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La MaMa Experimental Theatre – A Lasting Bridge Between Cultures: The Dialogue with European Theater in the Years 1961–1975 (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Monica CristiniThis book focuses on the role of La MaMa Experimental Theatre within Avant-garde theater during the 1960s and 1970s. This study investigates the involvement of the Off-Off Broadway circuit in the Avant-garde experimentations both in the United States (New York specifically) and in Europe. This exploration shows the two-way influence – between Europe and the United States – testified by documents gathered in years of archival research. In this relevant artistic exchange, La MaMa (and Ellen Stewart as its founder and artistic director) emerges as a key element. La MaMa’s companies brought to Europe the American culture and the New York underground culture, while their members learnt European training techniques by attending workshops or taking part in the research of Eugenio Barba, Jerzy Grotowski, and Peter Brook, and brought their principles back to the United States. This book goes through a chronological path that presents some key cases of collaboration between the above-mentioned European masters and some La MaMa’s artists and companies: Tom O ’Horgan and La MaMa Repertory Troupe, the Open Theatre, Andrei Serban and The Great Jones Repertory Company, La MaMa Plexus. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater and performance studies.
The Legacy of Stylistic Theatre in the Creation of a Modern Sinhala Drama in Sri Lanka (ISSN)
by Lakshmi D. BulathsinghalaThis book explores the development of Sinhala stylistic drama from its earliest manifestations to the post-independence era.Bulathsinghala examines the impact of indigenous and imported folk theatrical forms on the work of the most significant postcolonial stylistic dramatists and on key plays that they produced. In the process, the book explores a number of myths and misunderstandings regarding Sri Lanka’s folk heritage and seeks to establish more reliable information on the principal indigenous Sri Lankan folk dramatic forms and their characteristics. At the same time, by drawing connections between folk drama and the post-independence stylistic theatrical movement, the author demonstrates the essential role of the former in Sinhala culture prior to the advent of Western and other influences and shows how both continue to inflect Sri Lankan drama today.This book will help to open the field of South Asian drama studies to an audience consisting not only of scholars and students but also of general readers who are interested in the fields of drama and theatre and Asian studies.
Les deseo una feliz Navidad
by Laurent MoreauEn la escuela, un grupo, parece genial. ¿Qué se puede decir cuando se escoge a alguien que parece más débil que los demás y sale mal? Una vida destruida, un malestar... ¡Una venganza! ¡Se dice que la venganza es un plato que se sirve frío! Bueno, no es más que un doble eufemismo...
Lessons in Creativity from Musical Theatre Characters
by James C. Kaufman Dana P. RoweLessons in Creativity from Musical Theatre Characters marries art and science with a new and exciting collaboration between one of the world’s leading creativity scholars and an internationally renowned musical theatre composer. This book will help readers tap into their creativity and unleash their own creative potential as they start their careers. Blending cutting-edge research, juicy anecdotes, lived experience, hands-on activities, and gentle advice, authors James C. Kaufman and Dana P. Rowe take readers on a journey to explore and enhance their own creativity. Each chapter addresses a key aspect of creativity, from how to overcome blocks to understanding one’s personal strengths all through the lens of Musical Theatre characters along with insights from those within the industry. Kaufman and Rowe shatter creativity myths (such as the tormented artist or having one big break) that may be harming the reader’s potential growth. Probing questions, fun quizzes, and engaging exercises will help the reader reflect on the material and develop strategies for their next step. All throughout, the readers can learn from the tales of Sweeney Todd, Maria Von Trapp, Alexander Hamilton, Christine Daaé, and countless others to inspire their own creativity. This book is ideal for aspiring theatre professionals, students of performing arts, and theatre and creativity scholars.
Lives in Motion: Celebrating Dance in Thailand (Celebrating Dance in Asia and the Pacific)
by Pornrat Damrhung Lowell SkarLives in Motion celebrates dance in Thailand, focusing on the diversity of Thailand’s dance cultures and their place in today’s world. Giving voice to eminent artists and scholars on the complex roles that Thailand is pursuing for artful movement at home and abroad, the book provides key perspectives on Thai dance traditions and practitioners. It explores the many forms and meanings in contemporary dance, changing local traditions in the country, the evolution of Thai dance on the global stage, and hybrid features of the Thai dance world. The book examines how hybridity has been integral to dance cultures in Thailand and discusses how they have actively adapted and negotiated their knowledge in relation to modernity and globalization. Developing new models, standards and sites for dance, movement and theater, dance in Thai has been advancing in innovative ways, whether it is to include fresh forms of skilled bodily movement or to expand in new arenas like tourism and online platforms. Similarly, old systems of training, which included artists’ homes, palaces, and temples, have been adapted into the new world of modern education, media, home schooling, and new community rituals. A pioneering contribution on Thai performing arts, this volume examines contemporary Thai dance cultures in the local, national, regional, and global contexts. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of dance and performance studies, cultural studies, Southeast Asia studies, and art.
Living the Dream: Building a Sustainable Career in the Performing Arts
by Kirstin Chávez Johnathon PapeLiving the Dream: Building a Sustainable Career in the Performing Arts offers an accessible guide to understanding one’s arts career as a business. This essential companion to the inner workings of the arts world begins with defining the dream, including how to conceive mission statements, branding and business plans. Part II covers sharing the dream with others through social media, networking, and working with agents or artist managers. Part III offers an overview of the financial aspect, including budgets, taxes, and managing risks. Part IV concludes by discussing the realities of an arts career, including work/life balance, preparing for the future, and managing mental health. This practical and insightful overview is a must‑have companion for aspiring and early career professionals in the performing arts, as well as students on a range of arts courses, including Music Business, Entrepreneurship, and Career Skills classes.
LO: Screendance Remixed (ISSN)
by Alanna Thain Priscilla GuyThis edited collection assembles international perspectives from artists, academics, and curators in the field to bring the insights of screendance theory and practice back into conversations with critical methods, at the intersections of popular culture, low-tech media practices, dance, and movement studies, and the minoritarian perspectives of feminism, queer theory, critical race studies and more.This book represents new vectors in screendance studies, featuring contributions by both artists and theoreticians, some of the most established voices in the field as well as the next generation of emerging scholars, artists, and curators. It builds on the foundational cartographies of screendance studies that attempted to sketch out what was particular to this practice. Sampling and reworking established forms of inquiry, artistic practice and spectatorial habits, and suspending and reorienting gestures into minoritarian forms, these conversations consider the affordances of screendance for reimaging the relations of bodies, technologies, and media today.This collection will be of great interest to students and scholars in dance studies, performance studies, cinema and media studies, feminist studies, and cultural studies.
Marina Carr and Greek Tragedy: Feminist Myths of Monstrosity (Routledge Studies in Irish Literature)
by Salomé PaulMarina Carr and Greek Tragedy examines the feminist transposition of Greek tragedy in the theatre of the contemporary Irish dramatist Marina Carr. Through a comparison of the plays based on classical drama with their ancient models, it investigates Carr’s transformation not only of the narrative but also of the form of Greek tragedy. As a religious and political institution of the 5th-century Athenian democracy, tragedy endorsed the sexist oppression of women. Indeed, the construction of female characters in Greek tragedy was entirely disconnected from the experience of womanhood lived by real women in order to embody the patriarchal values of Athenian democracy. Whether praised for their passivity or demonized for showing unnatural agency and subjectivity, women in Greek tragedy were conceived to (re)assert the supremacy of men. Carr’s theatre stands in stark opposition to such a purpose. Focusing on women’s struggle to achieve agency and subjectivity in a male-dominated world, her plays show the diversity of experiencing womanhood and sexist oppression in the Republic of Ireland, and the Western societies more generally. Yet, Carr’s enduring conversation with the classics in her theatre demonstrates the feminist willingness to alter the founding myths of Western civilisation to advocate for gender equality.
Martin McDonagh (Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists)
by Catherine ReesThis comprehensive, accessible introduction to one of Britain’s leading contemporary playwrights and filmmakers outlines Martin McDonagh’s body of work, the key critical contexts for understanding and exploring his career, analysis of productions, and includes an exclusive interview with the director of his most recent stage work. Analysis of McDonagh’s writing is broken down into three periods – his early Irish plays, his screenplays, and his later plays that move away from and outside of Ireland. Works are discussed thematically, giving a dynamic reading of the scripts and the ideas around which they circle. The book’s final section then delves in more detail into selected seminal productions of McDonagh’s writing, outlining key phases and transitions in his career.Part of the Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists series, Martin McDonagh is an essential guide for scholars and students who are setting out to understand the life and work of one of the most popular and acclaimed British dramatists and filmmakers of the twenty-first century.
Massinger’s Italy: Re-Imagining Italian Culture in the Plays of Philip Massinger (Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies)
by Cristina ParavanoMassinger’s Italy: Re-Imagining Italian Culture in the Plays of Philip Massinger offers the first book-length account of the pervasive influence of Italian culture on the canon of Philip Massinger, one of the most successful playwrights of the post-Shakespearean period. This volume explores the relationships between Massinger and Italian literary, dramatic and intellectual culture in the larger context of Anglo-Italian cultural exchanges. The book investigates the influence of Italian culture, considering Massinger’s engagement and appropriation of Italian texts, dramatic and political theories and ideas related to the country and his use of Italy as a setting. Massinger’s Italy offers a fresh and unexpected perspective on the development of Anglo-Italian discourse on the early modern English stage, showing to what extent Massinger contributed to the myth of Italy and to the circulation of Italian culture and shedding light on the complex system of Anglo-Italian interconnections within the corpus of Massinger’s plays as well as with the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Meaning in the Midst of Performance: Contradictions of Participation (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Gareth WhiteBeing an audience participant can be a confusing and contradictory experience. When a performance requires us to do things, we are put in the situation of being both actor and spectator, of being part of the work of art while also being the audience who receives it, and of being both perceiving subject and aesthetic object. This book examines these contradictions – and many others – as they appear by accident and by design in increasingly popular forms of interactive, immersive, and participatory performance in theatre and live art. Borrowing concepts from cognitive philosophy and bringing them into a conversation with critical theory, Gareth White sharply examines meaning as a process that happens to us as we are engaged in the problems and negotiations of a participatory performance. This study will be of great interest to scholars and students of theatre and performance, intermedial arts and games studies, and to practising artists.
Messy Connections: Creating Atmospheres of Addiction Recovery Through Performance Practice (ISSN)
by Cathy SloanThis book examines performance practices that involve people in recovery from addiction, theorising such practices as recovery-engaged.Focusing on examples of practice from a growing movement of UK-based recovery arts practitioners and performers, it highlights a unique approach to performance that infuses an understanding of lived experiences of addiction and recovery with creative practice. It offers a philosophy of being in recovery that understands lived experience, and performance practice, as a dynamic system of interrelations with the human and nonhuman elements that make up the societal settings in which recovery communities struggle to exist. It thereby frames the process of recovery, and recovery-engaged performance, as an affective ecology – a system of messy connections. Building upon ideas from posthumanist research on addiction, cultural theory on identity and new materialist interpretations of performance practice, it considers how such contemporary theory might offer additional ways of thinking and doing arts practice with people affected by addiction. The discussion highlights the distinct aesthetics, ethics and politics of this area of performance practice.This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in Applied Theatre and Critical Arts and Mental Health studies.
Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities (Milestones)
by Emily A. RollieThis introduction to the staging of genders and sexualities across world theatre sets out a broad view of the subject by featuring plays and performance artists that shifted the conversation in their cultural, social, and historical moments.Designed for weekly use in theatre studies, dramatic literature, or gender and performance studies courses, these ten milestones highlight women and writers of the global majority, supporting and amplifying voices that are key to the field and some that have typically been overlooked. From Paula Vogel, Split Britches, and Young Jean Lee to Werewere Liking, Mahesh Dattani, Yvette Nolan, and more, the chapters place artists’ key works into conversation with one another, structurally offering an intersectional perspective on staging genders and sexualities.Milestones are a range of accessible textbooks, breaking down the need-to-know moments in the social, cultural, political, and artistic development of foundational subject areas.
Multilingual Dramaturgies: Towards New European Theatre (New Dramaturgies)
by Kasia LechMultilingual Dramaturgies provides a study of dramaturgical practices in contemporary multilingual theatre in Europe. Featuring interviews with international theatremakers, the book gives an insight into diverse approaches towards multilingual theatre and its dramaturgy that reflect cultural, political, and economic landscapes of contemporary Europe, its inhabitants, and its theatres. First-hand accounts are contextualized to reveal a complex set of negotiations involved in the creative and political tasks of staging multilingualism and engaging the audience, as well as in practical issues like funding and developing working models. Using interviews with practitioners from a diverse range of theatrical backgrounds and career levels, and with various models of financial support, Multilingual Dramaturgies also offers an insight into different attitudes towards multilingualism in European theatres. The book illuminates not only the potential for multilingual dramaturgies, but also the practical and creative difficulties involved in making them. By bringing the voices of artists together and providing a critical commentary, the book reveals multilingual dramaturgies as webbed practices of differences that also offer new ways of understanding and performing identity in a European context. Multilingual Dramaturgies sheds light on an exciting theatre practice, argues for its central role in Europe and highlights potential directions for its further development.
Networked Music Performance: Theory and Applications
by Miriam IorwerthNetworked Music Performance (NMP) is the essential guide to both playing music online and ensemble music through networks. Offering a range of case studies, from highly technical solutions to inclusive community projects, this book provides inspiration to musicians to try NMP whatever their level of technical expertise. Drawing upon recent research to examine the background and history of the practice as well as specific practical approaches, technical and musical considerations are included for readers, as are ideas around accessibility and creativity. Accessibility is considered in the context of the opportunities that NMP gives to musicians working remotely, as well as some of the barriers to participation in NMP and how these can be overcome. Synchronous and asynchronous approaches to NMP are explored in detail, examining the technical and musical affordances and challenges of working remotely for musicians. Networked Music Performance will appeal to music and music technology students as well as professional musicians and technicians who have started working online and wish to improve their practice. As NMP in the context of music education and community music are also explored, this book supplies educators and community leaders with knowledge and practical guidance on how to move their practice online.
New Approaches to Decolonizing Fashion History and Period Styles: Re-Fashioning Pedagogies
by Ashley BelletNew Approaches to Decolonizing Fashion History and Period Styles: Re-Fashioning Pedagogies offers a wide array of inclusive, global, practical approaches for teaching costume and fashion history. Costume designers, technicians, and historians have spent the last several years re-evaluating how they teach costume and fashion history, acknowledging the need to refocus the discourse to include a more global perspective. This book is a collection of pedagogical methods aimed to do just that, with an emphasis on easy reference, accessible activities, and rubrics, and containing a variety of ways to restructure the course. Each chapter offers a course description, syllabus calendar, course objectives, and learning outcomes, as well as sample activities from instructors across the country who have made major changes to their coursework. Using a combination of personal narratives, examples from their work, bibliographies of helpful texts, and student responses, contributors suggest a variety of ways to decolonize the traditionally Western-focused fashion history syllabus. This collection of pedagogical approaches is intended to support and inspire instructors teaching costume design, costume history, fashion history, period styles, and other aesthetic histories in the arts.
New Approaches to Decolonizing Fashion History and Period Styles: Re-Fashioning Pedagogies
by Ashley BelletNew Approaches to Decolonizing Fashion History and Period Styles: Re-Fashioning Pedagogies offers a wide array of inclusive, global, practical approaches for teaching costume and fashion history.Costume designers, technicians, and historians have spent the last several years re-evaluating how they teach costume and fashion history, acknowledging the need to refocus the discourse to include a more global perspective. This book is a collection of pedagogical methods aimed to do just that, with an emphasis on easy reference, accessible activities, and rubrics, and containing a variety of ways to restructure the course. Each chapter offers a course description, syllabus calendar, course objectives, and learning outcomes, as well as sample activities from instructors across the country who have made major changes to their coursework. Using a combination of personal narratives, examples from their work, bibliographies of helpful texts, and student responses, contributors suggest a variety of ways to decolonize the traditionally Western-focused fashion history syllabus.This collection of pedagogical approaches is intended to support and inspire instructors teaching costume design, costume history, fashion history, period styles, and other aesthetic histories in the arts.
Nine questions every actor of color should consider when tokenism is not enough
by Shanésia DavisThis book confronts and analyzes the systemic racism that confronts actors of color in the USA through interviews with leading performers in the nation’s theatrical epicentre of Chicago.Each chapter deals with a different central question, from how these actors approach roles and the obstacles that they face, to the ways in which the industry can change to better enable actors of color. By bringing together these actors and sharing the ways in which they have functioned within the white theatre world, we can appreciate how theatre needs to embrace their identities so that all voices are heard, understood, and valued. The stories of these actors will reflect the systemic racism of the past and present with the hope of remaking the future.This is an important book for students, teachers, and professionals who engage in theatre work, helping them to understand the lived experiences of actors of color through those actors’ own words.
Object Performance in the Black Atlantic: The United States
by Paulette RichardsGiven that slaveholders prohibited the creation of African-style performing objects, is there a traceable connection between traditional African puppets, masks, and performing objects and contemporary African American puppetry? This study approaches the question by looking at the whole performance complex surrounding African performing objects and examines the material culture of object performance. Object Performance in the Black Atlantic argues that since human beings can attribute private, personal meanings to objects obtained for personal use such as dolls, vessels, and quilts, the lines of material culture continuity between African and African American object performance run through objects that performed in ritual rather than theatrical capacity. Split into three parts, this book starts by outlining the spaces where the African American object performance complex persisted through the period of slavery. Part Two traces how African Americans began to reclaim object performance in the era of Jim Crow segregation and Part Three details how increased educational and economic opportunities along with new media technologies enabled African Americans to use performing objects as a powerful mode of resistance to the objectification of Black bodies. This is an essential study for any students of puppetry and material performance, and particularly those concerned with African American performance and performance in North America more broadly.
Of Kings and Clowns: Leadership in Contemporary Egyptian Theatre Since 1967 (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Tiran ManucharyanThis book examines the transformations Egyptian theatre has undergone since 1967. Through detailed analyses of the plays, the book investigates the ways Egyptian theatre represents, formulates, and imagines political and cultural leadership and, by implication, enacts its own leadership. Alongside the work of established playwrights, such as Yusuf Idris, Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny, Fathia El-ʿAssal and Lenin El-Ramly, it also discusses the input in theatre of a younger generation, reflecting the new transformations in Egyptian theatre following the 2011 revolution. Relating the theoretical underpinnings of its analyses to theoretical discussions by Egyptian playwrights, the book contributes to current English-language scholarship in theatre studies, by providing a discourse largely absent from it. Considering the growing sense in English-language academia on the need for research and education beyond the Western canon this book offers an important addition to the study resources. This book will interest both scholars and students who study the Arab world, and researchers and students with an interest in cultural studies, more specifically twentieth- and twenty-first-century theatre, and literature studies. The book’s specific focus on political theatre and its gender perspective make it also of interest to the fields of political and gender studies.
Office and Duty in King Lear: Shakespeare’s Political Theologies (Palgrave Shakespeare Studies)
by Alexander ThomThis book advances five original readings of Shakespeare's King Lear, influenced by Giorgio Agamben, but tempered by primary research into Jacobean literature, law, religion, and philosophy. To grasp Lear’s encounter between politics and identity, the play demands a wider understanding of the religious influence on political thought. As Lear himself realises, sovereignty is an extreme, glamorous example of a deeper category: sacred office. Lear also shows duty intersecting with a hierarchy of bastards, outlaws, women, waifs, and monks. This book introduces concepts like petit treason, civil death, and waivery into political theological studies, complicating Agamben’s models. Goneril’s treason shows the sovereign’s consort and children are consecrated lives too. Lear’s crisis of "self-knowing" stages a landmark critique of office. The promise of his poignant speech before the prison is foreclosed by Shakespeare's invention: an officer dutifully murdering Cordelia. This book’s conclusion, through Hannah Arendt, reconsiders Lear’s persistent association with the Holocaust.
The Only Way Out: The Racial and Sexual Performance of Escape
by Katherine Brewer BallIn The Only Way Out, Katherine Brewer Ball explores the American fascination with the escape story. Brewer Ball argues that escape is a key site for exploring American conceptions of freedom and constraint. Stories of escape are never told just once but become mythic in their episodic iterations, revealing the fantasies and desires of society, the storyteller, and the listener. While white escape narratives have typically been laden with Enlightenment fantasies of redemption where freedom is available to any individual willing to seize it, Brewer Ball explores how Black and queer escape offer forms of radical possibility. Drawing on Black studies, queer theory, and performance studies, she examines a range of works, from nineteenth-century American literature to contemporary queer of color art and writing by contemporary American artists including Wilmer Wilson IV, Tourmaline, Tony Kushner, Junot Díaz, Glenn Ligon, Toshi Reagon, and Sharon Hayes. Throughout, escape emerges as a story not of individuality but of collectivity and entanglement.
Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi
by Blair HoxbySince the nineteenth century, some of the most influential historians have portrayed opera and tragedy as wholly distinct cultural phenomena. These historians have denied a meaningful connection between the tragedy of the ancients and the efforts of early modern composers to arrive at styles that were intensely dramatic. Drawing on a series of case studies, Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi traces the productive, if at times rivalrous, relationship between opera and tragedy from the institution of French regular tragedy under Richelieu in the 1630s to the reform of opera championed by Calzabigi and Gluck in the late eighteenth century. Blair Hoxby and his fellow contributors shed light on “neighbouring forms” of theatre, including pastoral drama, tragédie en machines, tragédie en musique, and Goldoni’s dramma giocoso. Their analysis includes famous masterpieces by Corneille, Voltaire, Metastasio, Goldoni, Calzabigi, Handel, and Gluck, as well as lesser-known artists such as Luisa Bergalli, the first female librettist to write for the public theatre in Italy. Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi delves into a series of quarrels and debates in order to illuminate the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theatre.
The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism
by Brenda Ayres Sarah E. MaierThis handbook offers analysis of diverse genres and media of neo-Victorianism, including film and television adaptations of Victorian texts, authors’ life stories, graphic novels, and contemporary fiction set in the nineteenth century. Contextualized by Sarah E Maier and Brenda Ayres in a comprehensive introduction, the collection describes current trends in neo-Victorian scholarship of novels, film, theatre, crime, empire/postcolonialism, Gothic, materiality, religion and science, amongst others. A variety of scholars from around the world contribute to this volume by applying an assortment of theoretical approaches and interdisciplinary focus in their critique of a wide range of narratives—from early neo-Victorian texts such as A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1963) and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) to recent steampunk, from musical theatre to slumming, and from The Alienist to queerness—in their investigation of how this fiction reconstructs the past, informed by and reinforming the present.
Pandemic Play: Community in Performance, Gaming, and the Arts (Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology)
by Carolyn Ownbey Catherine QuirkWhen the arts, culture, and entertainment industries came to a halt in late winter 2020, many claimed this was the end of art as we knew it. Theatre managers, museum directors, performers, artists, and everyday folks had to figure out new strategies for living and thriving in a new world order. As the global pandemic and its consequences continue to play out, the question of how we have learned—as creators or consumers—to play, is far from settled. This collection addresses pandemic play in broad terms: how did creative industries adapt to a majority virtual world? How have our understandings of community and play evolved? Might new forms of art and play outlive the pandemic and supplant earlier iterations? Pandemic Play takes these questions as a starting point, exploring strategies, case studies, and effects of the arts worlds gone virtual.