In defiance of the alleged "death of romantic comedy," After "Happily Ever After": Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age edited by Maria San Filippo attests to rom-com's continuing vitality in new modes and forms that reimagine and rejuvenate the genre in ideologically, artistically, and commercially innovative ways. No longer the idyllic fairy tale, today's romantic comedies ponder the realities and complexities of intimacy, fortifying the genre's gift for imagining human connection through love and laughter. It has often been observed that the rom-com's "happily ever after" trope enables the genre to avoid addressing the challenges of coupled life. This volume's contributors confront how recent rom-coms contend with a "post-romantic age" of romantic disillusionment and seismically shifting emotional and relational bonds. Fifteen chapters contemplate the resurgence of the "radical romantic comedy" and uncoupling comedy, new approaches in genre hybridity and serial narrative, and how recent rom-coms deal with divisive topical issues and contemporary sexual mores from reproductive politics and marriage equality to hook-up culture and technology-enabled sex. Rom-coms remain underappreciated and underexamined-and still largely defined within Hollywood's parameters of culturally normative coupling and its persistent marginalization of racial and sexual minorities. Making the case for taking romantic comedy seriously, this volume employs critical perspectives drawn from feminist, queer, postcolonial, and race studies to critique the genre's homogeneity and social and sexual conservatism, recognizing innovative works inclusive of LGBTQ people, people of color, and the differently aged and abled. Encompassing a rich range of screen media from the last decade, After "Happily Ever After" celebrates works that disrupt and subvert rom-com fantasy and formula so as to open audience's eyes along with our hearts. This volume is intended for all readers with an interest in film, media, and gender studies.

In Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre, Richard Murphet presents a close analysis of the theatre practice of two ground-breaking artists - Richard Foreman and Jenny Kemp - active over the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century. In addition, he tracks the development of a form of 'epileptic' writing over the course of his own career as writer/director. Murphet argues that these three auteurs have developed subversive alternatives to the previously dominant forms of dramatic realism in order to re-think the relationship between theatre and reality. They write and direct their own work, and their artistic experimentation is manifest in the tension created between their content and their form. Murphet investigates how the works are made, rather than focusing upon an interpretation of their meaning. Through an examination of these artists, we gain a deeper understanding of a late modernist paradigm shift in theatre practice.

Performing Architectures offers a coherent introduction to the fields of performance and contemporary architecture, exploring the significance of architecture for performance theory and theatre and performance practice. It maps the diverse relations that exist between these disciplines and demonstrates how their aims, concerns and practices overlap through shared interests in space, action and event. Through a wide range of international examples and contributions from scholars and practitioners, it offers readers an analytical survey of current practices and equips them with the tools for analyzing site-specific and immersive theatre and performance. The essays in this volume, contributed by leading theorists and practitioners from both disciplines, focus on three key sites of encounter: * Projects: examines recent trends in architecture for performance; * Practices: looks at cross-currents in artistic practice, including spatial dramaturgies, performance architectonics and performative architectures; and * Pedagogies: considers the uses of performance in architectural education and architecture in teaching performance. The volume provides an essential introduction to the ways in which performance and architecture, as socio-spatial processes and as things made or constructed, operate as generating, shaping and steering forces in understanding and performing the other.

Volume 1 of Theater(s) and Public Sphere in a Global and Digital Society inquires the fundamental contribution that artistic and cultural forms bring to social dynamics and how these can consolidate cohabitation and create meaningfulness, in addition to fulfilling economic and regulatory needs. As symbolic forms of collective social practices, artistic and cultural forms weave the meaning of a territory, a context, and a people, but also of the generations who traverse these same cultures. These forms of meaning interact with the social imagery, mediate marginalization, transform barriers into bridges, and are the indispensable tools for any social coexistence and its continuous rethinking in everyday life. The various epistemic approaches present here, refer to sociology, theatre studies, cultural studies, psychology, economy of culture, and social statistics which observe theatre as a social phenomenon. Contributors are: Claudio Bernardi, Marco Bernardi, Massimo Bertoldi, Martina Guerinoni, Mara Nerbano, Chiara Pasanisi, Benedetta Pratelli, Roberto Prestigiacomo, Ilaria Riccioni, Daniela Salinas Frigerio, Eleonora Sparano, Emanuele Stochino, Matteo Tamborrino, Tiziana Tesauro, Katia Trifiro, Alessandro Tolomelli, and Andrea Zardi.

This is the first full-length book to provide an introduction to badhai performances throughout South Asia, examining their characteristics and relationships to differing contexts in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Badhai's repertoires of songs, dances, prayers, and comic repartee are performed by socially marginalised hijra, khwaja sira, and trans communities. They commemorate weddings, births and other celebratory heteronormative events. The form is improvisational and responds to particular contexts, but also moves across borders, including those of nation, religion, genre, and identity. This collaboratively authored book draws from anthropology, theatre and performance studies, music and sound studies, ethnomusicology, queer and transgender studies, and sustained ethnographic fieldwork to examine badhai's place-based dynamics, transcultural features, and communications across the hijrascape. This vital study explores the form's changing status and analyses these performances' layered, scalar, and sensorial practices, to extend ways of understanding hijra-khwaja sira-trans performance.

This accessible and engaging text covering sketch, sitcom and comedy drama, alongside improvisation and stand-up, brings together a panoply of tools and techniques for creating short and long-form comedy narratives for live performance, TV and online. Referencing a broad range of comedy from both sides of the Atlantic, spanning several decades and including material on contemporary internet sketches, it offers all kinds of useful advice on creating comic narratives for stage and screen: using life experience as raw material; constructing comedy worlds; creating comic characters, their relationships and interactions; structuring sketches, scenes and routines; and developing and plotting stories. The book's interviewees, from the UK and the USA, feature stand-ups, sketch comics, improvisers and TV comedy producers, and include Steve Kaplan, Hollywood comedy guru and author of The Hidden Tools of Comedy, Will Hines teacher and improviser from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and Lucy Lumsden TV producer and former Controller of Comedy Commissioning for BBC. Written by "the ideal person to nurture new talent" (The Guardian), Creating Comedy Narratives for Stage & Screen includes material you won't find anywhere else and is a stimulating resource for comedy students and their teachers, with a range and a depth that will be appreciated by even the most eclectic and multi-hyphenated writers and performers.

This wide-ranging volume explores the technical and physical aspects of voice as a craft, questioning its definitions, its historical presence, training practices and its publications. Drawing on a wealth of experience, Jane Boston presents a selection of readings that demonstrate and contextualize some of the defining moments of voice throughout history. This clear and accessible text examines the relationship between voice and aesthetics and poetics, against the backdrop of class, race and gender politics, demonstrating how vocal training has been and still is inevitably connected to such issues. Underpinned by theory, voice practitioner accounts, and cultural and historical contextualization, this comprehensive resource will be invaluable for practitioners, researchers and students of voice studies, physical theatre and theatre history.

Delinquent presenters, controversial executive pay-offs, the Jimmy Savile scandal...The BBC is one of the most successful broadcasters in the world, but its programme triumphs are often accompanied by management crises and high-profile resignations.One of the most respected figures in the broadcasting industry, Roger Mosey has taken senior roles at the BBC for more than twenty years, including as editor of Radio 4's Today programme, head of television news and director of the London 2012 Olympic coverage.Now, in Getting Out Alive, Mosey reveals the hidden underbelly of the BBC, lifting the lid on the angry tirades from politicians and spin doctors, the swirling accusations of bias from left and right alike, and the perils of provoking Margaret Thatcher.Along the way, this remarkable memoir charts the pleasures and pitfalls of life at the top of an organisation that is variously held up as a treasured British institution and cast down as a lumbering, out-of-control behemoth.Engaging, candid and very funny, Getting Out Alive is a true insider account of how the BBC works, why it succeeds and where it falls down.