Sound experimentation by avant-garde theatre artists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is an important but largely ignored aspect of theatre history. In this book, Curtin shows how attention to this activity enhances our understanding of artistic practice (modernism) and historical circumstance (modernity) and considers how avant-gardists staged sonic modernity by exploring its conceptual and communicative possibilities as well as its experiential realities. He critically examines avant-garde theatre through a composite analysis of dramatic texts, historical productions, sound recordings, philosophical speculations, and social movements.

Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance is an edited collection designed to address a diverse set of critical responses to and practical interrogations of the notion of being intimate in emergent and hybrid performance practices, aiming to elicit connectivity and provoke debate about the potency, nature and agency of intimacy in contemporary performance.Lauren Berlant suggests that 'intimacy (...) involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared' (2000, p. 1). Sensing intimacy in performance relocates registers of affect from the private experience to the public sphere. Within the current climate of intense global political, social and financial insecurity and unrest, at a time infused with both hope and fear, artists appear to be demonstrating a desire for intimacy and closeness with the Other. Those public figurings of intimacy - staged through contemporary performance, visual culture and digital art practices - become the cultural fuel which, when placed alongside political potentialities, can ignite debates and provocations such as those contained herein.

This book is the first study of popular theatre in France from left to right, exploring how theatre shapes political acts, ideals, and communities in the modern world. As the French found innovative ways of imagining culture and politics in the age of the masses, popular theatre became central to the republican project of using art to create citizens, using secular spaces for the experience of civic communion. But while state projects often faltered in finding playwrights, locations, and audiences, popular theatre flourished on the political and geographical peripheries. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book illuminates lost worlds of political conviviality, from anarchist communes and clandestine agit-prop drama to royalist street politics and right-wing mass spectacle. It reveals new connections between French initiatives and their European counterparts, and demonstrates the enduring strength of radical communities in shaping political ideals and engagement.

With a companion website that includes short online film episodes, this book proposes expansive ways of deconstructing and re-constituting sexuality and gender and thus more embodied and ethical ways of 'doing' life, and offers an understanding and critique of embodiment through an integration of performance, psychotherapy and feminist philosophy.

Combine Kafka's eerie vision with a soulless world run by computers and the result is this comic nightmare of a play. Strand's play - revolving around a bug in the system - premiered at the Actor's Theatre in Louisville Humana Festival, and has been produced by other theatres across the country.

This the first sustained study of the interest of John Ruskin in the theatre of his time. It examines Ruskin's active engagement with and influence on the Victorian popular theatre. Ruskin was an enthusiastic and catholic theatre-goer, enjoying pantomime as much as Shakespeare. Through the lens of Ruskin's discussions of pantomime, melodrama, Shakespearean tragedy, and painting and the stage, Newey and Richards offer a new view of the late Victorian stage focusing on London's West End in its heyday.

How do audiences look at actors in costume onstage? How does costume shape theatrical identity and form bodies? What do audiences wear to the theatre? This lively and cutting-edge book explores these questions, and engages with the various theoretical approaches to the study of actors in performance. Aoife Monks focuses in particular on the uncanny ways in which costume and the actor's body are indistinguishable in the audience's experience of a performance. From the role of costume in Modernist theatre to the actor's position in the fashion system, from nudity to stage ghosts, this wide-ranging exploration of costume, and its histories, argues for the centrality of costume to the spectator's experience at the theatre. Drawing on examples from paintings, photographs, live performances, novels, reviews, blogs and plays, Monks presents a vibrant analysis of the very peculiar work that actors and costumes do on the stage.

Born in 1916 in La Jolla, California, Gregory Peck took up acting in college on a lark that would lead to a career. In his early years, he appeared in a series of summer stock engagements and Broadway shows. He became a star within a year after arriving in Hollywood during World War II, and he won an Academy Award nomination for his second film. From the 1940s to the present, he has played some of film's most memorable and admired characters. This volume provides complete information about Gregory Peck's work in film, television, radio, and the stage. Entries are included for all of his performances, with each entry providing cast and credit information, a plot summary, excerpts from reviews, and critical commentary. A biography and chronology highlight significant events in his life, while a listing of his honors and awards summarizes the recognition he has received over the years. For researchers seeking additional information, the book includes descriptions of special collections holding material related to Peck's work, along with an extensive bibliography of books and articles.

In two acts that consider what the theatre is and what it does, a star-studded cast of intellects, wits and wags here take centre stage to enlighten, provoke, and amuse. A collection of close to 1000 distinctive anecdotes, aphorisms, adages and assaults written and spoken by actors, directors, composers, producers, critics and other observers -- everyone from Sophocles to David Mamet, from Buddah to Brando.

This collection of essays is dedicated to the theory and practice of drama translation. The focus is on foreign-language plays translated into English and staged in Anglo-American theatres. In this connection, concepts like acculturation and cultural transfer,

Patty Duke is one of the few former child actors who has survived the transition from child to adolescent to adult and gone on to greater fame and success in her adult years. Academy Award-winner, television comedy series star, talk-show hostess, author, and aspiring director, this multi-talented actress has become an entertainment industry phenomenon. Researchers as well as film, television, and theater buffs will be interested in Stephen Eberly's research guide, which presents a biography of Patty Duke together with complete and detailed listings of her television, movie, and stage appearances; awards; and recordings.

Lillian Russell was the Victorian era's symbol of talent, charm, and beauty. She was introduced by impresario Tony Pastor in 1880, and was considered an emblem of feminine beauty until the turn of the century. Although her voice still set a standard of excellence, by that time America's vision of loveliness had changed, and her middle-aged body could not meet the new challenge on the musical stage. Russell responded with extraordinary resilience. She adapted with the times and became the Igrande dameR of the American theatre in non-musical plays, burlesque, variety, and the lecture circuit. She wrote widely-read newspaper columns in which she pioneered an optimistic philosophy of self-help, and she used her numerous connections to champion the causes that she held dear.

Carefully researched, this reference book is a comprehensive and thoroughly documented guide to Lillian Russell's life and career. A biography places her in the social and cultural context of her time and adds previously ignored information about her parents, birth, coming-of-age in the Midwest, early career, daughter, and death. A chronology then gives a detailed listing of events in her life and career. The chapters that follow are devoted to her many performances. Entries in each section provide cast and credit information, plot synopses, review excerpts, and critical commentary. Several appendices offer additional information about her work, and an extensive annotated bibliography lists sources of additional information.

This book examines the influence of the early modern period on Antonin Artaud's seminal work The Theatre and Its Double, arguing that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and their early modern context are an integral part of the Theatre of Cruelty and essential to its very understanding. The chapters draw links between the early modern theatrical obsession with plague and regeneration, and how it is mirrored in Artaud's concept of cruelty in the theatre. As a discussion of the influence of Shakespeare and his contemporaries on Artaud, and the reciprocal influence of Artaud on contemporary interpretations of early modern drama, this book is an original addition to both the fields of early modern theatre studies and modern drama.

Whether you are ""in the business,"" or a music theorist, musicologist, or simply an opera fan - read on! This is an analytical monograph by a Schenkerian theorist, but it is also written by one performer and enthusiast for another. ""Tonality as Drama"" draws on the fields of dramaturgy, music theory, and historical musicology to answer a fundamental question about twentieth-century music: Why does tonality persist in opera, even after it has been abandoned in other genres?Combining the analytical approaches of the leading music and dramatic theorists of the twentieth century - Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) and Russian director Constantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) - Edward D. Latham reveals insights into works by Scott Joplin, George Gershwin, Kurt Weill, and Aaron Copland that are relevant to analysts, opera directors, and performers alike. ""Tonality as Drama"" is not a textbook - rather, it is an innovative study meant to inspire changes in the analysis and performance of tonal opera.

Theatre and Aural Attention investigates what it is to attend theatre by means of listening. Focusing on four core aural phenomena in theatre - noise, designed sound, silence, and immersion - George Home-Cook concludes that theatrical listening involves paying attention to atmospheres.

What is the history of devised theatre? Why have theatre-makers, since the 1950s, chosen to devise performances? What different sorts of devising practices are there? What are the myths attached to devising, and what are the realities? First published in 2005, Devising Performance remains the only book to offer the reader a history of devising practice. Charting the development of collaboratively created performances from the 1950s to the early 21st century, it presents a range of case studies drawn from Britain, America and Australia. Companies discussed include The Living Theatre, Open Theatre, Australian Performing Group, People Show, Teatro Campesino, Theatre de Complicite, Legs on the Wall, Forced Entertainment, Goat Island and Graeae. Providing a history of devising practice, Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling encourage us to look more carefully at the different modes of devising and to consider the implications of our use of these practices in the 21st century.

This book provides biographical and analytical data on significant historical and contemporary practitioners and theorists of the theatrical design field who have contributed to the development of the art. Beginning with a historical survey on the evolution of theatrical design, the volume features entries on some 270 set, costume, lighting, and theatre building designers, mainly dating from the fifteenth century to the present. Coverage is international, with a necessary emphasis on the United States and Western Europe.

Essays of varying length describe and evaluate the career and contributions of each designer, providing information on positions, productions, and awards and generally ending with sources for further reading. Particularly valuable are the detailed chronological listings of design credits given as available, mainly for prominent twentieth century figures. Appendixes to the volume list the designers chronologically by birth date and also by country of birth. The volume ends with an annotated general bibliography on theatre design and designers and an index. The only reference book specifically dedicated to theatrical designers, its coverage will significantly extend the information contained in more general works on theatre presently available for library research.

Few individuals have positioned their work more controversially or consequently than Richard Schechner within the pivotal debates that define Performance Studies. The Rise of Performance Studies is the first collection of essays to critically examine the profound contributions that Schechner has made to Performance Studies as a discipline.

Staging the Impossible explores the most recent critical thinking on the relationship between the literary mode of the fantastic and the literary genre of drama with respect to modern theatre. While a few monographs treat a particular dimension of the fantastic in drama, the Gothic or the fairy tale for instance, no other volume provides a critically sophisticated introduction to the diversity of fantastic drama written and performed in this century. The essays here lay to rest the illusion that realism is the only genuine form of theatrical expression and the notion that cinema special effects have rendered science fiction and the stage incompatible. Competing with the realism of the first half of the twentieth century and the "new realism" of the second half have been a range of successful theatrical repertoire, including the absurd, the horrific, the supernatural, the mythic, the dream-vision quest, the postmodern, the hyper-realistic, and the science fictional. Wide ranging in time and space, this volume comprises fourteen essays on the fantastic on the modern stage, assessing dramatic works from the United States, Ireland, England, Western Europe, and the Caribbean. Canonical figures, such as Strindberg, Yeats, Beckett, Ionesco, Cocteau, and Stoppard are studied, along with neglected figures, such as Wassily Kandinsky, better known as an expressionist painter, and Halper Leivick, author of the Yiddish play The Golem, and innovative new performance troupes and individual artists, such as Squat Theatre and Spalding Gray. Concluding essays are devoted to contemporary experimental theatre and postmodern drama. A study of science fiction on stage includes an annotated listing of fortyEnglish-language plays. Concerned with the interstice of theatre and the fantastic, this work will be valuable to students and scholars of both, of genre studies, and of contemporary literature in general.