This handbook collects, for the first time, the state of research on role-playing games (RPGs) across disciplines, cultures, and media in a single, accessible volume. Collaboratively authored by more than 50 key scholars, it traces the history of RPGs, from wargaming precursors to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to the rise of live action role-play and contemporary computer RPG and massively multiplayer online RPG franchises, like Fallout and World of Warcraft. Individual chapters survey the perspectives, concepts, and findings on RPGs from key disciplines, like performance studies, sociology, psychology, education, economics, game design, literary studies, and more. Other chapters integrate insights from RPG studies around broadly significant topics, like transmedia worldbuilding, immersion, transgressive play, or player-character relations. Each chapter includes definitions of key terms and recommended readings to help fans, students, and scholars new to RPG studies find their way into this new interdisciplinary field.

1. This book is a crucial conversation about how racialized bodies and power intersect within actor training spaces. 2. this book specifically examines race from various and diverse points of view. 3. the book looks at acting training and race from a voice and movement perspective.

As practitioner-researchers, how do we discuss and analyse our work without losing the creative drive that inspired us in the first place? Built around a diverse selection of writings from leading researcher-practitioners and emerging artists in a variety of fields, The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice celebrates the extraordinary range of possibilities available when writing about one's own work and the work one is inspired by. It re-thinks the conventions of the scholarly output to propose that critical writing be understood as an integral part of the artistic process, and even as artwork in its own right. Finding ways to make the intangible nature of much of our work 'count' under assessment has become increasingly important in the Academy and beyond. The Creative Critic offers an inspiring and useful sourcebook for students and practitioner-researchers navigating this area. Please see the companion site to the book, http://www.creativecritic.co.uk, where some of the chapters have become unfixed from the page.

* The book will include high quality contributions from practitioners and researchers that consider the ethics and aesthetics of the work, investigating the role of sound in community building, wellbeing, education, and social or environmental justice. * Would be recommended reading in leading applied and socially engaged theatre courses, in sound studies and sonic art courses and in media and communication courses. * The closest competitors are more a broad survey of sound art while this book looks to the future, building possibilities, and imagining what might be through the creative acts of inquiry and sound. Contribution from Brandon LaBelle (key theorist in sound studies) First book to address community engaged arts through a sound studies lens An area of community engaged arts that has exploded recently since the COVID-19 pandemic

This collection of short, accessible essays serves as a supplementary text to Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's play, Emilia. Critically acclaimed and beloved by audiences, this innovative and ground-breaking show is a speculative history, an imaginative (re)telling of the life of English Renaissance poet Aemilia Bassano Lanyer. This book features essays by theatre practitioners, activists, and scholars and informed by intersectional feminist, critical race, queer, and postcolonial analyses will enable students and their teachers across secondary school and higher education to consider the play's major themes from a wide variety of theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives. This volume explores the current events and cultural contexts that informed the writing and performing of Emilia between 2017 and 2019, various aspects of the professional London productions, critical and audience responses, and best practices for teaching the play to university and secondary school students. It includes a foreword by Emilia playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, arts activism, feminist literature, and theory.

Tadeusz Kantor - a theoretician, director, innovator and painter famed for his very visual theatre style - was a key figure in European avant-garde theatre. He was also known for his challenging theatrical innovations, such as extending stages and the combination of mannequins with living actors. The book combines: a detailed study of the historical context of Kantor's work an exploration of Kantor's own writings on his theatrical craft a stylistic analysis of the key works, including The Dead Class and Let the Artists Die, and their critical reception an examination of the practical exercises devised by Kantor. As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today's student.

This book focuses on experimental theatre company, GAle GAtes, credited as "the true innovator" of the contemporary immersive movement. The Immersive Theatre of GAle GAtes is a case-study of this little-known but visionary company, with a focus on its development and dramaturgy. Through rare archival and primary research, as well as historical context, the text chronicles company narrative and celebrates the artistic impulse. The book employs descriptive-narrative and dramaturgical analysis and is composed of historical research, rare archives, and primary source interviews. Chapters focus on the trajectory of the avant-garde leading up to the climate in which the company formed, company formative years, and major works and a discussion on the interdisciplinary and theoretical frameworks critical to its understanding. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies and essential reading for theatre artist and historian alike, with a focus on the experimental theatre landscape.

Performing Interdisciplinarity proposes new ways of engaging with performance as it crosses, collides with, integrates and/or disturbs other disciplinary concerns. From Activism and Political Philosophy to Cognitive Science and Forensics, each chapter explores the relationships between performance and another discipline. Including cross-chapter discussions which address the intersections between fields, Performing Interdisciplinarity truly examines the making of meaning across disciplinary conventions. This is a volume for performance practitioners and scholars who are living, learning, writing, teaching, making and thinking at the edges of their specialisms.

This book is a manifesto. It is about rethinking performance autoethnography, about the formation of a critical performative cultural politics, about what happens when everything is already performative, when the dividing line between performativity and performance disappears. This is a book about the writing called autoethnography. It is also about what this form of writing means for writers who want to perform work that leads to social justice. Denzin's goal is to take the reader through the history, major terms, forms, criticisms and issues confronting performance autoethnography and critical interpretive. To that end many of the chapters are written as performance texts, as ethnodramas. A single thesis organizes this book: the performance turn has been taken in the human disciplines and it must be taken seriously. Multiple informative performance models are discussed: Goffman's dramaturgy; Turner's performance anthropology; performance ethnographies by A. D. Smith, Conquergood, and Madison; Saldana's ethnodramas; Schechter's social theatre; Norris's playacting; Boal's theatre of the oppressed; and Freire's pedagogies of the oppressed. They represent different ways of staging and hence performing ethnography, resistance and critical pedagogy. They represent different ways of "imagining, and inventing and hence performing alternative imaginaries, alternative counter-performances to war, violence, and the globalized corporate empire" (Schechner 2015). This book provides a systematic treatment of the origins, goals, concepts, genres, methods, aesthetics, ethics and truth conditions of critical performance autoethnography. Denzin uses the performance text as a vehicle for taking up the hard questions about reading, writing, performing and doing critical work that makes a difference.

Since entering the performance lexicon in the 1970s, the term Live Art has been used to describe a diverse but interrelated array of performance practices and approaches. This volume offers a contextual and critical introduction to the scene of contemporary Live Art in Britain. Focusing on key artists whose prolific body of work has been vital to the development of contemporary practice, this collection studies the landscape of Live Art in the UK today and illuminates its origins, as well as particular concerns and aesthetics. The introduction to the volume situates Live Art in relation to other areas of artistic practice and explores the form as a British phenomenon. It considers questions of cultural specificity, financial and institutional support, and social engagement, by tracing the work and impact of key organizations on the UK scene: the Live Art Development Agency, SPILL Festival of Performance and Compass Live Art. Across three sections, leading scholars offer case studies exploring the practice of key artists Tim Etchells, Marisa Carnesky, Marcia Farquhar, Franko B, Martin O'Brien, Oreet Ashery, David Hoyle, Jordan McKenzie, and Cosey Fanni Tutti.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and Francis, an informa company.

If theatre is a way of seeing, an event onstage but also a fleeting series of moments; not a copy or double but more vitally metamorphosis, transformation, and change, how might we speak to - and of - it? How do we envision and frame a fluid reality that moves faster than we can write? Arranged over two parts, 'Figurations' and 'Translations', Essays on Theatre and Change reflects on the animal, history, doubling, translation, and the performative potential of writing itself. Each fictocritical essay weaves between voices, genres and contexts to consider what theatre might be, offering a 'partial object' rather than a complete theory. Leaving the page radically open to its reader, Essays on Theatre and Change is a dazzling, multi-lensed account of what it is to think and write on theatre.

If theatre is a way of seeing, an event onstage but also a fleeting series of moments; not a copy or double but more vitally metamorphosis, transformation, and change, how might we speak to - and of - it? How do we envision and frame a fluid reality that moves faster than we can write? Arranged over two parts, 'Figurations' and 'Translations', Essays on Theatre and Change reflects on the animal, history, doubling, translation, and the performative potential of writing itself. Each fictocritical essay weaves between voices, genres and contexts to consider what theatre might be, offering a 'partial object' rather than a complete theory. Leaving the page radically open to its reader, Essays on Theatre and Change is a dazzling, multi-lensed account of what it is to think and write on theatre.

Here is a visual feast in the tradition of 1990s club kids. See performance artists JoJo Baby and Sal-E use their bodies as canvases to become inspired and whimsical conceptual characters, executed with expert skill using original, theatrical makeup and costumes. In more than 100 portraits, photographer Bernard Colbert rigorously captures these two performance artists in genius moments as psychedelic Hindi gods, comic book villains, fantastical creatures, astronauts, and much, much more. Colbert's stunning portraits document these delightful transformations over a five-year period and are the same body of work featured in the Clive Barker documentary titled JoJo Baby. Through Colbert's collaboration with JoJo and Sal, viewers can experience a front row seat to an ongoing show which has been entertaining club goers in Chicago for two decades. This is a portfolio for the visually adventuress and fans of true creative vision.

Global Media, Biopolitics and Affect shows how mediations of bodily vulnerability have become a strong political force in contemporary societies. In discussions and struggles concerning war involvement, healthcare issues, charity, democracy movements, contested national pasts, and climate change, performances of bodily vulnerability is increasingly used by citizens to raise awareness, create sympathy, encourage political action, and to circulate information in global media networks. The book thus argues that bodily vulnerability can serve as a catalyst for affectively charging and disseminating particular political events or issues by means of media. To investigate how, when and why that happens, and to evaluate the long-term social impacts of mediating bodily vulnerability, the book offers a theoretical framework for understanding the role of bodily vulnerability in contemporary digital media culture. Likewise, it presents a range of close empirical case studies in the areas of illness blogging, global protests after the killing of Neda Agda Soltan in Iran, charity communication, green media activism, online war commemoration and digital witnessing related to conflicts in Sarajevo and Ukraine.

This book offers a unique Australian perspective on the global crisis in refugee protection. Using performance as both an object and a lens, this volume explores the politics and aesthetics of migration control, border security and refugee resistance. The first half of the book, titled On Stage, examines performance objects such as verbatim and documentary plays, children's theatre, immersive performance, slam poetry, video art and feature films. Specifically, it considers how refugees, and their artistic collaborators, assert their individuality, agency and authority as well as their resistance to cruel policies like offshore processing through performance. The second half of the book, titled Off Stage, employs performance as a lens to analyse the wider field of refugee politics, including the relationship between forced migrants and the forced displacement of First Nations peoples that underpins the settler-colonial state, philosophies of cosmopolitanism, the role of the canon in art history and the spectacle of bordering practices. In doing so, it illuminates the strategic performativity-and nonperformativity-of the law, philosophy, the state and the academy more broadly in the exclusion and control of refugees. Taken together, the chapters in this volume draw on, and contribute to, a wide range of disciplines including theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, border studies and forced migration studies, and will be of great interest to students and scholars in all four fields.

Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere is the first interdisciplinary analysis of performance art in East, Central and Southeast Europe under socialist rule. By investigating the specifics of event-based art forms in these regions, each chapter explores the particular, critical roles that this work assumed under censorial circumstances. The artistic networks of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, East Germany and Czechoslovakia are discussed with a particular focus on the discourses that shaped artistic practice at the time, drawing on the methods of Performance Studies and Media Studies as well as more familiar reference points from art history and area studies.

Drama and the Politics of Generational Conflict in Shakespeare's England examines the intersection between art and culture and explains how ideas about age circulated in early modern England. Stephannie Gearhart illustrates how a variety of texts - including drama by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton - placed elders' and youths' voices in dialogue with one another to construct the period's ideology of age and shape elder-youth relations.

This is the first history of the harp in Scotland to be published. It sets out to trace the development of the instrument from its earliest appearance on the Pictish stones of the 8th century, to the present day. Describing the different harps played in the Highlands and the Lowlands of Scotland, the authors examine the literary and physical evidence for their use within the Royal Courts and "big houses" by professional harpers and aristocratic amateurs. They vividly follow the decline of the wire-strung clarsach from its links with the hereditary bards of the Highland chieftains to its disappearance in the 18th century, and the subsequent attempts at the revival of the small harp during the 19th and 20th centuries. The music played on the harp, and its links with the great families of Scotland are described. The authors present, in this book, material which has never before been brought to light, from unpublished documents, family papers and original manuscripts. They also make suggestions, based on their research, about the development and dissemination of the early Celtic harps and their music. This book, therefore, should be of great interest, not only to harp players but to historians, to all musicians in the fields of traditional and early music, and to any reader who recognises the importance of these beautiful instruments, and their music, throughout a thousand years of Scottish culture.

In Collective Situations scholars, artists, and art collectives present a range of socially engaged art practices that emerged in Latin America during the Pink Tide period, between 1995 and 2010. This volume's essays, interviews, and artist's statements-many of which are appearing in English for the first time-demonstrate the complex relationship between moments of political transformation and artistic production. Whether addressing human rights in Colombia, the politics of urban spaces in Brazil, the violent legacy of military dictatorships in the region, or art's intersection with public policy, health, and the environment, the contributors outline the region's long-standing tradition of challenging ideas about art and the social sphere through experimentation. Introducing English-language readers to some of the most dynamic and innovative contemporary art in Latin America, Collective Situations documents new possibilities for artistic practice, collaboration, and creativity in ways that have the capacity to foster vibrant forms of democratic citizenship. Contributors Gavin Adams, Mariola V. Alvarez, Gustavo Buntinx, Maria Fernanda Cartagena, David Gutierrez Castaneda, Fabian Cereijido, Paloma Checa-Gismero, Kency Cornejo, Raquel de Anda, Bill Kelley Jr., Grant H. Kester, Suzanne Lacy, Ana Longoni, Rodrigo Marti, Elize Mazadiego, Annie Mendoza, Alberto Muenala, Prerana Reddy, Maria Reyes Franco, Pilar Riano-Alcala, Juan Carlos Rodriguez

Performance as Research (PAR) is characterised by an extraordinary elasticity and interdisciplinary drive. Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact celebrates this energy, bringing together chapters from a wide range of disciplines and eight different countries. This volume focuses explicitly on three critical, often contentious themes that run through much discussion of PaR as a discipline: Knowledge - the areas and manners in which performance can generate knowledge Methods - methods and methodologies for approaching performance as research Impact - a broad understanding of the impact of this form of research These themes are framed by four essays from the book's editors, contextualising their interrelated conversations, teasing out common threads, and exploring the new questions that the contributions pose to the field of performance. As both an intervention into and extension of current debates, this is a vital collection for any reader concerned with the value and legitimacy of performance as research.

The refusal on the part of academic critics to recognize the primacy of farce in Moliere's theatre is contradicted by wide spread theatrical pracitce. These essays develop the argument that Moliere needs to be rescued from the pantheon of classical literature and put back on the Pont-Neuf with the strolling players, low-life rogues, cut-purses and clowns with whom he filled his theatre.

Richard Foreman has been writing, directing and designing avant-garde theatre in New York since he first founded his Ontological-Hysteric company there in 1968. In all that time, few directors have taken up the challenge of staging his problematic, rewarding texts, and Foreman's work remains under-explored by other practitioners. Richard Foreman: An American (Partly) in Paris argues that Foreman can productively be viewed as a (partly) European artist, whose thinking and theatre-making have been radically shaped by contact with Europe. Through a detailed account of his European productions, interviews with Foreman himself, a set of practical strategies for staging the plays and the full text of Foreman's previously unpublished play Georges Bataille's Bathrobe (1983), Neal Swettenham introduces the director's work to a new generation of readers and theatre-makers.

Aesthetic theory in the West has, until now, been dominated by ideas of effect, autonomy, and reception. Transformative Aesthetics uncovers these theories' mutual concern with the transformation of those involved. From artists to spectators, readers, listeners, or audiences, the idea of transformation is one familiar to cultures across the globe. Transformation of the individual is only one part of this aesthetic phenomenon, as contemporary artists are increasingly called upon to have a transformative, sustainable impact on society at large. To this end, Erika Fischer Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz present a series of fresh perspectives on the discussion of aesthetics, uniting Western theory with that of India, China, Australia, and beyond. Each chapter of Transformative Aesthetics focuses on a different approach to transformation, from the foundations of aesthetics to contemporary theories, breaking new ground to establish a network of thought that spans theatre, performance, art history, cultural studies, and philosophy.