Winner of the 2021 Music & Drama Education Award for Outstanding Drama Education Resource Much of the theatre we make starts with a script and a story given to us by someone else. But what happens when we're required to start from scratch? How do we begin to make theatre using our own ideas, our own perspective, our own stories? A Beginner's Guide to Devising Theatre, written by the artistic directors of the award-winning young people's performance company Junction 25 and is aimed at those new to devising or wanting to further develop their skills. It explores creative ways to create original theatre from a contemporary stimulus. It offers a structure within which to approach the creative process, including ideas on finding a starting point, generating material, composition and design; it offers practical ideas for use in rehearsal; and it presents grounding in terminology that will support a confident and informed approach to production. The book features contributions from some of the young performers who have been a part of Junction 25's work to date, as well as key artists and companies that work professionally in devised theatre, including case studies from Quarantine, the Team, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Nic Green and Ontroerend Goed. The work of Junction 25 is used to illustrate the concepts and ideas set out in the book. Ideal for any student faced with the challenge of creating work from scratch, A Beginner's Guide to Devising Theatre offers constructive guidance, which supports the requirements of students taking Drama and Theatre Studies courses. The book includes a foreword by theatre critic Lyn Gardner.

Dramaturgy is at the heart of any musical theatre score, proving that song and music combined can collectively act as drama. The Musical Theatre Composer as Dramatist: A Handbook for Collaboration offers techniques for approaching a musical with the drama at the centre of the music. Written by a working composer of British musical theatre, this original and highly practical book is intended for composers, students of musical theatre and performing arts and their collaborators. Through detailed case studies, conceptual frameworks and frank analysis, this book encourages the collaboration between the languages of music and drama. It offers a shared language for talking about music in the creation of musical theatre, as well as practical exercises for both composers and their collaborators and ways of analysing existing musical theatre scores for those who are versed in musical terminology, and those who are not. Speaking directly to the contemporary artist, working examples are drawn from a wide range of musicals throughout Part One, before a full case study analysis of Matilda the Musical brings all the ideas together in Part Two. Part Three offers a range of practical exercises for anyone creating new musicals, particularly composers and their collaborators.

Rhythm is often referred to as one of the key elements of performance and acting, being of central importance to both performance making and training. Yet what is meant by this term and how it is approached and applied in this context are subjects seldom discussed in detail. Addressing these, Rhythm in Acting and Performance explores the meanings, mechanisms and metaphors associated with rhythm in this field, offering an overview and analysis of the ways rhythm has been, and is embodied and understood by performers, directors, educators, playwrights, designers and scholars. From the rhythmic movements and speech of actors in ancient Greece, to Stanislavski's use of Tempo-rhythm as a tool for building a character and tapping emotions, continuing through to the use of rhythm and musicality in contemporary approaches to actor training and dramaturgy, this subject finds resonance across a broad range of performance domains. In these settings, rhythm has often been identified as an effective tool for developing the coordination and conscious awareness of individual performers, ensembles and their immediate relationship to an audience. This text examines the principles and techniques underlying these processes, focusing on key approaches adopted and developed within European and American performance practices over the last century. Interviews and case studies of individual practitioners, offer insight into the ways rhythm is approached and utilised within this field. Each of these sections includes practical examples as well as analytical reflections, offering a basis for comparing both the common threads and the broad differences that can be found here. Unpacking this often mystified and neglected subject, this book offers students and practitioners a wealth of informative and useful insights to aid and inspire further creative and academic explorations of rhythm within this field.

Granville Barker on Theatre brings together some of the most important critical theatrical writings of Harley Granville Barker, a major figure of 20th-century British theatre. Known as a pioneer of the National Theatre and Repertory Movement, and remembered mainly for his Prefaces to Shakespeare, from the 1900s to his death in the 1940s Granville Barker commented enthusiastically in newspaper items, introductions to plays, articles, essays, articles, and published lectures on a range of topics: the nature of theatre as an art form and as a social medium, the need for ensemble playing in a repertory system, the relationship between the three chief constituents of theatre - the actor, the playwright and the audience. Granville Barker on Theatre makes available again these writings in which Barker dissects the state of theatre as he saw it, with coruscating critiques of the commercial system, the long run and censorship, the vitality of theatre outside Britain, and what he saw as the welcome renaissance of theatre in non-professional groups liberated from the profit motive. These writings show a master practitioner concerned with, above all, promoting a new type of drama; vital not only for its own sake but for the sake of the health of society at large.

For a brief period in the late Elizabethan Era an innovative company of players dominated the London stage. A fellowship of dedicated thespians, Lord Strange's Men established their reputation by concentrating on "modern matter" performed in a spectacular style, exploring new modes of impersonation, and deliberately courting controversy. Supported by their equally controversial patron, theater connoisseur and potential claimant to the English throne Ferdinando Stanley, the company included Edward Alleyn, considered the greatest actor of the age, as well as George Bryan, Thomas Pope, Augustine Phillips, William Kemp, and John Hemings, who later joined William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage in the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Though their theatrical reign was relatively short lived, Lord Strange's Men helped to define the dramaturgy of the period, performing the plays of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and others with their own distinctive flourish.
Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean offer the first complete account of the troupe and its enormous influence on Elizabethan theater. Seamlessly blending theater history and literary criticism, the authors paint a lively portrait of a unique community of performing artists, their intellectual ambitions and theatrical innovations, their business practices, and their fearless engagements with the politics and religion of their time.

Applied Practice: Evidence and Impact in Theatre, Music and Art engages with a diversity of contexts, locations and arts forms - including theatre, music and fine art - and brings together theoretical, political and practice-based perspectives on the question of 'evidence' in relation to participatory arts practice in social contexts. This collection is a unique contribution to the field, focusing on one of the vital concerns for a growing and developing set of arts and research practices. It asks us to consider evidence not only in terms of methodology but also in the light of the ideological, political and pragmatic implications of that methodology. In Part One, Matthew Reason and Nick Rowe reflect on evidence and impact in the participatory arts in relation to recurring conceptual and methodological motifs. These include issues of purpose and obliquity; the relationship between evidence and knowledge; intrinsic and instrumental impacts, and the value of participatory research. Part Two explores the diversity of perspectives, contexts and methodologies in examining what it is possible to know, say and evidence about the often complex and intimate impact of participatory arts. Part Three brings together case studies in which practitioners and practice-based researchers consider the frustrations, opportunities and successes they face in addressing the challenge to produce evidence for the impact of their practice.

Applied Theatre: Creative Ageing examines the complex social, political and cultural needs of a diverse group in our society and asks how contemporary applied theatre responds to those needs. It allows an examination of innovative national and international practice in applied theatre that responds to the needs of older adults to encourage outcomes such as wellbeing and social inclusion. The book does this while also questioning how we, as a society, wish to respond to the complex needs of older adults and the process of ageing and how applied theatre practices can help us do so in a way that is both positive and inclusive. In Part One Sheila McCormick reviews and historicises the practice of applied theatre with, for and by the elderly. It argues that pioneering applied theatre strategies are vital if the creative practice is to respond to the growing needs of older members of society, and reflects on particular cultural responses to ageing and the elderly. The second part of the book is made up of essays and case studies from leading experts and practitioners from Britain, America and Australia, including consideration of applied theatre approaches to dementia, health, wellbeing, social inclusion and Alzheimer's disease.

What do we mean when we talk about bodies in theatre? And how does theatre affect the way we think about the human body? Bodies are vital elements of theatre production and spectatorship. But the body is not just physical, it is also conceptual. Drawing on many examples from contemporary performance, Theatre& the Body is a provocative starting point for understanding the surprisingly complex relationship between theatre and the body. Concise and clear, this book explores the revealing tensions between the body, bodies, language, representation and movement in the theatre. Foreword by Marina Abramovic

The most important theatrical movement in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe, the commedia dell'arte has inspired playwrights, artists, and musicians including Moliere, Dario Fo, Picasso, and Stravinsky. Because of its stock characters, improvised dialogue, and extravagant theatricalism, the commedia dell'arte is often assumed to be a superficial comic style. With Befriending the Commedia dell'Arte of Flaminio Scala, Natalie Crohn Schmitt demolishes that assumption.

By reconstructing the commedia dell'arte scenarios published by troupe manager Flaminio Scala (1547-1624), Schmitt demonstrates that in its Golden Age the commedia dell'arte relied as much on craftsmanship as on improvisation and that Scala's scenarios are a treasure trove of social commentary on early modern daily life in Italy.

In the book, Schmitt makes use of her intensive research into the social and cultural history of sixteenth-century Italy and the aesthetic principles of the period. She combines this research with her insights drawn from studying with contemporary commedia dell'arte performers and from directing a production of one of Scala's scenarios. The result is a new perspective on the commedia dell'arte that illuminates the style's full richness.

Second only to Shakespeare in terms of performances, Ibsen is performed in almost every culture. Since Ibsen wrote his plays about bourgeois family life in Northern Europe, they have become part of local theatre traditions in cultures as different as the Chinese and the Zimbabwean, the Indian and the Iranian. The result is that today there are incredibly many and different 'Ibsens' around the world. A play like Peer Gynt can be staged on the same continent and in the same year as a politically progressive piece of theatre for development in one place, and as a nationalistic and orientalistic piece of elite spectacle in another. This book charts differences across cultures and political boundaries, and attempts to understand them through an in-depth analysis of their relation to political, social, ideological and economic forces within and outside of the performances themselves.Through the discussion of productions of Ibsen plays on three continents, this book explores how Ibsen is created through practice and his work and reputation maintained as a classics central to the theatrical repertoire.

A practical guide to the principles of teaching and learning movement, this book instructs the actor on how to train the body to become a medium of expression. Starting with a break-down of the principles of actor training through exercises and theatre games, Dick McCaw teaches the actor about their own body and its possibilities including: the different ways it can move, the space it occupies and finally its rhythm, timing and pacing. With 64 exercises supported by diagrams and online video, Dick McCaw draws on his 20 years of teaching experience to coach the reader in the dynamics of movement education to achieve a responsive and articulate body.

Through an examination of a range of performance works ranging from Jean Cocteau's ballet The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party (1921) to Julie Taymor's monumental production of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark (2010) and Mexican playwright Isaac Gomez's La Ruta(2018), Staging Technology asks what becomes visible when we encounter plays, operas, and musicals that are themselves about fraught human/machine interfaces. What can theatrical production tell us about the way technology functions as an element of ideology and power in narrative drama? About the limits of the human? Staging Technology bridges the divide between the technical practices of theatre production and critical, theoretical approaches to interpreting drama to examine the way dramatic theatre's technologies are shaped by larger historical, ideological, and economic forces. At the same time, it examines how those technologies themselves have influenced 20th and 21st-century playwrights', composers', and librettists' choice of subject matter for staged representation. Examining performance works from the modernist and post-modern European and American canon of drama, opera, and performance art including works by Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Heiner Muller, Sophie Treadwell, Harold Pinter, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, Arthur Miller, Robert Pinsky, John Adams and Alice Goodman, Staging Technology transforms how we think about the interrelationship between theatre practice, performance, narrative drama, and text. In it Craig N. Owens synthesizes approaches to interpretation and practice from disparate realms, offering insights into over-arching ways of making meaning that are illustrated through focused and innovative readings of individual works for the dramatic stage. Staging Technology provides a new and transformative paradigm for thinking about dramatic literature, the practices of representational theatre production, and the historical and social contexts they inhabit.

At once both guide book and provocation, this is an indispensable companion for students and practitioners of applied theatre. It addresses all key aspects: principles, origins, politics and aesthetics in a concise and accessible style designed to appeal both to those who have recently discovered this sub-discipline and to experienced practitioners and academics. Part 1 is divided into two chapters. The first introduces the sub-discipline of Theatre for Development, covering its origins, principles and history, and providing an overview of theatre for development in Western contexts as well as in Africa, Asia, the Indian Subcontinent and Latin America. The second focuses upon theoretical and philosophical issues confronting the discipline and its relationship to contemporary politics, as well as considering its future role. Part 2 consists of seven chapters contributed by leading figures and current practitioners from around the world and covering a diverse range of themes, methodologies and aesthetic approaches. One chapter offers a series of case studies concerned with sexual health education and HIV prevention, drawn from practitioners working in Vietnam, Papua New Guinea, Southern Africa, and China. Other chapters include studies of intercultural theatre in the Peruvian Amazon; a programme of applied theatre conducted in schools in Canterbury, New Zealand, following the 2010 earthquake; an attempt to reinvigorate a community theatre group in South Brazil; and an exchange between a Guatemalan arts collective and a Dutch youth theatre company, besides others.