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Performing Post-Tariqa Sufism: Making Sacred Space with Mevlevi and Rifai Zikir in Turkey (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Esra ÇizmeciThis ethnographic research project examines the generation of post-tariqa Tasavvuf (Sufism: a spiritual practice and philosophy recognised as the inner dimension of Islam) in a variety of private, semi-public, public, secular and sacred urban spaces in present-day Turkey. Through extensive field research in minority Sufi communities, this book investigates how devotees of specific orders maintain, adapt, mobilise, and empower their beliefs and values through embodied acts of their Sufi followers. Using an ethnographic methodology and theories derived from performance studies, Esra Çizmeci examines the multiple ways in which the post-tariqa Mevlevi and Rifai practice is formed in present-day Turkey, such as through the authority of the spiritual teacher; the individual and collective performance of Sufi rituals; nefs (self) training; and, most importantly, the practice of Sufi doctrines in everyday life through the production of sacred spaces. Drawing on the theories of performance, she examines how the Sufi way of living and spaces are created anew in the process of each devotee’s embodied action. This book is informed by theories in performance studies, anthropology, religious studies, and cultural studies and places current Sufi practices in a historical perspective.
Performing Power: The Political Secrets of Gustav III (1771-1792)
by Maria BerlovaPerforming Power explores 18th-century fabrication of the royal image by focusing on the example of King Gustav III (1746–1792) – one of Sweden’s most acclaimed and controversial monarchs – who conspicuously chose theater as the primary media for his image-making and role construction. The text postulates that Gustav III was motivated by theater’s ability to aid him in fulfilling Enlightenment’s tenet of broadly educating the populace and inculcating it with royal ideology. That he was an amateur actor, stage director, and playwright were other engines driving his choice. The project challenges and expands the commonly accepted perception of Gustav III’s contribution to Swedish theater, which has generally been limited to founding its National Opera, developing its national drama, and forming its national dramatic repertoire. Maria Berlova presents Gustav III as a performing King who strategically used political events as a framework through which he could embody the image of the ideal or enlightened monarch as presented by Voltaire. Through this, Performing Power explores the tight relationship and complex bond between theatrical arts and politics. This unique study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater studies, 18th-century culture, and politics.
Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics
by Rivera-Servera Ramón H.Performing Queer Latinidad highlights the critical role that performance played in the development of Latina/o queer public culture in the United States during the 1990s and early 2000s, a period when the size and influence of the Latina/o population was increasing alongside a growing scrutiny of the public spaces where latinidad could circulate. Performances---from concert dance and street protest to the choreographic strategies deployed by dancers at nightclubs---served as critical meeting points and practices through which LGBT and other nonnormative sex practitioners of Latin American descent (individuals with greatly differing cultures, histories of migration or annexation to the United States, and contemporary living conditions) encountered each other and forged social, cultural, and political bonds. At a time when latinidad ascended to the national public sphere in mainstream commercial and political venues and Latina/o public space was increasingly threatened by the redevelopment of urban centers and a revived anti-immigrant campaign, queer Latinas/os in places such as the Bronx, San Antonio, Austin, Phoenix, and Rochester, NY, returned to performance to claim spaces and ways of being that allowed their queerness and latinidad to coexist. These social events of performance and their attendant aesthetic communication strategies served as critical sites and tactics for creating and sustaining queer latinidad.
Performing Religion on the Secular Stage (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Sharon Aronson-LehaviThis book examines the relations between Western religion, secularism, and modern theater and performance. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi posits that the ongoing cultural power of religious texts, icons, and ideas on the one hand and the artistic freedom enabled by secularism and avant-garde experimentalism on the other, has led theatre artists throughout the twentieth century to create a uniquely modern theatrical hybrid–theater performances that simultaneously re-inscribe and grapple with religion and religious performativity. The book compares this phenomenon with medieval forms of religious theater and offers deep and original analyses of significant contemporary works ranging from plays and performances by August Strindberg, Hugo Ball (Dada), Jerzy Grotowski, and Hanoch Levin, to those created by Adrienne Kennedy, Rina Yerushalmi, Deb Margolin, Milo Rau, and Sarah Ruhl. The book analyzes a new and original historiography of a uniquely modern theatrical phenomenon, a study that is of high importance considering the reemergence of religion in contemporary culture and politics.
Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment
by Rebecca Schneider'At last, the past has arrived! Performing Remains is Rebecca Schneider's authoritative statement on a major topic of interest to the field of theatre and performance studies. It extends and consolidates her pioneering contributions to the field through its interdisciplinary method, vivid writing, and stimulating polemic. Performing Remains has been eagerly awaited, and will be appreciated now and in the future for its rigorous investigations into the aesthetic and political potential of reenactments.' - Tavia Nyong'o, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University 'I have often wondered where the big, important, paradigm-changing book about re-enactment is: Schneider’s book seems to me to be that book. Her work is challenging, thoughtful and innovative and will set the agenda for study in a number of areas for the next decade.' - Jerome de Groot, University of Manchester Performing Remains is a dazzling new study exploring the role of the fake, the false and the faux in contemporary performance. Rebecca Schneider argues passionately that performance can be engaged as what remains, rather than what disappears. Across seven essays, Schneider presents a forensic and unique examination of both contemporary and historical performance, drawing on a variety of elucidating sources including the "America" plays of Linda Mussmann and Suzan-Lori Parks, performances of Marina Abramovic´ and Allison Smith, and the continued popular appeal of Civil War reenactments. Performing Remains questions the importance of representation throughout history and today, while boldly reassessing the ritual value of failure to recapture the past and recreate the "original."
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.
Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Meghan Moe BeitiksHow might performance serve as a means for facing ubiquitous trauma and pain, in humans and ecologies? While reflecting on her multidisciplinary work Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience, artist Meghan Moe Beitiks considers bodies of knowledge in Trauma Theory, Intersectional Feminist Philosophy, Ecology, Disability Studies, New Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Gender Studies, Artistic Research, Psychology, Performance Studies, Social Justice, Performance Philosophy, Performance Art, and a series of first-person interviews in an attempt to answer that question. Beitiks brings us through the first-person process of making the work and the real-life, embodied encounters with the theories explored within it as an expansion of the work itself. Facing down difficult issues like trauma, discrimination, and the vulnerability of the body, Beitiks looks to commonalities across species and disciplines as means of developing resilience and cultivating communities. Rather than paint a picture of glorious potential utopias, Beitiks takes a hard look at herself as an embodiment of the values explored in the work, and stays with the difficult, sucky, troubling, work to be done. Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain is a vulnerable book about the quiet presence and hard looking needed to shift systems away from their oppressive, destructive realities.
Performing Ruins (Performing Landscapes)
by Simon MurrayThis book engages with the relationship between ruins, dilapidation, and abandonment and cultural events performed within such spaces. Following the author’s fieldwork in the UK, Bosnia Herzegovina, Poland, Germany, Greece, and Sicily, chapters describe, investigate, and reflect upon live performance events which have taken place in sites of decay and abandonment. The book’s main focus is upon modern economic ruins and ruins of warfare. Each chapter provides several case studies based upon the author’s own site visits and interviews with actors, directors, producers, curators, writers, and other artists. The book contextualises these events within the wider framework of Ruin Studies and provides brief summaries of how we might understand the ruin in terms of time, politics, culture, and atmospheres. The book is particularly preoccupied with artists’ reasons and motivations for placing performance events in ruined spaces and how these work dramaturgically.
Performing Science and the Virtual
by Sue-Ellen CaseThis impressive new book from Sue-Ellen Case looks at how science has been performed throughout history, tracing a line from nineteenth century alchemy to the twenty-first century virtual avatar. In this bold and wide-ranging book that is written using a crossbreed of styles, we encounter a glance of Edison in his laboratory, enter the soundscape of John Cage and raid tombs with Lara Croft. Case looks at the intersection of science and performance, the academic treatment of classical plays and internet-like bytes on contemporary issues and experiments where the array of performances include: electronic music Sun Ra, the jazz musician the recursive play of tape from Samuel Beckett to Pauline Oliveros Performing Science and the Virtual reviews how well these performances borrow from spiritualist notions of transcendence, as well as the social codes of race, gender and economic exchange. This book will appeal to academics and graduates studying theatre and performance studies, cultural studies and philosophy.
Performing Scottishness: Enactment and National Identities
by Ian BrownThis wide-ranging and ground-breaking book, especially relevant given Brexit and renewed Scottish independence campaigning, provides in-depth analysis of ways Scottishness has been performed and modified over the centuries. Alongside theatre, television, comedy, and film, it explores performativity in public events, Anglo-Scottish relations, language and literary practice, the Scottish diaspora and concepts of nation, borders and hybridity. Following discussion of the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath and the real meanings of the 1706/7 Treaty of Union, it examines the differing perceptions of what the ‘United Kingdom’ means to Scots and English. It contrasts the treatment of Shakespeare and Burns as ‘national bards’ and considers the implications of Scottish scholars’ invention of ‘English Literature’. It engages with Scotland’s language politics –rebutting claims of a ‘Gaelic Gestapo’ – and how borders within Scotland interact. It replaces myths about ‘tartan monsters’ with level-headed evidence before discussing in detail representations of Scottishness in domestic and international media.
Performing Self in Ethnographic Fieldwork
by Marilena PapachristophorouThis provocative book presents a methodological proposal for teaching ethnographic fieldwork, applying interdisciplinary tools inspired from performance theory, acting, experiential anthropology and existential psychotherapy. At the same time, it constitutes a theoretical and methodological trajectory mapping the history of ethnographic fieldwork through highly characteristic moments along with the author's own personal journey in the field in terms of a lifetime project. Starting from the assumption that ethnographic fieldwork constitutes a deeply human experience, the book proposes a step further towards the performative dimension of an ethnographic condition inspired by the Stanislavski method, which in practice complements performance theory issues: it is argued that participant observation offers an intermediate identity for the ethnographer through a conscious management of the social "role" dictated by their research participants; this ethnographic mediation of the Self may also have psychotherapeutic effects, mainly through conscious management of self-diversity and reflexivity in ethnographic writing. Ethnographic fieldwork is thus highlighted as a performative stage and a field of deep transformations for the ethnographer’s identity.
Performing Shakespeare Unrehearsed: A Practical Guide to Acting and Producing Spontaneous Shakespeare
by Bill KincaidPerforming Shakespeare Unrehearsed: A Practical Guide to Acting and Producing Spontaneous Shakespeare outlines how Shakespeare’s plays can be performed effectively without rehearsal, if all the actors understand a set of performance guidelines and put them into practice. Each chapter is devoted to a specific guideline, demonstrating through examples how it can be applied to pieces of text from Shakespeare’s First Folio, how it creates blocking and stage business, and how it enhances story clarity. Once the guidelines have been established, practical means of production are discussed, providing the reader with sufficient step-by-step instruction to prepare for Unrehearsed performances. This book is written for the actor and performer.
Performing Site-Specific Theatre
by Joanne Tompkins Anna BirchThis book investigates the expanding parameters for site-specific performance to account for the form's increasing popularity in the twenty-first century. Leading practitioners and theorists interrogate issues of performance and site to broaden our understanding of the role that place plays in performance and the ways that performance influences it
Performing Social Change on the Island of Ireland: From Republic to Pandemic (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Ciara L. MurphyThis book examines the relationship between moments of significant social change on the island of Ireland and performance practice during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It examines how moments of significant change influence not only the content of performance practice but also the form and function of theatre production and reception. This book investigates how the Troubles and subsequent Peace Process, Second-Wave Feminism, the Celtic Tiger and neoliberalism, social revolution, and the COVID-19 pandemic impacts the form and function of performance practice across the island of Ireland. Although these forms of theatre and performance making refer to varied and distinct lineages of practice internationally, there are key parallels that compel a study of their inter-relationality in a specific Irish context This book explores how the performance of Ireland illuminates histories and stories that are on the margins, illuminating the lived realities of everyday life through the presentation of moments of violence, oppression, and trauma as something that is as important as the larger narratives often ascribed to nationhood. This book asks how performance practice engages with and informs moments of major social change on the island of Ireland through the distinct yet intersecting lenses of place, performance form, and social context over the course of almost a century of Irish theatre and performance practice.
Performing Southeast Asia: Performance, Politics and the Contemporary (Contemporary Performance InterActions)
by Marcus Cheng Chye Tan Charlene Rajendran"Performing Southeast Asia: Performance, Politics and the Contemporary is an important reconsideration of the histories and practices of theatre and performance in a fluid and dynamic region that is also experiencing an overarching politics of complexity, precarity and populist authoritarian tendencies. In a substantial introductory essay and essays by leading scholars, activists and practitioners working inside the region, the book explores fundamental questions for the arts. The book asks how theatre contributes to and/or addresses the political condition in the contemporary moment, how does it represent the complexity of experiences in peoples’ daily lives and how does theatre engage in forms of political activism and enable a diversity of voices to flourish. The book shows how, in an age of increasingly violent politics, political institutions become sites for bad actors and propaganda. Forces of biopolitics, neo-liberalism and religious and ethnic nationalism intersect in unpredictable ways with decolonial practices – all of which the book argues are forces that define the contemporary moment. Indeed, by putting the focus on contemporary politics in the region alongside the diversity of practices in contemporary theatre, we see a substantial reformation of the idea of the contemporary moment, not as a cosmopolitan and elite artistic practice but as a multivalent agent of change in both aesthetic and political terms. With its focus on community activism and the creative possibilities of the performing arts the region, Performing Southeast Asia, is a timely intervention that brings us to a new understanding of how contemporary Southeast Asia has become a site of contest, struggle and reinvention of the relations between the arts and society." - Peter Eckersall, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA "Performing Southeast Asia – with chapters concerned with how regional theatres seek contextually-grounded, yet post-national(istic) forms; how history and tradition shape but do not hold down contemporary theatre; and how, in the editors’ words, such artistic encounters could result in theatres ‘that do not merely attend to matters of cultural heritage, tradition or history, but instead engage overtly with theatre and performance in the contemporary’ – contributes to the possibility of understanding what options for an artistically transubstantiated now-ness may be: to the possibility, that is, of what might be called a ‘Present-Tense Theatre’." - C. J. W.-L. Wee, Professor of English, Nanyang Technological University, SingaporeThis book examines contemporary performance practices and politics in Southeast Asia. It analyses performances created and performed in Southeast Asia, with specific focus on particular nation states, as these engage the volatile or shifting cultures and politics that inform contemporary life, particularly in urban Southeast Asia. In a region haunted historically by political divergence, authoritarianism and militarism, religious diversity and ethnic strife, the chapters reveal how contemporary performance, and performances today reflect yet challenge dominant socio-political discourses. The authors centre their discussion on the efficacies of performance as political intervention in Southeast Asia in a time of seismic socio-political change. They consider issues of state hegemonies, censorship, the resurgence of authoritarianism, the persistence of history and tradition, the impact of finance and sponsorship, social liberalism and conservatism and globalisation and cultural practice.
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.
Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire (African Expressive Cultures)
by Laura EdmondsonWhat are the stakes of performance in a time of war? How is artistic expression prone to manipulation by the state and international humanitarian organizations? From the standpoint of empire, Laura Edmondson explores cultural production that responds to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the twenty-year civil war in northern Uganda, and regional conflict in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She examines memorial ceremonies, plays, indigenous performance, NGO media campaigns, and contemporary dance to reveal how artists and cultural workers challenge state and humanitarian narratives in the shadow of empire and how empire, in turn, infiltrates creative capacities. Carefully contextualizing these narratives within the charged political terrain of the Great Lakes Region, Edmondson deepens our understanding of the role of creative expression and cultural agency in conflict and postconflict zones.
Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire (African Expressive Cultures)
by Laura Edmondson“An outstanding addition to the literature on theatre and performance in situations of conflict and post-conflict.” —New Theatre QuarterlyWhat are the stakes of cultural production in a time of war? How is artistic expression prone to manipulation by the state and international humanitarian organizations? In the charged political terrain of post-genocide Rwanda, post-civil war Uganda, and recent violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Laura Edmondson explores performance through the lens of empire.Instead of celebrating theatre productions as expression of cultural agency and resilience, Edmondson traces their humanitarian imperatives to a place where global narratives of violence take precedence over local traditions and audiences. Working at the intersection of performance and trauma, Edmondson reveals how artists and cultural workers manipulate narratives in the shadow of empire and how empire, in turn, infiltrates creative capacities.
Performing Truth: Works of Radical Memory for Times of Social Amnesia
by L.M. BogadPerforming Truth answers the most pressing questions facing any theatre-makers who are wrestling with how to present historical, political or socioeconomic information in an engaging, entertaining, and galvanizing way. How to make data compelling and documents mobilizing? How to keep an audience interested in what might be dry, dire, or depressing? How to surprise an audience and keep them alert? Collecting together the performance texts of international performance artist and activist L.M. Bogad, this book accompanies each script with essays that further explore that work's performance strategies. It also equips readers with specific resources and pedagogical tools to help those wishing to stage these pieces or create their own work to engage with similar topics. Bogad also provides "takeaways" for each piece, illustrating the challenges of its particular subject matter and how to overcome those challenges with innovations unique to performance art. This is a key guidebook for artists and theatre-makers facing the challenges of engaging with information in an era of fake news, propaganda bots, and the polarization of ideological spheres, as well as students and teachers taking on that challenge in theatre studies, performance studies and performing arts classrooms.
Performing Unification: History and Nation in German Theater after 1989
by Matt CornishSince the moment after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the most important German theater artists have created plays and productions about unification. Some have challenged how German history is written, while others opposed the very act of storytelling. Performing Unification examines how German directors, playwrights, and theater groups including Heiner Müller, Frank Castorf, and Rimini Protokoll have represented and misrepresented the past, confronting their nation’s history and collective identity. While scholars and critics have scrutinized unification in cinema and literature, this is the first book to focus on theater and performance. Author Matt Cornish surveys German-language history plays from the Baroque period through Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, Brecht, and up to the documentary theater movement of the 1960s to show how German identity has always been contested, even well before Germany became a nation. Then turning to performances of unification after 1989, Cornish argues that theater, in its structures and its live gestures, on pages, stages, and streets, helps us to understand the past and its effect on us, our relationships with others in our communities, and our futures. Engaging with theater theory from Aristotle through Bertolt Brecht and Hans-Thies Lehmann’s “postdramatic” theater, and also with theories of history from Hegel to Walter Benjamin and Hayden White, Performing Unification demonstrates that historiography and dramaturgy are intertwined.
Performing Violence: Limits and Transformative Means in Staged Violence (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Davide GiovanzanaThis book offers an exhaustive approach to all forms of staged violence and an in-depth analysis of their emergence and repercussions (dramaturgically and physically).This study explores instruments to surpass the dichotomic opposition victim-oppressor, to demystify the spell of violence, and to get rid of the morbid voyeurism often connected to staged violence, and eventually, it proposes transformative tools to explore empowering experiences through violence. Considering all the aspects of a theatre performance engaging with staged violence (the story displaying violence, the actors’ embodiment of violence, the spectators’ experiences of being exposed to violence, and the process of performing violence), this book proposes analytical and practical tools to explore the limit and to transform the experience of performing violence.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies.
Performing Welfare: Applied Theatre, Unemployment, and Economies of Participation (Contemporary Performance InterActions)
by Sarah BartleyThis book explores what happens to socially committed performance when state systems of social security are dismantled. Since 2010, a punishing programme of economic austerity and a seismic overhaul of the Welfare State in the United Kingdom has been accompanied by an ideological assault on dependency; a pervasive scapegoating of the poor, young, and disabled; and an intensification of the discursive relationship between morality and work. This book considers the artistic, material, and ideological consequences of such shifts for applied and socially engaged performance. Performing Welfare reveals how such arts practices might reconstitute notions of work and labour in socially constructive ways. It focuses on the political potential of participation during a period in which classifications of labour and productivity are intensely contested. It examines the migration of discourses from state policy to the cultural sector; narratives of community and aesthetics of dependency; the paradoxes of visibility in creative projects with stigmatised participants; the implicit relationship of participatory performance to neoliberal productivity; and, the parallels between gendered divisions of labour, social reproduction, and applied performance. It will appeal to students, scholars, and practitioners interested in applied and socially engaged performance, participation, community, representation, the welfare state, social policy, labour, and unemployment.
Performing Witchcraft, Exorcism, and Abortion on the Italian Renaissance Stage: The Witch and The Possessed Girl by Antonfrancesco Grazzini (Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies)
by Mary GallucciAntonfrancesco Grazzini’s plays, La Spiritata (The Possessed Girl) and La Strega (The Witch), are available in English for the first time, with notes and an “Introduction.” These plays deal with witchcraft, superstition, sexuality, and abortion. The context for such themes is analyzed in the “Introduction.” Grazzini enhanced literary drama with elements from popular performances. He influenced other playwrights, including in England, where The Possessed Girl was adapted as the Elizabethan comedy, The Bugbears. Writer and linguist John Florio used Grazzini’s plays in his lexicon of Italian for English learners. Grazzini celebrated artistic and popular traditions of Renaissance Florence; he is significant for writing and preserving many literary genres, especially the burlesque and carnivalesque. He participated in Florentine spectacle and theater, as a writer of plays, a composer of interludes, and a chronicler of festive events. His importance to the development of the Italian language is evident in his plays.
Performing for the Don: Theaters of Faith in the Trump Era (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Hank WillenbrinkThis volume examines the intersection of political power and religion during the presidency of Donald Trump through an examination of performance. This study begins with an examination of white evangelical Christian support for Trump through readings of the 2018 film The Trump Prophecy, based on a book of the same name, and The Faith of Donald J. Trump, a "spiritual biography" of the former president by veteran Christian reporters David Brody and Scott Lamb. White evangelicals Christianized Trump during his run for office in 2016 and Trump’s ascension to the presidency broke down barriers between church and state in service of dominionistic Christian aims. This exploration then looks at the conservative Catholicism through an exploration of Heroes of the Fourth Turning, a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama by Will Arbery, and Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. While Trump’s connection to evangelicals is well documented, conservative Catholics like Attorney General Bill Barr and Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett took on pivotal roles during the Trump administration demonstrating the significance of conservative Catholicism to his presidency. The author finally examines the "cult" of Trump on the internet by interrogating the performance of spirituality in pro-Trump conspiracy theories like QAnon. This book will be of great interest not only to theatre and performance studies scholars but also scholars with interests in political and religious studies.
Performing in Contemporary Musicals
by David Sisco Laura JosepherPerforming in Contemporary Musicals brings into sharp focus the skills performers must possess when tackling shows that are newly written, in development, or somewhere in between. The authors bust myths about contemporary musical theatre and analyze the development timelines of musicals from around the world. They also explore how performers can become invaluable to a creative team by developing the skills needed to move a new musical forward including: contemporary acting and singing techniques, dramaturgy, quickly picking up new material, and collaboration. Each chapter features insightful industry interviews, recommended activities, an extensive reading list, and an online companion for further study. This textbook is the only comprehensive resource that provides an overview of the development process of a new musical while guiding musical theatre performers to be fruitful collaborators in a new works scenario.