By examining how female characters speak and act during coming of age, engagement, marriage, and intimacy, Consent in Shakespeare will enhance understanding about how and why women spoke, remained silent, or acted as they did in relation to their intimate partners in Early Modern and contemporary private and public situations in and around the Mediterranean. Consent in intimate relationships is front and center in today's conversations. This book re-examines the verbal and physical interactions of female-identified characters in Early Modern and contemporary cultures in Shakespeare's Mediterranean comedies and the sources from which he derived his plays. This re-examination of the words that women say or do not say, and actions that women do or do not take, in Shakespeare's Mediterranean plays and his probable sources sheds light on how Shakespeare's audiences might have perceived Mediterranean cultural mores and norms. Assessment of source materials for Shakespeare's comedies set in the Balkans, France, Italy, the Near East, North Africa, and Spain suggests how women of diverse backgrounds communicated in everyday life and peak life experiences in the Early Modern era. Given Shakespeare's impact worldwide, this initiative to shift the conversation about the power of consent of female protagonists and supporting characters in Shakespeare's Mediterranean plays will further transform conversations about consent in class, board and conference rooms, and the international stage.

Opera in Performance elucidates the performative dimension of contemporary opera productions. What are the most striking and decisive moments in a performance? Why do we respond so strongly to stagings that transform familiar scenes, to performers' bodily presence, and to virtuosic voices as well as ill-disposed ones? Drawing on phenomenology and performance theory, Clemens Risi explains how these moments arise out of a dialogue between performers and the audience, representation and presence, the familiar and the new. He then applies these insights in critical descriptions of his own experiences of various singers, stagings, and performances at opera houses and festivals from across the German-speaking world over the last twenty years. As the first book to focus on what happens in performance as such, this study shifts our attention to moments that have eluded articulation and provides tools for describing our own experiences when we go to the opera. This book will particularly interest scholars and students in theater and performance studies, musicology, and the humanities, and may also appeal to operagoers and theater professionals.

Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music offers a range of approaches central to the performance of French piano music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors include scholars and active performers who see performance not as an independent activity but as a practice enriched by a wealth of historical and analytical approaches. To underline the usefulness of contextual understanding for performance, each author highlights the choices performers must confront with examples drawn from particular repertoires and composers. Topics explored include editorial practice, the use of early recordings, emergent disciplines such as analysis-and-performance, and traditions passed down from teacher to student. Themes that emerge demonstrate the importance of editions as a form of communication, the challenges of notation, the significance of detail and of deeper continuity, the importance of performing and teaching traditions, and the influence of cross disciplinary frameworks. A link to a set of performed examples on the frenchpianomusic.com website allows readers to hear and compare performances and interpretations of the music discussed. The volume will appeal to musicologists and analysts interested in performance, performers, students, and piano teachers.

Mark Berry explores the political and religious ideas expounded in Wagner's Ring through close attention to the text and drama, the multifarious intellectual influences upon the composer during the work's lengthy gestation and composition, and the wealth of Wagner source material. Many of his writings are explicitly political in their concerns, for Wagner was emphatically not a revolutionary solely for the sake of art. Yet it would be misleading to see even the most 'political' tracts as somehow divorced from the aesthetic realm; Wagner's radical challenge to liberal-democratic politics makes no such distinction. This book considers Wagner's treatment of various worlds: nature, politics, economics, and metaphysics, in order to explain just how radical that challenge is. Classical interpretations have tended to opt either for an 'optimistic' view of the Ring, centred upon the influence of Young Hegelian thought - in particular the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach - and Wagner's concomitant revolutionary politics, or for the 'pessimistic' option, removing the disillusioned Wagner-in-Swiss-exile from the political sphere and stressing the undoubtedly important role of Arthur Schopenhauer. Such an 'either-or' approach seriously misrepresents not only Wagner's compositional method but also his intellectual method. It also sidelines inconvenient aspects of the dramas that fail to 'fit' whichever interpretation is selected. Wagner's tendency is not progressively to recant previous 'errors' in his oeuvre. Radical ideas are not completely replaced by a Schopenhauerian world-view, however loudly the composer might come to trumpet his apparent 'conversion'. Nor is Wagner's truly an Hegelian method, although Hegelian dialectic plays an important role. In fact, Wagner is in many ways not really a systematic thinker at all (which is not to portray him as self-consciously unsystematic in a Nietzschean, let alone 'post-modernist' fashion). His tendency, rather, is agglomerative,

Flop Musicals of the Twenty-First Century offers a provocative and revealing historical narrative of a group of musicals that cost millions and had spectacular potential ... but bombed anyway. Stephen Purdy examines at length the production histories, which are all bound together by a common thread. The book focuses the lens on several seemingly infallible theatre creatives who weren't destined to repeat their successes with the shows discussed in this volume. As such, Purdy grounds the discussion by examining what the legendary creators of Les Miserables, pop superstar Elton John, wunderkind Julie Taymor, and many others have in common besides being inspired storytellers of iconic Broadway musicals. The answer is that they also all created shows that, for one reason or a dozen, didn't find an audience. Flop Musicals of the Twenty-First Century shares the story of what can happen when formidable creative teams of sell-out musicals attempt to re-create their success but miss the mark. This is an engaging book for students, practitioners, and fans of musical theatre that contains thoughtful observations about luck and creative differences, botched adaptations, and alienated audiences, all of which can determine the fate of a musical.

Forced Migration in the Feminist Imagination explores how feminist acts of imaginative expression, community-building, scholarship, and activism create new possibilities for women experiencing forced migration in the twenty-first century. Drawing on literature, film, and art from a range of transnational contexts including Europe, the Middle East, Central America, Australia, and the Caribbean, this volume reveals the hitherto unrecognised networks of feminist alliance being formulated across borders, while reflecting carefully on the complex politics of cross-cultural feminist solidarity. The book presents a variety of cultural case-studies that each reveal a different context in which the transcultural feminist imagination can be seen to operate - from the 'maternal feminism' of literary journalism confronting the European 'refugee crisis' to Iran's female film directors building creative collaborations with displaced Afghan women; and from artists employing sonic creativities in order to listen to women in U.K. and Australian detention, to LGBTQ+ poets and video artists articulating new forms of queer feminist community against the backdrop of the hostile environment. This is an essential read for scholars in Women's and Gender Studies, Feminist and Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies, and Comparative Literary Studies, as well as for those operating in the fields of Gender and Development Studies and Forced Migration Studies.

Barrie Kosky on the Contemporary Australian Stage is the first book-length study of Kosky's adaptations of tragedy in Australia. The book charts the early parts of Kosky's career that came to impact upon his prolific work in opera in Europe. The book uses affect theory to draw critical attention to audience's experience of Kosky's work outside of traditional reception theories. The book provides a concept of 'post-tragedy' that can be productively taken up in relation to other directors radically adapting tragedy for contemporary performance.

Fire Under My Feet seeks to expose the diverse, significant, and often under-researched historical and developmental phenomena revealed by studies in the dance systems of the African Diaspora. In the book, written documentation and diverse methodologies are buttressed by the experiences of those whose lives are built around the practice of African diaspora dance. Replete with original perspectives, this book makes a significant contribution to dance and African diaspora scholarship simultaneously. Most important, it highlights the work of researchers from Ecuador, India, Puerto Rico, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and it exposes under-researched and omitted voices of the African diaspora dance world of the aforesaid locations and Puerto Rico, Columbia, and Trinidad as well. This study showcases a blend of scholars, dance practitioners, and interdisciplinarity, and engages the relationship between African diaspora dance and the fields of history, performance studies, critical race theory, religion, identity, and black agency.

The musical adaptation of Seth's George Sprott, captured on vinyl and packaged by the cartoonist himself! Something strange happens when you pass your work along to another artist for interpretation. It goes away a relative and comes back a stranger. Lines of dialogue I had written in my graphic novel, now spoken or sung by actors, were odd and moving. I could suddenly recognize from what wellspring of emotion they had originated in me. A truly moving experience." --Seth Seth's acclaimed graphic novel George Sprott has now inspired a modern opera by the artistic director and musician Mark Haney. Captured on a classic vinyl record with a sumptuous, over-the-top design by Seth, Omnis Temporalis: A Visual Long-Playing Record is part chamber music, part song cycle, and part audio drama. Haney's unique project builds on Seth's original picture novella while standing alone as a musical triumph. Omnis Temporalis remixes elements of Seth's George Sprott to bring the main character and several other residents of Dominion to life, telling a story of time, memory, loss, and the ties that bind. Featuring acclaimed TV and voice actor Richard Newman as George and soprano Dory Hayley as Daisy, the cast also includes many of Canada's best-known stage and TV actors. The trio of alto flute, cello, and double bass create a musical palette on which the dialogue and songs float in an ethereal, atmospheric narrative that traces parts of George's life as we accompany him through the last day of his life.

Girls, Performance, and Activism offers artists, activists, educators, and scholars a comprehensive analysis, celebration, and critique of the ways in which teenage girls create and perform activist theater. Girls, particularly Black and Latinx teenagers, are using the tools of performance to share their stories, devise new ones, and use the stage to advocate for social change. Interweaving interviews, poetic text, drama, and theory, this book provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of how and why this field erupted and the ways in which girls are using performance to transform themselves and enact change in their communities. As a white woman who has collaboratively created theater with hundreds of girls of color over the past 20 years, Dana Edell offers strategies for engaging with girls across difference through an intersectional lens in order to acknowledge the ways in which race, gender, age, class, ability, and sexuality influence girls' experiences and relationships with adult collaborators as they work to create meaningful, impactful, and often personal activist performances. This is the go-to handbook for teachers, theater directors, and performance makers who want to create politically engaged work with teenage girls.

Regarded by Augusto Boal as the international icon of his vision, Jana Sanskriti are the leading practitioners of Theatre of the Oppressed and Forum Theatre in India and the East. The group has worked continuously with rural communities in West Bengal since its beginnings in 1985 to reconfigure social and political relationships through theatre, achieving both a solid regional presence and an international reputation. This book combines: a biography of the group, charting their history, methodology and modes of operation an examination of Jana Sanskriti through the writings of their founder, Sanjoy Ganguly a detailed analysis of their performance events and practices, including the plays collected in Ganguly's Where We Stand (2009) practical exercises and games, taken from Jana Sanskriti's workshops and festivals. 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.

This Companion documents and celebrates artistic journeys within the framework of rich and complex cultural heritages and traditional dance practices of the Asia-Pacific region. It presents various dance forms from Australia, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and the South Pacific. Drawing on extensive research and decades of performative experience as artists, choreographers, producers, teachers, and critics, the authors approach issues of dance and cultural diversity from a theoretical perspective while at the same time exploring change, process, and transformation through dance. The book discusses themes such as tradition, contemporization, interdisciplinarity, dance education, youth dance, dance networks, curatorial practices, and evolving performative practices of dance companies and independents. It also looks at regional networking, curating dance festivals and spaces that foster collaboration, regional cooperation, and cultural exchange, which are essential features of dance in Asia and the Pacific. This collection will be of interest to students and researchers of pedagogy, choreography, community dance practice, theatre and performance studies, social and cultural studies, aesthetics, interdisciplinary arts, and more. It will be an invaluable resource for artists and practitioners working in dance schools and communities.

Flop Musicals of the Twenty-First Century offers a provocative and revealing historical narrative of a group of musicals that cost millions and had spectacular potential ... but bombed anyway. Stephen Purdy examines at length the production histories, which are all bound together by a common thread. The book focuses the lens on several seemingly infallible theatre creatives who weren't destined to repeat their successes with the shows discussed in this volume. As such, Purdy grounds the discussion by examining what the legendary creators of Les Miserables, pop superstar Elton John, wunderkind Julie Taymor, and many others have in common besides being inspired storytellers of iconic Broadway musicals. The answer is that they also all created shows that, for one reason or a dozen, didn't find an audience. Flop Musicals of the Twenty-First Century shares the story of what can happen when formidable creative teams of sell-out musicals attempt to re-create their success but miss the mark. This is an engaging book for students, practitioners, and fans of musical theatre that contains thoughtful observations about luck and creative differences, botched adaptations, and alienated audiences, all of which can determine the fate of a musical.

i)The author is a very famous expert in the study of the history of drama in China, who held many positions in important academic institutions. ii) This book is the most comprehensive monograph on the study of the history of Chinese drama in the 20th century, with high academic value. iii) This book is both academic and readable and tries to describe the development track of Chinese drama in the 20th century as completely and comprehensively as possible.

Digital Scenography in Opera in the Twenty-First Century is the first definitive study of the use of digital scenography in Western opera production. The book begins by exploring digital scenography's dramaturgical possibilities and establishes a critical framework for identifying and comparing the use of digital scenography across different digitally enhanced opera productions. The book then investigates the impacts and potential disruptions of digital scenography on opera's longstanding production conventions, both on and off the stage. Drawing on interviews with major industry practitioners, including Paul Barritt, Mark Grimmer, Donald Holder, Elaine J. McCarthy, Luke Halls, Wendall K. Harrington, Finn Ross, S. Katy Tucker, and Victoria 'Vita' Tzykun, author Caitlin Vincent identifies key correlations between the use of digital scenography in practice and subsequent impacts on creative hierarchies, production design processes, and organisational management. The book features detailed case studies of digitally enhanced productions premiered by Dutch National Opera, Komische Oper Berlin, Opera de Lyon, The Royal Opera, Covent Garden, San Francisco Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Theatre Royal de la Monnaie, The Metropolitan Opera, Victorian Opera, and Washington National Opera.

This Companion documents and celebrates artistic journeys within the framework of rich and complex cultural heritages and traditional dance practices of the Asia-Pacific region. It presents various dance forms from Australia, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and the South Pacific. Drawing on extensive research and decades of performative experience as artists, choreographers, producers, teachers, and critics, the authors approach issues of dance and cultural diversity from a theoretical perspective while at the same time exploring change, process, and transformation through dance. The book discusses themes such as tradition, contemporization, interdisciplinarity, dance education, youth dance, dance networks, curatorial practices, and evolving performative practices of dance companies and independents. It also looks at regional networking, curating dance festivals and spaces that foster collaboration, regional cooperation, and cultural exchange, which are essential features of dance in Asia and the Pacific. This collection will be of interest to students and researchers of pedagogy, choreography, community dance practice, theatre and performance studies, social and cultural studies, aesthetics, interdisciplinary arts, and more. It will be an invaluable resource for artists and practitioners working in dance schools and communities.

Early modern audiences, readerships, and viewerships were not homogenous. Differences in status, education, language, wealth, and experience (to name only a few variables) could influence how a group of people, or a particular person, received and made sense of sermons, public proclamations, dramatic and musical performances, images, objects, and spaces. The ways in which each of these were framed and executed could have a serious impact on their relevance and effectiveness. The chapters in this volume explore the ways in which authors, poets, artists, preachers, theologians, playwrights, and performers took account of and encoded pluriform potential audiences, readers, and viewers in their works, and how these varied parties encountered and responded to these works. The contributors here investigate these complex interactions through a variety of critical and methodological lenses.

- Each historical chapter is followed by a process chapter giving the explication of a detailed rehearsal methodology useful to both directors and actors. - The process chapters include objectives, examples from the practice of other directors and actors, and examples from the author's practice, making this a useful text for practitioners and students in Directing and Acting programs. - From the unique perspective of a female director from a working class background.

Our revision resources are the smart choice for those revising for the external assessment for the Performing Arts BTEC Tech Award. This book will help you to: Revise all the essential content and key skills Organise your revision with the one-topic-per-page format Speed up your revision with the helpful hints on how to tackle questions and tasks Track your revision progress with at-a-glance check boxes Check your understanding with annotated example responses Practise with revision questions and answers.

Sports Plays is a volume about sports in the theatre and what it means to stage sports. The chapters in this volume examine sports plays through a range of critical and theoretical approaches that highlight central concerns and questions both for sports and for theatre. The plays cut across boundaries and genres, from Broadway-style musicals to dramas to experimental and developmental work. The chapters examine and trouble the conventions of staging sports as they open possibilities for considering larger social and cultural issues and debates. This broad range of perspectives make the volume a compelling resource for students and scholars of sport, theatre, and performance studies whose interests span feminism, sexuality, politics, and race.

The essays in this book productively conjoin the fields of performance studies and American studies. The book will appeal to international programs and research projects in American Studies, Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, and Theater Studies. The book features the documentation of the performance Border Movement... by Marina Barsy Janer and Caro Ley, and an interview with the performance artist Denise Uyehara.

The first feminist analysis of some of the most performed works in the American-opera canon, emphasizing the voices and perspectives of the sopranos who brought these operas to life. In the 1950s, composers and librettists in the United States were busy seeking to create an opera repertory that would be deeply responsive to American culture and American concerns. They did not break free, however, of the age-old paradigm so typically expressed in European opera: that is, of women as either saintly and pure or sexually corrupt, with no middle ground. As a result, in American opera of the 1950s, women risked becoming once again opera's inevitable victims. Yet the sopranos who were tasked with portraying these paragons of virtue and their opposites did not always take them as their composers and librettists made them. Sometimes they rewrote, through their performances, the roles they had been assigned. Sometimes they used their lived experiences to invest greater authenticity in the roles. With chapters on The Tender Land, Susannah, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Lizzie Borden, this book analyzes some of the most performed yet understudied works in the American-opera canon. It acknowledges Catherine Clement's famous description of opera as "the undoing of women," while at the same time illuminating how singers like Beverly Sills and Phyllis Curtin worked to resist such undoing, years before the official resurgence of the American feminist movement. In short, they ended up helping to dismantle powerful gendered stereotypes that had often reigned unquestioned in opera houses until then.

Playwriting with Purpose: A Guide and Workbook for New Playwrights provides a holistic approach to playwriting from an award-winning playwright and instructor. This book incorporates craft lessons by contemporary playwrights and provides concrete guidance for new and emerging playwrights. The author takes readers through the entire creative process, from creating characters and writing dialogue and silent moments to analyzing elements of well-made plays and creating an atmospheric environment. Each chapter is followed by writing prompts and pro tips that address unique facets of the conversation about the art and craft of playwriting. The book also includes information on the business of playwriting and a recommended reading list of published classic and contemporary plays, providing all the tools to successfully transform an idea into a script, and a script into a performance. Playwriting with Purpose gives writers and students of playwriting hands-on lessons, artistic concepts, and business savvy to succeed in today's theater industry.

The book fills a niche in early modern scholarship, no such comprehensive treatment of hobby-horse allusions was published before. Relevant dictionaries and glossaries in critical editions will be much helped by the book, because it contextualizes and often corrects traditional explanations for the word 'hobby-horse.' The comprehensive treatment of hobby-horse allusions, ranging from cultural history to theatrical, print productions and images allows for a fuller understanding of how popular culture worked in early modern England. Comparative close readings of little known and canonical plays highlight differences between types of dramaturgical composition, and such conclusions may be useful for theatre practitioners even today. The book caters for the interests of people coming from various fields: theatre, cultural history, literature, art history, folklore studies. The book is written in an accessible language, guiding the reader informatively through a lot of early modern texts and concepts.