Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions provides a wide-ranging analysis of the role of the director in shaping adaptations for the stage today. Through its focus on a wide range of international productions by Katie Mitchell, Theodoros Terzopoulos, Peter Sellars, Jan Fabre, Ariane Mnouchkine, Tadashi Suzuki, Yukio Ninagawa, Andrei Serban, Nikos Charalambous, Bryan Doerries and Richard Schechner, among others, it offers readers a detailed study of the ways directors have responded to the original texts, refashioning them for different audiences, contexts and purposes. As such the volume will appeal to readers of theatre and performance studies, classics and adaptation studies, directors and theatre practitioners, and anyone who has ever wondered 'why they did it like that' when watching a stage production of an ancient Greek play. The volume Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy is divided in three sections: the first section - Global Perspectives - considers the work of a range of major directors from around the world who have provided new readings of Greek Tragedy: Peter Sellars and Athol Fugard in the US, Katie Mitchell in the UK, Theodoros Terzopoulos in Greece and Tadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa in Japan. Their work on a wide range of plays is analysed, including Electra, Oedipus the King, The Persians, Iphigenia at Aulis, and Ajax. Parts Two and Three - Directing as Dialogue with the Community and Directorial Re-Visions - focus on a range of productions of key plays from the repertoire, including Prometheus Landscape II, Les Atrides, The Trojan Women, The Bacchae, Antigone and The Suppliants, among others. In each, the varying approaches of different directors are analysed, together with a detailed investigation of the mise-en-scene. In considering each stage production, the authors raise issues of authenticity, contemporary resonances, translation, directorial control/auteurship and adaptation.

The first comprehensive publication on the subject, this book investigates interactions between racial thinking and the stage in the modern and contemporary world, with 25 essays on case studies that will shed light on areas previously neglected by criticism while providing fresh perspectives on already-investigated contexts. Examining performances from Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Africa, China, Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacifi c islands, this collection ultimately frames the history of racial narratives on stage in a global context, resetting understandings of race in public discourse.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage demonstrates the links made between excess of emotion and madness in the early modern period. It argues that the ways in which today's popular and theatrical cultures judge how much is too much can distort our understanding of early modern drama and theatre. It argues that permitting the excesses of the early modern drama onto the contemporary stage might free actors and audiences alike from assumptions that in order to engage with the drama of the past, its characters must be just like us. The book deals with characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries who are sad for too long, or angry to the point of irrationality; people who laugh when they shouldn't or make their audiences do so; people whose selfhood has broken down into an excess of fragmentary extremes and who are labelled mad. It is about moments in the theatre when excessive emotion is rewarded and applauded - and about moments when the expression of emotion is in excess of what is socially acceptable: embarrassing, shameful, unsettling or insane. The book explores the broader cultures of emotion that produce these theatrical moments, and the theatre's role in regulating and extending the acceptable expression of emotion. It is concerned with the acting of excessive emotion and with acting emotion excessively. And it asks how these excesses are produced or erased, give pleasure or pain, in versions of early modern drama in theatre, film and television today. Plays discussed include Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Spanish Tragedy, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, and Coriolanus.

In this sophisticated and compelling introduction to puppet theatre, Penny Francis offers engaging contemporary perspectives on this universal art-form. She provides an account of puppetry's different facets, from its demands and techniques, through its uses and abuses, to its history and philosophy. Now recognized as a valuable and powerful medium used in the making of most forms of theatre and filmed work, those referring to Puppetry will discover something of the roots, dramaturgy, literature and techniques of this visual art form. The book gathers together material from an international selection of sources, bringing puppet theatre to life for the student, practitioner and amateur alike.

This book strives to unmask the racial inequity at the root of the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the US Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). This book focuses on physical culture - systematic, non-competitive exercise performed under the direction of an expert - because tracing how people practiced physical culture in the Progressive Era, especially middle- and upper-class white women, reveals how modes of popular performance, institutional regulation, and ideologies of individualism and motherhood combined to sublimate whiteness beneath the veneer of liberal progressivism and reform. The sites in this book give the fullest picture of the different strata of physical culture for white women during that time and demonstrate the unracialization of whiteness through physical culture practices. By illuminating the ways in which whiteness in the US became a default identity category absorbed into the "universal" ideals of culture, arts, and sciences, the author shows how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions, audience, and promised profitability. Finally, the chapters reveal troubling connections between the daily habits physical culturists promoted and the eugenics movement's drive towards more reproductively efficient white bodies. By examining these written, visual, and embodied texts, the author insists on a closer scrutiny of the implicit whiteness of physical culture and forwards it as a crucial site of analysis for performance scholars interested in how corporeality is marshaled by and able to contest local and global systems of power.

Euripides' Medea is one of the most popular Greek tragedies in the contemporary theatre. Numerous modern adaptations see the play as painting a picture of the struggle of the powerless under the powerful, of women against men, of foreigners versus natives. The play has been adapted into colonial and historical contexts to lend its powerful resonances to issues of current import. Black Medea is an anthology of six adaptations of the Euripidean tragedy by contemporary American playwrights that present Medea as a woman of color, combined with interviews, analytical essays and introductions which frame the original and adaptations. Placing six adaptations side by side and interviewing the playwrights in order to gain their insights into their work allows the reader to see how an ancient Greek tragedy has been used by contemporary American artists to frame and understand African American history. Of the six plays present in the volume, three have never before been published and one of the others has been out of print for almost thirty years. Thus the volume makes available to students, scholars and artists a significant body of dramatic work not currently available. Black Medea is an important book for scholars, students, artists and libraries in African American studies, classics, theatre and performance studies, women and gender Studies, adaptation theory and literature. Theatre companies, universities, community theatres, and other producing organizations will also be interested in the volume.

This unique anthology presents the important historical essays on tragedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span, it traces the development of theories and philosophies of tragedy, enabling readers to consider the ways in which different varieties of environmentalist, feminist, leftist and postcolonial thought have transformed the status of tragedy, and the idea of the tragic, for recent generations of artists, critics and thinkers. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and 21st century theorists. Ideas of tragedy and the tragic have been central to the understanding of culture for the past two millennia. Writers and thinkers from Plato through to Martha Nussbaum have analyzed the genre of tragedy to probe the most fundamental of questions about ethics, pleasure and responsibility in the world. Does tragedy demand that we enjoy witnessing the pain of others? Does it suggest that suffering is inevitable? Is human sexuality tragic? Is tragedy even possible in a world of rolling news on a digitally connected planet, where atrocity and trauma from around the globe are matters of daily information? In order to illustrate the different ways that writers have approached the answers to such questions, this Reader collects together a comprehensive selection of canonical writings on tragedy from antiquity to the present day arranged in six sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts.

This book assembles texts by renowned academics and theatre artists who were professionally active during the wars in former Yugoslavia. It examines examples of how various forms of theatre and performance reacted to the conflicts in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, and Kosovo while they were ongoing. It explores state-funded National Theatre activities between escapism and denial, the theatre aesthetics of protest and resistance, and symptomatic shifts and transformations in the production of theatre under wartime circumstances, both in theory and in practice. In addition, it looks beyond the period of conflict itself, examining the aftermath of war in contemporary theatre and performance, such as by considering Ivan Vidic's war trauma plays, the art campaigns of the international feminist organization Women in Black, and Peter Handke's play Voyage by Dugout. The introduction explores correlations between the contributions and initiates a reflection on the further development of the research field. Overall, the volume provides new perspectives and previously unpublished research in the fields of theory and historiography of theatre, as well as Southeast European Studies.

This book analyses the work of applied theatre practitioners using a new framework of 'responsivity' to make visible their unique expertise. In-depth investigation of practice combines with theorisation to provide a fresh view of the work of artists and facilitators. Case studies are drawn from community contexts: with women, mental health service users, refugees, adults with a learning disability, older people in care, and young people in school. Common skills and qualities are given a vocabulary to help define applied theatre work, such as awareness, anticipation, adaptation, attunement, and responsiveness. The Applied Theatre Artist is of scholarly, practical, and educational interest. The book offers detailed analysis of how skilled theatre artists make in-action decisions within socially engaged participatory projects. Rich description of in-session activity reveals what workshop facilitators actually do and how they think, offering a rare focus in applied theatre.

This book is about the centrality of movement, movement perception, and kinesthetic experience to theatrical spectatorship. Drawing upon phenomenological accounts of movement experience and the insights of cognitive science, neuroscience, acting theory, dance theory, philosophy of mind, and linguistics, it considers how we inhabit the movements of others and how these movements inhabit us. Individual chapters explore the dynamics of movement and animation, action and intentionality, kinesthetic resonance (or mirroring), language, speech, and empathy. In one of its most important contributions to the study of theatre, performance, and spectatorship, this book foregrounds otherness, divergence, and disability in its account of movement perception. The discussions of this and other issues are accompanied by detailed analysis of theatre, puppetry, and dance performances.

"Death and Life in Colonial Nahua Mexico" presents seven dramas from the first truly American theater. Composed in Nahuatl during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most of these plays survive only in later copies. Five are morality plays. Presenting Christian views of moral reform, death, judgment, and punishment for sin, they reveal how these themes were adapted into Nahua culture. The other two plays dramatize biblical narratives: the stories of Abraham and Isaac and of the three wise men.

In this volume, Barry D. Sell and Louise M. Burkhart offer faithful transcriptions of the Nahuatl as well as new English translations of these remarkable dramas. Accompanying the plays are four interpretive essays and a foreword that broaden our understanding of these rare works.

"This volume is the first in a four-volume set entitled "Nahuatl Theater," edited by Barry D. Sell and Louise M. Burkhart"

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This book considers how Samuel Beckett's critical essays, dialogues and reflections drew together longstanding philosophical discourses about the nature of representation, and fostered crucial, yet overlooked, connections between these discourses and his fiction and poetry. It also pays attention to Beckett's writing for little-magazines in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, before going on to consider how the style of Beckett's late prose recalls and develops figures and themes in his critical writing. By providing a long-overdue assessment of Beckett's work as a critic, this study shows how Beckett developed a new aesthetic in knowing dialogue with ideas including phenomenology, Kandinsky's theories of abstraction, and avant-garde movements such as Surrealism. This book will be illuminating for students and researchers interested not just in Beckett, but in literary modernism, the avant-garde, European visual culture and philosophy.

In the 21st century, actors face radical changes in plays and performance styles, as they move from stage to screen and grapple with new technologies that present their art to ever-expanding audiences. Active Analysis offers the flexibility of mind, body, and spirit now urgently needed in acting. Dynamic Acting through Active Analysis brings to light this timely legacy, born during the worst era of Soviet repression and hidden for decades from public view. Part I unfolds like a mystery novel through letters, memoirs, and transcripts of Konstantin Stanislavsky's last classes. Far from the authoritarian director of his youth, he reveals himself as a generous mentor, who empowers actors with a brand new collaborative approach to rehearsals. His assistant, Maria Knebel, first bears witness to his forward-looking ideas and then builds the bridge to new plays in new styles through her directing and influential teaching. Part II follows a 21st century company of diverse actors as they experience the joy of applying Active Analysis to their own creative and professional work.

Based on extensive archival research, this open access book examines the poetics and politics of the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) over the first three decades of its existence, discussing some of its remarkable productions in the comparative contexts of avant-garde theatre, Hollywood cinema, popular culture, and the development of Irish-language theatre, respectively. The overarching objective is to consider the output of the Gate in terms of cultural convergence - the dynamics of exchange, interaction, and acculturation that reveal the workings of transnational infrastructures.