-known among scholars, and the wider public know his image even if they can't necessarily put a name to it, but he has never been studied through such a wide range of manuscript as well as published sources, many of them identified for the first time.

- A comprehensive guide to musicals that are based on musicians' existing back catalogues - how they work, why they work and why they are so successful. - Written for musical theatre students at all levels - primarily on the 150 BA degrees across the UK and North America. - The first book to address this relatively new genre of musical theatre, doing so with in-depth and wide ranging analysis.

features chapters by a group of scholars and performers of varied backgrounds and specialties The premise of the volume is the idea that constructive dialogue between musicologists and musicians, stage directors and theater historians, as well as philologists and literary critics, can shed new light on Monteverdi's two Venetian operas. will appeal to scholars and researchers in Opera Studies and Music History as well as being of interest to early music performers and all those involved with presenting opera on stage.

Shows how performative and creative research can have a real impact on community engagement with academic research Shows the aesthetics and use of arts-based research approaches in practice Expands the rapidly-emerging field of collaborative research

Shows how performative and creative research can have a real impact on community engagement with academic research Shows the aesthetics and use of arts-based research approaches in practice Expands the rapidly-emerging field of collaborative research

An international collection of essays by leading academics, artists, writers, and curators examining ways in which the global tragedies of our century are being negotiated in current theatre practice Includes discussion on how dramaturgy and performance today have tackled specific forms of crisis that seem inherent to the 21st century Includes essays, provocations, interviews, original works, and diaries by theatre artists

Floating Bones charts the author's journey into tensegrity, which begins in ballet and culminates in a model for addressing one's body as a teacher. Tensegrity flips traditional biomechanical models such that instead of support coming from the bones, the bones float, and it is the muscles and other soft connective tissue that provide support for the moving body. Using the model of tensegretic experience, Roses-Thema connects somatics, cognition, rhetoric, and reflective practices detailing the means that constructed approaching the body as a teacher. This study presents the argument for extending the models of thinking to include bodily thinking, by citing how the experiential perspective of tensegrity constructs physical evidence of the rhetorical concept, metis, where the body thinks as it moves. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of dance, theater, and sociology.

Brecht in India analyses the dramaturgy and theatrical practices of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht in post-independence India. The book explores how post-independence Indian drama is an instance of a cultural palimpsest, a site celebrating a dialogue between Western and Indian theatrical traditions, rather than a homogenous and isolated canon. Analysing the dissemination of a selection of Brecht's plays in the Hindi belt between the 1960s and the 1990s, this study demonstrates that Brecht's work provided aesthetic and ideological paradigms to modern Hindi playwrights, helping them develop and stage a national identity. The book also traces how the reception of Brecht was mediated in India, how it helped post-independence Indian playwrights formulate a political theatre, and how the dissemination of Brechtian aesthetics in India addressed the anxiety related to the stasis in Brechtian theatre in Europe. Tracking the dialogue between Brechtian aesthetics in India and Europe and a history of deliberate cultural resistance, Brecht in India is an invaluable resource for academics and students of theatre studies and theatre historiography, as well as scholars of post-colonial history and literature.

* Showcases an exploration of monstrosity in performance through key themes including race, gender and sexuality, disability studies * Interdisciplinary book that will be relevant to students and scholars from many backgrounds including Theatre and Performance, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Disability Studies * Uniquely international approach to the study of monstrosity which sets it apart from other books whose focus are more Eurocentric/Western

This book presents a ground-breaking, comprehensive study of the modern performance history of plays in the John Fletcher canon, excluding his collaborations with Shakespeare. It examines how seventeen of Fletcher's plays have been interpreted in British productions. In addition, the book offers a consideration of the contexts in which these productions took place, from the early twentieth century 'Elizabethan Revival' to the more politicized theatrical cultures of the 1960s and beyond. Revived with Care opens a window on some of the theatrical developments of the past 135 years, in the context of radical changes in the presentation and reception of early modern drama, while for theatre practitioners it provides ideas and inspiration for exploring little-known but powerful plays in exciting new productions. The book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working in the field of theatre and performance studies.

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.