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How do ideas take shape? How do concepts emerge into form? This
book argues that they take shape quite literally in the human body,
often appearing on stage in new styles of performance. Focusing on
the historical period of modernity, Performance and Modernity:
Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage demonstrates how the
unforeseen impact of economic, industrial, political, social, and
psychological change was registered in bodily metaphors that took
shape on stage. In new styles of performance-acting, dance, music,
pageantry, avant-garde provocations, film, video and networked
media-this book finds fresh evidence for how modernity has been
understood and lived, both by stage actors, who, in modelling new
habits, gave emerging experiences an epistemological shape, and by
their audiences, who, in borrowing the strategies performers
enacted, learned to adapt to a modernizing world.
Although often dismissed as a minor offshoot of the better-known
German movement, expressionism on the American stage represents a
critical phase in the development of American dramatic modernism.
Situating expressionism within the context of early
twentieth-century American culture, Walker demonstrates how
playwrights who wrote in this mode were responding both to new
communications technologies and to the perceived threat they posed
to the embodied act of meaning. At a time when mute bodies
gesticulated on the silver screen, ghostly voices emanated from tin
horns, and inked words stamped out the personality of the hand that
composed them, expressionist playwrights began to represent these
new cultural experiences by disarticulating the theatrical
languages of bodies, voices and words. In doing so, they not only
innovated a new dramatic form, but redefined playwriting from a
theatrical craft to a literary art form, heralding the birth of
American dramatic modernism.
Although often dismissed as a minor offshoot of the better-known
German movement, expressionism on the American stage represents a
critical phase in the development of American dramatic modernism.
Situating expressionism within the context of early
twentieth-century American culture, Walker demonstrates how
playwrights who wrote in this mode were responding both to new
communications technologies and to the perceived threat they posed
to the embodied act of meaning. At a time when mute bodies
gesticulated on the silver screen, ghostly voices emanated from tin
horns, and inked words stamped out the personality of the hand that
composed them, expressionist playwrights began to represent these
new cultural experiences by disarticulating the theatrical
languages of bodies, voices and words. In doing so, they not only
innovated a new dramatic form, but redefined playwriting from a
theatrical craft to a literary art form, heralding the birth of
American dramatic modernism.
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