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iBroadway: Musical Theatre in the Digital Age
by Jessica Hillman-McCordThis book argues that the digital revolution has fundamentally altered the way musicals are produced, followed, admired, marketed, reviewed, researched, taught, and even cast. In the first hundred years of its existence, commercial musical theatre functioned on one basic model. However, with the advent of digital and network technologies, every musical theatre artist and professional has had to adjust to swift and unanticipated change. Due to the historically commercial nature of the musical theatre form, it offers a more potent test case to reveal the implications of this digital shift than other theatrical art forms. Rather than merely reflecting technological change, musical theatre scholarship and practice is at the forefront of the conversation about art in the digital age. This book is essential reading for musical theatre fans and scholars alike.
Echo and Meaning on Early Modern English Stages
by Susan L. AndersonThis book examines the trope of echo in early modern literature and drama, exploring the musical, sonic, and verbal effects generated by forms of repetition on stage and in print. Focusing on examples where Echo herself appears as a character, this study shows how echoic techniques permeated literary, dramatic, and musical performance in the period, and puts forward echo as a model for engaging with sounds and texts from the past. Starting with sixteenth century translations of myths of Echo from Ovid and Longus, the book moves through the uses of echo in Elizabethan progress entertainments, commercial and court drama, Jacobean court masques, and prose romance. It places the work of well-known dramatists, such as Ben Jonson and John Webster, in the context of broader cultures of performance. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of early modern drama, music, and dance.
Performing Statelessness in Europe
by S. E. WilmerThis book examines performative strategies that contest nationalist prejudices in representing the conditions of refugees, the stateless and the dispossessed. In the light of the European Union failing to find a political solution to the current migration crisis, it considers a variety of artistic works that have challenged the deficiencies in governmental and transnational practices, as well as innovative efforts by migrants and their hosts to imagine and build a new future. It discusses a diverse range of performative strategies, moving from a consideration of recent adaptations of Greek tragedy, to performances employing fictive identification, documentary dramas, immersive theatre, over-identification and subversive identification, nomadism and political activism. This study will appeal to those interested in questions of statelessness, migration, and the problematic role of the nation-state.
Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946: Sounding Modernities (Transnational Theatre Histories)
by MeLê YamomoThis book examines the intersection between sound and modernity in dramatic and musical performance in Manila and the Asia-Pacific between 1869 and 1948. During this period, tolerant political regimes resulted in the globalization of capitalist relations and the improvement of transcontinental travel and worldwide communication. This allowed modern modes of theatre and music consumption to instigate the uniformization of cultural products and processes, while simultaneously fragmenting societies into distinct identities, institutions, and nascent nation-states.Taking the performing bodies of migrant musicians as the locus of sound, this book argues that the global movement of acoustic modernities was replicated and diversified through its multiple subjectivities within empire, nation, and individual agencies. It traces the arrival of European travelling music and theatre companies in Asia which re-casted listening into an act of modern cultural consumption, and follows the migration of Manila musicians as they engaged in the modernization project of the neighboring Asian cities.
Viral Dramaturgies: Hiv And Aids In Performance In The Twenty-first Century
by Alyson Campbell Dirk GindtThis book analyses the impact of HIV and AIDS on performance in the twenty-first century from an international perspective. It marks a necessary reaffirmation of the productive power of performance to respond to a public and political health crisis and act as a mode of resistance to cultural amnesia, discrimination and stigmatisation. It sets out a number of challenges and contexts for HIV and AIDS performance in the twenty-first century, including: the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry; the unequal access to treatment and prevention technologies in the Global North and Global South; the problematic division between dominant (white, gay, urban, cis-male) and marginalised narratives of HIV; the tension between a damaging cultural amnesia and a potentially equally damaging partner ‘AIDS nostalgia’; the criminalisation of HIV non-disclosure; and, sustaining and sustained by all of these, the ongoing stigmatisation of people living with HIV.This collection presents work from a vast range of contexts, grouped around four main areas: women’s voices and experiences; generations, memories and temporalities; inter/national narratives; and artistic and personal reflections and interventions.
Posthuman Pedagogies in Practice: Arts based Approaches for Developing Participatory Futures
by Annouchka BayleyThis book investigates transdisciplinary, arts-based approaches to developing innovative and pertinent higher education pedagogy. Introducing timely critical thinking strategies, the author addresses some of the key issues facing educators today in an increasingly complex digital, technological and ecological world. The author combines emerging ideas in the New Materialism and Posthumanism schools of thought with arts-based teaching and learning, including Practice-as-Research, for Social Science contexts, thus exploring how this approach can be used to productively create new pedagogical strategies. Drawing on a rich repertoire of real-life examples, the volume suggests transferrable routes into practice that are suitable for lecturers, researchers and students. This practical and innovative volume will appeal to researchers and practitioners interested in Posthuman and New Materialist theories, and how these can be applied to the educational landscape in future.
Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect: Shaw, Freud, Simmel (Bernard Shaw And His Contemporaries Ser.)
by Stephen WattThis book traces the effects of materiality - including money and its opposite, poverty - on the psychical lives of George Bernard Shaw and his characters. While this study focuses on the protagonists of the five novels Shaw wrote in the late 1870s and early 1880s, it also explores how materialism, feeling, and emotion are linked throughout his entire canon. At the same time, it demonstrates how Shaw’s conceptions of human subjectivity parallel those of two of his contemporaries, Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel. In particular, this book explores how theories of so-called 'marginal economics' influence fin de siècle thought about human psychology and the sociology of the modern metropolis, particularly London.
Teaching Postdramatic Theatre: Anxieties, Aporias and Disclosures
by Glenn D’CruzThis book explores the concept and vocabulary of postdramatic theatre from a pedagogical perspective. It identifies some of the major anxieties and paradoxes generated by teaching postdramatic theatre through practice, with reference to the aesthetic, cultural and institutional pressures that shape teaching practices. It also presents a series of case studies that identify the pedagogical fault lines that expose the power-relations inherent in teaching (with a focus on the higher education sector as opposed to actor training institutions). It uses auto-ethnography, performance analysis and critical theory to assist university teachers involved in directing theatre productions to deepen their understanding of the concept of postdramatic theatre.
The Biblical Covenant in Shakespeare
by Mary Jo KietzmanThe theo-political idea of covenant—a sacred binding agreement—formalizes relationships and inaugurates politics in the Hebrew Bible, and it was the most significant revolutionary idea to come out of the Protestant Reformation. Central to sixteenth-century theology, covenant became the cornerstone of the seventeenth-century English Commonweath, evidenced by Parliament’s passage of the Protestation Oath in 1641 which was the “first national covenant against popery and arbitrary government,” followed by the Solemn League and Covenant in 1643. Although there are plenty of books on Shakespeare and religion and Shakespeare and the Bible, no recent critics have recognized how Shakespeare’s plays popularized and spread the covenant idea, making it available for the modern project. By seeding the plays with allusions to biblical covenant stories, Shakespeare not only lends ethical weight to secular lives but develops covenant as the core idea in a civil religion or a founding myth of the early-modern political community, writ small (family and friendship) and large (business and state). Playhouse relationships, especially those between actors and audiences, were also understood through the covenant model, which lent ethical shading to the convention of direct address. Revealing covenant as the biblical beating heart of Shakespeare’s drama, this book helps to explain how the plays provide a smooth transition into secular society based on the idea of social contract.
Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture
by Jennifer Higginbotham Mark Albert JohnstonThis volume analyzes early modern cultural representations of children and childhood through the literature and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contributors include leading international scholars of the English Renaissance whose essays consider asexuals and sodomites, roaring girls and schoolboys, precocious princes and raucous tomboys, boy actors and female apprentices, while discussing a broad array of topics, from animal studies to performance theory, from queer time to queer fat, from teaching strategies to casting choices, and from metamorphic sex changes to rape and cannibalism. The collection interrogates the cultural and historical contingencies of childhood in an effort to expose, theorize, historicize, and explicate the spectacular queerness of early modern dramatic depictions of children.
Theatricality and Performativity: Writings On Texture From Plato's Cave To Urban Activism (Performance Philosophy)
by Teemu PaavolainenThis book defines theatricality and performativity through metaphors of texture and weaving, drawn mainly from anthropologist Tim Ingold and philosopher Stephen C. Pepper. Tracing the two concepts’ various relations to practices of seeing and doing, but also to conflicting values of novelty and normativity, the study proceeds in a series of intertwining threads, from the theatrical to the performative: Antitheatrical (Plato, the Baroque, Michael Fried); Pro-theatrical (directors Wagner, Fuchs, Meyerhold, Brecht, and Brook); Dramatic (weaving memory in Shaffer’s Amadeus and Beckett’s Footfalls); Efficient (from modernist “machines for living in” to the “smart home”); Activist (knit graffiti, clown patrols, and the Anthropo(s)cene). An approach is developed in which ‘performativity’ names the way we tacitly weave worlds and identities, variously concealed or clarified by the step-aside tactics of ‘theatricality’.
Robert Lepage’s Scenographic Dramaturgy: The Aesthetic Signature at Work (Adaptation in Theatre and Performance)
by Melissa PollThis book theorizes auteur Robert Lepage’s scenography-based approach to adapting canonical texts. Lepage’s technique is defined here as ‘scenographic dramaturgy’, a process and product that de-privileges dramatic text and relies instead on evocative, visual performance and intercultural collaboration to re-envision extant plays and operas. Following a detailed analysis of Lepage’s adaptive process and its place in the continuum of scenic writing and auteur theatre, this book features four case studies charting the role of Lepage’s scenographic dramaturgy in re-‘writing’ extant texts, including Shakespeare’s Tempest on Huron-Wendat territory, Stravinsky’s Nightingale in a twenty-seven ton pool, and Wagner’s Ring cycle via the infamous, sixteen-million-dollar Metropolitan Opera production. The final case study offers the first interrogation of Lepage’s twenty-first century ‘auto-adaptations’ of his own seminal texts, The Dragons’ Trilogy and Needles & Opium. Though aimed at academic readers, this book will also appeal to practitioners given its focus on performance-making, adaptation and intercultural collaboration.
Performing Remembering: Women's Memories of War in Vietnam (Contemporary Performance InterActions)
by Rivka Syd EisnerThis book explores the performances and politics of memory among a group of women war veterans in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Through ethnographic, oral history-based research, it connects the veterans’ wartime histories, memory politics, performance practices, recollections of imprisonment and torture, and social activism with broader questions of how to understand and attend to continuing transgenerational violence and trauma. With an extensive introduction and subsequent chapters devoted to in-depth analysis of four women’s remarkable life stories, the book explores the performance and performativity of culture; ethnographic oral history practice; personal, collective, and (trans)cultural memory; and the politics of postwar trauma, witnessing, and redress. Through the veterans’ dynamic practices of prospective remembering, 'pain-taking', and enduring optimism, it offers new insights into matrices of performance vital to the shared work of social transformation. It will appeal to readers interested in performance studies, memory studies, gender studies, Vietnamese studies, and oral history.
The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare's Queens (Queenship and Power)
by Kavita Mudan Finn Valerie SchutteOf Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays, fifteen include queens. This collection gives these characters their due as powerful early modern women and agents of change, bringing together new perspectives from scholars of literature, history, theater, and the fine arts. Essays span Shakespeare’s career and cover a range of famous and lesser-known queens, from the furious Margaret of Anjou in the Henry VI plays to the quietly powerful Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; from vengeful Tamora in Titus Andronicus to Lady Macbeth. Early chapters situate readers in the critical concerns underpinning any discussion of Shakespeare and queenship: the ambiguous figure of Elizabeth I, and the knotty issue of gender presentation. The focus then moves to analysis of issues such as motherhood, intertextuality, and contemporary political contexts; close readings of individual plays; and investigations of rhetoric and theatricality. Featuring twenty-five chapters with a rich variety of themes and methodologies, this handbook is an invaluable reference for students and scholars, and a unique addition to the fields of Shakespeare and queenship studies.
Contemporary Physics Plays: Making Time To Know Responsibility (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine)
by Jenni G. HalpinThis book analyzes recent physics plays, arguing that their enaction of concepts from the sciences they discuss alters the nature of the decisions made by the characters, changing the ethical judgements that might be cast on them. Recent physics plays regularly alter the shape of space-time itself, drawing together disparate moments, reversing the flow of time, creating apparent contradictions, and iterating scenes for multiple branches of counterfactual history. With these changes both causality and responsibility shift, variously. The roles of iconic scientists, such as Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg, are interrogated for their dramatic value, placing history and dramatic license in tension. Cold War strategies and the limits of espionage highlight the emphatically personal involvement of ordinary individuals. This study is vital reading for those interested in physics plays and the relationship between the sciences and the humanities.
Reconsidering National Plays in Europe
by Rob Zalm Suze PollThis volume frames the concept of a national play. By analysing a number of European case studies, it addresses the following question: Which play could be regarded as a country's national play, and how does it represent its national identity? The chapters provide an in-depth look at plays in eight different countries: Germany (Die Räuber, Friedrich Schiller), Switzerland (Wilhelm Tell, Friedrich Schiller), Hungary (Bánk Bán, József Katona), Sweden (Gustav Vasa, August Strindberg), Norway (Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen), the Netherlands (The Good Hope, Herman Heijermans), France (Tartuffe, Molière), and Ireland. This collection is especially relevant at a time of socio-political flux, when national identity and the future of the nation state is being reconsidered.
Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere (Avant-Gardes in Performance)
by Katia Arfara Aneta Mancewicz Ralf RemshardtThis volume is a collection of scholarly articles and interviews with intermedial artists working with the concepts of public sphere at the intersection of aesthetics and politics. It explores the response of socially-engaged artistic practices to the current crisis in politics and media. It also critically examines urgent issues such as rampant nationalism and populism, expanding neoliberalism, the refugee crisis, growing inosculations of corporate and cyber culture, and the ongoing geopolitical changes in the Middle East. Can intermedial performances reflect the present artistic and political dilemmas in Europe and beyond?The collection provides theoretical frameworks that interrogate the role that spectators as citizens can play in our mediatized world while focusing on the functions of immersion, participation, and civic engagement in contemporary performance and society. The collection provides analyses by international scholars from Europe, Asia, and the USA, covering global performance created in the twenty-first century. It also introduces interviews with internationally acclaimed intermedial artists and companies such as BERLIN, Rimini Protokoll, Dries Verhoeven, Akira Takayama, and Kris Verdonck.
Samuel Beckett's Critical Aesthetics
by Tim LawrenceThis book considers how Samuel Beckett’s critical essays, dialogues and reflections drew together longstanding philosophical discourses about the nature of representation, and fostered crucial, yet overlooked, connections between these discourses and his fiction and poetry. It also pays attention to Beckett’s writing for little-magazines in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, before going on to consider how the style of Beckett’s late prose recalls and develops figures and themes in his critical writing. By providing a long-overdue assessment of Beckett’s work as a critic, this study shows how Beckett developed a new aesthetic in knowing dialogue with ideas including phenomenology, Kandinsky’s theories of abstraction, and avant-garde movements such as Surrealism. This book will be illuminating for students and researchers interested not just in Beckett, but in literary modernism, the avant-garde, European visual culture and philosophy.
Theatre for Peacebuilding: The Role Of Arts In Conflict Transformation In South Asia (Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies)
by Nilanjana PremaratnaThis book contributes to key debates in peacebuilding by exploring the role of theatre and art in general. Premaratna argues that the dialogical and multi-voiced nature of theatre is particularly suited to assisting societies coming to terms with conflict and opening up possibilities for conversation. These are important parts of the peacebuilding process. The book engages the conceptual links between theatre and peacebuilding and then offers an in-depth empirical exploration of how three South Asian theatre groups approach peacebuilding: Jana Karaliya in Sri Lanka, Jana Sanskriti in India, and Sarwanam in Nepal. The ensuing reflections offer insights that are relevant to both students and practitioners concerned with issues of peace and conflict.
The Theatre of Imagining: A Cultural History of Imagination in the Mind and on the Stage
by Ulla KallenbachThis book is the first comprehensive analysis of the fascinating and strikingly diverse history of imagination in the context of theatre and drama. Key questions that the book explores are: How do spectators engage with the drama in performance, and how does the historical context influence the dramaturgy of imagination? In addition to offering a study of the cultural history and theory of imagination in a European context including its philosophical, physiological, cultural and political implications, the book examines the cultural enactment of imagination in the drama text and offers practical strategies for analyzing the aesthetic practice of imagination in drama texts. It covers the early modern to the late modernist period and includes three in-depth case studies: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c.1606); Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879); and Eugène Ionesco’s The Killer (1957).
Performing Character in Modern Irish Drama: Between Art And Society
by Michał LachmanThis book is about the history of character in modern Irish drama. It traces the changing fortunes of the human self in a variety of major Irish plays across the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. Through the analysis of dramatic protagonists created by such authors as Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, Friel and Murphy, and McGuinness and Walsh, it tracks the development of aesthetic and literary styles from modernism to more recent phenomena, from Celtic Revival to Celtic Tiger, and after.The human character is seen as a testing ground and battlefield for new ideas, for social philosophies, and for literary conventions through which each historical epoch has attempted to express its specific cultural and literary identity. In this context, Irish drama appears to be both part of the European literary tradition, engaging with its most contentious issues, and a field of resistance to some conventions from continental centres of avant-garde experimentation. Simultaneously, it follows artistic fashions and redefines them in its critical contribution to European artistic and theatrical diversity.
Lady Gregory and Irish National Theatre: Art, Drama, Politics (Bernard Shaw And His Contemporaries Ser.)
by Eglantina RemportThis book is the first comprehensive critical assessment of the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Augusta Gregory, founder, patron, director, and dramatist of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It elaborates on her distinctive vision of the social role of a National Theatre in Ireland, especially in relation to the various reform movements of her age: the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, the Co-operative Movement, and the Home Industries Movement. It illustrates the impact of John Ruskin on the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Gregory and her circle that included Horace Plunkett, George Russell, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. All of these friends visited the celebrated Gregory residence of Coole Park in Country Galway, most famously Yeats. The study thus provides a pioneering evaluation of Ruskin’s immense influence on artistic, social, and political discourse in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Theaters of Error: Problems Of Performance In German And French Enlightenment Theater (Palgrave Studies In Theatre And Performance History Ser.)
by Pascale LaFountainThis book offers provocative readings of canonical Enlightenment dramas that reflect and shape the period’s changing understanding of error. With striking interdisciplinary connections to theater treatises as well as works from the philosophical, legal, and medical discourses, it tracks the relocation of error from the moral to the physical realm, a movement that begins with Lessing and continues through the turn of the nineteenth century.Featuring detailed analyses of Lessing’s Miß Sara Sampson, Diderot’s Le Fils naturel, Schiller’s Die Räuber, and Kleist’s Die Familie Schroffenstein alongside rich close readings of diverse primary sources, ranging from previously untranslated acting treatises by Sainte-Albine and Engel to texts from the German Archiv des Criminalrechts, this study introduces the reader to new Enlightenment sources and compellingly concludes that ultimately it is no longer evil, but rather bodily irregularities and mistakes in reading the body that become the driving principle of Enlightenment drama.
Racism and Early Blackface Comic Traditions: From the Old World to the New (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)
by Robert HornbackThis book traces blackface types from ancient masks of grinning Africans and phallus-bearing Roman fools through to comedic medieval devils, the pan-European black-masked Titivillus and Harlequin, and racial impersonation via stereotypical 'black speech' explored in the Renaissance by Lope de Vega and Shakespeare. Jim Crow and antebellum minstrelsy recycled Old World blackface stereotypes of irrationality, ignorance, pride, and immorality. Drawing upon biblical interpretations and philosophy, comic types from moral allegory originated supposedly modern racial stereotypes. Early blackface traditions thus spread damning race-belief that black people were less rational, hence less moral and less human. Such notions furthered the global Renaissance’s intertwined Atlantic slave and sugar trades and early nationalist movements. The latter featured overlapping definitions of race and nation, as well as of purity of blood, language, and religion in opposition to 'Strangers'. Ultimately, Old World beliefs still animate supposed 'biological racism' and so-called 'white nationalism' in the age of Trump.
South Africa's Shakespeare and the Drama of Language and Identity (Global Shakespeares)
by Adele SeeffThis volume considers the linguistic complexities associated with Shakespeare’s presence in South Africa from 1801 to early twentieth-first century televisual updatings of the texts as a means of exploring individual and collective forms of identity. A case study approach demonstrates how Shakespeare’s texts are available for ideologically driven linguistic programs. Seeff introduces the African Theatre, Cape Town, in 1801, multilingual site of the first recorded performance of a Shakespeare play in Southern Africa where rival, amateur theatrical groups performed in turn, in English, Dutch, German, and French. Chapter 3 offers three vectors of a broadening Shakespeare diaspora in English, Afrikaans, and Setswana in the second half of the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 analyses André Brink’s Kinkels innie Kabel, a transposition of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors into Kaaps, as a radical critique of apartheid’s obsession with linguistic and ethnic purity. Chapter 5 investigates John Kani’s performance of Othello as a Xhosa warrior chief with access to the ancient tradition of Xhosa storytellers. Shakespeare in Mzansi, a televisual miniseries uses black actors, vernacular languages, and local settings to Africanize Macbeth and reclaim a cross-cultural, multilingualism. An Afterword assesses the future of Shakespeare in a post-rainbow, decolonizing South Africa. Global Sha Any reader interested in Shakespeare Studies, global Shakespeare, Shakespeare in performance, Shakespeare and appropriation, Shakespeare and language, Literacy Studies, race, and South African cultural history will be drawn to this book.