The Stage Lives of Animals examines what it might mean to make theatre beyond the human. In this stunning collection of essays, Una Chaudhuri engages with the alternative modes of thinking, feeling, and making art offered by animals and animality, bringing insights from theatre practice and theory to animal studies as well as exploring what animal studies can bring to the study of theatre and performance. As our planet lives through what scientists call "the sixth extinction," and we become ever more aware of our relationships to other species, Chaudhuri takes a highly original look at the "animal imagination" of well-known plays, performances and creative projects, including works by: Caryl Churchill Rachel Rosenthal Marina Zurkow Edward Albee Tennesee Williams Eugene Ionesco Covering over a decade of explorations, a wide range of writers, and many urgent topics, this volume demonstrates that an interspecies imagination deeply structures modern western drama.

The Stage Lives of Animals examines what it might mean to make theatre beyond the human. In this stunning collection of essays, Una Chaudhuri engages with the alternative modes of thinking, feeling, and making art offered by animals and animality, bringing insights from theatre practice and theory to animal studies as well as exploring what animal studies can bring to the study of theatre and performance. As our planet lives through what scientists call "the sixth extinction," and we become ever more aware of our relationships to other species, Chaudhuri takes a highly original look at the "animal imagination" of well-known plays, performances and creative projects, including works by: Caryl Churchill Rachel Rosenthal Marina Zurkow Edward Albee Tennesee Williams Eugene Ionesco Covering over a decade of explorations, a wide range of writers, and many urgent topics, this volume demonstrates that an interspecies imagination deeply structures modern western drama.

Everyone has an animal story-the pet they loved or hated, the wild animal that captured their childhood imagination, the nasty dog at the end of the street, the deer your uncle shot or your neighbour hit while driving. Telling stories about animals is part of how we tell the story of being human, but recent scientific breakthroughs in animal cognition, the exploding interdisciplinary field of animal studies, and global climate change have all complicated these stories. Animal Acts collects some of the most exciting, provocative, and moving solo performances on animals, grounded by commentaries that help put these engaging works in a larger context. Animal Acts includes the work of leading theatre artists Holly Hughes, Rachel Rosenthal, Deke Weaver, Carmelita Tropicana, and others, along with commentary by major scholars including Donna Haraway, Jane Desmond, Jill Dolan, and Nigel Rothfels. A masterful introduction by Una Chaudhuri provides readers a useful foundation for understanding and appreciating the intersection of animal studies and performance. The anthology makes an important contribution to several fields as it foregrounds questions of race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and other issues central to the human project within the discourse of the "post human." The collection will be of interest to those interested in solo performance, animal studies, gender studies, performance studies, and environmental studies.

"Land/Scape/Theater" proposes landscape as a necessary paradigm for understanding modern theater's increasingly spatialized aesthetic as well as its engagement with the cultural meanings of place and space.
Embracing subjects as diverse as the "landscape dramaturgy" of Suzan-Lori Parks, Artaud's trip to the Sierra Madre, Gertrude Stein's landscape theory and practice, Guillermo Gomez-Pena's "border subjects," and Bayreuth and Disneyland as cultic sites, "Land/Scape/Theater" draws on a broad range of theory, dramatic texts, and performance. All aspects of modern theater, these essays suggest, including the bedrock Aristotelian constituents of plot and character, have a landscape dimension that often goes unrecognized.
With its broad theoretical range and cross-disciplinary reach, "Land/Scape/Theater" will interest theater theorists and practitioners and cultural studies specialists, including historians of landscape. Theater students, scholars, teachers, directors, designers, and actors will find here a new framework and a new vocabulary for understanding both theater and the larger culture.

"Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama" reimagines the content and continuities of theater history and exposes underlying dialogues between "home and homelessness, belonging and exile"--a century-long struggle with the meaning and power of place, which the author terms "geopathology." By reading canonical works in conjunction with contemporary ones, Chaudhuri charts the evolution of a dramatic paradigm with profound theatrical and thematic implications.
Chaudhuri starts with a discussion of a "poetics of exile" in early modern drama, where the figure of home is constructed as a locus of two conflicting impulses: the desire to find a stable site for individual identity and the desire to deterritorialize the self. By mid-century, she argues, a new discourse of "failed homecoming" begins to displace this geopathic model and replace the poetics of exile with a grim anti-poetics of immigration. She then employs postmodern and postcolonial theories of place and culture to define the emerging multiculturalism as a creative reworking of the figures of home, homecoming, homelessness, immigration and exile.
"This is a book of real originality. Its treatment of space in modern drama is elegant and powerful. . . ." --William B. Worthen, Northwestern University
"Staging Place is a powerfully written book, deft in its handling of familiar and unfamiliar plays alike and eclectic in its use of theatrical sources." --"Essays in Theatre/ etudes theatrales"
"This sophisticated and well-written study for graduate students and their teachers explores modern drama's preoccupation with the seemingly irreconcilable discontinuities between the notions of home and homelessness, belonging andexile. . . . The readings of individual plays are fresh and invigorating. . . ." --"Choice"
Una Chaudhuri is Associate Professor of English, New York University.

The story of the artistic collaboration between the originators of the ecosex movement, their diverse communities, and the Earth   What’s sexy about saving the planet? Funny you should ask. Because that is precisely—or, perhaps, broadly—what Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have spent many years bringing to light in their live art, exhibitions, and films. In 2008, Sprinkle and Stephens married the Earth, which set them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality as they became lovers with the Earth and made their mutual pleasure an embodied expression of passion for the environment. Ever since, they have been not just pushing but obliterating the boundaries circumscribing biology and ecology, creating ecosexual art in their performance of an environmentalism that is feminist, queer, sensual, sexual, posthuman, materialist, exuberant, and steeped in humor. Assuming the Ecosexual Position tells of childhood moments that pointed to a future of ecosexuality—for Annie, in her family swimming pool in Los Angeles; for Beth, savoring forbidden tomatoes from the vine on her grandparents’ Appalachian farm. The book describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory, which involved influential performance artists Linda M. Montano, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and feminist pornographer Madison Young. Stephens and Sprinkle share the process of making interactive performance art, including the Chemo Fashion Show, Cuddle, Sidewalk Sex Clinics, and Ecosex Walking Tours. Over the years, they celebrated many more weddings to various nature entities, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Adriatic Sea. To create these weddings, they collaborated with hundreds of people and invited thousands of guests as they vowed to love, honor, and cherish the many elements of the Earth. As entertaining as it is deeply serious, and arriving at a perilous time of sharp differences and constricting categories, the story of this artistic collaboration between Sprinkle, Stephens, their diverse communities, and the Earth opens gender and sexuality, art and environmentalism, to the infinite possibilities and promise of love.

The story of the artistic collaboration between the originators of the ecosex movement, their diverse communities, and the Earth What's sexy about saving the planet? Funny you should ask. Because that is precisely-or, perhaps, broadly-what Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have spent many years bringing to light in their live art, exhibitions, and films. In 2008, Sprinkle and Stephens married the Earth, which set them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality as they became lovers with the Earth and made their mutual pleasure an embodied expression of passion for the environment. Ever since, they have been not just pushing but obliterating the boundaries circumscribing biology and ecology, creating ecosexual art in their performance of an environmentalism that is feminist, queer, sensual, sexual, posthuman, materialist, exuberant, and steeped in humor. Assuming the Ecosexual Position tells of childhood moments that pointed to a future of ecosexuality-for Annie, in her family swimming pool in Los Angeles; for Beth, savoring forbidden tomatoes from the vine on her grandparents' Appalachian farm. The book describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory, which involved influential performance artists Linda M. Montano, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, and feminist pornographer Madison Young. Stephens and Sprinkle share the process of making interactive performance art, including the Chemo Fashion Show, Cuddle, Sidewalk Sex Clinics, and Ecosex Walking Tours. Over the years, they celebrated many more weddings to various nature entities, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Adriatic Sea. To create these weddings, they collaborated with hundreds of people and invited thousands of guests as they vowed to love, honor, and cherish the many elements of the Earth. As entertaining as it is deeply serious, and arriving at a perilous time of sharp differences and constricting categories, the story of this artistic collaboration between Sprinkle, Stephens, their diverse communities, and the Earth opens gender and sexuality, art and environmentalism, to the infinite possibilities and promise of love.