Includes an international and multidisciplinary list of contributors.

Provides a broad a bottom-up set of multiple international examples of projects initiated by social practitioners and by artists - and by collaboration between the two - in varied settings and domains. Provides a set of examples, methods, and ideas for including social workers, community workers, social change advocates, art therapists, psychologists, human geographers, and town and urban planners, but also social artists, cultural policy makers, and those interested in using social arts in participatory research. Will be of interest to community workers, social change advocates, art therapists, psychologists, human geographers, and town and urban planners and will inspire and guide all of the above groups on the theoretical, academic, training, and practice levels of using social arts.

This book studies the intersection of performance and nationalism in South Asia.It traces the emergence of the culture of nationalism from the late nineteenth century through to contemporary times. Drawing on various theatrical performance texts, it looks at the ways in which performative narratives have reflected the national narrative and analyses the role performance has played in engendering nationhood. The volume discusses themes such as political martyrdom as performative nationalism, the revitalisation of nationalism through new media, the sanitisation of physical gestures in dance, the performance of nationhood through violence in Tajiki films, as well as K-Pop and the new northeastern identity in India. A unique contribution to the study of nationalism, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of history, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, modern India, Asian studies, political studies, social anthropology and sociology.

Embodied Playwriting: Improv and Acting Exercises for Writing and Devising is the first book to compile new and adapted exercises for teaching playwriting in the classroom, workshop, or studio through the lens of acting and improvisation. The book provides access to the innovative practices developed by seasoned playwriting teachers from around the world who are also actors, improv performers, and theatre directors. Borrowing from the embodied art of acting and the inventive practice of improvisation, the exercises in this book will engage readers in performance-based methods that lead to the creation of fully imagined characters, dynamic relationships, and vivid drama. Step-by-step guidelines for exercises, as well as application and coaching advice, will support successful lesson planning and classroom implementation for playwriting students at all levels, as well as individual study. Readers will also benefit from curation by editors who have experience with high-impact educational practices and are advocates for the use of varied teaching strategies to increase accessibility, inclusion, skill-building, and student success. Embodied Playwriting offers a wealth of material for teachers and students of playwriting courses, as well as playwrights who look forward to experimenting with dynamic, embodied writing practices.

An eye for an eye. It's very simple. You choose your homeland like a hyena picking and choosing where he steals his next meal from. Scavenger. Yes you grovel to the feet of Mengistu and when his people spit at you and kick you from the bowl you scuttle across the border. Scavenger. As a violent civil war rages back home in Ethiopia, teenager Alem and his father are in a bed and breakfast in Berkshire. It's his best holiday ever. The next morning his father is gone and has left a note explaining that he and his mother want to protect Alem from the war. This strange grey country of England is now his home. On his own, and in the hands of the social services and the Refugee Council, Alem lives from letter to letter, waiting to hear something from his father. Then he meets car-obsessed Mustapha, the lovely 'out-of-your-league' Ruth and dangerous Sweeney - three unexpected allies who spur him on in his fight to be seen as more than just the Refugee Boy. Lemn Sissay's remarkable stage adaptation of Benjamin Zephaniah's bestselling novel is published here in the Methuen Drama Student Edition series, featuring commentary & notes by Professor Lynette Goddard (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK) that help the student unpack the play's themes, language, structure and production history to date.

A unique survey of the twentieth century's most influential acting methods, offering invaluable practical insights for actors and drama teachers. Each of the ten famous techniques included in this handbook is described in detail by one of today's foremost practitioners. Each chapter outlines the development of the respective technique and offers practical guidance for actors wishing to explore it for themselves. * Lee Strasberg Technique by Anna Strasberg * Stella Adler Technique by Tom Oppenheim * Sanford Meisner Technique by Victoria Hart * Michael Chekhov Technique and The Mask by Per Brahe * Uta Hagen's Technique by Carol Rosenfeld * Physical Acting Inspired by Grotowski by Stephen Wangh * The Viewpoints by Mary Overlie * Practical Aesthetics by Robert Bella * Interdisciplinary Training by Fritz Ertl * Neo-classical Training by Louis Scheeder

'Much like Mr. Miller, Quentin is a witness to alarming public and personal catastrophes: the stock market crash, the Holocaust, the McCarthy witchhunts and the self-destruction of a show business idol to whom he is married.' NEW YORK TIMES Haunted by past romantic failures, Quentin, a New York City Jewish intellectual, retreats into his mind as he debates marrying for a third time: as he revisits past loves and losses, his mind and memory fragments under philosophical questions; are our failures really just our own? Or is possible to hide away from the mistakes of the past? One of Miller's most personal plays, After the Fall takes place almost entirely inside the mind of the play's protagonist, who is often read as a stand-in for the playwright himself. Touching on themes of the Holocaust, McCarthyism and inherited sin, the play is one of the most discussed within Miller's canon. This Methuen Drama Student Edition is edited by Ramon Espejo-Romero, with commentary and notes that explore the play's production history (including excerpts from an interview with Michael Blakemore, former Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre,) as well as the dramatic, thematic and academic debates that surround it.

'Mr. Miller knows his audience... he is letting us know, the devil will have his due.' NEW YORK TIMES When insurance agent Lyman Felt is hospitalised following a near-fatal car crash, both of his wives show up at his bedside and his duplicitous bigamy is revealed. As his shocked spouses - the prim Theo and the assertive Leah - reel from this revelation and their husband's hypocrisy, an outrageous question is presented: is marriage actually easier this way? Touching on themes of betrayal, crisis and reconciliation, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan is one of Miller's more controversial works, and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play in 1991. This Methuen Drama Student Edition is edited by Thiago Russo, with commentary and notes that explore the play's production history (including excerpts from an interview with director David Esbjornson) as well as the dramatic, thematic and academic debates that surround it.

Play helps define who we are as human beings. However, many of the leisurely/ludic activities people participate in are created and governed by corporate entities with social, political, and business agendas. As such, it is critical that scholars understand and explicate the ideological underpinnings of played-through experiences and how they affect the player/performers who engage in them. This book explores how people play and why their play matters, with a particular interest in how ludic experiences are often constructed and controlled by the interests of institutions, including corporations, non-profit organizations, government agencies, religious organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Each chapter explores diverse sites of play. From theme parks to comic conventions to massively-multiplayer online games, they probe what roles the designers of these experiences construct for players, and how such play might affect participants' identities and ideologies. Scholars of performance studies, leisure studies, media studies and sociology will find this book an essential reference when studying facets of play.

This edited volume explores the role of arts and meditation within educational settings, and looks in particular at the preventive and developmental function of the arts in educational contexts through different theoretical perspectives. Encompassing research from an array of disciplines including theatre, psychology, neuroscience, music, psychiatry, and mindfulness, the book draws insights relevant to a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary fields. Chapters are divided into thematic sections, each outlining praxes and emphasising how educating within and through the arts can provide tools for critical thinking, creativity and a sense of agency, consequently fulfilling the need of well-being and contributing towards human flourishing. Ultimately, the book focuses on the role the arts have played in our understanding of physical and mental health, and demonstrates the new-found significance of the discipline in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. With its interdisciplinary and timely nature, this book will be essential reading for scholars, academics, and post-graduate researchers in the field of arts education, creative therapies, neuroscience, psychology, and mindfulness.

Inspired by the podcast Dear Multi-Hyphenate, this book explores how to be a multi-hypenate - an artist with multiple proficiencies - in the entertainment industry. Answers questions about individual mission-driven entrepreneurship in the Theatre industry. Each chapter features an interview with a notable theatre artist.

This volume investigates performance cultures as rich and dynamic environments of knowledge practice through which distinctive epistemologies are continuously (re)generated, cultivated, and celebrated. Epistemologies are dynamic formations of rules, tools, and procedures not only for understanding but also for doing knowledges. This volume deals in particular with epistemological challenges posed by practices and processes of interweaving performance cultures. These challenges arise in artistic and academic contexts because of hierarchies between epistemologies. European colonialism worked determinedly, violently, and often with devastating effects on instituting and sustaining a hegemony of modern Euro-American rules of knowing in many parts of the world. Therefore, Interweaving Epistemologies critically interrogates the (im)possibilities of interweaving epistemologies in artistic and academic contexts today. Writing from diverse geographical locations and knowledge cultures, the book's contributors-philosophers, political scientists as well as practitioners and scholars of theater, performance, and dance-investigate prevailing forms of epistemic ignorance and violence. They introduce key concepts and theories that enable critique of unequal power relations between epistemologies. Moreover, contributions explore historical cases of interweaving epistemologies and examine innovative present-day methods of working across and through epistemological divides in non-hegemonic, sustainable, creative, and critical ways. Ideal for practitioners, students and researchers of theater, performance, and dance as well as of philosophy and history (of science), Interweaving Epistemologies emphasizes the urgent need to acknowledge, study and promote epistemological plurality and diversity in practices of performance making as well as in scholarship on theater and performance around the globe today.

From director and cofounder of the Royal Shakespeare Company Peter Brook, "The Empty Space" is a timeless analysis of theatre from the most influential stage director of the twentieth century.
As relevant as when it was first published in 1968, groundbreaking director and cofounder of the Royal Shakespeare Company Peter Brook draws on a life in love with the stage to explore the issues facing a theatrical performance--of any scale. He describes important developments in theatre from the last century, as well as smaller scale events, from productions by Stanislavsky to the rise of Method Acting, from Brecht's revolutionary alienation technique to the free form happenings of the 1960s, and from the different styles of such great Shakespearean actors as John Gielgud and Paul Scofield to a joyous impromptu performance in the burnt-out shell of the Hamburg Opera just after the war.
Passionate, unconventional, and fascinating, this book shows how theatre defies rules, builds and shatters illusions, and creates lasting memories for its audiences.

Kristin Linklater is one of the most internationally recognised names in the field of voice training, and this volume explores her work and life whilst also putting her work into practice. Charting the development of Linklater's process, including her work at LAMDA, the Lincoln Centre, NYU, Columbia, and the KLVC on Orkney, the book provides a comprehensive overview of one of the world's leading voice coaches. This book contains: A detailed biography of Linklater's life, including her work with Iris Warren at LAMDA, as well as the founding of her own companies and the KLVC on Orkney Detailed analysis of her key text, Freeing the Natural Voice and her work with Carol Gilligan on The Company of Women, an all-female Shakespeare company they co-conceived A comprehensive set of exercises - several of these previously unpublished This book offers essential reading and an invaluable practice handbook to the contemporary performer, voice teacher and actor trainer. As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today's student.

A Galaxy of Things explores the ways in which all puppets, masks, and makeup-prosthetic figures are "material characters," and uses Star Wars creatures, droids, and helmeted-characters to illustrate what makes the good ones not only compelling, but meaningful. The book begins with author Colette Searls' Star Wars thing aesthetic, described through a release-order overview of what creatures, droids and masked characters have brought to 45+ years of live-action Star Wars. Building on theories from the burgeoning field of puppetry and material performance, it sees these "material characters" as a group and describes three specific powers that they share - distance, distillation, and duality - using the ubiquitously recognizable Star Wars characters to illustrate them. The book describes Distance, Distillation, and Duality as material character powers, using characters like C-3PO and Jabba the Hutt to illustrate how all three work to generate meaning. An in-depth exploration of the original Empire Strikes Back Yoda and "Baby" Yoda (Grogu) reveals how these two puppets use those powers to transform their human companions: Luke Skywalker, and then Din Djarin. Searls provides an in-depth analysis of Darth Vader's mask trajectory across three trilogies (1977 - 2019), revealing its contribution as a "performing thing." Finally, the book presents problematic uses of material character powers by critiquing droids in service, and the historical use of racial stereotypes in characters like Jar Jar Binks, before offering a hopeful analysis of how early 2020s live-action Star Wars began centering the non-, semi-, and concealed human in redemptive ways. This is an accessible exploration for students and scholars of theatre, film, media studies and popular culture who want to better understand puppets, masks, and makeup-prosthetic characters. Its terms and concepts will be useful to scholarly explorations of non-, semi-, and concealed human portrayals for a range of other fields, including posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, ethnic studies, and material culture.

* This book offers an exciting examination of the theatrical functions of medieval English stage directions as records of earlier performance. * Would be recommended reading in for any undergraduate or master's level students studying the medieval period in Performance studies, English Literature or in History (in particular in the UK and the US). * The closest competitors focus on after 1560 so this project is a first in its time period coverage.

This book, first published in 1980, is a comprehensive study of the radical theatre movement in Britain from 1968 to 1978. The essays are based on first-hand interviews, with each section being introduced with a summary of key events before detailing the artists under examination.

Written by a scholar of satire and politics, Trump Was a Joke explains why satire is an exceptional foil for absurd political times and why it did a particularly good job of making sense of Trump. Covering a range of comedic interventions, it analyzes why political satire is surprisingly effective at keeping us sane when politics is making us crazy. Its goal is to highlight the unique power of political satire to encourage critical thinking, foster civic action, and further rational debate in moments of political hubris and hysteria. The book has been endorsed by Bassem Youssef, referred to as the Jon Stewart of Egypt, and Srdja Popovic, author of Blueprint for Revolution, who used satirical activism to bring down Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. With a foreword by award-winning filmmaker, satirist and activist Michael Moore, this study will be of interest to readers who follow politics and enjoy political comedy and will appeal to the communications, comedy studies, media studies, political science, rhetoric, cultural studies, and American studies markets.

Replete with interviews with key practitioners (both in the book and online) will give up-to-date information on the techniques, forms and concepts used by leading figures in contemporary Live Visuals.

Surveys the key figures in the development and evolution of LGBTQ representation in contemporary US theatre. Aimed at the full breadth of theatre and performing arts students in the USA. No other book has the same breadth and depth of coverage in this subject area, or a comparable roster of leading scholars.

Regina Mingotti was the first female impresario to run London's opera house. Born in Naples in 1722, she was the daughter of an Austrian diplomat, and had worked at Dresden under Hasse from 1747. Mingotti left Germany in 1752, and travelled to Madrid to sing at the Spanish court, where the opera was directed by the great castrato, Farinelli. It is not known quite how Francesco Vanneschi, the opera promoter, came to hire Mingotti, but in 1754 (travelling to England via Paris), she was announced as being engaged for the opera in London 'having been admired at Naples and other parts of Italy, by all the Connoisseurs, as much for the elegance of her voice as that of her features'. Michael Burden offers the first considered survey of Mingotti's London years, including material on Mingotti's publication activities, and the identification of the characters in the key satirical print 'The Idol'. Burden makes a significant contribution to the knowledge and understanding of eighteenth-century singers' careers and status, and discusses the management, the finance, the choice of repertory, and the pasticcio practice at The King's Theatre, Haymarket during the middle of the eighteenth century. Burden also argues that Mingotti's years with Farinelli influenced her understanding of drama, fed her appreciation of Metastasio, and were partly responsible for London labelling her a 'female Garrick'. The book includes the important publication of the complete texts of both of Mingotti's Appeals to the Publick, accounts of the squabble between Mingotti and Vanneschi, which shed light on the role a singer could play in the replacement of arias.

A fresh approach to the theatre text for the Twenty First Century, including recent developments in the fields of technology, publishing and theatre-making. Intended for scholars and upper-level students of theatre studies and performance studies. Gives a much fresher and more comprehensive perspective than previous work in this area, particularly in regard to topics like technology and digital performance.

Latinx Actor Training presents essays and pioneering research from leading Latinx practitioners and scholars in the United States to examine the history and future of Latino/a/x actor training practices and approaches. Born out of the urgent need to address the inequities in academia and the industry as Latinx representation on stage and screen remains disproportionately low despite population growth, this book seeks to reimagine and restructure the practice of actor training by inviting deep investigation into heritage and identity practices. Latinx Actor Training features contributions covering current and historical acting methodologies, principles, and training, explorations of linguistic identity, casting considerations, and culturally inclusive practices that aim to empower a new generation of Latinx actors and to assist the educators who are entrusted with their training. This book is dedicated to creating career success and championing positive narratives to combat pervasive and damaging stereotypes. Latinx Actor Training offers culturally inclusive pedagogies that will be invaluable for students, practitioners, and scholars interested in the intersections of Latinx herencia (heritage), identity, and actor training.

Bringing together eminent scholars and emerging critics who offer a range of perspectives and critical methods, this collection sets a new standard in Beddoes criticism. In line with the goals of Ashgate's Research Companion series, the editors and contributors provide an overview of Beddoes's criticism and identify significant new directions in Beddoes studies. These include exploring Beddoes's German context, only recently a site of critical attention; reading Beddoes's plays in light of gender theory; and reassessing Beddoes's use of dramatic genre in the context of recent work by theatre historians. Rounding out the volume are essays devoted to key areas in Beddoes's scholarship such as nineteenth-century medical theories, psychoanalytic myth, and Romantic ventriloquism. This collection makes the case for Beddoes's centrality to contemporary debates about nineteenth-century literary culture and its contexts and his influence on Modernist conceptions of literature.

London's West End has a rich and unique collection of theatres, ranging in date from early the early 19th century to the end of the 20th;more than fifty are located within an area of two square miles. This book celebrates the working buildings at the heart of the British theatrical industry. Focusing on the theatres in the West End, it looks at their architecture and history as well as examining what it is that constitutes a West End Theatre. The exquisite photographs in the book lead the reader on a tour - taking in the front -of -house areas, the auditoria and the backstage spaces - of some of London's most famous theatres. From the Palladium to the Lyceum, it offers glimpses of those areas not normally seen by the public, Such as rehearsal spaces, dressing rooms, backstage areas and even a Royal reception room. In doing so, it enters the private realms of the theatre technicians and actors, and brings to light the theatre's hidden world.