Drawing on hands-on experience from workshops and interviews, "Performance Practice and Process" explores the work of eight gender aware theater and performance artists and companies; Bobby Baker, Curious, SuAndi, Sarah Daniels, Split Britches, Rebecca Prichard, Vayu Naidu, and Jenny Eclair. Aston and Harris offer rare insights into the processes, as well as the practice, of these internationally renowned artists and employ an inside, practical approach to understanding their ground-breaking and politically radical theater and performance work.

Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook is a helpful, practical guide to theatre-making which explores the different ways of representing gender. Best-selling author, Elaine Aston, takes the reader through the various stages of making feminist theatre - from warming up, through workshopped exploration, to performance - this volume is organised into three clear and instructive parts:
* Women in the Workshop
* Dramatic Texts, Feminist Contexts
* Gender and Devising Projects.
Orientated around the classroom/workshop, Handbook of Feminist Theatre Practice encompasses the main elements of feminist theatre, both practical or theoretical.

Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook is a helpful, practical guide to theatre-making which explores the different ways of representing gender. Best-selling author, Elaine Aston, takes the reader through the various stages of making feminist theatre- from warming up, through workshopped exploration, to performance - this volume is organised into three clear and instructive parts:
* Women in the Workshop
* Dramatic Texts, Feminist Contexts
* Gender and Devising Projects.
Orientated around the classroom/workshop, Handbook of Feminist Theatre Practice encompasses the main elements of feminist theatre, both practical or theoretical.

Pulp and Other Plays by Tasha Fairbanks is an anthology of plays which were written for the British group Siren Theatre Company, a lesbian theatre collective founded in 1979 by women from the punk music scene who worked with their unorthodox performance skills to challenge mainstream traditions of "straight" acting. This anthology of three of the company's plays brings long overdue recognition to the company which was Britain's foremost lesbian collective in the 1980s. This collection indicates the diversity of Siren's theatre work: their radical feminist critique of heterosexuality and male violence in "Curfew," their celebration of lesbian glamour and desire in "Pulp," and a scathing attack on Thatcherite Britain in "Now Wash Your Hands Please."
About the Editors
Gabrielle Griffin is Professor of Women's Studies at Nene College, Northampton. She is author of "Heavenly Love? Lesbian Images in Twentieth Century Women's Writing" (1993) and has most recently edi

This student guide to the study of drama explains in detail the relationship between the drama text and the theory and practice of theatre in performance. The study of semiotics is an increasingly important area of critical practice, and a vital component in any up-to-date drama course, yet it poses a number of tricky and tantalizing questions for the student approaching it for the first time. What is the relationship between theory and practice? How can an understanding of the text as a system of signs be related to the semiotics of stage performance? Can the performance of drama also be read as a sign-system? Beginning at the beginning, with accessible explanations of the meanings and methods of semiotics, "Theatre as Sign-System" addresses key drama texts from Sophocles to Caryl Churchill, and offers new and detailed information about performance theory which can be related to textual practice. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of theatre studies, English literature and the performance arts as well as theatre practitioners.

This invaluable student handbook is the first detailed guide to explain in detail the relationship between the drama text and the theory and practice of drama in performance. Beginning at the beginning, with accessible explanations of the meanings and methods of semiotics, Theatre as Sign System addresses key drama texts and offers new and detailed information about the theories of performance.

Caryl Churchill's plays are internationally performed, studied and acclaimed by practitioners, theatre scholars, critics and audiences alike. With fierce imagination the plays dramatise the anxieties and terrors of contemporary life. This Companion presents new scholarship on Churchill's extraordinary and ground-breaking work. Chapters explore a cluster of major plays in relation to pressing social topics - ecological crisis, sexual politics, revolution, terror and selfhood - providing close readings of texts in their theatrical, theoretical and historical contexts. These topic-based essays are intercalated with other essays that delve into Churchill's major collaborations, her performance innovations and her influences on a new generation of playwrights. Contributors explore Churchill's career-long experimentation - her risk-taking that has reinvigorated the stage, both formally and politically. Providing a new critical platform for the study of a theatrical career that spans almost fifty years, the Companion pays fresh attention to Churchill's poetic precision, dark wit and inexhaustible creativity.

This Companion addresses the work of women playwrights in Britain throughout the twentieth century. Chapters explore the historical and theatrical contexts in which women have written for the theater and examine the work of individual playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Pam Gems, and Timberlake Wertenbaker. The volume brings together a transatlantic team of feminist theater scholars and practitioners. A chronological section on playwriting from the 1920s to the 1970s is followed by chapters that raise issues of nationality and identity. Later sections question accepted notions of the canon and include chapters on nonmainstream writing, including black and lesbian performance.

Restaging Feminisms offers a re-encounter with the tripartite modelling of liberal, radical, and socialist feminisms foundational to establishing feminist approaches to theatre. This lucid account of past-present connections to the staging of feminism assesses the legacies and renewals of all three feminist dynamics as they intersect with austerity Britain, the Weinstein watershed, and the #MeToo movement. Feminist politics, concepts, and the role of affect in the making of political attachments inform an approach that values understanding feminism's past as critical to reanimating and restaging socially progressive, feminist futures. The volume includes case studies of productions staged between 2016 and 2019: Caryl Churchill's Escaped Alone; David Greig's version of The Suppliant Women; Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's Emilia; Nina Raine's Consent; Townsend Theatre's We Are The Lions Mr Manager; and Laura Wade's Home, I'm Darling. From an author with a pioneering and thirty-year-long commitment to the study of feminism and British theatre, Restaging Feminisms is for an intergenerational feminist-theatre readership: for those who are discovering relations between feminism and theatre for the first time and those re-encountering the feminist dynamics and their renewed resonance on the contemporary British stage.

At last and accessible and intelligent introduction to the energising and challenging relationship between feminism and theatre.

In this clear and enlightening book, Aston discusses wide-ranging theoretical topics and provides case studies including:

• Feminism and theatre history
• M/Othering the self: French feminist theory and theatre
• Black women: shaping feminist theatre
• Performing gender: a materialist practice
• Colonial landscapes

Feminist thought is changing the way theatre is taught and practised. An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre will be essential reading for anyone who needs a precise and insightful guide to this dynamic field.

Restaging Feminisms offers a re-encounter with the tripartite modelling of liberal, radical, and socialist feminisms foundational to establishing feminist approaches to theatre. This lucid account of past-present connections to the staging of feminism assesses the legacies and renewals of all three feminist dynamics as they intersect with austerity Britain, the Weinstein watershed, and the #MeToo movement. Feminist politics, concepts, and the role of affect in the making of political attachments inform an approach that values understanding feminism's past as critical to reanimating and restaging socially progressive, feminist futures. The volume includes case studies of productions staged between 2016 and 2019: Caryl Churchill's Escaped Alone; David Greig's version of The Suppliant Women; Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's Emilia; Nina Raine's Consent; Townsend Theatre's We Are The Lions Mr Manager; and Laura Wade's Home, I'm Darling. From an author with a pioneering and thirty-year-long commitment to the study of feminism and British theatre, Restaging Feminisms is for an intergenerational feminist-theatre readership: for those who are discovering relations between feminism and theatre for the first time and those re-encountering the feminist dynamics and their renewed resonance on the contemporary British stage.

Feminist Views on the English Stage, first published in 2003, is an exciting and insightful study on drama from a feminist perspective, one that challenges an idea of the 1990s as a 'post-feminist' decade and pays attention to women's playwriting marginalized by a 'renaissance' of angry young men. Working through a generational mix of writers, from Sarah Kane, the iconoclastic 'bad girl' of the stage, to the 'canonical' Caryl Churchill, Elaine Aston charts the significant political and aesthetic changes in women's playwriting at the century's end. Aston also explores writing for the 1990s in theatre by Sarah Daniels, Bryony Lavery, Phyllis Nagy, Winsome Pinnock, Rebecca Prichard, Judy Upton and Timberlake Wertenbaker.

Caryl Churchill's plays are internationally performed, studied and acclaimed by practitioners, theatre scholars, critics and audiences alike. With fierce imagination the plays dramatise the anxieties and terrors of contemporary life. This Companion presents new scholarship on Churchill's extraordinary and ground-breaking work. Chapters explore a cluster of major plays in relation to pressing social topics - ecological crisis, sexual politics, revolution, terror and selfhood - providing close readings of texts in their theatrical, theoretical and historical contexts. These topic-based essays are intercalated with other essays that delve into Churchill's major collaborations, her performance innovations and her influences on a new generation of playwrights. Contributors explore Churchill's career-long experimentation - her risk-taking that has reinvigorated the stage, both formally and politically. Providing a new critical platform for the study of a theatrical career that spans almost fifty years, the Companion pays fresh attention to Churchill's poetic precision, dark wit and inexhaustible creativity.

Working through a generational mix of writers, from Sarah Kane, the iconoclastic "bad girl" of the stage, to the "canonical" Caryl Churchill, Elaine Aston charts the significant political and aesthetic changes in women's playwriting at the end of the twentieth century. Aston also explores "new" writing for the 1990s in theater by Sarah Daniels, Bryony Lavery, Phyllis Nagy, Winsome Pinnock, Rebecca Prichard, Judy Upton and Timberlake Wertenbaker.

This Companion addresses the work of women playwrights in Britain throughout the twentieth century. Chapters explore the historical and theatrical contexts in which women have written for the theater and examine the work of individual playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Pam Gems, and Timberlake Wertenbaker. The volume brings together a transatlantic team of feminist theater scholars and practitioners. A chronological section on playwriting from the 1920s to the 1970s is followed by chapters that raise issues of nationality and identity. Later sections question accepted notions of the canon and include chapters on nonmainstream writing, including black and lesbian performance.

The volume traces the scope and development of Caryl Churchill’s theatre from her early writing for radio and television, through her stage career of the 1970s and 1980s to her recent major success Far Away (2000). Making use of contemporary critical and feminist theory, the study offers close dramatic and theatrical readings of the plays highlighting Churchill’s concerns with feminism, socialism and theatrical style. A key chapter on ‘The Woman Writer’ examines those plays, including Cloud Nine and Top Girls, which brought Churchill to the attention of the international feminist theatre academy, and links Churchill’s emergent feminism to her personal struggle to combine a career in the theatre with motherhood. Detailing the international success of play such as Serious Money and Mad Forest, alongside some of the lesser known and lesser studied earlier work, this accessible account illustrates how Churchill has come to be recognised as one of the leading playwrights of our contemporary theatre.

This classic studyis both an introduction to, and an overview of, the relationship between feminism and theatre. The reissued edition features a newForeword by Elaine Aston who examines the context in which Case's book was written, the influence it has had, subsequent developments in the field and the continued importance of the work.

You are not at liberty to avenge the pornography industry in this country. We have the censorship laws for that. Masterpieces opens on three couples having dinner in a restaurant, exchanging sexist jokes. The response is varied: some of them laugh uproariously, some of them uncomfortably, and one is deeply unhappy. Their domestic discussion about the morality of pornography is suddenly amplified a thousand-fold in the next scene in which Rowena is on trial for murder. She had just been to see a 'snuff' film in which a porn actress is actually mutilated and killed on screen, and on her way home is approached threateningly by a man who she ends up pushing under a train because he was harassing her. The play is the story of Rowena's journey, through seeing a porn magazine for the first time to a thwarted attempt to help an unhappy prostitute, from uncomfortable laughter to radical and disgusted protest at female subjugation. Masterpieces is an angry and defiant play, first staged in 1983, at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, before transferring to the Royal Court Theatre, London. It earned Daniels a London Theatre Critics Award for Most Promising Playwright. This edition introduces Sarah Daniels into the Modern Classics series and features an introduction by Elaine Aston, Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University.