Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? shocked audiences and critics alike with its assault on decorum. At base though, the play is simply a love story: an examination of a long-wedded life, filled with the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and pain that accompany the passing of many years together. While the ethos of the play is tragicomic, it is the anachronistic, melodramatic secret object-the nonexistent "son"-that upends the audience's sense of theatrical normalcy. The mean and vulgar bile spewed among the characters hides these elements, making it feel like something entirely "new." As Michael Y. Bennett reveals, the play is the same emperor, just wearing new clothes. In short, it is straight out of the grand tradition of living room drama: Ibsen, Chekhov, Glaspell, Hellmann, O'Neill, Wilder, Miller, Williams, and Albee.

Expanding the Space for Improvisation Pedagogy in Music is a critical, research-based anthology exploring improvisation in music pedagogy. The book broadens the understanding of the potentials and possibilities for improvisation in a variety of music education contexts and stimulates the development of knowledge and reflection on improvisation. The book critically examines the challenges, cultural values, aims and methods involved in improvisation pedagogy. Written by international contributors representing a variety of musical genres and research methodologies, it takes a transdisciplinary approach and outlines a way ahead for improvisation pedagogy and research, by providing a space for the exchange of knowledge and critique. This book will be of great interest to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students in the fields of arts education, music education, improvisation, music psychology, musicology, ethnomusicology, artistic research and community music. It will also appeal to music educators on all levels in the field of music education and music psychology.

Adrian Howells (1962-2014) was one of the world's leading figures in the field of one-to-one performance practice - the act of staging an event for one audience participant at a time. Developed over more than a decade, Howells's award-winning work demonstrated not only his enduring commitment to this genre of performance, but also his determination to find new challenges and innovations in performance art, 'intimate theatre' and socially engaged art. It's All Allowed, edited by Deirdre Heddon and Dominic Johnson, is the first book devoted to Howells's remarkable achievements and legacy. Contributors here testify to the methodological, thematic and historiographical challenges posed by Howells' performances. Citing his permissive mantra as its title, It's All Allowed includes new writing from leading scholars and artists, as well as writing by Howells himself, an extensive interview, scores and visual materials, which together reveal new insight into Howells's groundbreaking process.

What is 'performance drawing'? When does a drawing turn into a performance? Is the act of drawing in itself a performative process, whether a viewer is present or not? Through conversation, interviews and essays, the authors illuminate these questions, and what it might mean to perform, and what it might mean to draw, in a diverse and expressive contemporary practice since 1945. The term 'performance drawing' first appeared in the subtitle of Catherine de Zegher's Drawing Papers 20: Performance Drawings, in particular with reference to Alison Knowles and Elena del Rivero. In this book, it is used as a trope, and a thread of thinking, to describe a process dedicated to broadening the field of drawing through resourceful practices and cross-disciplinary influence. Featuring a wide range of international artists, this book presents pioneering practitioners, alongside current and emerging artists. The combination of experiences and disciplines in the expanded field has established a vibrant art movement that has been progressively burgeoning in the last few years. The Introduction contextualises the background and identifies contemporary approaches to performance drawing. As a way to embrace the different voices and various lenses in producing this book, the authors combine individual perspectives and critical methodology in the five chapters. While embedded in ephemerality and immediacy, the themes encompass body and energy, time and motion, light and space, imagined and observed, demonstrating how drawing can act as a performative tool. The dynamic interaction leads to a collective understanding of the term, performance drawing, and addresses the key developments and future directions of this applied drawing process.

Twenty-five years after the publication of A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, the distinguished critic and arts historian Richard Kostelanetz returns to his favorite subject for a third edition. Rewriting earlier entries, adding hundreds of new ones, Kostelanetz provides intelligence and information unavailable anywhere else, no less in print than online, about a wealth of subjects and individuals. Focused upon what is truly innovative and excellent, he ranges widely with insight and surprise, including appreciations of artistic athletes such as Muhammad Ali, Johan Cruyff, and the Harlem Globetrotters and such collective creations as Las Vegas and his native New York City. Continuing the traditions of cheeky high-style Dictionarysts, honoring Samuel Johnson and Nicolas Slonimsky (both with individual entries), Kostelanetz offers a "reference book" to be enjoyed not only in bits and chunks, but continuously as one of the dozen books someone would take if they planned to be stranded on a desert isle.

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

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.

Bertolt Brecht's methods of collective experimentation, and his unique framing of the theatrical event as a forum for change, placed him among the most important contributors to the theory and practice of theatre. His work continues to have a significant impact on performance practitioners, critics and teachers alike. Now revised and reissued, this book combines: an overview of the key periods in Brecht's life and work a clear explanation of his key theories, including the renowned ideas of Gestus and Verfremdung an account of his groundbreaking 1954 production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle an in-depth analysis of his practical exercises and rehearsal methods. As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners are an invaluable resource for students and scholars.

This newly-updated second edition explores Pina Bausch's work and methods by combining interviews, first-hand accounts, and practical exercises from her developmental process for students of both dance and theatre. This comprehensive overview of her work offers new and exciting insight into the theatrical approach of a singular performance practitioner. This is an essential introduction to the life and work of one of the most significant choreographers/directors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 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.

The Radical in Performance investigates the crisis in contemporary theatre, and celebrates the subversive in performance. It is the first full-length study to explore the link between a western theatre which, says Kershaw, is largely outdated and the blossoming of postmodern performance, much of which has a genuinely radical edge. In staying focused on the period between Brecht and Baudrillard, modernity and postmodernism, Baz Kershaw identifies crucial resources for the revitalisation of the radical across a wide spectrum of cultural practices.
This is a timely, necessary and rigorous book. It will be a compelling read for anyone searching for a critical catalyst for new ways of viewing and practising cultural politics.

In comparison with Literary Studies and Media and Film Studies, the disciplines of Theatre and Performance, with their strong anthropocentric heritage, have been relatively slow in responding to such things as climate change, species extinction, or pollution and toxicity etc. However, in the wake of recent work on animals, cyborgs, and objects, as well as publications with a specific focus on ecology and environment, there are real signs that theatre and performance scholars are beginning to make their own contribution to the Environmental Humanities. But if theatre critics are engaged in new forms of ecocritical analysis, it is worth posing a pertinent question from the outset: namely, what can theatre do ecologically? In this book, leading researchers and practitioners seek to answer that question from a number of perspectives and with diverse methodologies. Topics include: reflections on rehearsal processes, scores for performance, site-based interventions, ideas of conflict, investigations of temporality and time ecology, ecospectating, and the experience of disappointment. Taken together, these essays make an important intervention in the emergent (inter)disciplines of the Environmental Humanities and further our understanding of the ecological potential of Theatre and Performance in ways that are cautious, tentative but also generative. This book was originally published as a special issue of Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism.

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.

Master director, teacher, and theorist, Jerzy Grotowski's work extended well beyond the conventional limits of performance. Now revised and reissued, this book combines: an overview of Grotowski's life and the distinct phases of his work an analysis of his key ideas a consideration of his role as director of the renowned Polish Laboratory Theatre a series of practical exercises offering an introduction to the principles underlying Grotowski's working methods. 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.

Over the last forty years, French director Ariane Mnouchkine and her theater collective, Le Theatre du Soleil, have devised a form of research and creation that is both engaged with contemporary history and committed to reinvigorating theater by focusing on the actor. Now revised and reissued, this volume combines: an overview of Mnouchkine's life, work and theatrical influences an exploration of her key ideas on theater and the creative process analysis of key productions, including her early and groundbreaking environmental political piece, 1789, and the later Asian-inspired play penned by Helene Cixous, Drums on the Dam. practical exercises, including tips on mask work. As a first step toward critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today's student.

As individuals incorporate new forms of media into their daily routines, these media transform individuals' engagement with networks of heterogeneous actors. Using the concept of media practices, this volume looks at processes of social and political transformation in diverse regions of the world to argue that media change and social change converge on a redefinition of the relations of individuals to larger collective bodies. To this end, contributors examine new collective actors emerging in the public arena through digital media or established actors adjusting to a diversified communication environment. The book offers an important contribution to a vibrant, transdisciplinary, and international field of research emerging at the intersections of communication, performance and social movement studies.

Praise for the First Edition: 'A major contribution to performance studies. If cynicism and political quietism have quelled your impulse to rage against this sorry state of affairs, Bogad demonstrates, with wit and verve, that it is possible to expose the sham and, through a variety of performative tactics, make a meaningful contribution to democracy.' Modern Drama 'A compelling and urgent read. Bogad's passion for the topic reminds the reader of the exhilaration of live performance and the importance of engagement in democratic life.' Theatre Journal 'Delightfully written and wonderfully provocative ... Valuable reading for any scholar of social movements.' Mobilization 'As a guide to both theory and action, it is insightful, entertaining and indispensable.' Andrew Boyd, Wrangler-in-Chief, Beautiful Trouble 'Beautifully contextualized within social movement theory, this book enlivens the debate about performative interventions into power.'Jan Cohen-Cruz, Editor, Public, A Journal of Imagining America 'Electoral Guerrilla Theatre deals a refreshing wild card in the repertoire of resistance.' Baz Kershaw, Emeritus Professor, University of Warwick, and author of The Radical In Performance. In liberal democracies across the globe, where the right to vote is framed as both civil right and civic duty, disillusioned creative activists run for public office on satiric, ironic and iconoclastic platforms. With little intention of "winning" in the conventional sense, they use drag, camp and stand-up comedy to undermine the legitimacy of their opponents and sometimes the electoral system itself. This revised and updated edition of Electoral Guerrilla Theatre explores the phenomenon of the satirical election campaign, and questions the purpose of such public political performances. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research, this is an entertaining and illuminating read that will be invaluable to students and scholars working across a variety of disciplines, including performance studies, the social sciences, cultural studies and politics. New case studies for this edition include: Reverend Billy's run for Mayor of New York City in 2009; Stephen Colbert's run for President in 2012; Candidates including Superbarrio, the Best Party, Antanas Mockus, and Einstein the Dog.

Stunningly beautiful, deeply puzzling, profoundly moving or intensely unsettling - performance art can evoke a wide variety of responses. In this important and richly illustrated book, Catherine Wood, one of the world's leading curators and writers on the subject, provides the broadest and most up-to-date survey published in recent years. Wood proposes performance not as a genre of art separate from object-making but as an attitude that has infiltrated the entire terrain of contemporary art. From the musical-theatricals of Marvin-Gaye Chetwynd to the public encounters created by Tino Seghal and the social activism of Tania Bruguera, a hugely divergent set of practices has emerged in the past twenty to thirty years which embrace the worlds of sculpture and painting, spectacle and protest. Examining in turn individual, social and object-based approaches in the field, Wood first examines the influential performance art of the 1960s to 1980s: the body art of the Viennese actionists; the raw performances of Yoko Ono and Chris Burden; and the experiments of the Japanese Gutai group among others. She then explores how these sources have been revisited, reformed or rejected by contemporary artists in the twenty-first century. This impressive book encompasses international artists who fall outside the traditional European and North American focus, giving the reader the broadest and most up-to-date insight into the subject yet published.

Praise for the First Edition: 'A major contribution to performance studies. If cynicism and political quietism have quelled your impulse to rage against this sorry state of affairs, Bogad demonstrates, with wit and verve, that it is possible to expose the sham and, through a variety of performative tactics, make a meaningful contribution to democracy.' Modern Drama 'A compelling and urgent read. Bogad's passion for the topic reminds the reader of the exhilaration of live performance and the importance of engagement in democratic life.' Theatre Journal 'Delightfully written and wonderfully provocative ... Valuable reading for any scholar of social movements.' Mobilization 'As a guide to both theory and action, it is insightful, entertaining and indispensable.' Andrew Boyd, Wrangler-in-Chief, Beautiful Trouble 'Beautifully contextualized within social movement theory, this book enlivens the debate about performative interventions into power.'Jan Cohen-Cruz, Editor, Public, A Journal of Imagining America 'Electoral Guerrilla Theatre deals a refreshing wild card in the repertoire of resistance.' Baz Kershaw, Emeritus Professor, University of Warwick, and author of The Radical In Performance. In liberal democracies across the globe, where the right to vote is framed as both civil right and civic duty, disillusioned creative activists run for public office on satiric, ironic and iconoclastic platforms. With little intention of "winning" in the conventional sense, they use drag, camp and stand-up comedy to undermine the legitimacy of their opponents and sometimes the electoral system itself. This revised and updated edition of Electoral Guerrilla Theatre explores the phenomenon of the satirical election campaign, and questions the purpose of such public political performances. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research, this is an entertaining and illuminating read that will be invaluable to students and scholars working across a variety of disciplines, including performance studies, the social sciences, cultural studies and politics. New case studies for this edition include: Reverend Billy's run for Mayor of New York City in 2009; Stephen Colbert's run for President in 2012; Candidates including Superbarrio, the Best Party, Antanas Mockus, and Einstein the Dog.

Ian Wilkie contends that comic acting is a distinct art form, and as such demands a unique skillset. By exploring the ways in which performance choices and improvised moments can work in conjunction with texts themselves, Performing in Comedy offers an indispensable practical tool for enhancing comic performance. This volume is a must-read for any actors, directors or students who work with comic texts. Wilkie synthesises theories and principles of comedy with practical tips, and re-evaluates the ways in which these ideas can be used by the performer. Most importantly, these skills - timing, focus, awareness - are teachable rather than being innate talents. Exercises, interviews and guides to further resources enhance this comprehensive exploration of comic acting.

There are over 150 BFA and MFA acting programs in the US today, nearly all of which claim to prepare students for theatre careers. Peter Zazzali contends that the curricula of these courses represent an ethos that is as outdated as it is limited, given today's shrinking job market for stage actors. Acting in the Academy traces the history of actor training in universities to make the case for a move beyond standard courses in voice and speech, movement, or performance, to develop an entrepreneurial model that motivates and encourages students to create their own employment opportunities. This book answers questions such as: How has the League of Professional Theatre Training Programs shaped actor training in the US? How have training programmes and the acting profession developed in relation to one another? What impact have these developments had on American acting as an art form? Acting in the Academy calls for a reconceptualization of actor training the US, and looks to newly empower students of performance with a fresh, original perspective on their professional development.

Explores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan tracks instances and meanings of deadpan-a vaudeville term meaning "dead face"-across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. Beginning with the expressionless faces of mid-twentieth-century documentary photography and proceeding to early twenty-first-century drama, this project examines performances of blackness's deadpan aesthetic within and beyond black embodiments, including Young Jean Lee's The Shipment and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Neighbors, as well as Buster Keaton's signature character and Steve McQueen's restitution of the former's legacy within the continuum of Black cultural production. Through this varied archive, Post reveals how deadpan aesthetics function in and between opacity and fugitivity, minimalism and saturation, excess and insensibility.

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.

Beginning with Richard Drew's controversial photograph of a man falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, Learning How to Fall investigates the changing relationship between world events and their subsequent documentation, asking: Does the mediatization of the event overwhelm the fact of the event itself? How does the mode by which information is disseminated alter the way in which we perceive such information? How does this impact upon our memory of an event? T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko posits contemporary art and performance as not only a stylized re-envisioning of daily life but, inversely, as a viable means by which one might experience and process real-world political and social events. This approach combines two concurrent and contradictory trends in aesthetics, narrative, and dramaturgy: the dramatization of real-world events so as to broaden the commercial appeal of those events in both mainstream and alternative media, and the establishment of a more holistic relationship between politically and aesthetically motivated modes of disseminating and processing information. By presenting engaging and diverse case studies from both the art world and popular culture - including Aliza Shvarts's censored senior thesis at Yale University, Kerry Skarbakka's provocative photographs of falling, Didier Morelli's crawl through Toronto, and Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom - Learning How to Fall creates a new understanding of the relationship between the event and its documentation, where even the truth of an event might be called into question.

Improvisation is a performance practice that animates and activates diverse energies of inspiration, critique, and invention. In recent years it has coalesced into an exciting and innovative new field of interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry, becoming a cornerstone of both practical and theoretical approaches to performance."

The Improvisation Studies Reader" draws together the works of key artists and thinkers from a range of disciplines, including theatre, music, literature, film, and dance. Divided by keywords into eight sections, this book bridges the gaps between these fields. The book includes case studies, exercises, graphic scores and poems in order to produce a teaching and research resource that identifies central themes in improvisation studies. The sections include:

• Listening
• Trust/Risk
• Flow
• Dissonance
• Responsibility
• Liveness
• Surprise
• Hope

Each section of the Reader is introduced by a newly commissioned think piece by a key figure in the field, which opens up research questions reflecting on the keyword in question.

By placing key theoretical and classic texts in conversation with cutting-edge research and artists statements, this book answers the urgent questions facing improvising artists and theorists in the mediatized Twenty-First Century. "