Affective Movements, Methods and Pedagogies invites readers to think with affect about performance, pedagogies and their inherent activist, embodied and collective natures. It works across multiple spheres to help readers understand how to deploy affective approaches rather than to simply think with affect theory about traditional methods. The book is structured and curated across three main thematic sections: affective movements, methods and pedagogies, each of which treats the core explorations of affect and performance through a different perspective. It is concerned with the ways performance and theatrical methods work with and through a theoretics of affect. The sixteen chapters include work that models theoretical practices in writing, and demonstrates how theorising affect and its methods is itself a performative practice. The contributors offer rich examples from diverse geopolitical as well as disciplinary contexts, innovative methods, and finally, intersectional theoretics. This collection will be of interest to higher education students exploring methodologies, and academic researchers and teachers in the fields of performance studies, communication, critical studies, sociology and the arts.

Aloha"" is at once the most significant and the most misunderstood word in the Indigenous Hawaiian lexicon. For Kanaka Maoli people, the concept of ""aloha"" is a representation and articulation of their identity, despite its misappropriation and commandeering by non-Native audiences in the form of things like the ""hula girl"" of popular culture. Considering the way aloha is embodied, performed, and interpreted in Native Hawaiian literature, music, plays, dance, drag performance, and even ghost tours from the twentieth century to the present, Stephanie Nohelani Teves shows that misunderstanding of the concept by non-Native audiences has not prevented the Kanaka Maoli from using it to create and empower community and articulate its distinct Indigenous meaning. While Native Hawaiian artists, activists, scholars, and other performers have labored to educate diverse publics about the complexity of Indigenous Hawaiian identity, ongoing acts of violence against Indigenous communities have undermined these efforts. In this multidisciplinary work, Teves argues that Indigenous peoples must continue to embrace the performance of their identities in the face of this violence in order to challenge settler-colonialism and its efforts to contain and commodify Hawaiian Indigeneity.

Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd is an innovative collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of theatre, performance and eco-criticism, which reconfigures absurdist theatre through the optics of ecology and environment. As well as offering strikingly new interpretations of the work of canonical playwrights such as Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Adamov, Albee, Kafka, Pinter, Shepard and Churchill, the book playfully mimics the structure of Martin Esslin's classic text The Theatre of the Absurd, which is commonly recognised as one of the most important scholarly publications of the 20th century. By reading absurdist drama, for the first time, as an emergent form of ecological theatre, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd interrogates afresh the very meaning of absurdism for 21st-century audiences, while at the same time making a significant contribution to the development of theatre and performance studies as a whole. The collection's interdisciplinary approach, accessibility, and ecological focus will appeal to students and academics in a number of different fields, including theatre, performance, English, French, geography and philosophy. It will also have a major impact on the new cross disciplinary paradigm of eco-criticism.

Pathos as Communicative Strategy in Late-Medieval Religious Drama and Art explores the strategies employed to trigger emotional responses in late-medieval dramatic texts from several Western European traditions, and juxtaposes these texts with artistic productions from the same areas, with an emphasis on Britain. The aim is to unravel the mechanisms through which pathos was produced and employed, mainly through the representation of pain and suffering, with mainly religious, but also political aims. The novelty of the book resides in its specific linguistic perspective, which highlights the recurrent use of words, structures and dialogic patterns in drama to reinforce messages on the salvific value of suffering, in synergy with visual messages produced in the same cultural milieu.

To Die Upon a Kiss-- Othello is Shakespeare's great tragic play of love, trust, and deceit. Iago, an officer of the watch, sets out to destroy Othello by convincing him that his young bride, Desdemona, has betrayed him and is secretly in love with another man. What sense had I of her stol'n hours of lust? I saw't not, thought it not, it harm'd not me; I slept the next night well, was free and merry; I found not Cassio's kisses on her lips. He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stol'n, Let him not know't and he's not robb'd at all.

Tennessee Williams and Europe: Intercultural Encounters, Transatlantic Exchanges documents the bi-directional exchange of ideas and images between Williams and post-war Europe that have altered the artistic landscapes of both continents. Fifteen Williams scholars from around the world examine this artistic symbiosis and explore avenues of research mostly uncharted in Williams scholarship to date, including our understanding of the early Williams and the uses he made of various European sources in his theatre; the late Williams and the promise European theatre afforded him with his experimental plays; and the posthumous Williams and his influence on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century European theatre and cinema. To some extent both a product of and a muse for Europe over the last half century, Williams is well positioned to become America's most famous playwright on the international stage. This book hopes to mark the beginnings of Williams' rich critical tradition within that global context.

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.

Beckett's Voices / Voicing Beckett uses 'voice' as a prism to investigate Samuel Beckett's work across a range of texts, genres, and performance cultures. Twenty-one contributors, all members of the Samuel Beckett Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research, discuss the musicality of Beckett's voices, the voice as 'absent other', the voices of the vulnerable, the cinematic voice, and enacted voices in performance and media. The volume engages not only with Beckett's history and legacy, but also with many of the central theoretical issues in theatre studies as a whole. Featuring testimonies from Beckett practitioners as well as emerging and established scholars, it is emblematic of the thriving and diverse community that is twenty-first century Beckett Studies. Contributors: Svetlana Antropova, Linda Ben-Zvi, Jonathan Bignell, Llewellyn Brown, Julie Campbell, Thirthankar Chakraborty, Laurens De Vos, Everett C. Frost, S. E. Gontarski, Mariko Hori Tanaka, Nicholas E. Johnson, Kumiko Kiuchi, Anna McMullan, Melissa Nolan, Cathal Quinn, Arthur Rose, Teresa Rosell Nicolas, Jurgen Siess, Anna Sigg, Yoshiko Takebe, Michiko Tsushima

It was a time when personal exploration was a way of life-a time when it was still okay to hitchhike, grow your hair long, and be carefree. But during the 1970s and early 1980s, it still was not okay to be gay. In "Complex, " the first of the two plays presented in "Baby Crib, " author Michael J.-P. Williams introduces Mickey, a man haunted by guilt-and a dark secret. Just as a new consciousness is lighting the way for those who wish to escape the closet, artist wannabe Mickey is battling internal demons. Ashamed that he is homosexual and even more ashamed that he is still alive after his twin brother dies from cancer, Mickey must struggle to accept himself and his desires. In the second play, "I Ski Maybell, " Paul West is on the road to success. With a newly acquired MBA in hand and a good job in a new city, Paul's fresh start in life suddenly goes awry when he allies himself with Nova McWorth. Unfortunately, she is his boss. Williams interweaves multifaceted characters within poignant storylines that prove that perhaps life really is too short to worry about what we cannot control.

Irish theatre and its histories appear to be dominated by men and their actions. This book's socially and culturally contextualized analysis of performance over the last two decades, however reveals masculinities that are anything but hegemonic, played out in theatres and other arenas of performance all over Ireland.

Is postdramatic theatre political and if so how? How does it relate to Brecht's ideas of political theatre, for example? How can we account for the relationship between aesthetics and politics in new forms of theatre, playwriting, and performance? The chapters in this book discuss crucial aspects of the issues raised by the postdramatic turn in theatre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: the status of the audience and modes of spectatorship in postdramatic theatre; the political claims of postdramatic theatre; postdramatic theatre's ongoing relationship with the dramatic tradition; its dialectical qualities, or its eschewing of the dialectic; questions of representation and the real in theatre; the role of bodies, perception, appearance and theatricality in postdramatic theatre; as well as subjectivity and agency in postdramatic theatre, dance and performance. Offering analyses of a wide range of international performance examples, scholars in this volume engage with Hans-Thies Lehmann's theoretical positions both affirmatively and critically, relating them to other approaches by thinkers ranging from early theorists such as Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin, to contemporary thinkers such as Fischer-Lichte, Ranciere and others

Speaking of Wagner compiles in a new and highly accessible format celebrated author, lecturer, and Metropolitan Opera commentator William Berger's collection of talks and presentations about Richard Wagner, the most controversial, and perhaps the most widely influential, artist in history. These talks have been successful with diverse audiences, ranging from newcomers to the field to the most exacting experts, often at the same time! Berger's book preserves that wide range of tone: erudite but engaging, from lofty to startlingly coarse (as the subject requires), and connecting the subject to references from mythology to psychology and even (and especially) to cutting-edge pop culture.