This new in paperback edition of World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre covers the Americas, from Canada to Argentina, including the United States. Entries on twenty six countries are preceded by specialist introductions on Theatre in Post-Colonial Latin America, Theatres of North America, Puppet Theatre, Theatre for Young Audiences, Music Theatre and Dance Theatre. The essays follow the series format, allowing for cross-referring across subjects, both within the volume and between volumes. Each country entry is written by specialists in the particular country and the volume has its own teams of regional editors, overseen by the main editorial team based at the University of York in Canada headed by Don Rubin. Each entry covers all aspects of theatre genres, practitioners, writers, critics and styles, with bibliographies, over 200 black & white photographs and a substantial index. This Encyclopedia is indispensable for anyone interested in the cultures of the Americas or in modern theatre. It is also an invaluable reference tool for students and scholars of a wide range of disciplines including history, performance studies, anthropology and cultural studies.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203359119

In the twenty years that preceded the publication of this book in 1988, David Rabe was in the vanguard of playwrights who shaped American theatre. As the first full-length work on Rabe, this book laid the groundwork for later critical and biographical studies. The first part consists of an essay that covers three sections: a short biography, a summary and evaluation of his formative journalism for the New Haven Register, and a detailed and cohesive stage history of his work. The second part presents the most comprehensive and authoritative primary bibliography of Rabe to date, with the third section containing a secondary bibliography - including a section on biographical studies.

Jana Sanskriti is internationally recognised as the most iconic post-Boalian Theatre of the Oppressed operation in the world today. This fully illustrated book by the Bengali company's founder and artistic director Sanjoy Ganguly, edited by Ralph Yarrow, collects and explains their programme of workshop exercises, placing them in the context of their social and activist work. A set of interviews with Ganguly complements these practical sequences, drawing in topics such as the role of the joker, the nature of development, participation and agency, aesthetics as transformation, and Theatre of the Oppressed in the context of a market economy.

The fifteen essays of Performing History glimpse the diverse ways music historians "do" history, and the diverse ways in which music histories matter. This book's chapters are structured into six key areas: historically informed performance; ethnomusicological perspectives; particular musical works that "tell," "enact," or "perform" war histories; operatic works that works that "tell," "enact," or "perform" power or enlightenment; musical works that deploy the body and a broad range of senses to convey histories; and histories involving popular music and performance. Diverse lines of evidence and manifold methodologies are represented here, ranging from traditional historical archival research to interviewing, performing, and composing. The modes of analyzing music and its associated texts represented here are as various as the kinds of evidence explored, including, for example, reading historical accounts against other contextual backdrops, and reading "between the lines" to access other voices than those provided by mainstream interpretation or traditional musicology.

Anna Halprin traces the life's work of this radical dance-maker, documenting her early career as a modern dancer in the 1940s through to the development of her groundbreaking approach to dance as an accessible and life-enhancing art form. Now revised and reissued, this book: sketches the evolution of the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop, exploring Halprin's connections with the avant-garde theatre, music, visual art and architecture of the 1950s and 60s offers a detailed analysis of Halprin's work from this period provides an important historical guide to a time when dance was first explored beyond the confines of the theatre and considered as a healing art for individuals and communities. As a first step towards critical understanding, and an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today's student.

First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Originally published in 1982. The songs on which this study is based were once vibrant in the throats and ears and minds of living people. This book examines the songs and their meanings in relation to the lives of those people, and relates them to the cultural tradition and practice of which they were an integral part. The art of village song represents a sense of cohesiveness and mutual identity around local patterns of kinship, social groupings, territorial orientations and cultural relationships. The actual ways in which songs were part of village life is of course highly problematic, but this book endeavours, most of all, to present an understanding of the place of song in the social life of villagers.

What is re-enactment and how does it relate to heritage? Re-enactments are a ubiquitous part of popular and memory culture and are of growing importance to heritage studies. As concept and practice, re-enactments encompass a wide range of forms: from the annual 'Viking Moot' festival in Denmark drawing thousands of participants and spectators, to the (re)staged war photography of An-My Le, to the Titanic Memorial Cruise commemorating the centennial of the ill-fated voyage, to the symbolic retracing of the Berlin Wall across the city on 9 November 2014 to mark the 25th anniversary of its toppling. Re-enactments involve the sensuousness of bodily experience and engagement, the exhilarating yet precarious combination of imagination with 'historical fact', in-the-moment negotiations between and within temporalities, and the compelling drive to re-make, or re-presence, the past. As such, re-enactments present a number of challenges to traditional understandings of heritage, including taken-for-granted assumptions regarding fixity, conservation, originality, ownership and authenticity. Using a variety of international, cross-disciplinary case studies, this volume explores re-enactment as practice, problem, and/or potential, in order to widen the scope of heritage thinking and analysis toward impermanence, performance, flux, innovation and creativity. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies.

This invaluable student handbook is the first detailed guide to explain in detail the relationship between the drama text and the theory and practice of drama in performance. Beginning at the beginning, with accessible explanations of the meanings and methods of semiotics, Theatre as Sign System addresses key drama texts and offers new and detailed information about the theories of performance.

Originally published in 1971. Nineteenth-century theatre in England has been greatly neglected, although serious study would reveal that the roots of much modern drama are to be found in the experiments and extravagancies of the nineteenth-century stage. The essays collected here cover a range of topics within the world of Victorian theatre, from particular actors to particular theatres; from farce to Byron's tragedies, plus a separate section about Shakespearean productions.

Originally published in 1986. This volume points to the rich variety of critical responses to the Henry IV plays and their complexity. It includes selections from characteristic thought of the neoclassical age, character criticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, historical and new criticism, theatrical interpretation and other pieces by the likes of Samuel Johnson and W. H. Auden. The editor's introduction explains the collection's relevance and puts the pieces in context. Several chapters look at the character of Falstaff and the changing response and critique through time. Organised chronologically, the collection then ends with two pieces of theatrical criticism.

Originally published in 1984. The four parts of this collection of articles, from 1601 to the 1970s, look at the historical and political dynamics of the play, the play in the theatre, the psychology of its characters, and its poetry and rhetoric. Bringing together the best that was written about Richard II, this volume represents the collective wisdom of Shakespeare scholars and provides the most insightful criticism in one place. An unpopular play for many years due to the perceived weak main character and the theme of deposition, the play later gained popularity and interest in its psychology and political investigation. The poetry in particular has garnered enthusiastic response and is mentioned in most of the pieces included here.

Originally published in 1984. With selections organised chronologically, this collection presents the best writing on one of Shakespeare's most studied plays. The structure displays the changing responses to the play and includes a wide range of criticism from the likes of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Moulton, Granville-Barker, Orwell, Levin, Stampfer, Gardner and Speaight interspersed with short entries from Keats, Raleigh, Freud and others. The final chapter by the editor elucidates his own thoughts on Lear, building on his commentary in the Introduction which puts the collection in context.

Reissuing works originally published between 1984 and 1995, this set brings back into print early volumes from the Shakespearean Criticism Series originally edited by Joseph Price. The books present selections of renowned scholarship on each play, touching on performances as well as the dramatic literature. The pieces included are a mixture of influential historical criticism, more modern interpretations and enlightening reviews, most of which were published in wide-spread places before these compilations were first made. Companions to the plays, these books showcase critical opinion and scholarly debate.

This is the first bibliography in its field, based on first-hand collations of the actual articles. International in scope, it includes publications found in public theatre libraries and archives of Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Florence, London, Milan, New York and Paris amongst others. Over 3500 detailed entries on separately published sources such as books, sales and exhibition catalogues and pamphlets provide an indispensible guide for theatre students, practitioners and historians. Indices cover designers, productions, actors and performers. The iconography provides an indexed record of over 6000 printed plates of performers in role, illustrating performance costume from the 18th to 20th century.

This collection charts three projects by performance-makers who generate autobiographical writing by taking walks. It includes performance texts and photographs, as well as essays by the artists that discuss processes of development, writing and performance.The Crab Walks and Crab Steps Aside are performances made by Phil Smith based on an initial exploratory walking of an area of South Devon where he was taken for childhood holidays and then on to Munich, Herm and San Gimignano. Both shows were accompanied by the distribution of maps seeking to provoke the audience to make their own exploratory walks. Mourning Walk is a performance that relates to a walk Carl Lavery made to mark the anniversary of his father's death. Lavery shows how a secret can be both shared and hidden through the act of communication as he explores "an ethics of autobiographical performance". In Tree, the result of a multi-disciplinary collaborative process, Dee Heddon occupies a single square foot of soil, and discovers that by standing stationary and looking closely she can travel across continents and centuries, making unexpected connections through an extroverted autobiographical practice.The work of all three artists, taken together and separately, raises important issues about memory, ritual, life writing, textuality, subjectivity, and site in performance.

Creating Solo Performance is an innovative toolbox of exercises and challenges focused on providing you - the performer - with engaging and inspiring ways to explore and develop your idea both on the page and in the performance space. The creation of a solo show may be the most rewarding, liberating and stressful challenge you will take on in your career. This book acts as your silent collaborator as you develop your performance, by helpfully arranging exercises under the following headings: Beginnings Creating character Generating material Using your performance space Technology Endings Collaboration Exercises can be explored in sequence, at random or according to your specific needs and interests as a performer. By enabling you to create a bespoke formula that best applies to your specific subject, area of interest, style and discipline, this book will become an indispensable resource as you produce your solo show.

Winner of the 2019 ASCA Book Award Participation is the utopian sweet dream that has turned into a nightmare in contemporary neoliberal societies. Yet can the participatory ideal be discarded or merely replaced with another term, just because it has become disemboweled into a tool of pacification? The gestures of participatory art insists that the concept of participation must be re-imagined and shifted onto other registers. Moving from reflections on institutional critique and impact to concrete analyses of moments of unsolicited, delicate participation and refusal, the book examines a range of artistic practices from India, Sudan, Guatemala and El Salvador, the Lebanon, the Netherlands and Germany. It proposes the concept of the gesture as a way of theorising participatory art, situating it between the visual and the performing arts, as both individual and collective, both internal attitude and social habitude. -- .

The distances that separate East from West - the two extremes of the Eurasian continent - are enormous. Yet, since ancient times, the people of Europe and Asia have tried to overcome this remoteness through a network of trade routes known as the Silk Road. The great migrations, the continuous military conquests and the paths relentlessly opened up by merchants have been at the origin of ideological, technical and artistic exchanges, resulting in a fusion of cultures. Among the ceaseless travellers on the routes of the Silk Road, along with soldiers, merchants, messengers, and pilgrims, we find those who earned their living as jugglers, acrobats, musicians, actors and dancers. They were people who brought with them, rooted in their bodies, their own techniques and histories. Through these performers, the 'fabulous and mysterious Orient' has exerted an ongoing influence on the art of the theatre in Europe and America. In the same way, especially in modern times, actors and dancers from India, China, Japan, and other Asian countries have drawn inspiration from Western dramatic genres for a renewal of their ancient traditions. A long history of travelling actors moving between East and West has slowly taken shape, and lies at the foundation of our contemporary, professional performative arts. This updated and revised edition of Drama and Performance Between East and West (first published in 1992), traces this history from classical antiquity to the present. The book constitutes the first complete in-depth historiographic inquiry into the subject.

This book explores the life experiences of children who are born with a variety of medical or physical disorders. It provides an integration of scientific and personal perspectives on such conditions. In accounting for both outcomes, it suggests how the social responses of others (family, friends, and professionals) may foster resilience as well as risk. It also describes the results of an intervention that facilitates the more positive experiences of such children early in life.

In Exercises for Rebel Artists, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes use their extensive teaching and performance experience with La Pocha Nostra to help students and practitioners to create border art .

Designed to take readers right into the heart of radical performance, the authors use a series of crucial practical exercises, honed in workshops worldwide, to help create challenging theatre which transcends the boundaries of nation, gender, and racial identity.

The book features:

• Detailed exercises for using Pocha Nostra methods in workshops
• Inspirational approaches for anyone creating, producing or teaching radical performance
• A step-by-step guide for large-scale group performance
• New, unpublished photos of the Pocha Nostra method in practice

Exercises for Rebel Artists advocates teaching as an important form of activism and as an extension of the performance aesthetic. It is an essential text for anyone who wants to learn how use performance to both challenge and change.

Ritual has long been a central concept in anthropological theories of religious transmission. Ritual, Performance and the Senses offers a new understanding of how ritual enables religious representations - ideas, beliefs, values - to be shared among participants.Focusing on the body and the experiential nature of ritual, the book brings together insights from three distinct areas of study: cognitive/neuroanthropology, performance studies and the anthropology of the senses. Eight chapters by scholars from each of these sub-disciplines investigate different aspects of embodied religious practice, ranging from philosophical discussions of belief to explorations of the biological processes taking place in the brain itself. Case studies range from miracles and visionary activity in Catholic Malta to meditative practices in theatrical performance and include three pilgrimage sites: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the festival of Ramlila in Ramnagar, India and the mountain shrine of the Lord of the Shiny Snow in Andean Peru. Understanding ritual allows us to understand processes at the very centre of human social life and humanity itself, making this an invaluable text for students and scholars in anthropology, cognitive science, performance studies and religious studies.

A missed phone call. A misheard word. An indiscernible noise. All these can make the difference between life and death. Failures to listen are frequently at the root of the marginalization and exclusion of certain forms of life. Audibility decides livability. Shattering Biopolitics elaborates for the first time the intimate and complex relation between life and sound in recent European philosophy, as well as the political stakes of this entanglement. Nowhere is aurality more pivotal than in the dialogue between biopolitical theory and deconstruction about the power over and of life. Closer inspection of these debates reveals that the main points of contention coalesce around figures of sound and listening: inarticulate voices, meaningless sounds, resonant echoes, syncopated rhythms, animal cries, bells, and telephone rings. Shattering Biopolitics stages a series of "over-hearings" between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben who often mishear or completely miss hearing in trying to hear too much. Notions of power and life are further diffracted as Helene Cixous, Catherine Malabou, and Jean-Luc Nancy join in this high-stakes game of telephone. This self-destructive character of aurality is akin to the chanciness and risk of death that makes life all the more alive for its incalculability. Punctuating the book are a series of excurses on sound-art projects that interrogate aurality's subordination and resistance to biopower from racialized chokeholds and anti-migrant forensic voice analysis to politicized speech acts and activist practices of listening. Shattering Biopolitics advances the burgeoning field of sound studies with a new, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the political imbrications of its object of inquiry. Above all, it is sound's capacity to shatter sovereignty, as if it were a glass made to vibrate at its natural frequency, that allows it to amplify and disseminate a power of life that refuses to be mastered.