In this book practitioner and researcher Louise Ann Wilson examines the expanding field of socially engaged scenography and promotes the development of scenography as a distinctive type of applied art and performance practice that seeks tangible, therapeutic, and transformative real-world outcomes. It is what Christopher Baugh calls 'scenography with purpose'. Using case studies drawn from the body of site-specific walking-performances she has created in the UK since 2011, Wilson demonstrates how she uses scenography to emplace challenging, marginalizing or 'missing' life-events into rural landscapes - creating a site of transformation - in which participants can reflect upon, re-image and re-imagine their relationship to their circumstances. Her work has addressed terminal illness and bereavement, infertility and childlessness by circumstance, and (im)mobility and memory. These works have been created on mountains, in caves, along coastlines and over beaches. Each case-study is supported by evidential material demonstrating the effects and outcomes of the performance being discussed. The book reveals Wilson's creative methodology, her application of three distinct strands of transdisciplinary research into the site/landscape, the subject/life-event, and with the people/participants affected by it. She explains the 7 'scenographic' principles she has developed, and which apply theories and aesthetics relating to land/scape art and walking and performance practices from Early Romanticism to the present day. They are underpinned by the concept of the feminine 'material' sublime, and informed by the attentive, autotopographic, therapeutic and highly scenographic use of walking and landscape found in the work of Dorothy Wordsworth and her female contemporaries. Case studies include Fissure (2011), Ghost Bird (2012), The Gathering (2014), Warnscale (2015), Mulliontide (2016), Dorothy's Room (2018) and Women's Walks to Remember: 'With memory I was there' (2018-2019).

Composer and cultural official Nicolas Nabokov (1903-78) led an unusual life even for a composer who was also a high-level diplomat. Nabokov was for nearly three decades an outstanding and far-sighted player in international cultural exchanges during the Cold War, much admired by some of the most distinguished minds of his century for the range of his interests and the breadth of his vision. Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music follows Nabokov's life through its fascinating details: a privileged Russian childhood before the Revolution; exile, first to Germany, then to France; the beginnings of a promising musical career, launched under the aegis of Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes with Ode in 1928; his twelve-year "American exile" during which he occupied several academic positions; his return to Europe after the war to participate in the denazification of Germany; his involvement in anti-Stalinist causes in the first years of the Cold War; his participation in the Congress for Cultural Freedom; his role as cultural adviser to the Mayor of Berlin and director of the Berlin Festival in the early 1960s; the resumption of his American academic and musical career in the late 1960s and 1970s. Nabokov is unique not only in that he was involved on a high level in international cultural politics, but also in that his life intersected at all times with a vast array of people within, and also well beyond, the confines of classical music. Drawing on a vast array of primary sources, Vincent Giroud's first-ever biography of Nabokov will be of interest readers interested in twentieth-century music, Russian music, Russian emigration, and the Cold War, particularly in its cultural aspects. Musicians and musicologists interested in Nabokov as a composer, or in twentieth century Russian composers in general, will find in the book information not available anywhere else.

Constituting the first comprehensive look at Ruth Maleczech's work, Jessica Brater's companion is a landmark study in innovative theatre practice, bringing together biography, critical analysis, and original interviews to establish a portrait of this Obie-award winning theatre artist. Tracing Maleczech's background, training, and influences, the volume contextualizes her work and the founding of Mabou Mines within the wider landscape of American avant-garde theatre. It considers her performances and productions, revealing both her interest in making ordinary women important onstage, and her predilection for resurrecting extraordinary women from history and finding their resonances within a contemporary theatrical context. Brater considers Maleczech's investment in redrawing the boundaries of what women are allowed to say, both on stage and off, and shows how her commitment to radical artistic and production risks has reshaped the contours of a contemporary theatrical experience. Highlights of the volume include discussion of productions such as Mabou Mines' Lear, Dead End Kids, Hajj, Lucia's Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, Red Beads, and La Divina Caricatura, as well as a close look at Maleczech's final work-in-progress, Imagining the Imaginary Invalid.

Nancy Meyers is acknowledged as the most commercially successful woman filmmaker of all time, described by Daphne Merkin in The New York Times on the release of It's Complicated as "a singular figure in Hollywood - [she] may, in fact, be the most powerful female writer-director-producer currently working". Yet Meyers remains a director who, alongside being widely dismissed by critics, has been largely absent in scholarly accounts both of contemporary Hollywood cinema, and of feminism and film. Despite Meyers' impressive track record for turning a profit (including the biggest box-office return ever achieved by a woman filmmaker at that timefor What Women Want in 2000), and a multifaceted career as a writer/producer/director dating back to her co-writing Private Benjamin in 1980, Meyers has been oddly neglected by Film Studies to date. Including Nancy Meyers in the Bloomsbury Companions to Contemporary Filmmakers rectifies this omission, giving her the kind of detailed consideration and recognition she warrants and exploring how, notwithstanding the challenges authorship holds for feminist film studies, Meyers can be situated as a skilled 'auteur'. This book proposes that Meyers' box-office success, the consistency of style and theme across her films, and the breadth of her body of work as a writer/producer/director across more than three decades at the forefront of Hollywood, (thus importantly bridging the second/third waves of feminism) make her a key contemporary US filmmaker. Structured to meet the needs of both the student and scholar, Jermyn's volume situates Meyers within this historical and critical context, exploring the distinctive qualities of her body of work, the reasons behind the pervasive resistance to it and new ways of understanding her films.

The TV series that was never made and that you ve never heard of celebrates its 40th year with an exhaustive retrospective guide! Growing from a child's game, the bizarrely-titled The Magnet Editor ran for ten years and a breathtaking 47 series. In bringing the series to life, Nick Goodman drew from 70s pop culture including Doctor Who and The New Avengers, and shared it only with his bewildered mother and childhood friends. Jo Bunsell was one such friend and soon the pair would be transported into a shared universe of preposterous and badly designed monsters and non-stop adventure with their extraordinary and strangely-named hero, Cabin Relese. Goodman and Bunsell open up their archive of materials and memories, and take you on a roller-coaster ride into their world! Magnet Memories is an episode guide, a frank, critical, incredulous and nostalgic reflection, a snapshot of childhood in the 70s and 80s... and it's possibly the most wonderfully bonkers cult TV book ever published!

The cinema of Theo Angelopoulos is celebrated as challenging the status quo. From the political films of the 1970s through to the more existential works of his later career, Vrasidis Karalis argues for a coherent and nuanced philosophy underpinning Angelopoulos' work. The political force of his films, including the classic The Travelling Players (1975), gave way to more essayistic works exploring identity, love, loss, memory and, ultimately, mortality. This development of sensibilities is charted along with the key cultural moments informing Angelopoulos' shifting thinking. From Voyage to Cythera (1984) until his last film, The Dust of Time (2009), Angelopoulos' problematic heroes in search of meaning and purpose engaged with the thinking of Plato, Mark, Heidegger, Arendt and Luckacs, both implicitly and explicitly. Theo Angelopoulos also explores the rich visual language and 'ocular poetics' of Angelopopulos' oeuvre and his mastery of communicating profundity through the everyday. Karalis argues for a reading of his work that embraces contradiction and celebrates the unsettling questions at the heart of his work.

Is there a fundamental connection between New York's Elevator Repair Service's 9-hour production of The Great Gatsby and a Kathakali performance? How can we come to appreciate the slowness of Kabuki theatre as much as the pace of the Whatsapp theatre of post-Arab Spring Turkey? Can we go beyond our own culture's contemporary definition of a 'good play' and think about the theatre in a deep and pluralistic manner? Drawing on his extensive experience working with theatre artists, students and thinkers across the globe - up to and including an hour-long audience with the Dalai Lama - playwright Abhishek Majumdar considers why we make theatre and how we see it in different parts of the world. His own work has taken him from theatre in Japan to dance companies in the Phillippines, writers in Lebanon and Palestine, theatre groups in Burkina Faso, war-torn areas like Kashmir and North Eastern India, and to China and Tibet, Argentina and Mexico. Via a far-reaching and provocative collection of essays that is informed by this wealth of experience, Majumdar explores: - how different cultures conceive theatre and how the norm of one place is the experiment of another; - the ways in which theatre across the world mirrors its socio political and philosophical climate; - how, for thousands of years, theatre has been a tool to both disrupt and to heal; - and how, even within the many differences, there are universals from which we can all learn and how theatre does cross borders Of interest to theatre makers everywhere - be they writers, actors, directors or designers - this book offers an oversight, as well as interrogation, into the place of theatre in the world today.

Theatre, Performance and Cognition introduces readers to the key debates, areas of research, and applications of the cognitive sciences to the humanities, and to theatre and performance in particular. It features the most exciting work being done at the intersection of theatre and cognitive science, containing both selected scientific studies that have been influential in the field, each introduced and contextualised by the editors, together with related scholarship from the field of theatre and performance that demonstrates some of the applications of the cognitive sciences to actor training, the rehearsal room and the realm of performance more generally. The three sections consider the principal areas of research and application in this interdisciplinary field, starting with a focus on language and meaning-making in which Shakespeare's work and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia are considered. In the second part which focuses on the body, chapters consider applications for actor and dance training, while the third part focuses on dynamic ecologies, of which the body is a part.

Analysis of improvisation as a compositional practice in the Commedia dell'Arte and related traditions from the Renaissance to the 21st century. Domenic Pietropaolo takes textual material from the stage traditions of Italy, France, Germany and England, and covers comedic drama, dance, pantomime and dramatic theory, and more. He shines a light onto 'the signs of improvised communication'. The book is comprehensive in its analysis of improvised dramatic art across theatrical genres, and is multimodal in looking at the spoken word, gestural and non-verbal signs. The book focusses on dramatic text as well as: - The semiotics of stage discourse, including semantic, syntactic and pragmatic aspects of sign production - The physical and material conditions of sign-production including biomechanical limitations of masks and costumes. Semiotics and Pragmatics of Stage Improvisation is the product of an entire career spent researching the semiotics of the stage and it is essential reading for semioticians and students of performance arts.

An eye for an eye. It's very simple. You choose your homeland like a hyena picking and choosing where he steals his next meal from. Scavenger. Yes you grovel to the feet of Mengistu and when his people spit at you and kick you from the bowl you scuttle across the border. Scavenger. As a violent civil war rages back home in Ethiopia, teenager Alem and his father are in a bed and breakfast in Berkshire. It's his best holiday ever. The next morning his father is gone and has left a note explaining that he and his mother want to protect Alem from the war. This strange grey country of England is now his home. On his own, and in the hands of the social services and the Refugee Council, Alem lives from letter to letter, waiting to hear something from his father. Then he meets car-obsessed Mustapha, the lovely 'out-of-your-league' Ruth and dangerous Sweeney - three unexpected allies who spur him on in his fight to be seen as more than just the Refugee Boy. Lemn Sissay's remarkable stage adaptation of Benjamin Zephaniah's bestselling novel is published here in the Methuen Drama Student Edition series, featuring commentary & notes by Professor Lynette Goddard (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK) that help the student unpack the play's themes, language, structure and production history to date.

This edited book documents practices of learning-oriented language assessment through practitioner research and research syntheses. Learning-oriented language assessment refers to language assessment strategies that capitalise on learner differences and their relationships with the learning environments. In other words, learners are placed at the centre of the assessment process and its outcomes. The book features 17 chapters on learning-oriented language assessment practices in China, Brazil, Turkey, Norway, UK, Canada, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Spain. Chapters include teachers' reflections and practical suggestions. This book will appeal to researchers, teacher educators, and language teachers who are interested in advancing research and practice of learning-oriented language assessment.

Place, Setting, Perspective examines the films of the Italian filmmaker, Nanni Moretti, from a fresh viewpoint, employing the increasingly significant research area of space within a filmic text. The book is conceived with the awareness that space cannot be studied only in aesthetic or narrative terms: social, political, and cultural aspects of narrated spaces are equally important if a thorough appraisal is to be achieved of an oeuvre such as Moretti's, which is profoundly associated with socio-political commentary and analysis. After an exploration of various existing frameworks of narrative space in film, the book offers a particular definition of the term based on the notions of Place, Setting, and Perspective. Place relates to the physical aspect of narrative space and specifically involves cityscapes, landscapes, interiors, and exteriors in the real world. Setting concerns genre characteristics of narrative space, notably its differentiated use in melodrama, detective stories, fantasy narratives, and gender based scenarios. Perspective encompasses the point of view taken optically by the camera which supports the standpoint of Moretti's personal philosophy expressed through the aesthetic aspects which he employs to create narrative space. The study is based on a close textual analysis of Moretti's eleven major feature films to date, using the formal film language of mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound. The aim is to show how Moretti selects, organizes, constructs, assembles, and manipulates the many elements of narrative space into an entire work of art, to enable meanings and pleasures for the spectator.