Since his emergence from the Flemish avant-garde movement of the 1980s, Ivo van Hove's directorial career has crossed international boundaries, challenging established notions of theatre-making. He has brought radical interpretations of the classics to America and organic acting technique to Europe. Ivo van Hove Onstage is the first full English language study of one of theatre's most prominent iconoclasts. It presents a comprehensive, multifaceted account of van Hove's extraordinary work, including key productions, design innovations, his revolutionary approach to text and ambience, and his relationships with specific theatres and companies.

For whom does the actor perform? To answer this foundational question of the actor's art, Grotowski scholar Kris Salata explores acting as a self-revelatory action, introduces Grotowski's concept of "carnal prayer," and develops an interdisciplinary theory of acting and spectating. Acting after Grotowski: Theatre's Carnal Prayer attempts to overcome the religious/secular binary by treating "prayer" as a pre-religious, originary deed, and ultimately situates theatre along with ritual in their shared territory of play. Grounded in theatre practice, Salata's narrative moves through postmodern philosophy, critical theory, theatre, performance, ritual, and religious studies, concluding that the fundamental structure of prayer, which underpins the actor's deed, can be found in any self-revelatory creative act.

This expanded second edition of Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ambitious and unprecedented overview of many of the key directors working in European theatre over the past 30 years. This book is a vivid account of the vast range of work undertaken in European theatre during the last three decades, situated lucidly in its artistic, cultural, and political context. Each chapter discusses a particular director, showing the influences on their work, how it has developed over time, its reception, and the complex relation it has with its social and cultural context. The volume includes directors living and working in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Russia, Romania, the UK, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, offering a broad and international picture of the directing landscape. Now revised and updated, Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ideal text for both undergraduate and postgraduate directing students, as well as those researching contemporary theatre practices, providing a detailed guide to the generation of directors whose careers were forged and tempered in the changing Europe following the end of the Cold War.

The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader is a selection of the most outstanding critical analysis featured in the journal Comedy Studies in the decade since its inception in 2010. The Reader illustrates the multiple perspectives that are available when analysing comedy. Wilkie's selections present an array of critical approaches from interdisciplinary scholars, all of whom evaluate comedy from different angles and adopt a range of writing styles to explore the phenomenon. Divided into eight unique parts, the Reader offers both breadth and depth with its wide range of interdisciplinary articles and international perspectives. Of interest to students, scholars, and lovers of comedy alike, The Routledge Comedy Studies Reader offers a contemporary sample of general analyses of comedy as a mode, form, and genre.

The Birth of Modern Theatre: Rivalry, Riots, and Romance in the Age of Garrick is a vivid description of the eighteenth-century London theatre scene-a time when the theatre took on many of the features of our modern stage. A natural and psychologically based acting style replaced the declamatory style of an earlier age. The theatres were mainly supported by paying audiences, no longer by royal or noble patrons. The press determined the success or failure of a play or a performance. Actors were no longer shunned by polite society, some becoming celebrities in the modern sense. The dominant figure for thirty years was David Garrick, actor, theatre manager and playwright, who, off the stage, charmed London with his energy, playfulness, and social graces. No less important in defining eighteenth-century theatre were its audiences, who considered themselves full-scale participants in theatrical performances; if they did not care for a play, an actor, or ticket prices, they would loudly make their wishes known, sometimes starting a riot. This book recounts the lives-and occasionally the scandals-of the actors and theatre managers and weaves them into the larger story of the theatre in this exuberant age, setting the London stage and its leading personalities against the background of the important social, cultural, and economic changes that shaped eighteenth-century Britain. The Birth of Modern Theatre brings all of this together to describe a moment in history that sowed the seeds of today's stage.

Dance is communication. From contemporary collaborations or the first happenings of the Japanese Butoh dancers and the pioneers of Modern dance, Global Groove explores the cultural history of contact between the West and the Far East. Global Groove is going back even to the early performances by Asian dancers in Europe around 1900. Photographs, paintings, sculptures, films and live actions reveal the role played by the language of dance in the political and cultural transformation of societies.

Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive is a ground-breaking and movingly written exploration of what remains when actors evacuate the space and time of performance. An analysis of 'leftovers', it moves between tracking the politics of what is consciously archived and the politics of visible and invisible theatrical labour to trace the persistence of performance. In this fascinating volume, Hodgdon considers how documents, material objects, sketches, drawings and photographs explore scenarios of action and behaviour - and embodied practices. Rather than viewing these leftovers as indexical signs of a theatrical past, Hodgdon argues that the work they do is neither strictly archival nor documentary but performative - that is, they serve as sites of re-performance. Shakespeare, Performance and the Archive creates a deeply materialized historiography of performance and attempts to make that history do something entirely new. Barbara Hodgdon is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, now retired. Her major interest is in theatrical performances, especially performed Shakespeare. She is the author of: The End Crowns All, The Shakespeare Trade, and most recently the Arden edition of The Taming of the Shrew.

What did Bakhtin think about the theatre? That it was outdated? That is 'stopped being a serious genre' after Shakespeare? Could a thinker to whose work ideas of theatricality, visuality, and embodied activity were so central really have nothing to say about theatrical practice? Bakhtin and Theatre is the first book to explore the relation between Bakhtin's ideas and the theatre practice of his time. In that time, Stanislavsky co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 and continued to develop his ideas about theatre until his death in 1938. Stanislavsky's pupil Meyerhold embraced the Russian Revolution and created some stunningly revolutionary productions in the 1920s, breaking with the realism of his former teacher. Less than twenty years after Stanislavsky's death and Meyerhold's assassination, a young student called Grotowski was studying in Moscow, soon to break the mould with his Poor Theatre. All three directors challenged the prevailing notion of theatre, drawing on, disagreeing with and challenging each other's ideas. Bakhtin's early writings about action, character and authorship provide a revealing framework for understanding this dialogue between these three masters of Twentieth Century theatre.

Performing Home is the first sustained study of the ways in which artists create artworks in, and in response to, domestic dwellings. In the context of growing interest in ideas and practices that cross between architecture, arts practice and performance, it is valuable to understand what happens when artists make work in and about specific buildings. This is particularly important with domestic dwellings, which can be bound up with experiences, issues, practices and understandings of home. The book focuses on a range of recent artistic projects to identify and investigate critical ways by which artists practise domestic dwellings. In doing so, it addresses the ways in which artists enquire into a dwelling, are resident in a dwelling, adapt the form of a dwelling, practise a mobile dwelling, and make a dwelling. By considering these practices together, Andrews demonstrates the breadth and significance of recent artistic engagement in and with domestic dwellings and highlights the contribution that artistic practice can make to the ways in which we understand the form and practice of a building. Performing Home will be of particular relevance to scholars, students and practitioners in architecture, art and performance, to those in geography, material culture and cultural studies, and to anyone seeking to make sense of the place in which they live.

This book provides a new social history of British performance cultures in the early decades of the twentieth century, where performance across stage and screen was generated by dynamic and transformational industries. Exploring an era book-ended by wars and troubled by social unrest and political uncertainty, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900-1939 makes use of the popular material cultures produced by and for the industries - autobiographies, fan magazines and trade journals, as well as archival holdings, popular sketches, plays and performances. Maggie B. Gale looks at how the performance industries operated, circulated their products and self-regulated their professional activities, in a period where enfranchisement, democratization, technological development and legislation shaped the experience of citizenship. Through close examination of material evidence and a theoretical underpinning, this book shows how performance industries reflected and challenged this experience, and explored the ways in which we construct our 'performance' as participants in the public realm. Suited not only to scholars and students of British theatre and theatre history, but to general readers as well, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900-1939 offers an original intervention into the construction of British theatre and performance histories, offering new readings of the relationship between the material cultures of performance, the social, professional and civic contexts from which they arise, and on which they reflect.

Radical Street Performance is the first volume to collect together the fascinating array of writings by activists, directors, performers, critics, scholars and journalists who have documented street theatre around the world.
More than thirty essays explore the myriad forms this most public of performances can take:
* agit-prop
* invisible theatre
* demonstrations and rallies
* direct action
* puppetry
* parades and pageants
* performance art
* guerrilla theatre
* circuses
These essays look at performaces in Europe, Africa, China, India and both the Americas. They describe engagement with issues as diverse as abortion, colonialism, the environment and homophobia, to name only a few. Introduced by editor Jan Cohen-Cruz, the essays are organized into thematic sections: Agitating; Witnessing; Involving; Imagining; and Popularizing.
Radical Street Performance is an inspiring testimony to this international performance phenomenon, and an invaluable record of a form of theatre which continues to flourish in a televisual age.

Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre examines the function of dramaturgy and the role of the dramaturg in making a theatre performance situated at the crossroads of multiple theatre forms and performative devices. This book explores how these forms and devices are employed, challenged, experimented with, and reflected upon in the work of migrant theatre by performance and dance artists. Meerzon and Pewny ask: What impact do peoples' movement between continents, countries, cultures, and languages have on the process of meaning production in plays about migration created by migrant artists? What dramaturgical devices do migrant artists employ when they work in the context of multilingual production, with the texts written in many languages, and when staging performances that target multicultural and multilingual theatregoers? And, finally, how do the new multilingual practices of theatre writing and performance meet and transform the existing practices of postdramatic dramaturgies? By considering these questions in a global context, the editors explore the overlapping complexities of migratory performances with both range and depth. Ideal for scholars, students, and practitioners of theatre, dramaturgy, and devising, Dramaturgy of Migration expresses not only the practicalities of migratory performances but also the emotional responses of the artists who stage them.

This collection of new essays explores connections between dance, modernism, and modernity by examining the ways in which leading dancers have responded to modernity. Burt and Huxley examine dance examples from a period beginning just before the First World War and extending to the mid-1950s, ranging across not only mainland Europe and the United States but also Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Asian region, and the UK. They consider a wide range of artists, including Akarova, Gertrude Colby, Isadora Duncan, Katherine Dunham, Margaret H'Doubler, Hanya Holm, Michio Ito, Kurt Jooss, Wassily Kandinsky, Margaret Morris, Berto Pasuka, Uday Shankar, Antony Tudor, and Mary Wigman. The authors explore dancers' responses to modernity in various ways, including within the contexts of natural dancing and transnationalism. This collection asks questions about how, in these places and times, dancing developed and responded to the experience of living in modern times, or even came out of an ambivalence about or as a reaction against it. Ideal for students and practitioners of dance and those interested in new modernist studies, Dance, Modernism, and Modernity considers the development of modernism in dance as an interdisciplinary and global phenomenon.

The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader combines extracts from over 70 international practitioners, companies, collectives and makers from the fields of Dance, Theatre, Music, Live and Performance Art, and Activism to form an essential sourcebook for students, researchers and practitioners. This is the follow-on text from The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, which has been the key introductory text to all kinds of performance for over 20 years since it was first published in 1996. Contributions from new and emerging practitioners are placed alongside those of long-established individual artists and companies, representing the work of this century's leading practitioners through the voices of over 140 individuals. The contributors in this volume reflect the diverse and eclectic culture of practices that now make up the expanded field of performance, and their stories, reflections and working processes collectively offer a snapshot of contemporary artistic concerns. Many of the pieces have been specially commissioned for this edition and comprise a range of written forms - scholarly, academic, creative, interviews, diary entries, autobiographical, polemical and visual. Ideal for university students and instructors, this volume's structure and global span invites readers to compare and cross-reference significant approaches outside of the constraints and simplifications of genre, encouraging cross-disciplinary understandings. For those who engage with new, live and innovative approaches to performance and the interplay of radical ideas, The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader is invaluable.

A radically urgent intervention, An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre: 1900 - 1950 uncovers the hidden Black history of this most influential of artforms. Drawing on lost archive material and digitised newspapers from the turn of the century onwards, this exciting story has been re-traced and restored to its rightful place. A vital and significant part of British cultural history between 1900 and 1950, Black performance practice was fundamental to resisting and challenging racism in the UK. Join Mayes (a Broadway- and Toronto-based Music Director) and Whitfield (a musical theatre historian and researcher) as they take readers on a journey through a historically-inconvenient and brilliant reality that has long been overlooked. Get to know the Black theatre community in London's Roaring 20s, and hear about the secret Florence Mills memorial concert they held in 1928. Acquaint yourself with Buddy Bradley, Black tap and ballet choreographer, who reshaped dance in British musicals - often to be found at Noel Coward's apartment for late-night rehearsals, such was Bradley's importance. Meet Jack Johnson, the first African American Heavyweight Boxing Champion, who toured Britain's theatres during World War 1 and brought the sounds of Chicago to places like war-weary Dundee. Discover the most prolific Black theatre practitioner you've never heard of, William Garland, who worked for 40 years across multiple continents and championed Black British performers. Marvel at performers like cabaret star Mabel Mercer, born in Stafford in 1900, who sang and conducted theatre orchestras across the UK, as well as Black Birmingham comedian Eddie Emerson, who was Garland's partner for decades. Many of their names and works have never been included in histories of the British musical - until now.

Theatrocracy is a book about the power of the theatre, how it can affect the people who experience it, and the societies within which it is embedded. It takes as its model the earliest theatrical form we possess complete plays from, the classical Greek theatre of the fifth century BCE, and offers a new approach to understanding how ancient drama operated in performance and became such an influential social, cultural, and political force, inspiring and being influenced by revolutionary developments in political engagement and citizen discourse. Key performative elements of Greek theatre are analyzed from the perspective of the cognitive sciences as embodied, live, enacted events, with new approaches to narrative, space, masks, movement, music, words, emotions, and empathy. This groundbreaking study combines research from the fields of the affective sciences - the study of human emotions - including cognitive theory, neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, psychiatry, and cognitive archaeology, with classical, theatre, and performance studies. This book revisits what Plato found so unsettling about drama - its ability to produce a theatrocracy, a "government" of spectators - and argues that this was not a negative but an essential element of Athenian theatre. It shows that Athenian drama provided a place of alterity where audiences were exposed to different viewpoints and radical perspectives. This perspective was, and is, vital in a freethinking democratic society where people are expected to vote on matters of state. In order to achieve this goal, the theatre offered a dissociative and absorbing experience that enhanced emotionality, deepened understanding, and promoted empathy. There was, and still is, an urgent imperative for theatre.

Between 1955 and 1975 music theatre became a central preoccupation for European composers digesting the consequences of the revolutionary experiments in musical language that followed the end of the Second World War. The 'new music theatre' wrought multiple, significant transformations, serving as a crucible for the experimental rethinking of theatrical traditions, artistic genres, the conventions of performance, and the composer's relation to society. This volume brings together leading specialists from across Europe to offer a new appraisal of the genre. It is structured according to six themes that investigate: the relation of new music theatre to earlier and contemporaneous theories of drama; the use of new technologies; the relation of new music theatre to progressive politics; the role of new venues and environments; the advancement of new conceptions of the performer; and the challenges that new music theatre lays down for music analysis. Contributing authors address canonical works by composers such as Berio, Birtwistle, Henze, Kagel, Ligeti, Nono, and Zimmermann, but also expand the field to figures and artistic developments not regularly represented in existing music histories. Particular attention is given to new music theatre as a site of intense exchange - between practitioners of different art forms, across national borders, and with diverse mediating institutions.

Translating Classical Plays is a selection of edited papers by J. Michael Walton published and delivered between 1997 and 2014. Of the four sections, each with a new introduction, the first two cover the history of translating classical drama into English and specific issues relating to translation for stage performance. The latter two are concerned with the three Greek tragedians, and the Greek and Roman writers of old and new comedy, ending with the hitherto unpublished text of a Platform Lecture given at the National Theatre in London comparing the plays of Plautus with Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The volume is an invaluable resource for anyone involved in staging or translating classical drama.

In setting foot on stage, every performer risks the possiblity of failure. Indeed, the very performance of any human action is inextricable from its potential not to succeed. This inherent potential has become a key critical trope in contemporary theatre, performance studies, and scholarship around visual cultures. Beyond Failure explores what it means for our understanding not just of theatrical practice but of human social and cultural activity more broadly. The essays in this volume tackle contemporary debates around the theory and poetics of failure, suggesting that in the absence of success can be found a defiance and hopefulness that points to new ways of knowing and being in the world. Beyond Failure offers a unique and engaging approach for students and practitioners interested not only in the impact of failure on the stage, but what it means for wider social and cultural debates.

A pea soda. An apple balloon. A cotton candy picnic. A magical mole. These are just a handful of examples of mimetic cuisine, a diverse set of culinary practices in which chefs and artists treat food as a means of representation. As theatricalised fine dining and the use of food in theatrical situations both grow in popularity, Alimentary Performances traces the origins and implications of food as a mimetic medium, used to imitate, represent, and assume a role in both theatrical and broader performance situations. Kristin Hunt's rich and wide-ranging account of food's growing representational stakes asks: What culinary approaches to mimesis can tell us about enduring philosophical debates around knowledge and authenticity How the dramaturgy of food within theatres connects with the developing role of theatrical cuisine in restaurant settings Ways in which these turns toward culinary mimeticism engender new histories, advance new epistemologies, and enable new modes of multisensory spectatorship and participation. This is an essential study for anyone interested in the intersections between food, theatre, and performance, from fine dining to fan culture and celebrity chefs to the drama of the cookbook.

A pea soda. An apple balloon. A cotton candy picnic. A magical mole. These are just a handful of examples of mimetic cuisine, a diverse set of culinary practices in which chefs and artists treat food as a means of representation. As theatricalised fine dining and the use of food in theatrical situations both grow in popularity, Alimentary Performances traces the origins and implications of food as a mimetic medium, used to imitate, represent, and assume a role in both theatrical and broader performance situations. Kristin Hunt's rich and wide-ranging account of food's growing representational stakes asks: What culinary approaches to mimesis can tell us about enduring philosophical debates around knowledge and authenticity How the dramaturgy of food within theatres connects with the developing role of theatrical cuisine in restaurant settings Ways in which these turns toward culinary mimeticism engender new histories, advance new epistemologies, and enable new modes of multisensory spectatorship and participation. This is an essential study for anyone interested in the intersections between food, theatre, and performance, from fine dining to fan culture and celebrity chefs to the drama of the cookbook.

"Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane" considers the works of two pioneers of performance art. Jonas (born 1936) and Pane (1939-1990) lived and worked in the United States and France respectively. Each artist worked multidisciplinarily, producing sculpture, drawings, installations, film and video in addition to live actions. Notably, Jonas and Pane have been lauded for their foundational work in performance, a field in which both of these artists blazed trails. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, "Parallel Practices" explores the trajectory of these artists' practices to reveal shared and complementary aspects, as well as to highlight the significant divergences and differences that characterize each artist's work. It includes texts by curator Dean Daderko, Elisabeth Lebovici and Anne Tronche and Barbara Clausen.

Eugenio Barba is recognized as one of the most important theatre practitioners working today. Along with the company he founded over fifty years ago, the world-acclaimed Odin Teatret, he continues to produce extraordinary theatre performances that tour the world, and his International School of Theatre Anthropology has greatly developed research into the craft of the actor. Now revised and updated, this volume reveals the background to and work of a major influence on twentieth- and twenty-first century performance. Eugenio Barba is the first book to combine: an overview of Barba's work and that of his company, Odin Teatret exploration of his writings and ideas on theatre anthropology, and his unique contribution to contemporary performance research in-depth analysis of the 2000 production of Ego Faust, performed at the International School of Theatre Anthropology a practical guide to training exercises developed by Barba and the actors in the company. 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.

Music as a Chariot offers a multidisciplinary perspective whose primary proposition is that theatre is a type of music. Understanding how music enables the theatre experience helps to shape our entire approach to the performing arts. Beginning with a discussion on the origin and nature of time, the author takes us on an evolutionary journey to discover how music, language and mimesis co-evolved, eventually coming together to produce the complex way we experience theatre. The book integrates the evolutionary neuroscience of the human brain into this journey, offering practical implications and applications for the auditory expression of this concept-namely the fundamental techniques artists use to create sound scores for theatre. With contributions from directors, playwrights, actors and designers, Music as a Chariot explores the use of music to carry ideas into the human soul-a concept that extends beyond the theatrical to include film, video gaming, dance, or anywhere art is manipulated in time.