Women Writing and Directing in the USA: A Stage of Our Own features interviews with some of the most successful theatre artists currently working on and off Broadway and beyond. The book provides an insight on what it means and what it takes to be a successful female-identifying playwright and director in the USA, where the professional theatrical landscape is still mostly dominated by straight white men. The interviews explore a wide range of themes, including if and how the artists' female perspective influenced their art, the social and cultural significance of their work, and how theatre and women working in theatre can participate in awakening greater social awareness. Readers will learn about some of the most current and relevant American theatre artists, such as Young Jean Lee, Pam MacKinnon, Dominique Morisseau, Rachel Chavkin, and Martyna Majok. Written for students in directing and playwriting courses, Women Writing and Directing in the USA: A Stage of Our Own features inspirational and informative stories that will help young theatre artists find and pursue their artistic voices.

Stays and Corsets: Historical Patterns Translated for the Modern Body goes a step beyond traditional historical costuming texts by not only providing you with historical pattern diagrams and information, but by showing you how to adapt these patterns to the contemporary body shape. Using her original pattern-drafting system, author Mandy Barrington will show you how to draft a historical pattern for a modern body shape, while still retaining an accurate historical silhouette. Each pattern has been generated from an original stay, corset, or pattern taken from a historical garment. The instructions to follow these new patterns are designed to accommodate any size of female figure, allowing you to avoid extremely difficult, time consuming, and inaccurate historical pattern re-sizing Requiring only basic prior knowledge of pattern drafting, all calculations have been worked out for the costume maker and are provided in simple tables accompanied by easy-to-read, step-by-step diagrams that clearly show how the historical pattern is plotted onto the female basic block, coupled with photographs of the constructed stays and corsets.

The Art of Light on Stage is the first history of theatre lighting design to bring the story right up to date. In this extraordinary volume, award-winning designer Yaron Abulafia explores the poetics of light, charting the evolution of lighting design against the background of contemporary performance. The book looks at the material and the conceptual; the technological and the transcendental. Never before has theatre design been so vividly and excitingly illuminated. The book examines the evolution of lighting design in contemporary theatre through an exploration of two fundamental issues: 1. What gave rise to the new directions in lighting design in contemporary theatre? 2. How can these new directions be viewed within the context of lighting design history? The study then focuses on the phenomenological and semiotic aspects of the medium for light - the role of light as a performer, as the medium of visual perception and as a stimulus for imaginative representations - in selected contemporary theatre productions by Robert Wilson, Romeo Castellucci, Heiner Goebbels, Jossi Wieler and David Zinder. This ground-breaking book will be required reading for anyone concerned with the future of performance.

How do you develop the craft and skills of stage management for today's theatre industry? And how can these same skills be applied in a variety of entertainment settings to help you develop a rewarding and successful career? Drawing on his diverse experience working with companies from across the performing arts spectrum in venues from the Hollywood Bowl to the Barbican Centre in London, Michael Vitale offers a practical resource on the art of stage management for new and established stage managers. Besides providing detailed coverage of the role within theatre, the book uniquely explores the field of stage management in numerous branches of the entertainment industry. From theatre, opera, and theme parks, to cruise ships, special events, and dance, stage managers are an integral part of keeping productions running, and this book offers guidance on each distinct area to equip you for a varied and successful career. Written with candour and filled with real-world examples, the book examines the nuts and bolts of the job at each stage of the production process: from preproduction, room rehearsal, technical rehearsal, through to running the show. Vitale considers the skills needed to work with a myriad of different people, explores the traits of a successful stage manager, and helps you to hone and evaluate your own practice. Whether you are exploring the field for the first time or are a veteran looking to diversify your resume, Introduction to the Art of Stage Management will provide insight, practical information, and useful tips to help along the way. An accompanying Companion Website features a range of time-saving templates and forms, such as schedule templates and scene samples. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/introduction-to-the-art-of-stage-management-9781474257190/

Focused on the contemporary Anglophone adoption from the 1960s onwards, Beyond Scenography explores the porous state of contemporary theatre-making to argue a critical distinction between scenography (as a crafting of place orientation) and scenographics (that which orientate acts of worlding, of staging). With sections on installation art and gardening as well as marketing and placemaking, this book is an argument for what scenography does: how assemblages of scenographic traits orientate, situate, and shape staged events. Established stage orthodoxies are revisited - including the symbiosis of stage and scene and the aesthetic ideology of 'the scenic' - to propose how scenographics are formative to all staged events. Consequently, one of the conclusions of this book is that there is no theatre practice without scenography, no stages without scenographics. Beyond Scenography offers a manifesto for a renewed theory of scenographic practice for the student and professional theatrical designer.

This well-established and respected directory supports actors in their training and search for work in theatre, film, TV, radio and comedy. It is the only directory to provide detailed information for each listing and specific advice on how to approach companies and individuals, saving hours of further research. From agents and casting directors to producing theatres, showreel companies, photographers and much more, this essential reference book editorially selects only the most relevant and reputable contacts for the actor. Actors' and Performers' Yearbook 2022 features: * 4 newly commissioned interviews conducted by Polly Bennett and Joan Iyiola (co-founders of The Mono Box) with theatre industry professionals including Cherrelle Skeete, Hazel Holder, Ned Bennett and Tom Ross Williams * a new foreword by Polly Bennett With the listings updated every year, the Actors' and Performers' Yearbook continues to be the go-to guide for help with auditions, interviews and securing/sustaining work within the industry. Covering training and working in theatre, film, radio, TV and comedy, it contains invaluable resources such as a casting calendar and articles on a range of topics from your social media profile to what drama schools are looking for to financial and tax issues. An invaluable professional tool that anyone working in the industry will benefit from.

The main purpose of this volume is to look into a wide spectrum of artistic ventures which cross boundaries and challenge habitual thinking, consequently involving an element of provocation. While it is true that not all great art is provocative, the most memorable artefacts are these which have confounded our aesthetic expectations or stirred our moral imagination. However, as the turn of the millennium witnessed ever more shocking artistic gestures of provocation, the question arises if there are any limits to artistic freedom. The essays collected in this book offer a truly interdisciplinary perspective and deal with creative acts of transgression from a broad range of fields: literature, theatre, visual art, film, anthropology, and others. This volume will appeal to readers interested in artistic and academic pursuits that are subversive and irreverent.

"Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama" reimagines the content and continuities of theater history and exposes underlying dialogues between "home and homelessness, belonging and exile"--a century-long struggle with the meaning and power of place, which the author terms "geopathology." By reading canonical works in conjunction with contemporary ones, Chaudhuri charts the evolution of a dramatic paradigm with profound theatrical and thematic implications.
Chaudhuri starts with a discussion of a "poetics of exile" in early modern drama, where the figure of home is constructed as a locus of two conflicting impulses: the desire to find a stable site for individual identity and the desire to deterritorialize the self. By mid-century, she argues, a new discourse of "failed homecoming" begins to displace this geopathic model and replace the poetics of exile with a grim anti-poetics of immigration. She then employs postmodern and postcolonial theories of place and culture to define the emerging multiculturalism as a creative reworking of the figures of home, homecoming, homelessness, immigration and exile.
"This is a book of real originality. Its treatment of space in modern drama is elegant and powerful. . . ." --William B. Worthen, Northwestern University
"Staging Place is a powerfully written book, deft in its handling of familiar and unfamiliar plays alike and eclectic in its use of theatrical sources." --"Essays in Theatre/ etudes theatrales"
"This sophisticated and well-written study for graduate students and their teachers explores modern drama's preoccupation with the seemingly irreconcilable discontinuities between the notions of home and homelessness, belonging andexile. . . . The readings of individual plays are fresh and invigorating. . . ." --"Choice"
Una Chaudhuri is Associate Professor of English, New York University.

This comprehensive guide to achieving success in the exciting and imaginative world of audio performance - including radio, voice-overs, commercials, live theater, and more - provides all the information that radio and audio novices need to get started and brush up on their skills. Topics covered in this title include: microphone acting techniques; tips for creating convincing vocal effects; writing tips for audio theater; ideas for creating and manipulating emotion through sound; beginning and intermediate level tips for directors; and, an extensive list of suggestions for creating frequently requested sound effects.

This book uses digital media theory to explore contemporary understandings of expanded scenography as spatial practice. It surveys and analyses a selection of ground-breaking, experimental digital media performances that comprise a genealogy spanning the last 30 years, in order to show how the arrival of digital technologies have profoundly transformed performance practice. Performances are selected based on their ability to elicit the unique specificities of digital media in new and original ways, thereby exposing both the richness and shortcomings of digital culture. O'Dwyer argues that contemporary scenography is largely propelled by and dependent on digital technologies and represents a rich, fertile domain, where unbridled creativity can explore new techniques and challenge the limits of knowledge. The 30-year genealogy includes works by Troika Ranch, Stelarc, Klaus Obermaier, Chunky Moves, Onion Lab and Blast Theory. In addition to applying a broad scope of performance analysis and aesthetic theory, the work includes artists' interviews and opinions. The volume opens important aesthetic, philosophical and socio-political themes in order to highlight the impact of digital technologies on scenographic practice and the blossoming of experimental interdisciplinarity. Ultimately, the book is an exploration of how evolutionary leaps in technology contribute to how humans think, act, make work, engage one another, and therefore construct meaning and identity.

This book is a compendium of texts by international authors which reflect on Tadeusz Kantor's art in a broad range of contexts. The studies include works of prominent art historians, theatrologists and artists. The present revisiting of Kantor's artistic oeuvre reflects a contemporary historiographic approach. The authors place value on individual memory and consider contemporary art outside the traditional boundaries of particular artistic genres. The studies employ the latest strategies for researching theatrical performance as autonomous statements, without a literary anchor. Thanks to this approach, the eschatological and historical issues, crucial to the sphere of reference of Kantor's Theatre of Death, have acquired a new presence - as art that liberates thinking in the here-and-now.

Too often directors and stage designers approach the architectural layout of theatres as obstructive to the creative process. Condee's book teaches theater professionals to work creatively within even the most restrictive theatrical space and transform it into an asset rather than an obstacle. Condee has interviewed hundreds of prominent American and British directors, designers, and actors, and provides photographs and groundplans of major American theatres. Each chapter tackles a different set of problems, offering thoughtful solutions to common obstacles. Theatrical Space is not only a useful textbook for students of theatre, but also a valuable resource for all directors and designers, both young and experienced. Paperback edition available April 2002. Cloth version previously published in 1995.

Now in its Third Edition, Scenic Art for the Theatre: History, Tools and Techniques continues to be the most trusted source for both student and professional scenic artists. With new information on scenic design using Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and other digital imaging softwares this test expands to offer the developing artist more step-by-step instuction and more practical techniques for work in the field. New to this Edition: * material about dealing with digitally printed drops, coverings, etc. * more step-by-step illustrations and descriptions of common techniques and of examples showing a variety of techniques to produce a finished product * all updated information/techniques

Why are so many women still not properly listened to? Why do they sometimes feel that they're less interesting than they are? Why do they often rush when they speak? Why do some women feel the pressure to sound like little girls? From one of the world's leading experts on the voice comes this call to arms for women to reclaim their voices. Using elements of experience and practice from her prolific career, Patsy Rodenburg examines these questions, and many more, to decipher what lies at the heart of female empowerment. From the age of four, Rodenburg knew that she found communication difficult. Her struggle with her own voice set her on the journey that led her to discover her vocation. She has spent her life re-finding and re-empowering voices, particularly the lost voices of women. Watching her highly intelligent working-class mother and grandmother ignored and often silenced gave her the insight to investigate why that was and how to help women overcome this centuries-old issue. With warmth and humour, Rodenburg interrogates Shakespeare's texts and his presentation of female characters; develops the notion of rhetoric in relation to the female voice; and applies concepts explored in her previous books, including The Three Circles of Energy. And, perhaps most crucially, through arguing that power and voice are directly linked to breath, Rodenburg makes the case that Western society's oppression of women has diminished their natural ability to breathe. Exploring the female voice through practical exercises and stories from the front line, as well as profoundly personal and formative experiences from her own life, Rodenburg defines the art of accessing the voice within and reclaiming the woman's right to speak.

Scenic effects involving rotating turntables, tracking stage wagons, and the vertical movement of curtains and painted drops have become common in both Broadway and Regional theatre productions. The machines that drive these effects range from small pneumatic cylinders pushing loads of a few pounds an inch or two, to 40 horsepower winches running multi-ton scenery at speeds 6 feet per second or more. Usually this machinery is designed by theatre technicians specifically for a particular show's effect. Compared to general industry, this design process is short, often only a few days long, it is done by one person, design teams are rare, and it is done in the absence of reference material specifically addressing the issues involved. The main goal of this book is to remedy this last situation.
Mechanical Design for the Stage will be a reference for you that will:
* provide the basic engineering formulas needed to predict the forces, torques, speeds, and power required by a given move
* give a technician a design process to follow which will direct their work from general concepts to specific detail as a design evolves, and
* show many examples of traditional stage machinery designs.
The book's emphasis will be on following standard engineering design and construction practices, and developing machines that are functional, efficient to build, easily maintained, and safe to use.
* provides the basic engineering formulas needed to predict the forces torques, speeds, and power required by a given move
* describes the most common power transmission components used in stage
machines: roller chain, cable drums, bearings, gear reducers, etc.
* gives a technician adesign process to follow which will direct their work from general concepts to specific detail as a design evolves
* shows many examples of traditional stage machinery designs

By casting designers as authors, cultural critics, activists, entrepreneurs, and global cartographers, Essin tells a story about scenic images on the page, stage, and beyond that helped American audiences see the everyday landscapes and exotic destinations from a modern perspective.

Take Stage! is the first comprehensive "how-to" book for lesbians wanting to produce or direct lesbian theatre. Controversial and anecdotal, Take Stage! is written for the lesbian with no previous experience with theatre or lesbian organization. In addition to chapters on auditioning, rehearsals, selecting the script, booking space, and assembling a staff, the book includes chapters on issues of special interest to lesbians. Take Stage! includes information on how to challenge the "isms"-lookism, racism, classism, ageism, and other prejudices with which lesbian culture is currently engaged. It also looks at problems of accountability in non-hierarchal structures, boundary-setting among all-volunteer staffs, sabotage via hidden agendas or disassociative behaviors, horizontal hostility, and internalized homophobia. The appendix contains sample contracts, audition forms, light plots, budgets, and schedules. From the decision to produce the play to opening night and touring, Take Stage! covers all the bases and provides a healthy dose of moral support.

This book explores the development of Robert Lepage's distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984-1994) and middle (1995-2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect on shaping his aesthetic and his professional trajectory. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage's productions. Productions discussed include The Dragon's Trilogy, Needles and Opium, and The Far Side of the Moon. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage's original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the early 21st century. -- .

Behind the scenes of New York City's Great White Way, virtuosos of stagecraft have built the scenery, costumes, lights, and other components of theatrical productions for more than a hundred years. But like a good magician who refuses to reveal secrets, they have left few clues about their work. "Blue-Collar Broadway" recovers the history of those people and the neighborhood in which their undersung labor occurred.Timothy R. White begins his history of the theater industry with the dispersed pre-Broadway era, when components such as costumes, lights, and scenery were built and stored nationwide. Subsequently, the majority of backstage operations and storage were consolidated in New York City during what is now known as the golden age of musical theater. Toward the latter half of the twentieth century, decentralization and deindustrialization brought the emergence of nationally distributed regional theaters and performing arts centers. The resulting collapse of New York's theater craft economy rocked the theater district, leaving abandoned buildings and criminal activity in the place of studios and workshops. But new technologies ushered in a new age of tourism and business for the area. The Broadway we know today is a global destination and a glittering showroom for vetted products.Featuring case studies of iconic productions such as "Oklahoma " (1943) and "Evita" (1979), and an exploration of the craftwork of radio, television, and film production around Times Square, "Blue-Collar Broadway" tells a rich story of the history of craft and industry in American theater nationwide. In addition, White examines the role of theater in urban deindustrialization and in the revival of downtowns throughout the Sunbelt.

Skilful lighting involves a subtle blend of systematic mechanics and a sensitive visual imagination. It requires anticipation, perceptiveness, patience and know-how. But learning through practice alone can take a great deal of time. This book is a distillation of many years' experience, with advice and guidance that will bring successful results right from the start. Whether you are a student studying lighting techniques in the television, video and film media, or a professional lighting for the camera, this book will be an invaluable aid. Other members of the production team, including camera crews, designers and directors, will also find the information here interesting and useful. The book concentrates primarily on the fundamental principles of lighting in studios, on location and display, as well as single-camera, small unit production, improvised and economy lighting, and working with limited facilities. Emphasis is also placed on the safety aspects of working with lighting equipment. Lighting for Television and Film reflects the author's considerable experience of lighting techniques in BBC studios, his teaching and consultancy work. Gerald Millerson's analytical writings spring from a lifetime's personal experience in the medium, and from his teaching and engineering background. During his career with the BBC, he was primarily associated with studio operations in the Television Service. His lecturing background included courses in TV production at a number of American universities. His other books for Focal Press are Television Production, TV Scenic Design, Video Production Handbook and, in the Media Manuals series, Effective TV Production, Lighting for Video and Video Camera Techniques.

Transform common people into superheroes, movie stars, knights, witches -- whatever illusion you want to create. Creative costuming is all in the details. One garment can take on many totally different looks depending on how you accessorize it. Over the years Barb Rogers has learned all the tricks about how anyone can turn leftover clothing into fabulous costumes. This book's numerous drawings explain in detail the costuming process of "turning straw into gold." It shows you how to design illusions that you never thought possible. Yes, you can easily do all this -- and at a minimum expense! This is another Barb Rogers "must have" book for your library of costume ideas.

Maxim Gorky was dubbed the father of socialist realism in the Soviet period, but he had forged his career as an internationally known novelist and dramatist some three or more decades earlier. Posing questions that Soviet critics found difficult to confront, the author examines the effects of exile and religion on the content and form of the plays as well as the role played by women, and the personal and political implications of motherhood. All sixteen of Gorky's published plays are covered, and the book explores whether this body of work has themes and styles to unify it. While conflict is central to the core political themes and also infiltrates many aspects of the dramatic style (cartoonish and grotesque), other less expected themes and styles emerge. Viewing the post-revolutionary plays as a development of earlier work leads to a question rarely posed: are the plays written by Gorky in the process of defining the new Party-inspired socialist realism in fact less about socialist realist issues of conformity, and more about Gorky's own painful life experience? And what is equally under the microscope is a search for the monumental style frequently associated with socialist realist theatre: the proposed origins of the spatial grandeur in Gorky's plays come as a surprise.

The essays in this volume explore the borderland between ecology and the arts. Nature is here read by a number of contributors as 'cultural', by others as an 'independent domain', or even as a powerful process of exchange 'between the human and the other-than-human'. The four parts of the volume reflect these different understandings of nature and performance. Informed by psychoanalysis and cultural materialism, contributors to the first part, 'Spectacle: Landscape and Subjectivity', look at ways in which particular social and scientific experiments, theatre and film productions and photography either reinforce or contest our ideas about nature and human-human or human-animal relations and identities. The second part, 'World: Hermeneutic Language and Social Ecology', investigates political protest, social practice art, acoustic ecology, dance theatre, family therapy and ritual in terms of social philosophy. Contributors to the third part, 'Environment: Immersiveness and Interactivity', explore architecture and sculpture, site-specific and mediatised dance and paratheatre through radical theories of urban and virtual space and time, or else phenomenological philosophy. The final part, 'Void: Death, Life and the Sublime', indicates the possibilities in dance, architecture and animal behaviour of a shift to an existential ontology in which nature has 'the capacity to perform itself.

Traditional speech work has long favored an upper-class white accent as the model of intelligibility. Because of that, generations of actors have felt disconnected from their own identities and acting choices. This much-needed textbook redresses that trend and encourages actors to achieve intelligibility through rigorous language analysis and an exploration of their own accent and articulation practices. Following an acting class model, where you first analyze the script then reveal yourself through it, this work breaks down a process for analyzing language in a way that excites the imagination. Guiding the student through the labyrinth of abstract concepts and terms, readers are delivered into the practicality of exercises and explorations, giving them self-awareness that enables them to make their own speech come alive. Informed throughout by notes from the author's own extensive experience working with directors and acting teachers, this book serves as an ideal speech-training resource for the 21st -century actor, and includes specially commissioned online videos demonstrating key exercises.

This study provides the first comprehensive examination of every prop in Shakespeare's plays, whether mentioned in stage directions, indicated in dialogue or implied by the action. Building on the latest scholarship and offering a witty treatment of the subject, the author delves into numerous historical documents, the business of theater in Renaissance England, and the plays themselves to explain what audiences might have seen at the Globe, the Rose, the Curtain, or the Blackfriars Playhouse, and why it matters. Students of the plays will be able to read beyond Shakespeare's words and visualize the drama as it might have appeared on the stage. Scholars will find a wealth of previously unmined material for reconstructing Renaissance theatrical practices. School drama groups, amateur theaters and directors and prop masters of professional troupes will find help in mounting their own productions as Shakespeare's audiences would have seen them.