While the body appears in almost all cultural discourses, it is nowhere as visible as in dance. This book captures the resurgence of the dancing body in the second half of the twentieth century by introducing students to the key phenomenological, kinaesthetic and psychological concepts relevant to both theatre and dance studies.

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.

Murder, Mayhem, and Madness-- Collected here are five of William Shakespeare's greatest tragedies Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear. These are the plays that made Shakespeare's reputation. Murder, deceit, treachery, and madness play out on the grand stage. Stories for the ages Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

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.

In this first substantive study of directing Shakespeare in the USA, Charles Ney compares and contrasts directors working at major companies across the country. Because of the complexities of directing Shakespeare for audiences today, a director's methods, values and biases are more readily perceptible in their work on Shakespeare than in more contemporary work. Directors disclose their interpretation of the text, their management of the various stages of production, how they go about supervising rehearsals and share tactics. This book will be useful to students wanting to develop skills, practitioners who want to learn from what other directors are doing, and scholars and students studying production practice and performance.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.

The shift in temporal modalities of Romantic Theatre was the consequence of internal as well as external developments: internally, the playwright was liberated from the old imperative of "Unity of Time" and the expectation that the events of the play must not exceed the hours of a single day; externally, the new social and cultural conformance to the time-keeping schedules of labour and business that had become more urgent with the industrial revolution. In reviewing the theatre of the Romantic era, this monograph draws attention to the ways in which theatre reflected the pervasive impact of increased temporal urgency in social and cultural behaviour. The contribution this book makes to the study of drama in the early nineteenth century is a renewed emphasis on time as a prominent element in Romantic dramaturgy, and a reappraisal of the extensive experimentation on how time functioned.

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.

Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History takes up the urgent need to think about temporality and its relationship to history in new ways, focusing on theatre and performance as mediums through which politically innovative temporalities, divorced from historical processionism and the future, are inaugurated. Wickstrom is guided by three temporal concepts: the new present, the penultimate, and kairos, as developed by Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Antonio Negri respectively. She works across a field of performance that includes play texts by Aime Cesaire and C.L.R. James, and performances from Ni'Ja Whitson to Cassils, the Gob Squad to William Kentridge and African colonial revolts, Hofesh Schechter to Forced Entertainment to Andrew Schneider and Omar Rajeh. Along the way she also engages with Walter Benjamin, black international and radical thought and performance, Bruno Latour, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's logistics and the hold, and accelerationism. Representing a significant contribution to the growing interest in temporality in Theatre and Performance Studies, the book offers alternatives to what have been prevailing temporal preoccupations in those fields. Countering investments in phenomenology, finitude, ghosting, repetition, and return, Wickstrom argues that theatre and performance can create a fiery sense of how to change time and thereby nominate a new possibility for what it means to live.

"Applied Theatre: Aesthetics" re-examines how the idea of 'the aesthetic' is relevant to performance in social settings. The disinterestedness that traditional aesthetics claims as a key characteristic of art makes little sense when making performances with ordinary people, rooted in their lives and communities, and with personal and social change as its aim. Yet practitioners of applied arts know that their work is not reducible to social work, therapy or education. Reconciling the simultaneous autonomy and heteronomy of art is the problem of aesthetics in applied arts. Gareth White's introductory essay reviews the field, and proposes an interdisciplinary approach that builds on new developments in evolutionary, cognitive and neuro-aesthetics alongside the politics of art. It addresses the complexities of art and the aesthetic as everyday behaviours and responses. The second part of the book is made up of essays from leading experts and new voices in the practice and theory of applied performance, reflecting on the key problematics of applying performance with non-performers. New and innovative practice is described and interrogated, and fresh thinking is introduced in response to perennial problems.

A transnational study of Asian performance shaped by the homoerotics of orientalism, Brown Boys and Rice Queens focuses on the relationship between the white man and the native boy. Eng-Beng Lim unpacks this as the central trope for understanding colonial and cultural encounters in 20th and 21st century Asia and its diaspora. Using the native boy as a critical guide, Lim formulates alternative readings of a traditional Balinese ritual, postcolonial Anglophone theatre in Singapore, and performance art in Asian America. Tracing the transnational formation of the native boy as racial fetish object across the last century, Lim follows this figure as he is passed from the hands of the colonial empire to the postcolonial nation-state to neoliberal globalization. Read through such figurations, the traffic in native boys among white men serves as an allegory of an infantilized and emasculated Asia, subordinate before colonial whiteness and modernity. Pushing further, Lim addresses the critical paradox of this entrenched relationship that resides even within queer theory itself by formulating critical interventions around "Asian performance." Eng-Beng Lim is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University, and a faculty affiliate of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Department of East Asian Studies, and Department of American Studies. He is also a Gender and Sexuality Studies board member at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. In the Sexual Cultures series

The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical provides a comprehensive academic survey of British musical theatre offering both a historical account of the musical's development from 1728 and a range of in-depth critical analyses of the unique forms and features of British musicals, which explore the aesthetic values and sociocultural meanings of a tradition that initially gave rise to the American musical and later challenged its modern pre-eminence. After a consideration of how John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) created a prototype for eighteenth-century ballad opera, the book focuses on the use of song in early nineteenth century theatre, followed by a sociocultural analysis of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; it then examines Edwardian and interwar musical comedies and revues as well as the impact of Rodgers and Hammerstein on the West End, before analysing the new forms of the postwar British musical from The Boy Friend (1953) to Oliver! (1960). One section of the book examines the contributions of key twentieth century figures including Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Joan Littlewood and producer Cameron Macintosh, while a number of essays discuss both mainstream and alternative musicals of the 1960s and 1970s and the influence of the pop industry on the creation of concept recordings such as Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Les Miserables (1980). There is a consideration of "jukebox" musicals such as Mamma Mia! (1999), while essays on overtly political shows such as Billy Elliot (2005) are complemented by those on experimental musicals like Jerry Springer: the Opera (2003) and London Road (2011) and on the burgeoning of Black and Asian British musicals in both the West End and subsidized venues. The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical demonstrates not only the unique qualities of British musical theatre but also the vitality and variety of British musicals today.

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).

In this hard-hitting anthology, Ishmael Reed and Carla Blank have invited a diverse group of informed and accomplished writers, both women and men, who are rarely heard to comment on the long-standing bigotry on Broadway towards many different ethnic minorities. How do intellectuals and scholars feel about how members of their ethnic groups are portrayed on Broadway? How would we know? Very few of them have the power to rate which plays and musicals are worthy and which are flops, and above all, be heard or read. The American critical fraternity is an exclusive club. In this hard-hitting anthology, Ishmael Reed and Carla Blank have invited a diverse group of informed and accomplishes writers, both women and men, who are rarely heard to comment on the long-standing bigotry on Broadway towards many different ethnic minorities. Contributors include Lonely Christopher, Tommy Curry, Jack Foley, Emil Guillermo, Claire J. Harris, Yuri Kageyama, Soraya McDonald, Nancy Mercado, Aimee Phan, Betsy Theobald Richards, Shawn Wong, David Yearsley, and the editors. Under review are Madame Butterfly, the Irving Berlin songbook, Oklahoma, South Pacific, Miss Saigon, Flower Drum Song, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, The Color Purple, The Book of Mormon, West Side Story and Hamilton.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is widely considered Shakespeare's greatest play. Hamlet is confronted by the ghost of his father, who tells him that Hamlet's uncle and mother conspired to poison him. Knowing that his uncle, who now sits upon the throne, and his mother, who has married his uncle and is now his queen, have murdered his father, Hamlet sets out to avenge his father's death and set things to right. But his plan could destroy the entire realm. To be, or not to be-that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them. To die-to sleep- No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

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.

Singin' in the Rain, The Sound of Music, Camelot--love them or love to hate them, movie musicals have been a major part of all our lives. They're so glitzy and catchy that it seems impossible that they could have ever gone any other way. But the ease in which they unfold on the screen is deceptive. Dorothy's dream of finding a land "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was nearly cut, and even a film as great as The Band Wagon was, at the time, a major flop.
In Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter, award winning historian Richard Barrios explores movie musicals from those first hits, The Jazz Singer and Broadway Melody, to present-day Oscar winners Chicago and Les Miserables. History, film analysis, and a touch of backstage gossip combine to make Dangerous Rhythm a compelling look at musicals and the powerful, complex bond they forge with their audiences. Going behind the scenes, Barrios uncovers the rocky relationship between Broadway and Hollywood, the unpublicized off-camera struggles of directors, stars, and producers, and all the various ways by which some films became our most indelible cultural touchstones -- and others ended up as train wrecks.
Not content to leave any format untouched, Barrios examines animated musicals and popular music with insight and enthusiasm. Cartoons have been intimately connected with musicals since Steamboat Willie. Disney's short Silly Symphonies grew into the instant classic Snow White, which paved the way for that modern masterpiece, South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut. Without movie musicals, Barrios argues, MTV would have never existed. On the flip side, without MTV we might have been spared Evita.
Informed, energetic, and humorous, Dangerous Rhythm is both an impressive piece of scholarship and a joy to read."

This international collection brings together scientists, scholars and artist-researchers to explore the cognition of memory through the performing arts and examine artistic strategies that target cognitive processes of memory. The strongly embodied and highly trained memory systems of performing artists render artistic practice a rich context for understanding how memory is formed, utilized and adapted through interaction with others, instruments and environments. Using experimental, interpretive and Practice-as-Research methods that bridge disciplines, the authors provide overview chapters and case studies of subjects such as: * collectively and environmentally distributed memory in the performing arts; * autobiographical memory triggers in performance creation and reception; * the journey from learning to memory in performance training; * the relationship between memory, awareness and creative spontaneity, and * memorization and embodied or structural analysis of scores and scripts. This volume provides an unprecedented resource for scientists, scholars, artists, teachers and students looking for insight into the cognition of memory in the arts, strategies of learning and performance, and interdisciplinary research methodology.