What does Immersive Theatre 'do'? By contrasting two specific performances on the same theme - one an 'immersive' experience and the other a more conventional theatrical production - Nandita Dinesh explores the ways in which theatrical form impacts upon actors and audiences. An in-depth case study of her work Pinjare (Cages) sets out the 'hows' and 'whys' of her specific aesthetic framework. Memos from a Theatre Lab places Dinesh's practical work within the context of existing analyses of Immersive Theatre, using this investigation to generate an underpinning theory of how Immersive Theatre works for its participants.

From Commedia dell'Arte came archetypal characters that are still with us today, such as Harlequin and Pantalone, and the rediscovered craft of writing comic dramas and masked theatre. From it came the forces that helped create and influence Opera, Ballet, Pantomime, Shakespeare, Moliere, Lopes de Vega, Goldoni, Meyerhold, and even the glove puppet, Mr Punch. The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell'Arte is a wide-ranging volume written by over 50 experts that traces the history, characteristics, and development of this fascinating yet elusive theatre form. In synthesising the elements of Commedia, this book introduces the history of the Sartori mask studio; presents a comparison between Gozzi and Goldoni's complicated and adversarial approaches to theatre; invites discussions on Commedia's relevance to Shakespeare, and illuminates re-interpretations of Commedia in modern times. The authors are drawn from actors, mask-makers, pedagogues, directors, trainers, and academics, all of whom add unique insights into this fundamental pillar of western theatre. Notable contributions include: * Donato Sartori on the twentieth century Sartori mask * Rob Henke on the Form and Freedom in Commedia Improvisation * Anna Cottis on Carlo Boso * Didi Hopkins on One Man, Two Guv'nors * Kenneth Richards on acting companies * Antonio Fava on Commedia dell'Arte * Joan Schirle on Carlo Mazzone-Clementi and women in Commedia * M. A. Katritzky on Commedia Iconography.

Throwing fresh light on a much discussed but still controversial field, this collection of essays places the presence of Italian literary theories against and alongside the background of English dramatic traditions, to assess this influence in the emergence of Elizabethan theatrical convention and the innovative dramatic practices under the early Stuarts. Contributors respond anew to the process of cultural exchange, cultural transaction, and generic intertextuality involved in the debate on dramatic theory and literary kinds in the Renaissance, exploring, with special emphasis on Shakespeare's works, the level of cultural appropriation, contamination, revision, and subversion characterizing early modern English drama. Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories offers a wide range of approaches and critical viewpoints of leading international scholars concerning questions which are still open to debate and which may pave the way to further groundbreaking analyses on Shakespeare's art of dramatic construction and that of his contemporaries.

The great Shakespeare Jubilee festival was held at Stratford, under the direction of David Garrick. The occasion was the dedication of the new town hall and the presentation by Garrick of a statue of Shakespeare. Immense interest, enthusiasm, and controversy were aroused by the plans, which involved not only theatrical and rhetorical festivities but fireworks, processions and a horserace. This book was originally published in 1964 to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth. It describes the festival, which touched heights of success and depths of disaster, its impact on Stratford, its after effects in London, especially theatrical London, where rival managers tried to cash in on Garrick's idea and where Garrick turned the Stratford failure into resounding success at Drury Lane. The author quotes entertainingly from newspapers, memoirs, and plays, and illustrates her book with contemporary engravings and portraits.

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Lively yet intriguing, The Body in Performance is a varied collection of essays about this much-discussed area. Posing the question "Why this current preoccupation with the performed body?" the collection of specially commissioned essays from both academics and practitioners - in some cases one and the same person - considers such cutting edge topics as the abject body and performance, censorship and live art, the presentation of violence on stage, carnal art, and the vexed issue of mimesis in the theatre. Drawing variously on the work of Franko B., Orlan, Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley, and Forced Entertainment, it concludes with a creative piece about a 'Famous New York Performance Artist.' Contributors include Rebecca Schneider whose book The Explicit Body in Performance is a key text in this area, and Joan Lipkin, director and writer.

Alan Read asserts that there is no split between the practice and theory of theatre, but a divide between the written and the unwritten. In this revealing book, he sets out to retrieve the theatre of spontaneity and tactics, which grows out of the experience of everyday life. It is a theatre which defines itself in terms of people and places rather than the idealised empty space of avant garde performance. Read examines the relationship between an ethics of performance, a politics of place and a poetics of the urban environment. His book is a persuasive demand for a critical theory of theatre which is as mentally supple as theatre is physically versatile.

1. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from across the world who have raised pertinent issues regarding the role of stand-up comedy in contemporary times especially with increased presence of OTT platforms and internet penetration that allows for easy access to this art form. 2. It looks at the theoretical understanding of the different aspects of the humour, aesthetics and politics of stand up comedy, as well as case studies of various forms of stand up comedy such as Finnish, Persian, Indonesian, Indian, etc. 3. It will be of interest to departments of media, popular culture, digital culture, sociology, digital sociology/anthropology, and English literature across the US and UK. IT will also appeal to proplr interested in performance and performance studies as it looks at the genre of stand-up comedy in the global context with chapters on Finnish, Australian, Persian and Indian stand-up comedy, to name a few.

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.

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.

The prolific theatrical activity that abounded on the stages of early modern Europe demonstrates that drama was a genre that transcended national borders. The transnational character of early modern theater reflects the rich admixture of various dramatic traditions, such as Spain's comedia and Italy's commedia dell'arte, but also the transformations across cultures of Spanish novellas to French plays and English interludes. Of particular import to this study is the role that women and gender played in this cross-pollination of theatrical sources and practices. Contributors to the volume not only investigate the gendered effect of Spanish texts and literary types on English and French drama, they address the actual journeys of Spanish actresses to French theaters and of Italian actresses to the Spanish stage, while several emphasize the movement of royal women to various courts and their impact on theatrical activity in Spain and abroad. In their innovative focus on women's participation and influence, the chapters in this volume illustrate the frequent yet little studied transnational and transcultural points of contact between Spanish theater and the national theaters of England, France, Austria, and Italy.

Shakespeare and Venice is the first book length study to describe and chronicle the mythology of Venice that was formulated in the Middle Ages and has persisted in fiction and film to the present day. Graham Holderness focuses specifically on how that mythology was employed by Shakespeare to explore themes of conversion, change, and metamorphosis. Identifying and outlining the materials having to do with Venice which might have been available to Shakespeare, Holderness provides a full historical account of past and present Venetian myths and of the city's relationship with both Judaism and Islam. Holderness also provides detailed readings of both The Merchant of Venice and of Othello against these mythical and historical dimensions, and concludes with discussion of Venice's relevance to both the modern world and to the past.

Zanzibar, an island off the East African coast, with its Muslim and Swahili population, offers rich material for this study of identity, religion, and multiculturalism. This book focuses on the phenomenon of spirit possession in Zanzibar Town and the relationships created between humans and spirits; it provides a way to apprehend how society is constituted and conceived and, thus, discusses Zanzibari understandings of what it means to be human.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Dances of Jose Limon and Erick Hawkins examines stagings of masculinity, whiteness, and Latinidad in the work of US modern dance choreographers, Jose Limon (1908-1972) and Erick Hawkins (1908-1994). Focusing on the period between 1945 to 1980, this book analyzes Limon and Hawkins' work during a time when modern dance was forming new relationships to academic and governmental institutions, mainstream markets, and notions of embodiment. The pre-war expressionist tradition championed by Limon and Hawkins' mentors faced multiple challenges as ballet and Broadway complicated the tenets of modernism and emerging modern dance choreographers faced an increasingly conservative post-war culture framed by the Cold War and Red Scare. By bringing the work of Limon and Hawkins together in one volume, Dances of Jose Limon and Erick Hawkins accesses two distinct approaches to training and performance that proved highly influential in creating post-war dialogues on race, gender, and embodiment. This book approaches Limon and Hawkins' training regimes and performing strategies as social practices symbiotically entwined with their geo-political backgrounds. Limon's queer and Latino heritage is put into dialogue with Hawkins' straight and European heritage to examine how their embodied social histories worked co-constitutively with their training regimes and performance strategies to produce influential stagings of masculinity, whiteness, and Latinidad.

Examining the artistic, intellectual, and social life of performance, this book interrogates Theatre and Performance Studies through the lens of display and modern visual art. Moving beyond the exhibition of immaterial art and its documents, as well as re-enactment in gallery contexts, Guy's book articulates an emerging field of arts practice distinct from but related to increasing curatorial provision for 'live' performance. Drawing on a recent proliferation of object-centric events of display that interconnect with theatre, the book approaches artworks in terms of their curation together and re-theorizes the exhibition as a dynamic context in which established traditions of display and performance interact. By examining the current traffic of ideas and aesthetics moving between theatricality and curatorial practice, the study reveals how the reception of a specific form is often mediated via the ontological expectations of another. It asks how contemporary visual arts and exhibition practices display performance and what it means to generalize the 'theatrical' as the optic or directive of a curatorial concept. Proposing a symbiotic relation between theatricality and display, Guy presents cases from international arts institutions which are both displayed and performed, including the Tate Modern and the Guggenheim, and assesses their significance to the enduring relation between theatre and the visual arts. The book progresses from the conventional alignment of theatricality and ephemerality within performance research and teases out a new temporality for performance with which contemporary exhibitions implicitly experiment, thereby identifying supplementary modes of performance which other discourses exclude. This important study joins the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies with exciting new directions in curation, aesthetics, sociology of the arts, visual arts, the creative industries, the digital humanities, cultural heritage, and reception and audience theories.

How does the production of performance engage with the fundamental issues of our advanced neo-capitalist age? Andre Lepecki surveys a decade of experimental choreography to uncover the dual meaning of 'performance' in the twenty-first century: not just an aesthetic category, but a mode of political power. He demonstrates the enduring ability of performance to critique and subvert this power, examining this relationship through five 'singularities' in contemporary dance: thingness, animality, persistence, darkness, and solidity. Exploring the works of Mette Ingvartsen, Yvonne Rainer, Ralph Lemon, Jerome Bel and others, Lepecki uses his concept of 'singularity'-the resistance of categorization and aesthetic identification-to examine the function of dance and performance in political and artistic debate.

This broad-based collection of essays is an introduction both to the concerns of contemporary folklore scholarship and to the variety of forms that folk performance has taken throughout English history. Combining case studies of specific folk practices with discussion of the various different lenses through which they have been viewed since becoming the subject of concerted study in Victorian times, this book builds on the latest work in an ever-growing body of contemporary folklore scholarship. Many of the contributing scholars are also practicing performers and bring experience and understanding of performance to their analyses and critiques. Chapters range across the spectrum of folk song, music, drama and dance, but maintain a focus on the key defining characteristics of folk performance - custom and tradition - in a full range of performances, from carol singing and sword dancing to playground rhymes and mummers' plays. As well as being an essential reference for folklorists and scholars of traditional performance and local history, this is a valuable resource for readers in all disciplines of dance, drama, song and music whose work coincides with English folk traditions.

What role can provocation play in the process of renewal, both of individuals and of societies? Provocation in Popular Culture is an investigation into the practice of specific provocateurs and the wider nature of cultural provocation, examining, among others: Banksy Sacha Baron Cohen Leo Bassi Pussy Riot Philippe Petit Archaos. Drawing on Bim Mason's own twenty-five year career as performer, teacher and creative director, this book explores the power negotiations involved in the relationship between provocateur and provoked, and the implications of maintaining a position on the 'edge'. Using neuroscience as a bridge, it proposes a similarity between complexity theory and cultural theories of play and risk. Three inter-related analogies for the 'edge' on which these performers operate - the fulcrum, the blade and the border - reveal the shifts between structure and fluidity, and the ways in which these can combine in a single moment.

'Actors always talk about what the audience does. I don't understand, we are just sitting here.' Audience as Performer proposes that in the theatre, there are two troupes of performers: the actors and the audience. Although academics have scrutinised how audiences respond, make meaning and co-create while watching a performance, little research has considered the behaviour of the theatre audience as a performance in and of itself. This insightful book describes how an audience performs through its myriad gestural, vocal and paralingual actions, and considers the following questions: If the audience are performers, who are their audiences? How have audiences' roles changed throughout history? How do talkbacks and technology influence the audience's role as critics? What influence does the audience have on the creation of community in theatre? How can the audience function as both consumer and co-creator? Drawing from over 140 interviews with audience members, actors and ushers in the UK, USA and Austrialia, Heim reveals the lived experience of audience members at the theatrical event. It is a fresh reading of mainstream audiences' activities, bringing their voices to the fore and exploring their emerging new roles in the theatre of the Twenty-First Century.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Critics and fans alike often mistake theatrical song and dance as evoking a sweeping sense of simplicity, heteronormativity, and traditionalism. Nothing drove home this cultural misunderstanding for Kelly Kessler as when a relative insisted she watch the Clint Eastwood-Lee Marvin cinematic transfer of Paddy Chayefsky's Paint Your Wagon (1969) with a young niece and nephew because it was a 'sweet movie.' In the relative's memory, good old-fashioned singing and dancing-matched with the power of an assumed hegemonic embrace of social norms-far outweighed the whoremongering, alcoholism, wife-selling, and what appears to be narratively sanctioned polyamory. This collection seeks to trouble such an over-idealized impression of musical theatre. Tackling Rockettes, divas, and chorus boys; hit shows such as Hamilton and Spring Awakening; and lesser-known but ground-breaking gems like Erin Markey's A Ride on The Irish Cream and Kirsten Childs's Bella: An American Tall Tale. Gender, Sex and Sexuality in Musical Theatre: He/She/They Could Have Danced All Night takes a broad look at musical theatre across a range of intersecting lenses such as race, nation, form, dance, casting, marketing, pedagogy, industry, platform-specificity, stardom, politics, and so on. This collection assembles an amazing group of established and emergent musical theatre scholars to wrestle with the complexities of the gendered and sexualized musical theatre form. Gender and desire have long been at the heart of the musical, whether because 'birds and bees' (and educated fleas') were doing it, a farm girl simply couldn't 'say no,' or one's 'tits and ass' were preventing them from landing the part. An exciting and vibrant collection of articles from the archives of Studies in Musical Theatre, with contributions from Ryan Donovan, Michele Dvoskin, Sherrill Gow, Jiyoon Jung, David Haldane Lawrence, Stephanie Lim, Dustyn Martinich, Adrienne Gibbons Oehlers, Deborah Paredez, Alejandro Postigo, George Rodosthenous, Janet Werther, Stacy Wolf, Elizabeth L. Wollman, Bryan Vandevender and Kelly Kessler, brought together with a newly commissioned piece by Jordan Ealey. All set against the backdrop of Kelly Kessler's scene-setting introduction. Excellent potential for classroom and course use on undergraduate and graduate courses in theatre studies, musical studies, women's and gender studies.

Putting food and theatre into direct conversation, this volume focuses on how food and theatre have operated for centuries as partners in the performative, symbolic, and literary making of meaning. Through case studies, literary analyses, and performance critiques, contributors examine theatrical work from China, Japan, India, Greece, Italy, France, Germany, England, the United States, Chile, Argentina, and Zimbabwe, addressing work from classical, popular, and contemporary theatre practices. The investigation of uses of food across media and artistic genres is a burgeoning area of scholarly investigation, yet regarding representation and symbolism, literature and film have received more attention than theatre, while performance studies scholars have taken the lead in examining the performative aspects of food events. This collection looks across dramatic genres, historical periods, and cultural contexts, and at food in all of its socio-political, material complexity to examine the particular problems and potentials of invoking and using food in live theatre. The volume considers food as a transhistorical, global phenomenon across theatre genres, addressing the explosion of food studies at the end of the twentieth century that has shown how food is a crucial aspect of cultural identity.

Voice Studies brings together leading international scholars and practitioners, to re-examine what voice is, what voice does, and what we mean by "voice studies" in the process and experience of performance. This dynamic and interdisciplinary publication draws on a broad range of approaches, from composing and voice teaching through to psychoanalysis and philosophy, including: voice training from the Alexander Technique to practice-as-research; operatic and extended voices in early baroque and contemporary underwater singing; voices across cultures, from site-specific choral performance in Kentish mines and Australian sound art, to the laments of Kraho Indians, Korean pansori and Javanese wayang; voice, embodiment and gender in Robertson's 1798 production of Phantasmagoria, Cathy Berberian radio show, and Romeo Castellucci's theatre; perceiving voice as a composer, listener, or as eavesdropper; voice, technology and mobile apps. With contributions spanning six continents, the volume considers the processes of teaching or writing for voice, the performance of voice in theatre, live art, music, and on recordings, and the experience of voice in acoustic perception and research. It concludes with a multifaceted series of short provocations that simply revisit the core question of the whole volume: what is voice studies?