What do dogs mean in America? How do Americans make meaning through their dogs? The United States has long expressed its cultural unconscious through canine iconography. Through our dogs, we figure out what we're thinking and who we are, representing by proxy the things that we don't quite want to recognize in ourselves. Often, it's a specific breed or type of dog that serves as an informal cultural mascot, embodying an era's needs, fears, desires, longings, aspirations, repressions, and hopeless contradictions. Combining cultural studies with personal narrative, this book creates a playful, speculative reading of American culture through its canine self-representations. Looking at seven different breeds or types over the last seven decades, readers will go on an intellectual dog walk through some of the mazes of American cultural mythology.

This volume gathers contributions from a range of international scholars and geopolitical contexts to explore why people organise themselves into performance communities in sites of crisis and how performance - social and aesthetic, sanctioned and underground - is employed as a mechanism for survival. The chapters treat a wide range of what can be considered 'survival', ranging from sheer physical survival, to the survival of a social group with its own unique culture and values, to the survival of the very possibility of agency and dissent. Performance as a form of political resistance and protest plays a large part in many of the essays, but performance does more than that: it enables societies in crisis to continue to define themselves. By maintaining identities that are based on their own chosen affiliations and not defined solely in opposition to their oppressors, individuals and groups prepare themselves for a post-crisis future by keeping alive their own notions of who they are and who they hope to be.

This volume brings together performance texts from nine productions by the experimental theatre company Lightwork and one playtext from Lightwork's precursor company Academy Productions, presented between 1997 and 2011. Lightwork specialized in collaboratively created and multimedia performance. The company also experimented with several performance forms that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, including verbatim and site-specific approaches. Because of this, the texts cover a range of forms and formats - scripted plays such as Here's What I Did With My Body One Day by Dan Rebellato and Blavatsky by Clare Bayley; multimedia adaptations of classical myths such as Back At You (based on the story of Echo and Narcissus) and Once I was Dead (based on the story of Daedalus and Icarus); site-specific experiments such as The Good Actor, which took place in various spaces across Hoxton Hall, a Victorian theatre in London's East End; and the use of verbatim witness testimony from the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, War Crimes section in Sarajevo Story. The defining aspect of the Lightwork aesthetic is that multimedia and scenographic experimentation does not come at the expense of the mainstays of dramatic theatre: character, story and emotional resonance. What lies at the heart of the Lightwork shows you will encounter here are human-scale stories: relationships between lovers or family members, confrontations with the past (both as personal and as cultural history) and, in many cases, matters of life or death that entail wrestling with causality, consequence and fate. The twelve-year span covered by this work reflects a period in British performance practice when the interrelation of page and stage, process and production, text and 'non-text', were being radically rethought. In the collaborative and processual theatre making that Lightwork exemplifies, the text may be one element among many and is more likely to be the outcome of the process than its precursor. How do such playtexts (or performance texts) differ from those that are conceived and scripted by a single desk-based playwright in advance of the rehearsal? What gaps are left when the work of many hands is channelled through the pen (or keyboard) of one among them? The texts featured in this volume represent a number of answers to these questions about the nature of writing for the stage. The performance texts are each preceded (and sometime followed) by short essays written by some of the many people who have been involved in productions by Lightwork, including established academics and theatre practitioners: David Annen, Clare Bayley, Gregg Fisher, Sarah Gorman, Andy Lavender, Aneta Mancewicz, Bella Merlin, Alex Mermikides, Jo Parker, Dan Rebellato, and Ayse Tashkiran. Their contributions reflect the collaborative nature of the company and the respect that it accorded the various disciplinary perspectives that make up a theatre company. There are sections on scenography, sound design and technical operation, as well as on those crafts that might more usually draw attention: directing, writing and acting. These contributions offer an insight into the collaborative, multi-layered and sometimes messy business of their creation from an individual maker's or spectator's point of view. This book will be invaluable for those who are making, studying or researching performance in the twenty-first century, and an essential resource for the rehearsal room. Primary readership will include researchers, educators, students and practitioners interested in creative practice, theatre-making, integrated design and performance, and contemporary theatre. It will be an important resource for those on theatre and performance courses at all levels, as well as acting, theatre and performance design, dramaturgy and direction courses, creative writing courses and media arts programmes. It will have appeal for general readers interested in new texts and processes in theatre and performance, and individual texts are likely to be of interest to specialist researchers working in related fields - for example performance and the occult (Blavatsky), performance and conflict (Sarajevo Story).

For many of us, the only way we meet "dangerous" dogs is through news reports about vicious attacks, and films and TV shows that feature out-of-control versions of man's best friend. But there's more to the Bad Dog's story than sensational headlines and movie beasts. A deeper look at these representations reveals a villain much closer to home. This book takes the reader on a rich journey through depictions of violent dogs in popular media. It explores how press accounts and screen stories transform canines into bloodthirsty hunters, rabies-infested strays, ferocious fighters, rogue law enforcement partners and diabolical pets, all adding up to a frightening picture of our usually beloved companions. But, when media tell the dangerous dog's story, it is often with a deep connection to the person on the other end of the leash.

At age 60, Susan Hartzler has learned to accept, even love, the single life, provided she has good friends and a dog or two by her side. Always attracted to the quintessential bad boy with his good looks and charming ways, she was sure she could change "the one" into a devoted partner and loving father, but her compulsive giving and fixing behaviors went hand in hand with her disappointing and disastrous romantic relationships. On a purposeful trip to the pound, she hoped to find a dog to care for, one that would sniff out the bad guys, give her a sense of purpose, and help her find meaning in her crazy world. Thoughtful and funny, this memoir follows Susan's life through the many ups and downs on her way to finding unconditional love. Her journey is a personal one, full of the hard decisions it took to learn to put herself first and stop entering and staying in unhealthy relationships. By saving a dog, she rescues herself, learning to love herself as much as her dog loves her.

Trauma-tragedy investigates the extent to which performance can represent the 'unrepresentable' of trauma. Throughout, there is a focus on how such representations might be achieved and if they could help us to understand trauma on personal and social levels. In a world increasingly preoccupied with and exposed to traumas, this volume considers what performance offers as a means of commentary that other cultural products do not. The book's clear and coherent navigation of complex relations between performance and trauma and its analysis of key practitioners and performances (from Sarah Kane to Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Harold Pinter to Forced Entertainment, and Phillip Pullman to Franco B) make it accessible and useful to students of performance and trauma studies, yet rigorous and incisive for scholars and specialists. Duggan explores ideas around the phenomenological and socio-political efficacy and impact of performance in relation to trauma. Ultimately, the book advances a new performance theory or mode, 'trauma-tragedy', that suggests much contemporary performance can generate the sensation of being present in trauma through its structural embodiment in performance, or 'presence-in-trauma effects'. -- .

The Custers and Their Dogs is the first book to seriously explore the little known history of General George Armstrong and Libbie Custer as wholehearted dog lovers. At the time of Custer's death at Little Bighorn, they owned a rollicking pack of forty hunting hounds-including Scottish Deerhounds, Russian Wolfhounds, Greyhounds, and Foxhounds. Told engagingly through a dog owner's lens, this biography of the Custers' life covers their first dogs in the Civil War and Texas, hunting on the Kansas and Dakota frontiers, entertaining tourist buffalo hunters such as a Russian Archduke, English aristocracy, and The Great Showman, P. T. Barnum (all whom presented the general with hounds), Custer's attack on the Washita village (when he was accused of strangling his own dogs), and the 7th Cavalry's march to Little Bighorn with an analysis of the many rumors about a Last Stand dog. Duggan also reveals how the Custers' pack was re-homed after Armstrong's death in the first national dog rescue effort-and the strange fate of Libbie's favorite staghound. Included is an appendix discussing depictions of General Custer's dogs in art, literature, and film.

One of the oldest known breeds of domesticated dogs, the Saluki traveled throughout the Middle East with a number of nomadic desert tribes, who favored the dogs for their unparalleled ability to hunt desert gazelles. Famously carved into the walls of the Pharaohs' tombs, the Saluki have an exotic history that piqued the interests of dog enthusiasts and breeders during the early 20th century, including notable Edwardian men and women who played significant roles in popularizing the breed and importing the Saluki to Europe and the United States.This book tells the unique, true story of the characters who brought the Saluki to the West, most notably the Honorable Florence Amherst, who became smitten with the breed during a family tour of Egypt and went on to breed a staggering number of 50 litters and 199 registered puppies. The author also brings into the story a range of other prominent world travelers who fell under the Salukis' spell, including Lady Jane Digby, Lady Anne Blunt, Austen Layard and Gertrude Bell. Also covered in this book are a number of lesser-known but just as dedicated Saluki aficionados, mainly military officers who became addicted to hunting with their hounds in the deserts of Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt and who sought to replicate that addiction upon their return home.

Disability studies have long been the domain of medical and pedagogical academics. However, in recent years, the subject has outgrown its clinical origins. In Freaks of History, James MacDonald presents two dramatic explorations of disability within the wider themes of sexuality, gender, foreignness and the Other. Originally directed by Martin Harvey and performed by undergraduate students at the University of Exeter, Wellclose Square and Unsex Me Here analyse cultural marginalization against the backdrop of infamous historical events. MacDonald, who is cerebral palsied, recognizes that disability narratives are rarely written by and for disabled people. Therefore, his plays, accompanied by critical essays and director's notes, are a welcome addition to the emerging discourse of Crip theory and essential reading for disability students and academics alike.

Between 1960 and 2010, a new generation of British avant-garde theater companies, directors, designers, and performers emerged. Some of these companies and individuals have endured to become part of theater history while others have disappeared from the scene, mutated into new forms, or become part of the establishment. "Reverberations across Small-Scale British Theatre "at long last puts these small-scale British theater companies and personalities in the scholarly spotlight. By questioning what "Britishness" meant in relation to the small-scale work of these practitioners, contributors articulate how it is reflected in the goals, manifestos, and aesthetics of these companies.

This volume gathers contributions from a range of international scholars and geopolitical contexts to explore why people organise themselves into performance communities in sites of crisis and how performance - social and aesthetic, sanctioned and underground - is employed as a mechanism for survival. The chapters treat a wide range of what can be considered 'survival', ranging from sheer physical survival, to the survival of a social group with its own unique culture and values, to the survival of the very possibility of agency and dissent. Performance as a form of political resistance and protest plays a large part in many of the essays, but performance does more than that: it enables societies in crisis to continue to define themselves. By maintaining identities that are based on their own chosen affiliations and not defined solely in opposition to their oppressors, individuals and groups prepare themselves for a post-crisis future by keeping alive their own notions of who they are and who they hope to be.

Dogs have a storied history in health care, and the human-animal relationship has been used in the field for decades. Over the years, certain dogs have improved and advanced the field of health care in myriad ways. In this book, the author presents the stories of these pioneer dogs, from the mercy dogs of World War I, to the medicine-toting sled dogs Togo and Balto, to contemporary therapy dogs. More than the dogs themselves, this book is about the human-animal relationship, and moments in history where that relationship propelled health care forward.

Plays in Time collects four plays by Karen Malpede set during influential events from the late twentieth century to the present: the Bosnian war and rape camps; the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Israel's 2006 bombardment of Lebanon; 9/11 and the US torture programme; and the heroism of climate scientists facing attack from well-funded climate change deniers. In each play in this anthology, nature, poetry, ritual and empathy are presented in contrast to the abuse of persons and world. Despite their serious topics, the plays are full of humour and distinctively entertaining personalities. Each play was developed by Theater Three Collaborative for production in New York and internationally in Italy, Australia, London, Berlin and Paris.

Widely considered one of the most innovative voices in Hungarian theatre, Andras Visky has enjoyed growing audiences and increased critical acclaim over the last fifteen years. Nonetheless, his plays have yet to reach a wider English-language audience. This volume, edited by Jozefina Komporaly, begins to correct this by bringing together a translated collection of Visky's work. The book includes the first English-language anthology of Visky's best known plays - Juliet, I Killed My Mother, and Porn - as well as critical analysis and an exploration of Visky's 'Barrack Dramaturgy', a dramaturgical theory in which he considers the theatre as a space for exploring feelings of cultural and personal captivity. Inspired by personal experience of the oppressive communist regime in Romania, Visky's work explores the themes of gender, justice and trauma, encouraging shared moments of remembrance and collective memory. This collection makes use of scripts and director's notes, as well as interviews with creative teams behind the productions, to reveal a holistic, insider's view of Visky's artistic vision. Scholars and practitioners alike will benefit from this rare, English-language collection of Visky's work and dramaturgy.

JARMAN (all this maddening beauty) and Other Plays is a collection of three radically poetic works for live performance by OBIE award-winning playwright Caridad Svich. The playtexts include a lyrical meditation on the legacy of iconic queer artist Derek Jarman, a meditation on displacement and human suffering (Carthage/Cartagena) and an intimately operatic reflection on Penelope and Odysseus (The Orphan Sea). Accompanied by scholarly essays placing the plays in context, this book showcases the beautiful strangeness and profound resistance in Svich's work.

In a room in the middle of nowhere, a man and a woman dream up spectacular worlds: a decaying city, a lush and crumbling garden, a train journey across a drowned landscape. Darkly humorous, absurd and surreal, these are plays for a theatre in which time and space, character and setting are as uncertain as the maps this man and this woman draw. A co-founder of the legendary 1980s performance theatre company Impact Theatre Co-op, Claire MacDonald composed Utopia, a sequence of commissioned playtexts, between 1987 and 2008. This edition brings together both the plays and the story of how the plays came to be made and written. With a compelling introduction by the author, and including additional material by Tim Etchells, Deirdre Heddon, and Lenora Champagne, this book provides a range of historical and critical materials that put the plays in the context of MacDonald's career as writer and collaborator, and show how visual practices and poetics, theories of real and imagined space, and new approaches to language itself have profoundly shaped the development of performance writing in the UK.

The book provides an investigation grounded in performance practice and practice-as-research methodology on the issues of authorship and collaborative labour. This investigation is set in the context of a world more and more characterized by fragmentation, displacement and virtual communication and relationships. It addresses and playfully engages with the following questions: what is a collaborative body? How can one sole performer enact and convey a collaborative practice? How can one body on stage carry out several voices at once? Can we stand in for others? How do we maintain a sense of 'being-together' while being alone in a room? The book contains the full-length definitive version of the performance score from A Duet Without You, an original performance piece created between 2013 and 2015 by Chloe Dechery in collaboration with a range of high-profile artistic collaborators working inter- and cross-disciplinary, including Karen Christopher (Goat Island), Michael Pinchbeck, Deborah Pearson (Forest Fringe), Simone Kenyon and Pedro Ins. In addition to the main performance score, another original text has been produced and is included as a 'template' version of the script to be adapted and enacted by existing or potential future collaborators - the idea being that any reader could appropriate and reinterpret a version of the performance score and create their own personalised rendition of the show. Besides these two new and original performance scores, there is a complementary collection of essays, ranging from performative responses and co-authored articles to in-depth theoretical essays, written by a selection of pre-eminent writers, artists and academics. Primary readership will be those teaching, researching or studying in theatre and performance studies, visual arts, fine arts, art history, creative writing, poetry, philosophy or French literature. Will also be of interest to art school students and those with an interest in theatre.

This book presents four plays by Caridad Svich that explore the rough waters of citizenship under the pressure of globalization and the threads of human connection - often tested, but never wholly severed - across multiple geographic landscapes. Featuring an introduction by Welsh playwright and director Ian Rowlands and essays by practitioners Zac Kline, Blair Baker, Neil Scharnick, Carla Melo and Sherrine Azab, this wide-ranging, daring collection of plays refuses to pretend that the complex and thorny questions of existence are easily settled.

Trauma-tragedy investigates the extent to which performance can represent the 'unrepresentable' of trauma. Throughout, there is a focus on how such representations might be achieved and if they could help us to understand trauma on personal and social levels. In a world increasingly preoccupied with and exposed to traumas, this volume considers what performance offers as a means of commentary that other cultural products do not. The book's clear and coherent navigation of complex relation between performance and trauma and its analysis of key practitioners and performances (from Sarah Kane to Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Harold Pinter to Forced Entertainment, and Phillip Pullman to Franco B) make it accessible and useful to students of performance and trauma studies, yet rigorous and incisive for scholars and specialists. Duggan explores ideas around the phenomenological and socio-political efficacy and impact of performance in relation to trauma. Ultimately, the book advances a new performance theory or mode, 'trauma-tragedy', that suggests much contemporary performance can generate the sensation of being present in trauma through its structural embodiment in performance, or 'presence-in-trauma effects'. -- .