* This anthology has been curated by a seasoned playwright, academic, director and actor who has lived experience of being deaf. * Would be recommended reading in deaf studies and deaf culture courses across the world. * This book is the first anthology of its kind.

a short and accessible introduction on AI and Art written by leading experts

Performance Studies: The Basics offers an overview of the multiple, often overlapping definitions of performance, from performance art, performance as everyday life, and rituals, to the performative dimensions of identity, such as gender, race and sexuality. This book defines the interdisciplinary field of performance studies as it has evolved over the past four decades at the intersection of academic scholarship and artistic and activist practices. It discusses performance as an important means of communicating and of understanding the world, highlighting its intersections with critical theory and arguing for the importance of performance in the study of human behaviour and social practices. Complete with a helpful glossary and bibliography, as well as suggestions for further reading, this book is an ideal starting point for those studying performance studies as well as for general readers with an interest in the subject.

Focusing on the work of painter, choreographer and scenic designer Oskar Schlemmer, the "Master Magician" and leader of the Theatre Workshop, this book explains this "theatre of high modernism" and its historical role in design and performance studies; further, it connects the Bauhaus exploration of space with contemporary stages and contemporary ethics, aesthetics and society. The idea of "theatre of space" is used to highlight twentieth-century practitioners who privilege the visual, aural, and plastic qualities of the stage above character, narrative and, themes (for example Schlemmer himself, Robert Wilson, Tadeusz Kantor, Robert Lepage, Pina Bausch). This impressive volume will be of use to students and academics involved in the areas of twentieth-century performance, the history of performance art, the history of avant-garde theatre, modern German theatre, and Weimar-era performance.

Neoliberalism, Theatre and Performance tackles one of the most slippery but significant topics in culture and politics. Neoliberalism is defined by the contributors as a political-economic system, and the ideas and assumptions (individualism, market forces and globalisation) that it promotes are consequently examined. Readers will gain an insight into how neoliberalism shapes contemporary theatre, dance and performance, and how festival programmers, directors and other artists have responded. Jen Harvie gives a broad overview of neoliberalism, before examining its implications for theatre and performance and specific works that confront its grip, including Churchill's Serious Money and Prebble's Enron. Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink conducts a fascinating discussion with Rainer Hofmann, artistic director of the SPRING Festival in Utrecht, on ways in which performance festivals can respond to neoliberal culture. Cristina Rosa explores contemporary dance in neoliberal Brazil as a site for both commodification and challenge. Sarah Woods and Andrew Simms discuss and present excerpts from their activist satire Neoliberalism: The Break-up Tour. Slim and elegant, forceful and wide-ranging, Neoliberalism, Theatre and Performance is an accessible resource for students, practitioners and scholars interested in how neoliberalism both suffuses and is resisted by today's contemporary performance scene.

Glorious Catastrophe presents a detailed critical analysis of the work of Jack Smith from the early 1960s until his AIDS-related death in 1989. Dominic Johnson argues that Smith's work offers critical strategies for rethinking art's histories after 1960. Heralded by peers as well as later generations of artists, Smith is an icon of the New York avant-garde. Nevertheless, he is conspicuously absent from dominant histories of American culture in the 1960s, as well as from narratives of the impact that decade would have on coming years. Smith poses uncomfortable challenges to cultural criticism and historical analysis, which Glorious Catastrophe seeks to uncover. The first critical analysis of Smith's practices across visual art, film, performance, and writing, the study employs extensive, original archival research carried out in Smith's personal papers, and unpublished interviews with friends and collaborators. It will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in the life and art of Jack Smith, and the greater histories that he interrupts, including those of experimental arts practices, and the development of sexual cultures.

Live Art in LA: Performance Art in Southern California , 1970-1983 documents and critically examines one of the most fecund periods in the history of live art. The book forms part of the Getty Institute's Pacific Standard Time initiative - a series of exhibitions, performance re-enactments and research projects focused on the greater Los Angeles area. This extraordinary volume, beautifully edited by one of the leading scholars in the field, makes vivid the compelling drama of performance history on the west coast. Live Art in LA: moves lucidly between discussions of legendary figures such as Judy Chicago and Chris Burden, and the crucial work of less-celebrated solo artists and collectives; examines the influence of key institutions, particularly Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and the California Institute of the Arts - and the Feminist Art Programme established at the latter; features original and incisive essays by Peggy Phelan and Amelia Jones, and eloquent contributions by Michael Ned Holte, Suzanne Lacy and Jennifer Flores Sternad. Combining cutting-edge research with over 100 challenging and provocative photographs and video stills, Live Art in LA represents a major re-evaluation of a crucial moment in performance history. And, as performance studies becomes ever more relevant to the history of art, promises to become a vital and enduring resource for students, academics and artists alike.

Girls, Performance, and Activism offers artists, activists, educators, and scholars a comprehensive analysis, celebration, and critique of the ways in which teenage girls create and perform activist theater. Girls, particularly Black and Latinx teenagers, are using the tools of performance to share their stories, devise new ones, and use the stage to advocate for social change. Interweaving interviews, poetic text, drama, and theory, this book provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of how and why this field erupted and the ways in which girls are using performance to transform themselves and enact change in their communities. As a white woman who has collaboratively created theater with hundreds of girls of color over the past 20 years, Dana Edell offers strategies for engaging with girls across difference through an intersectional lens in order to acknowledge the ways in which race, gender, age, class, ability, and sexuality influence girls' experiences and relationships with adult collaborators as they work to create meaningful, impactful, and often personal activist performances. This is the go-to handbook for teachers, theater directors, and performance makers who want to create politically engaged work with teenage girls.

Archaeologies of Presence is a brilliant exploration of how the performance of presence can be understood through the relationships between performance theory and archaeological thinking. Drawing together carefully commissioned contributions by leading international scholars and artists, this radical new work poses a number of essential questions: What are the principle signifiers of theatrical presence? How is presence achieved through theatrical performance? What makes a memory come alive and live again? How is presence connected with identity? Is presence synonymous with 'being in the moment'? What is the nature of the 'co-presence' of audience and performer? Where does performance practice end and its documentation begin? Co-edited by performance specialists Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye, and archaeologist Michael Shanks, Archaeologies of Presence represents an innovative and rewarding feat of interdisciplinary scholarship.

What is it about musical theatre that audiences find entertaining? What are the features that lead to its ability to stimulate emotional attachment, to move and to give pleasure? Beginning from the passion musical theatre performances arouse and their ubiquity in London's West End and on Broadway this book explores the ways in which musical theatre reaches out to and involves its audiences. It investigates how pleasure is stimulated by vocal, musical and spectacular performances. Early discussions centre on the construction of the composed text, but then attention is given to performance and audience response. Musical theatre contains disruptions and dissonances in its multiple texts, it allows gaps for audiences to read playfully. This combines with the voluptuous sensations of embodied emotion, contagiously and viscerally shared between audience and stage, and augmented through the presence of voice and music. A number of features are discovered in the construction of musical theatre performance texts that allow them to engage the intense emotional attachment of their audiences and so achieve enormous popularity. In doing this, the book challenges the conception of musical theatre as 'only entertainment'. Entertainment instead becomes a desirable, ephemeral and playful concept.

An Illustrated History of British Theatre and Performance chronicles the history and development of theatre from the Roman era to the present day. As the most public of arts, theatre constantly interacted with changing social, political, and intellectual movements and ideas, and Robert Leach's masterful work restores to the foreground of this evolution the contributions of women, gay people, and ethnic minorities, as well as the regional theatres of Wales and Scotland. Highly-illustrated chapters trace the development of theatre through major plays from each period; evaluations of playwrights; contemporary dramatic theory; acting and acting companies; dance and music; the theatre buildings themselves; and the audience, while also highlighting enduring features of British theatre, from comic gags to the use of props.

This third volume in the 4x45 series addresses some of the most current and urgent performance work in contemporary theatre practice. As people from all backgrounds and cultures criss-cross the globe with an ever-growing series of pushes and pulls guiding their movements, this book explores contemporary artists who have responded to various forms of migration in their theatre, performance and multimedia work. The volume comprises two lectures and two curated conversations with theatre-makers and artists. Danish scholar of contemporary visual culture, Anne Ring Petersen, brings artistic and political aspects of 'postmigration' to the fore in an essay on the innovations of Shermin Langhoff at Berlin's Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, and the decolonial work of Danish-Trinidadian artist Jeannette Ehlers. The racialised and gendered exclusions associated with navigating 'the industry' for non-white female and non-white non-binary artists are interrogated in Melbourne-based theatre scholar Paul Rae's interview with two Australian performers of Indian heritage, Sonya Suares and Raina Peterson. UK playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson of Good Chance Theatre discuss their work in dialogue, and with their colleague, Iranian animator and illustrator Majid Adin. Emma Cox's essay on Irish artist Richard Mosse's video installation, Incoming, discusses thermographic 'heat signatures' as a means of seeing migrants and the imperative of envisioning global climate change. An accessible and forward-thinking exploration of one of contemporary performance's most pressing influences, 4x45 | Performance and Migration is a unique resource for scholars, students and practitioners of Theatre Studies, Performance Studies and Human Geography.

This book introduces a new perspective on Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607), a work widely regarded as the 'first great opera', by exploring the influence of the Mantuan Accademia deglia Invaghiti, the group which hosted the opera's performance, and to which the libretto author, Alessandro Striggio the Younger, belonged. Arguing that the Invaghiti played a key role in shaping the development of Orfeo, the author explores the philosophical underpinnings of the Invaghiti and Italian academies of the era. Drawing on new primary sources, he shows how the Invaghiti's ideas about literature, dramaturgy, music, gender, and aesthetics were engaged and contested in the creation and staging of Orfeo. Relevant to researchers of music history, performance, and Renaissance and Baroque Italy, this study sheds new light on Monteverdi's opera as an intellectual and philosophical work.

This volume explores the constitutive role played by space in the performance of Kutiyattam. The only surviving form of Sanskrit theatre, Kutiyattam is distinctive in terms of its performance conventions and its unique culture of extensive elaboration and interpretation. Drawing upon the concepts of phenomenology on the processes of perception, particularly on the works of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it analyses the role of space in the communicative structures of performance of Kutiyattam and its contribution to the production of meaning in theatre, especially in the context of contemporary theatre. The book explores the theatrical event as a phenomenon that comes into existence through a triangular relationship among the 'ways of being' of the performers, the 'ways of seeing' of the audience, and the space which brings them together. Based on this formulation, Kutiyattam is approached as a 'theatre of elaboration,' made possible by the 'intimate,' 'proximal' ways of seeing of the audience, in the particular theatrical space of the kuttampalams, the temple theatres, where Kutiyattam has customarily been performed for more than five centuries. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of cultural studies, theatre and performance studies, cultural anthropology, phenomenology and South Asian studies.

Adolphe Appia swept away the foundations of traditional theatre and set the agenda for the development of theatrical practice this century. In Adolphe Appia: Texts on Theatre, Richard Beacham brings together for the first time selections from all his major writings. The publication of these essays, many of which have long been unavailable in English, represents a significant addition to our understanding of the development of theatrical art. It will be an invaluable sourcebook for theatre students and welcomed as an important contribution to the literature of the modern stage.

Frantic Assembly have had a powerful and continuing influence on the popularisation of devising practices in contemporary theatre-making. Their work blends brave and bold physical theatre with exciting new writing, and they have collaborated with some of the leading theatre-makers in the UK. The company's impact reaches throughout the world, particularly through their extensive workshop and education programmes, as well as their individual and collective impact as movement directors on landmark, internationally successful productions such as Black Watch and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. This volume reveals the background to, and work of, a major influence on twentieth and twenty-first century performance. Frantic Assembly is the first book to combine: an overview of the history of the company since its foundation in 1994 an analysis of the key ideas underpinning the company's work a critical commentary on two key productions - Hymns by Chris O'Connell (1999) and Stockholm by Bryony Lavery (2007) a detailed description of a Frantic Assembly workshop, offering an introduction to how the company works. 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.

Neoliberalism, Theatre and Performance tackles one of the most slippery but significant topics in culture and politics. Neoliberalism is defined by the contributors as a political-economic system, and the ideas and assumptions (individualism, market forces and globalisation) that it promotes are consequently examined. Readers will gain an insight into how neoliberalism shapes contemporary theatre, dance and performance, and how festival programmers, directors and other artists have responded. Jen Harvie gives a broad overview of neoliberalism, before examining its implications for theatre and performance and specific works that confront its grip, including Churchill's Serious Money and Prebble's Enron. Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink conducts a fascinating discussion with Rainer Hofmann, artistic director of the SPRING Festival in Utrecht, on ways in which performance festivals can respond to neoliberal culture. Cristina Rosa explores contemporary dance in neoliberal Brazil as a site for both commodification and challenge. Sarah Woods and Andrew Simms discuss and present excerpts from their activist satire Neoliberalism: The Break-up Tour. Slim and elegant, forceful and wide-ranging, Neoliberalism, Theatre and Performance is an accessible resource for students, practitioners and scholars interested in how neoliberalism both suffuses and is resisted by today's contemporary performance scene.

The five essays in this book reflect many years of the author's sustained academic engagement with dramatic forms and traditions. The opening essay traces the historical trajectory of modern drama in Europe from its bourgeois period through the period of the liberal dissent to the more recent periods of radical alternative. The subsequent essays deal with certain specific examples of that drama in India and the West, such as Shakespeare adaptations on the Parsi theatre stage, Habib Tanvir, and Samuel Beckett. The author places each of these in a historical perspective. This approach constitutes the theoretical underpinning of the book giving cohesion to this collection of diverse essays. Although they were individually published in various journals and books in their earlier versions, they have been substantially revived and updated by the author for this volume. This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

This is the first textbook designed for students, practitioners and scholars of the performing arts who are curious about the power of the cognitive sciences to throw light on the processes of performance. It equips readers with a clear understanding of how research in cognitive neuroscience has illuminated and expanded traditional approaches to thinking about topics such as the performer, the spectator, space and time, culture, and the text. Each chapter considers four layers of performance: conventional forms of theatre, performance art, and everyday life, offering an expansive vision of the impact of the cognitive sciences on performance in the widest sense. Written in an approachable style, An Introduction to Theatre, Performance and the Cognitive Sciences weaves together case studies of a wide range of performances with scientific evidence and post-structural theory. Artists such as Robert Wilson, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Ariane Mnouchkine, Bertolt Brecht, and Antonin Artaud are brought into conversation with theories of Gilles Deleuze, Shaun Gallagher, Alva Noe, Tim Ingold and the science of V. S. Ramachandran, Vittorio Gallese, and Antonio Damasio. John Lutterbie offers a complex understanding of not only the act of performing but the forces that mark the place of theatre in contemporary society. In drawing on a variety of scientific articles, Lutterbie provides readers with an accessible account of significant research in areas in the field and reveals how the sciences can help us understand the experience of art.

The Self-Centred Art is a study of the plays of Ben Jonson and the actors who first performed in them. Jakub Boguszak shows how the idiosyncrasies of Jonson's comic characters were thrown into relief in actors' part-scripts-scrolls containing a single actor's lines and cues-some five hundred of which are reconstructed here from Jonson's seventeen extant plays. Reading Jonson's spectating parts, humorous parts, apprentice parts, and plotting parts, Boguszak argues that the kind of self-absorption which defines so many of Jonson's famous comic creations would have come easily to actors relying on these documents. Jonson's actors would have moreover worked on their cues, studied their speeches, and thought about the information excluded from their parts differently, depending on the type they had to play. Boguszak thus shows that Jonson brilliantly adapted his comedies to the way the actors worked, making the actors' self-centredness serve his art. This book addresses Jonson's dealings with the actors as well as the printers of his plays and supplements the discussion of different types of parts with a colourful range of case studies. In doing so, it presents a new way of understanding not just Ben Jonson, but early modern theatre at large.

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.

'At last, the past has arrived Performing Remains is Rebecca Schneider's authoritative statement on a major topic of interest to the field of theatre and performance studies. It extends and consolidates her pioneering contributions to the field through its interdisciplinary method, vivid writing, and stimulating polemic. Performing Remains has been eagerly awaited, and will be appreciated now and in the future for its rigorous investigations into the aesthetic and political potential of reenactments.' - Tavia Nyong'o, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

'I have often wondered where the big, important, paradigm-changing book about re-enactment is: Schneider's book seems to me to be that book. Her work is challenging, thoughtful and innovative and will set the agenda for study in a number of areas for the next decade.' - Jerome de Groot, University of Manchester

Performing Remains is a dazzling new study exploring the role of the fake, the false and the faux in contemporary performance. Rebecca Schneider argues passionately that performance can be engaged as what remains, rather than what disappears.

Across seven essays, Schneider presents a forensic and unique examination of both contemporary and historical performance, drawing on a variety of elucidating sources including the "America" plays of Linda Mussmann and Suzan-Lori Parks, performances of Marina Abramovic and Allison Smith, and the continued popular appeal of Civil War reenactments. Performing Remains questions the importance of representation throughout history and today, while boldly reassessing the ritual value of failure to recapture the past and recreate the "original."

The Problems of Viewing Performance challenges long-held assumptions by considering the ways in which knowledge is received by more than a single audience member, and breaks new ground by, counterintuitively, claiming that viewing performance is not a shared experience. Given that viewers come to each performance with differing amounts and types of knowledge, they each make different assumptions as to how the performance will unfold. Often modified by other viewers and often after the performance event, knowledge of performance is made more accurate by superimposing the experiences and justified beliefs of multiple viewers. These differences in the viewing experience make knowledge surrounding a performance intersubjective. Ultimately, this book explains the how and the why audience members have different viewing experiences. The Problems of Viewing Performance is important reading for theatre and performance students, scholars and practitioners, as it unpacks the dynamics of spectatorship and explores how audiences work.

?a game-changer, a must-read for scholars, students and artists alike? ? Tom Finkelpearl

At a time when art world critics and curators heavily debate the social, and when community organizers and civic activists are reconsidering the role of aesthetics in social reform, this book makes explicit some of the contradictions and competing stakes of contemporary experimental art-making.

Social Works is an interdisciplinary approach to the forms, goals and histories of innovative social practice in both contemporary performance and visual art. Shannon Jackson uses a range of case studies and contemporary methodologies to mediate between the fields of visual and performance studies. The result is a brilliant analysis that not only incorporates current political and aesthetic discourses but also provides a practical understanding of social practice.

This volume is a collection of five Sinhala plays, translated into English, which were written and performed during the most violent phase of modern Sri Lankan history. Ranjini Obeyesekere's translation of these five well-known and celebrated plays by K. B. Herath, Prasannajith Abeysuriya, Dhananjaya Karunarathne, Prasanna Jayakody and Rajitha Dissanayake highlights and explores the dynamic period of Sri Lankan theater and performance arts in the 1980s and 1990s. The plays in this collection offered a political space for criticism, introspection, discussion and protest during a time of suppression of voices, political violence and terror. Audiences flocked to the theater to watch plays produced by talented dramatists and artists who were experimenting with forms and themes under extremely challenging circumstances, shoe-string budgets and strict censorship. Kanchuka Dharmasiri's introduction to the volume further details the history and socio-political contexts of the theater of this period, discussing themes such as dissent, identity and the brutal power of the state. She also looks at the unique formal elements employed in these plays as well as their influence and reach. This volume is a significant addition to the growing corpus of Sinhala literature in translation. It will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of literature, performance studies, cultural studies, and the politics and history of Sri Lanka.