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Complicite, Theatre and Aesthetics: From Scraps of Leather
by Tomasz WiśniewskiThis book presents a pioneering critical study of Complicite's work throughout the years. Drawing on an extensive overview of the available research material - including interviews, manuscripts and the company's own archive - the book is framed within a clearly defined research perspective and explores the singularity of theatre communication. The book results from an encounter between the London-based - but cosmopolitan in scope - company, and a fresh application of the form-oriented scholarship of Eastern Europe, Yuri Lotman's semiosphere in particular. Focused on the aesthetics of Complicite, this study achieves a critical distance and undertakes multidimensional scrutiny of the available research material. By identifying the principles of Complicite's aesthetics, the book attempts to grasp the company's artistic paradigm. It focuses on ways of creating, preserving, and decoding meanings, rather than on the nuances of performance or contextual issues.
O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage
by Amanda Eubanks WinklerIn the 17th century, harmonious sounds were thought to represent the well-ordered body of the obedient subject, and, by extension, the well-ordered state; conversely, discordant, unpleasant music represented both those who caused disorder (murderers, drunkards, witches, traitors) and those who suffered from bodily disorders (melancholics, madmen, and madwomen). While these theoretical correspondences seem straightforward, in theatrical practice the musical portrayals of disorderly characters were multivalent and often ambiguous.O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note focuses on the various ways that theatrical music represented disorderly subjects--those who presented either a direct or metaphorical threat to the health of the English kingdom in 17th-century England. Using theater music to examine narratives of social history, Winkler demonstrates how music reinscribed and often resisted conservative, political, religious, gender, and social ideologies.
Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature
by Elizabeth WinklerAn &“extraordinarily brilliant&” and &“pleasurably naughty&” (André Aciman) investigation into the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote his plays became an act of blasphemy…and who the Bard might really be.The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard&’s biography is a &“black hole,&” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) &“immoral.&” In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo. Whisking you from London to Stratford-Upon-Avon to Washington, DC, she pulls back the curtain to show how the forces of nationalism and empire, religion and mythmaking, gender and class have shaped our admiration for Shakespeare across the centuries. As she considers the writers and thinkers—from Walt Whitman to Sigmund Freud to Supreme Court justices—who have grappled with the riddle of the plays&’ origins, she explores who may perhaps have been hiding behind his name. A forgotten woman? A disgraced aristocrat? A government spy? Hovering over the mystery are Shakespeare&’s plays themselves, with their love for mistaken identities, disguises, and things never quite being what they seem. As she interviews scholars and skeptics, Winkler&’s interest turns to the larger problem of historical truth—and of how human imperfections (bias, blindness, subjectivity) shape our construction of the past. History is a story, and the story we find may depend on the story we&’re looking for. &“Lively&” (The Washington Post), &“fascinating&” (Amanda Foreman), and &“intrepid&” (Stacy Schiff), Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies will forever change how you think of Shakespeare…and of how we as a society decide what&’s up for debate and what&’s just nonsense, just heresy.
The Curtain Went Up, My Pants Fell Down (Hank Zipzer, the World's Greatest Underachiever #11)
by Henry Winkler Lin OliverHank Zipzer is failing math, so he has to work with Heather Payne, resident class brain, to help get his grades up. At the same time, Hank’s school is putting on a production of The King and I. As coincidence would have it, Hank is cast as the King, and Heather as Anna. But when Hank’s dad tells him he can only appear in the play if he gets a B on his next math test, Hank knows he has to hit the books. Can Hank pull through in time for the show?
Rehearsals of Manhood: Athenian Drama as Social Practice
by John J. WinklerA bold reconception of ancient Greek drama by one of the most brilliant and original classical scholars of his generationWhen John Winkler died in 1990, he left an unpublished manuscript containing a highly original interpretation of the development and meaning of ancient Greek drama. Rehearsals of Manhood makes this groundbreaking work available for the first time, presenting an entirely novel picture of Greek tragedy and a vivid portrait of the cultural poetics of Athenian manhood.Ancient Athens was a military conclave as well as an urban capital, and male citizens were expected to embody the ideal of the Athenian citizen-soldier. Winkler understands Attic drama as a secular manhood ritual, a collaborative aesthetic and civic enterprise focused on the initiation of boys into manhood and the training, testing, and representation of young male warriors. Past efforts to discover the origins and development of Greek tragedy have largely treated drama as a literary genre, isolating it from other Athenian social practices. Winkler returns Greek tragedy to its social context, showing how it was one among many forms of display and performance cultivated by elite males in ancient Greece.The final work of a celebrated classical scholar, Rehearsals of Manhood highlights the civic function of the dramatic festivals at classical Athens as occasions for the examination and representation of boys on the verge of manhood, and offers a fresh explanation of how dramatic performance fit into the social life and gender politics of the Athenian state.
God Said This (Yale Drama Series)
by Leah Nanako WinklerThe 2018 winner of the Yale Drama Series competition is a riveting exploration of family and death Set in Kentucky, this compelling drama centers around a Japanese-American family reunited as their matriarch undergoes cancer treatment. The father, James, is a recovering alcoholic seeking redemption, and the two daughters are struggling to overcome their differences—Sophie is an ardent born-again Christian, while Hiro lives a single’s life in New York City. John, an old high school classmate of Hiro’s who is now a single dad, worries about leaving a legacy for his son. Wry and bittersweet, God Said This vividly captures the complexities of a familial reconciliation in the throes of crisis and looks deeply at the meaning of family—Japanese, Southern, and otherwise. This is the first Yale Drama Series winner chosen by Pulitzer prize–winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, who describes the play as conveying “a deeply felt sense of the universal—of the perfection of our parents’ flawed love for each other and for us; for the ways in which the approach of death can order the meaning of a human life.”
My TWP Plays
by Jack Winter Bruce BartonMy TWP Plays presents five important plays written by Jack Winter while he was resident playwright at Toronto Workshop Productions, one of the first great troupes of the experimental and alternative theatre movement. The carnivalesque style of the selected works in this anthology reflects the turbulence, contradictions, and subversion of the social revolution during which they were written and first produced, as well as the cultural politics at a time when Canadian artists were investigating new, noncolonial, and distinctly Canadian forms of expression that would define the nation and challenge received artistic styles and practices. Extensive notes by the playwright and a foreword by the director and dramaturge Bruce Barton (University of Toronto) illuminate an important two-decade period in the evolution of contemporary Canadian theatre, while providing glimpses of the artistic conditions, the cultural environment, and the personal circumstances within which the works were created.Before Compiègne (1963) wildly imagines Joan of Arc's final days.The Mechanic (1964) and its experiments in form and staging offer a contemporary take on Molière and the commedia dell'arte.The Death of Woyzeck (1965) dismantles, reconstructs, and rewrites Georg Büchner's famous fragmentary original of 1837.Ten Lost Years (1974) presents a highly theatricalized full-length dramatization of Barry Broadfoot's collected interviews with Canadian survivors of the Great Depression.You Can't Get Here from There (1975) examines Canada's complicity in the 1973 overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende.
Sam Shepard: A Life
by John J. Winters“John Winters offers a master class in literary sleuthing, untangling the many lives and unearthing the origin story of America’s foremost Renaissance man of letters.” —Kelly Horan, coauthor of Devotion and DefianceWith more than fifty–five plays to his credit—including the 1979 Pulitzer Prize–winning Buried Child, an Oscar nod for his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, and an onscreen persona that’s been aptly summed up as “Gary Cooper in denim”—Sam Shepard’s impact on American theater and film ranks with the greatest playwrights and actors of the past half–century.Sam Shepard: A Life gets to the heart of Sam Shepard, presenting a compelling and comprehensive account of his life and work.In a new epilogue, added by the author after Shepard’s untimely death in July of 2017, John J. Winters offers a glimpse into the enigmatic author’s last days, when very few knew he was suffering from ALS.“An excellent biography . . . Mr. Winters is especially good on the backstage of one of Mr. Shepard’s most frequently revived works, True West . . . Mr. Winters has an interesting story to tell, and he recounts it ably, bringing us close to a figure who, he admits, avoids intimacy.” —The Wall Street Journal“A new, thoroughly researched biography . . . Winters does indeed capture a personality more anxious and self–doubting than previous biographers have grasped.” —The Washington Post“Meticulously presents the facts of Shepard’s complex life along with incisive descriptions and analyses of diverse productions of Shepard’s demanding and innovative plays . . . Winters portrays Shepard as a magnetic, enigmatic, and multitalented artist drawing on a deep well of loneliness and self–questioning, keen attunement to the zeitgeist, and penetrating insight into human nature.” —Booklist (starred review)
A Sustainable Theatre
by Barry B. WithamBegun as an audacious experiment, for thirty years the Hedgerow Theatre prospered as America's most successful repertory company. While known for its famous alumnae (Ann Harding and Richard Basehart), Hedgerow's legacy is a living library of over 200 productions created by Jasper Deeter's idealistic and determined pursuit of 'truth and beauty. '
Country House: Polish Theatre Archive
by Stanislav I. Witkiewicz D. GerouldCountry House, a ''comedy with corpses,'' is a wicked subversion of all those realistic psychological dramas of jealousy, adultery, murder and suicide that ask to be taken seriously. Witkacy's send-up assumes the form of a ghost story full of surprises, in the course of which an entire family of four is gleefully dispatched to the other world. When it was first performed in 1923 in Torun, Country House was judged unsuitable for the general public because it derided moral, social and dramatic convention. Three years later, as directed by the playwright himself in Lwów, the drama proved an unexpected success with audiences (although it only ran for four nights) and ever since has been among Witkacy's most frequently performed works. Today we can appreciate Country House not only as a systematic demolition of stage realism, but also as an anxious probing of the elusive boundaries between life and death, exposing the ''dark places'' of the human psyche that make us laugh nervously.
Mr Price, or Tropical Madness and Metaphysics of a Two- Headed Calf
by Stanislaw Ignacy WitkiewiczThe Polish playwright and artist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, known as Witkacy, is now recognized as Poland's leading theatrical innovator of the interwar years and one of the outstanding creative personalities of the European avant-garde. This volume contains two of Witkacy's "tropical" plays inspired by the playwright's trip to Ceylon and Australia in 1914 with his close friend, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Mr. Price, or Tropical Madness is a drama of heightened passion and greed among British colonists in Rangoon who seem to have stepped out of Joseph Conrad's tales of the South Seas. Metaphysics of a Two headed Calf, set in New Guinea and Australia, pits savage European imperialists against a native tribal Australia and pits savage European imperialists against a native tribal chieftain whose fetish of a great golden frog offers greater insight into the mystery of existence than the Westerners' shallow rationalism. Both plays puncture the white rulers' poses of superiority and parody their images of the tropical Other. Also included in the volume are Witkacy's Foreword to Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf in which the playwright defends his concept of theatre as an autonomous art with a scenic language of its own and an appendix containing a documentary itinerary of Witkacy's journey to Ceylon.
The Media Players
by Stephen WittekThe Media Players: Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News builds a case for the central, formative function of Shakespeare's theater in the news culture of early modern England. In an analysis that combines historical research with recent developments in public sphere theory, Dr. Stephen Wittek argues that the unique discursive space created by commercial theater helped to foster the conceptual framework that made news possible. Dr. Wittek's analysis focuses on the years between 1590 and 1630, an era of extraordinary advances in English news culture that begins with the first instance of serialized news in England and ends with the emergence of news as a regular, permanent fixture of the marketplace. Notably, this period of expansion in news culture coincided with a correspondingly extraordinary era of theatrical production and innovation, an era that marks the beginning of commercial theater in London, and has left us with the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton. Book jacket.
Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Conversion (Early Modern Literature in History)
by Stephen WittekThis book takes a close look at Shakespeare’s engagement with the flurry of controversy and activity surrounding the concept of conversion in post-Reformation England. For playhouse audiences during the period, conversional thought encompassed a markedly diverse, fluid amalgamation of ideas, practices, and arguments centered on the means by which an individual could move from one category of identity to another. In an analysis that includes chapter-length readings of The Taming of the Shrew, Henry IV Part I, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest, the book argues that Shakespearean drama made a unique and substantive intervention in public discourse surrounding conversion, and continues to speak meaningfully about conversional experience for audiences in the present age. It will be of particular benefit to students and scholars with an interest in theatrical history, performance theory, theology, cultural studies, race studies, and gender studies.
Tadeusz Kantor (Routledge Performance Practitioners)
by Noel WittsTadeusz Kantor – a theoretician, director, innovator and painter famed for his very visual theatre style – was a key figure in European avant-garde theatre. He was also known for his challenging theatrical innovations, such as extending stages and the combination of mannequins with living actors. The book combines: a detailed study of the historical context of Kantor’s work an exploration of Kantor’s own writings on his theatrical craft a stylistic analysis of the key works, including The Dead Class and Let the Artists Die, and their critical reception an examination of the practical exercises devised by Kantor. As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today’s student.
The Twentieth Century Performance Reader
by Noel Witts Teresa BrayshawThe Twentieth-Century Performance Reader has been the key introductory text to all types of performance for over fifteen years. Extracts from over fifty practitioners, critics and theorists from the fields of dance, drama, music, theatre and live art form an essential sourcebook for students, researchers and practitioners. This carefully revised third edition offers focus on contributions from the world of music, and also privileges the voices of practitioners themselves ahead of more theoretical writing. A bestseller since its original publication in 1996, this new edition has been expanded to include contributions from: Bobby Baker; Joseph Beuys; Rustom Bharucha; Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker; Hanns Eisler; Karen Finley; Philip Glass; Guillermo Gómez-Peña; Matthew Goulish; Martha Graham; Wassily Kandinsky; Jacques Lecoq; Hans-Thies Lehmann; George Maciunas; Ariane Mnouchkine; Meredith Monk; Lloyd Newson; Carolee Schneemann; Gertrude Stein; Bill Viola. Each extract is fully supplemented by a contextual summary, a biography of the writer, and suggestions for further reading. The volume's alphabetical structure invites the reader to compare and cross-reference major writings on all types of performance outside of the constraints and simplifications of genre, encouraging cross-disciplinary understandings. All who engage with live, innovative performance, and the interplay of radical ideas, will find this collection invaluable.
Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising: Prophet Motives (Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries)
by Christopher WixsonThis book charts how promotional campaigns in which Bernard Shaw participated were key crucibles within which agency and personality could re-negotiate their relationship to one another and to the consuming public. Concurrent with the rise of modern advertising, the creation of Shaw’s 'G.B.S.' public persona was achieved through masterful imitation of patent medicine marketing strategies and a shrewd understanding of the relationship between product and spokesman. Helping to enhance the visibility of his literary writing and dovetailing with his Fabian political activities, 'G.B.S.' also became a key figure in the evolution of testimonial endorsement and the professionalizing of modern advertising. The study analyzes multiple ad series in which Shaw was prominently featured that were occasions for self-promotion for both Shaw and the agencies, and presage the iconoclastic style of contemporary 'public personality' and techniques of celebrity marketing.
Castration Celebration
by Jake WiznerIt's High School Musical--rated R! When the girl who's foresworn men meets the boy who's devoted himself to picking up women, there's bound to be drama--perfect for a six-week summer program devoted to the arts. Olivia's summer goal: to write a musical that censures men with wandering eyes. Max's summer goal: to hone his acting skills, along with his talent for attracting the ladies. Before camp is over, they'll perform Olivia's musical onstage and in real life--though the ending may turn out differently than either expects. Jake Wizner's story within a story takes the battle of the sexes to a whole new level in a bawdy, uproarious romp that's laugh-out-loud fun.
Acting on Cultural Policy: Arts Practitioners, Policy-Making and Civil Society (New Directions in Cultural Policy Research)
by Jane WoddisThis book investigates the role of arts practitioners in cultural policy-making, challenging the perception that arts practitioners have little or no involvement in policy and seeking to discover the extent and form of their engagement. Examining the subject through a case-study of playwriting policy in England since 1945, and paying particular attention to playwrights’ organisations and their history of self-directed activity, the book explores practitioners’ participation in cultural policy-making, encompassing both “invited” and “uninvited” interventions that also weave together policy activity and creative practice. It discusses why their involvement matters, and argues that arts practitioners and their organisations can be understood as participants in civil society whose policy activity contributes to the maintenance and enlargement of democratic practices and values.
Euripides and the Politics of Form
by Victoria WohlHow can we make sense of the innovative structure of Euripidean drama? And what political role did tragedy play in the democracy of classical Athens? These questions are usually considered to be mutually exclusive, but this book shows that they can only be properly answered together. Providing a new approach to the aesthetics and politics of Greek tragedy, Victoria Wohl argues that the poetic form of Euripides' drama constitutes a mode of political thought. Through readings of select plays, she explores the politics of Euripides' radical aesthetics, showing how formal innovation generates political passions with real-world consequences. Euripides' plays have long perplexed readers. With their disjointed plots, comic touches, and frequent happy endings, they seem to stretch the boundaries of tragedy. But the plays' formal traits--from their exorbitantly beautiful lyrics to their arousal and resolution of suspense--shape the audience's political sensibilities and ideological attachments. Engendering civic passions, the plays enact as well as express political ideas. Wohl draws out the political implications of Euripidean aesthetics by exploring such topics as narrative and ideological desire, the politics of pathos, realism and its utopian possibilities, the logic of political allegory, and tragedy's relation to its historical moment.Breaking through the impasse between formalist and historicist interpretations of Greek tragedy, Euripides and the Politics of Form demonstrates that aesthetic structure and political meaning are mutually implicated--and that to read the plays poetically is necessarily to read them politically.
Lady Romeo: The Radical and Revolutionary Life of Charlotte Cushman, America's First Celebrity
by Tana WojczukFor fans of Book of Ages and American Eve, this illuminating and enthralling biography of 19th-century queer actress Charlotte Cushman portrays her radical lifestyle that riveted New York City and made headlines across America. From the very beginning, she was a radical. At age nineteen, Charlotte Cushman, America&’s beloved actress and the country&’s first true celebrity, left her life—and countless suitors—behind to make it as a Shakespearean actress. After revolutionizing the role of Lady Macbeth in front of many adoring fans, she went on the road, performing in cities across a dividing America and building her fame. She was everywhere. And yet, her name has faded in the shadows of history. Now, for the first time in decades, Cushman&’s story comes to full and brilliant life in this definitive, exhilarating, and enlightening biography of the 19th-century icon. With rarely seen letters, Wojczuk reconstructs the formative years of Cushman&’s life, set against the excitement and drama of New York City in the 1800s, featuring a cast of luminaries and revolutionaries that changed the cultural landscape of America forever. A vivid portrait of an astonishing and uniquely American life, Lady Romeo reveals one of the most remarkable women in United States history, and restores her to the center stage where she belongs.
Scene Design And Stage Lighting
by R. Craig Wolf Dick BlockNow in full color and packed with professional information and cutting-edge technologies, SCENE DESIGN AND STAGE LIGHTING, Tenth Edition, equips you with the most up-to-date coverage available on scenery, lighting, sound, and technology. Completely current, the exciting new tenth edition has two new chapters on digital integration in scene design and lighting design (Chapters 12 and 13), a new chapter on getting work in the profession (Chapter 28), and mirrors the best of real-world practices. Vibrant color production photographs support the text and spotlight examples of contemporary work. The book retains its strong emphasis on modern technology, with many changes in the lighting design and sound design chapters, reflecting the latest practices. The text also includes an expanded section on television design, as well as an emphasis on health and safety issues. The authors emphasize collaboration in all sections of the text, and they provide insight via interviews with professional lighting and scenery designers in two features: "Working Professionals" and "Designers at Work." Reflecting current professional practice, SCENE DESIGN AND STAGE LIGHTING, Tenth Edition, offers in-depth coverage of a broad range of topics, making it the most detailed and comprehensive text available in the scenic, lighting, and sound design fields.
The Art of Broadsword Fighting for Stage and Screen: An Actor’s and Director’s Guide to Staged Violence
by Erick Vaughn WolfeThe Art of Broadsword Fighting for Stage and Screen provides historical and contemporary techniques and styles for the safe training and use of the European broadsword in a theatrical setting.This book starts with a brief breakdown of the history of broadswords, the time periods associated with their use, and the influences of historical masters and their manuscripts. After the brief history section, this book presents the basic techniques of broadsword fighting, starting with grip and body postures. Readers will then move fluidly into the basic actions of cuts, parries, blocks, and disarms. During this process, actors explore the connection between body and weapon and start learning the elements of storytelling through choreography. Special attention is given throughout the text on techniques which need to be approached in a physically and/or mentally safe way by directors, choreographers, performers, teachers, and students. The final chapter focuses on choreographing a fight and utilizing all the material previously covered in this book, with special notes for actors, directors, and teachers about what makes a good fight, how to keep it safe, and how to create the "wow factor" in choreography.The Art of Broadsword Fighting for Stage and Screen is intended for directors, choreographers, actors, students of acting, martial artists, and enthusiasts of stage combat and historical martial arts.
The Art of Knife Fighting for Stage and Screen: An Actor’s and Director’s Guide to Staged Violence
by Erick Vaughn WolfeThe Art of Knife Fighting for Stage and Screen: An Actor’s and Director’s Guide to Staged Violence provides detailed information for the safe use of knives and daggers in a theatrical setting and an in-depth understanding of safe theatrical weapons. The book starts with an extensive safety review, then moves on to the basic techniques of dagger fighting, starting with grip and body postures. Readers will then learn about the basic actions of cuts, parries, blocks, and disarms. During this process, they will explore the connection between body and weapon and start learning the elements of storytelling through choreography. Special attention is given to suicides, threats, and murder and how directors, choreographers, performers, teachers, and students can approach these techniques in a way that is physically and mentally safe. The book also covers the use of throwing knives, knife flips, and other tricks to help add a little flair to your fight. The Art of Knife Fighting for Stage and Screen teaches the safe theatrical use of the knife for directors, performers, educators, and students of stage combat.
The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction (Routledge Literature Handbooks)
by Graham WolfeNovelists have long been attracted to theatre. Some have pursued success on the stage, but many have sought to combine these worlds, entering theatre through their fiction, setting stages on their novels’ pages, and casting actors, directors, and playwrights as their protagonists. The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction has convened an international community of scholars to explore the remarkable array of novelists from many eras and parts of the world who have created fiction from the stuff of theatre, asking what happens to theatre on the pages of novels, and what happens to novels when they collaborate with theatre. From J. W. Goethe to Louisa May Alcott, Mikhail Bulgakov, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret Atwood, some of history’s most influential novelists have written theatre-fiction, and this Companion discusses many of these figures from new angles. But it also spotlights writers who have received less critical attention, such as Dorothy Leighton, Agustín de Rojas Villandrando, Ronald Firbank, Syed Mustafa Siraj, Li Yu, and Vicente Blasco Ibañez, bringing their work into conversation with a vital field. A valuable resource for students, scholars, and admirers of both theatre and novels, The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction offers a wealth of new perspectives on topics of increasing critical concern, including intermediality, theatricality, antitheatricality, mimesis, diegesis, and performativity.