This practical handbook is invaluable for anyone performing, teaching, studying or simply wanting a new way to enjoy Shakespeare. It provides an outline of Meisner's work and legacy, a discussion of that legacy in the light of the enduring global popularity of Shakespeare, and a wealth of practical exercises drawn from Meisner's techniques. Shakespeare writes about the truth in human relationships and human hearts. Sanford Meisner's work unlocks truthful acting. They would seem a perfect match. Yet, following Meisner's note to his actors that 'text is your greatest enemy', Shakespeare and Meisner are often considered 'strange bedfellows'. The rhetorical complexity of Shakespeare's text can often be perceived as rules an actor must learn in order to perform Shakespeare 'properly'. Meisner's main rule is that 'you can't say ouch until you've been pinched': in other words, an actor must genuinely feel something in order to react in a performance which is alive to the moment. This book explores how actors can use Meisner's tools of 'acting is reacting' to discover the infinite freedom within the apparent constraints of Shakespeare's text.

Few American phenomena are more evocative of time, place, and culture than the drive-in theater. From its origins in the Great Depression, through its peak in the 1950s and 1960s and ultimately its slow demise in the 1980s, the drive-in holds a unique place in the country's collective past. Michigan's drive-ins were a reflection of this time and place, ranging from tiny rural 200-car "ozoners" to sprawling 2,500-car behemoths that were masterpieces of showmanship, boasting not only movies and food, but playgrounds, pony rides, merry-go-rounds, and even roving window washers.

The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of a lively Portuguese-language theatre festival circuit, where Brazilian, Portuguese, and Lusophone African artists come together and jointly negotiate the cultural dynamics of an emerging transnational community grounded in a common language and shared colonial histories. Christina S. McMahon trains a sharp ethnographic eye on African performances staged at these festivals, revealing how festival productions and their aftermath can generate new perspectives on race and gender, colonial trauma, and the economics of cultural globalization. Featuring in-depth analysis of performances and artist interviews from Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique - countries with vibrant theatre practices and vexed colonial pasts - the book reveals how international festivals can be valuable platforms for new intercultural dialogues and diplomatic possibilities. Recasting Transnationalism through Performance offers a fresh look at the role of theatre in navigating new postcolonial realities.

(Applause Books). In this third volume of the distinguished The Great Songwriters series, musicologist Stephen Citron takes on two leading contributors to the lyric stage, Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd-Webber. By exploring the works of these two giants of musical theater and those of their contemporaries, Citron also simultaneously guides readers along the winding path of musical theater. Beginning with Sondheim's lyrics-only works West Side Story, Gypsy, and Do I Hear A Waltz ? through his scores for A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park, and Into the Woods, among other classic musicals, Citron presents major milestones of musical theater, exploring the influence of the artist's youthful training and private life upon his creative output. Lloyd-Webber's musical contributions from his early works The Likes of Us and Joseph to his smash hits Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, and The Phantom of the Opera, among others are also thoroughly analyzed. As in Citron's previous critically acclaimed books in this series, the artists'works are clarified and put into context with their contemporaries. Complete with a quadruple chronology that reveal Sondheim's and Lloyd-Webber's lives within the scope of world events, copious quotations from their works, and many never-before-published illustrations, Sondheim and Lloyd-Webber is a must-read for anyone interested in musical theater.

Richard Wagner is remembered as one of the most influential figures in music and theatre, but his place in history has been marked by a considerable amount of controversy. His attitudes towards the Jews and the appropriation of his operas by the Nazis, for example, have helped to construct a historical persona that sits uncomfortably with modern sensibilities. Yet Wagner's absolutely central position in the operatic canon continues. This volume serves as a timely reminder of his ongoing musical, cultural, and political impact. Contributions by specialists from such varied fields as musical history, German literature and cultural studies, opera production, and political science consider a range of topics, from trends and problems in the history of stage production to the representations of gender and sexuality. With the inclusion of invaluable and reliably up-to-date biographical data, this collection will be of great interest to scholars, students, and enthusiasts.

This book details the Irish socialistic tracks pursued by Bernard Shaw and Sean O'Casey, mostly after 1916, that were arguably impacted by the executed James Connolly. The historical context is carefully unearthed, stretching from its 1894 roots via W. B. Yeats' dream of Shaw as a menacing, yet grinning sewing machine, to Shaw's and O'Casey's 1928 masterworks. In the process, Shaw's War Issues for Irishmen, Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress, The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, Saint Joan, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, and O'Casey's The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, and The Silver Tassie are reconsidered, revealing previously undiscovered textures to the masterworks. All of which provides a rethinking, a reconsideration of Ireland's great drama of the 1920s, as well as furthering the knowledge of Shaw, O'Casey, and Connolly.

Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960), poet, novelist, playwright and composer would become one of the literary giants of the twentieth century. The father of magic realism in Italy, he was associated with the futurist avant-garde and then launched his own influential literary movement, Novecento. Editor and creator of various journals, he collaborated with some of the greatest writers of his day, from James Joyce to Luigi Pirandello. Bontempelli was a prominent fascist intellectual and largely for this reason is today a controversial, little studied and seldom translated writer. Patricia Gaborik strikes out at this problem by presenting here an extensive introduction on the thought and legacy of this figure and complete translations of three of his major plays: "Watching the Moon" (1916), "Stormcloud" (1935) and "Cinderella" (1942). Bontempelli's sense of theatricality was unparalleled, his characters are bewitching, and Gaborik's translations privilege both readability and playability, offering these plays the chance for a robust, English-language life not only on page but also on stage. In 1953, Bontempelli was awarded the Strega Prize, Italy's most prestigious literary award. "Watching the Moon" is a densely layered response to the era's avant-gardism, with traces of symbolism, expressionism and futurism. It presents the story of a woman who travels to the literal ends of the earth in an attempt to rescue her (dead) daughter, whom she believes has been kidnapped by the moon. "Stormcloud," where a nimbus is responsible for misery and destruction, points fingers at individual behaviors and especially at personal egotism in the face of love and death. It is a strange and compelling exemplar of magic realism for the stage. "Cinderella," fearless, radical and subversive, adds to Bontempelli's slate of strong and complex female characters, still sometimes a rare commodity on the stage. First English translation. Introduction, notes, select bibliography, illustrated. 198 pages.

Designing Presence offers a unique insight into the training that has helped people around the world to cultivate more presence in both professional and personal settings. It explains the research behind the method of Towards Vivencia, shares stories of how it has been implemented and offers practical exercises to apply it in any context. Presence is something that is often talked about but is difficult to pin down. We have all experienced moments when we felt one with what we are doing and with our environment. However, this feeling is usually fleeting and we don't know when or how we will experience it again. Towards Vivencia is the first methodology of its kind to train performers to locate and replicate that specific state of consciousness associated with presence and peak performance. Based on over 20 years of experience, combined with research in anthropology, philosophy and the latest advances in neuroscience, Towards Vivencia enables performers to become fully engaged with their experience in order to operate at their highest possible level. This book aims to equip readers with the ability to actively design their experiences and create lasting changes not only in how they approach performance but also how they approach their everyday lives.

In the Anthropocene, icy environments have taken on a new centrality and emotional valency. This book examines the diverse ways in which ice and humans have performed with and alongside each other over the last few centuries, so as to better understand our entangled futures. Icescapes - glaciers, bergs, floes, ice shelves - are places of paradox. Solid and weighty, they are nonetheless always on the move, unstable, untrustworthy, liable to collapse, overturn, or melt. Icescapes have featured - indeed, starred - in conventional theatrical performances since at least the eighteenth century. More recently, the performing arts - site-specific or otherwise - have provoked a different set of considerations of human interactions with these non-human objects, particularly as concerns over anthropogenic warming have mounted. The performances analysed in the book range from the theatrical to the everyday, from the historical to the contemporary, from low-latitude events in interior spaces to embodied encounters with the frozen environment.

Contemporary theatre is going through a period of unparalleled excitement and challenge. Terms like 'postmodern' and 'postdramatic' have their own contested and defended histories, while notions of truth in verbatim theatre are open to serious critical challenge. Theatre writing can result in no words being spoken and nothing appearing on the page, and productions are stretching the boundaries of space, place and context like never before. This revised and significantly expanded edition of New Performance/New Writing explores immersive and solo theatre, autoethnography, applied drama, performance writing, plot, story, narrative and devising. It presents an invaluable response to questions that arise from new theatre, prompting active reading that enhances classroom and workshop learning, and improves productivity in rehearsal. Each chapter explores a key aspect of theatre study, while an extensive timeline of theatre events gives a broad overview of its evolution. Case studies on practitioners as diverse as Kneehigh, Punchdrunk, Mark Ravenhill and Forced Entertainment are scattered throughout the book, along with detailed suggestions for workshops, which encourage readers to test some of the book's ideas in practice.

The world of theatre criticism is rapidly changing in its form, function and modes of operation in the twenty-first century. The dominance of the internet has led to a growing trend of selfappointed theatre critics and bloggers who are changing the focus and purpose of the discussion around live performance. Even though the blogosphere has garnered suspicion and hostility from some mainstream newspaper critics, it has also provided significant intellectual and ideological challenges to the increasingly conservative profile of the professional critic. This book features 16 commissioned contributions from scholars, arts journalists and bloggers, as well as a small selection of innovative critical practice. Authors from Australia, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Russia, the UK and the US share their perspectives on relevant historical, theoretical and political contexts influencing the development of the discipline, as well as specific aspects of the contemporary practices and genres of theatre criticism. The book features an introductory essay by its editor, Duska Radosavljevic.

It's not what you think. You may have heard Casanova's legend, but have you heard his heart? Could you read between the lines of the playwright who wrote the play Casanova and why he assumes that role of his character given the power of Cupid's bow and arrow? But he is just like you and I. After all, we all use the power of the bow and arrow in some form, whether through beauty, power, or wit. And we use that power to some extent to shapes love's stage. Admittedly, some are better than others. And of course, our intentions are good. Well, at least we try most of the time. But unfortunately there are desires and motivations which we know not of, and nor do we know where they are from. In fact, we just don't know ourselves. If you were given all the power of the bow and arrow, how would you act? Is there any guarantee that your aim would be any better than the blind whims of Cupid? Especially in a world where love loves to hide, mask itself in indifference and most of all, act. We will quickly learn that the real story is what is happening behind the stage, under the stage, in the earth deep below the stage, over the stage, behind the pen, inside the heart, in the heavens, and in that place so distant and so far back-a place called home. This is a story dictated by characters with no roles, stars with no spoken parts, no cameos, and no love shared at all. Something happened that moved Casanova's heart. It moved the characters on the stage, and it is about to move the heavens. It seems today that the earth is shaking and the ground is moving, and it is getting more frequent. You had better check your foundations like Casanova did. If our house is unsteady, perhaps we might want to checkhere, and it might just heal the world.

I would like to dedicate the book to the memory of Allison Miller Ferguson and Bryant Ferguson II. I would like to thank My Lovely Wife Latoya Ferguson, My mother Mae Ferguson, My sisters Karon Hall and Janet Ferguson, My Neice Aisha Ferguson and Henry Chancellor. My Daughters Jazmine and Janyah. My best Friend Lee Bostic his wife Felica Bostic and Scott Williams.