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Towards Embodied Performance: Directing and the Art of Composition
by Rachel DicksteinTowards Embodied Performance invites directors and other generative performance makers to experiment with making their own original, visually stunning, sonically immersive, and physically rigorous embodied performance.Through historical context, the author’s 30-plus years of experience, and original interviews with leading theatre artists, this book sets the stage for a new generation of artists building boundary-breaking work. Directors are often categorized into one of only two frameworks: the Stanislavskian director, whose method is based on text analysis and character wants and needs, and the “auteur” director, whose work might focus on visual spectacle at the expense of text or character objectives. This book argues that the director of embodied performance fuses these two approaches, acting as the author of the event. In Part I, readers will explore the core elements of embodied performance – space, time, body, language, and action – through a lens that bridges traditional directing methodology with experimental, devised, collaborative theatre-making. Part II provides examples of this embodied practice by multi-disciplinary artists in visual and sound installation, video and film, dance-theatre, and new music/opera, including such artists as Shirin Neshat, James Turrell, Bill T. Jones, Janet Cardiff, Okwui Okpokwasili, William Kentridge, and Heather Christian. Part III suggests creative prompts and exercises for performance makers to engage the visual, physical, textual, and sonic in compositional storytelling on stage.Towards Embodied Performance is an invaluable resource for theatre directors, devisers, and generative artists at all levels from students to teachers, from early-career to mid-career artists. Directors, actors, choreographers, designers, composers, writers, scholars, and engaged audience members can all use this text to explore collaboratively created performance that invites its audience into the ripest version of the present moment.
Towards Good Lighting for the Stage: Aesthetic Theory for Theatrical Lighting Design
by Marcus DoshiTowards Good Lighting for the Stage: Aesthetic Theory for Theatrical Lighting Design explores the theoretical underpinnings of effective lighting design from conceptualization to live performance. Through an investigation of the author’s own aesthetic point of view—grounded in a broad investigation of art and design that blends pop culture and fine art, theory, and practice—this book documents the author’s thinking on the design process to fill the unexplored gap between an aesthetic philosophy and its expression in composition. Redefinitions of the artist, artwork, and spectator link beauty and artistic efficacy to arrive at a set of principles for assessment that demand that contemporary lighting design surpass utilitarian visibility to become a vital part of the total artwork that is a theatrical production. Inspired by the movements of the broader art and design worlds of the mid-19th century through present day—citing influences as diverse as Jennifer Tipton, Lois Tyson, Dieter Rams, and Dave Hickey—this book charts a course from the artistic team’s dramaturgical work to a solo studio concept to the tech table. Engaging and wide-ranging, Towards Good Lighting for the Stage synthesizes years of cross-disciplinary research and case studies of the author’s own work into provocative reading for practitioners of lighting design, advanced students, and academics, as well as those interested in connecting theatrical practice, aesthetic theory, and visual art.
Towards a Cultural Philology: "Phedre" and the Construction of 'Racine'
by Amy Wygant"Amy Wygant reads Racine's ""Phedre"" (1677) through an analysis of its 17th-century cultural contexts and a consideration of its subsequent reception history. She explores the construction of Racinian language as ""musical"", the poetics of the Racinian gaze, and Racine's labyrinthine eros of memory and forgetting. Reference is made to Lully's operas, the battle between the advocates of colour and the champions of drawing in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and Le Notre's centreless garden labyrinth at Versailles. These close textual and contextual studies relate the detail of the tragedy to the conceptual sweep of 17th-century absolutism. Wygant's interdisciplinary study draws on the music history, as well as on emblematics, the history of the formal garden and the arts of memory. Racine's great threnody, the ""recit de Theramene"", is shown as representative of expressions of loss which lie at the root of early modern literature."
Towards a Poor Theatre (Eyre Methuen Dramabooks Ser.)
by Jerzy GrotowskiOriginally published in 1968, Jerzy Grotowski's groundbreaking book is available once again. As a record of Grotowski's theatrical experiments, this book is an invaluable resource to students and theater practioners alike.
Towards a Theatrical Jurisprudence
by Marett LeiboffThis book brings the insights of theatre theory to law, legal interpretation and the jurisprudential to reshape law as a practice of response and responsibility. Confronting a Baconian antitheatrical legality embedded in its jurisprudences and interpretative practices, Marett Leiboff turns to theatre theory and practice to ground a theatrical jurisprudence, taking its cues from Han-Thies Lehmann’s conception of the post-dramatic theatre and the early work of theatre visionary Jerzy Grotowski. She asks law to move beyond an imagined ideal grounded in Aristotelian drama and tragedy, and turns to the formation of the legal interpreter ・ lawyer, judge, jurisprudent ・ as fundamental to understanding what’s “noticed” or not noticed in law. We “notice” most easily through that which is written into the body of the legal interpreter, in a way that can’t be replicated through law’s standard practices of thinking and reasoning. Without more, thinking and reasoning are the epitome of antitheatricality legality; a set of theatrical antonyms, including transgression and instinct, offer instead a set of possibilities through which to reconceive assumptions and foundational concepts etched into the legal imaginary. And by turning to critical dramaturgy, the book reveals that the liveliness that sits behind theatrical jurisprudence isn’t a new concept in law at all, but has a long pedigree and lineage that had been lost and hidden. Theatrical jurisprudence, which demands an awareness of self and beyond self, grounds a responsiveness that can’t be found within doctrine, principle, or the technocratic, but also challenges us to notice what it is we think we know as well as what we know of lives in law that aren’t our own. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of jurisprudence, legal theory, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies and philosophy.
Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret
by Ian WatsonEugenio Barba is one of Europe's leading theatre directors, at the forefront of experimental and group theatre for more than twenty years. Ian Watson provides the most comprehensive and systematic study of Barba's work, including his training methods, dramaturgy, productions and theories, as well as his work at the International School of Theatre Anthropology.
Towards an Ecocritical Theatre: Playing the Anthropocene (Routledge Environmental Humanities)
by Mohebat AhmadiTowards an Ecocritical Theatre investigates contemporary theatre through the lens of Anthropocene-oriented ecocriticism. It assesses how Anthropocene thinking engages different modes of theatrical representation, as well as how the theatrical apparatus can rise to the representational challenges of changing interactions between humans and the nonhuman world. To explore these problems, the book investigates international Anglophone plays and performances by Caryl Churchill, Stephen Sewell, Andrew Bovell, E.M. Lewis, Chantal Bilodeau, Jordan Hall, and Miwa Matreyek, who have taken significant steps towards re-orienting theatre from its traditional focus on humans to an ecocritical attention to nonhumans and the environment in the Anthropocene. Their theatrical works show how an engagement with the problem of scale disrupts the humanist bias of theatre, provoking new modes of theatrical inquiry that envision a scale beyond the human and realign our ecological culture, art, and intimacy with geological time. Moreover, the plays and performances studied here, through their liveness, immediacy, physicality, and communality, examine such scalar shifts via the problem of agency in order to give expression to the stories of nonhuman actants. These theatrical works provoke reflections on the flourishing of multispecies responsibilities and sensitivities in aesthetic and ethical terms, providing a platform for research in the environmental humanities through imaginative conversations on the world’s iterative performativity in which all bodies, human and nonhuman, are cast horizontally as agential forces on the theatrical world stage. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre studies, environmental humanities, and ecocritical studies.
Toxic Masculinity on the London Stage, 1600–1610 (Routledge Focus on Literature)
by Anthony ArchdeaconThe idea of toxic masculinity might feel like a very modern, even twenty-first century notion, but similar concerns about male behaviour, also often characterised in terms of poisons and poisoning, can be identified in the literature of 400 hundred years ago, not only in Shakespeare’s Othello and The Winter’s Tale but also lesser-known plays that were popular on the London stage in the 1600s. Poison-related tropes, and the recurrent plot device of a man trying to poison a woman, expressed complex and sometimes contradictory attitudes towards socially unacceptable male behaviour. These plays depict the early modern male as both poisoned and poisoner – poisoned by inherited misogynistic ideas and attitudes, and poisoner of women, both literally and metaphorically. Seeing them as enacting problematic situations and raising difficult questions rather than simply offering the moral certitudes of Christianity or the prescriptions of contemporary conduct book, the book points to these plays as evidence of disquiet and anxieties to which we can still easily relate today. The fact that some plays responded to real-life events such as familicide is an indicator of this socially responsible role of the theatre, engaging its audience in current issues and controversies. The use of the poison theme in relation to male violence and misogyny shows that the early modern theatre was raising awareness of the same problems that are identified as toxic masculinity today.
Toyer
by Gardner MckayDrama / Characters: 1 male, 1 femaleThis psychological thriller is a favorite in acting workshops. It is a mind game play. Toyer is someone who toys; he is a mass paralyzer who toys with his victims. He does not murder or rape, he seduces and them immobilizes. Following productions in Los Angles and the Actors Studio, it was produced at the Eisenhower Theatre and the Kennedy Center with Kathleen Turner and Brad Davis, directed by Tony Richardson. . "Strong stuff. . .Outlandish mind games. Riveting, breathtaking."-Herald Examiner . "A classic mystery that always keeps you guessing on the edge of your seat."- Variety . "Powerful."- The Washington Post . "Deeply disturbing and entirely relevant."- NPR
Tracing Stars
by Erin E. MoultonA charming novel about sisterhood, self-identity, and friendship from the author of Flutter Indie Lee Chickory knows she's not as cool as her older sister Bebe. Bebe has more friends, for one. And no one tells Bebe she's a fish freak, for two. So when Indie accidentally brings her pet lobster to school, makes a scene, loses him in the ocean and embarrasses Bebe worse than usual, she makes a wish on a star to become a better Chickory. She tries to do this by joining the stage crew of the community's theater production, The Sound of Music. (Bebe has a starring role.) But Bebe is worried that Indie will embarrass her again, so she gives her a makeover and tells her who she should be friends with. That means Owen is out. But he's fun and smart, so Indie keeps her friendship with him a secret. At night, Indie and Owen rebuild a tree house into a ship in the sky to catch Indie's pet lobster. But during the day, Indie has to hide her friendship with Owen. When things come to a head, Indie realizes that being true to yourself is more important than being cool. But what's even more surprising is that Bebe realizes it, too.
Tracing Your Theatrical Ancestors: A Guide for Family Historians
by Katharine M. CockinAn essential source of reference for researchers trying to uncover the theatrical experience of one of their forebears. How can you find out about the lives of ancestors who were involved in the world of theater: on stage and on film, in the music halls and traveling shows, in the circus and in all sorts of other forms of public performance? Katharine Cockin’s handbook provides a fascinating introduction for readers searching for information about ancestors who had clearly defined roles in the world of the theater and performance as well as those who left only a few tantalizing clues behind. The wider history of public performance is outlined, from its earliest origins in church rituals and mystery plays through periods of censorship driven by campaigns on moral and religious grounds up to the modern world of stage and screen. Case studies, which are a special feature of the book, demonstrate how the relevant records and be identified and interpreted, and they prove how much revealing information they contain. Information on relevant archives, books, museums and websites make this an essential guide for anyone who is keen to explore the subject.
Tradition & Change Performance (Musical Performance Ser. #Vols. 2, Pts. 2.)
by TsaoFirst published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Tradition!: The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood Story of Fiddler on the Roof, the World's Most Beloved Musical
by Barbara IsenbergSince it first opened on Broadway in September, 1964, Fiddler on the Roof has constantly been onstage somewhere, including four Broadway revivals, four productions on London's West End and thousands of schools, army bases and countries from Argentina to Japan. Barbara Isenberg interviewed the men and women behind the original production, the film and significant revivals--Harold Prince, Sheldon Harnick, Joseph Stein, Austin Pendleton, Joanna Merlin, Norman Jewison, Topol, Harvey Fierstein and more--to produce a lively, popular chronicle of the making of Fiddler. Published in celebration of Fiddler's 50th anniversary, Tradition! is the book for everyone who loves Fiddler and can sing along with the original cast album.
Traditional Japanese Theater: An Anthology Of Plays (Translations From The Asian Classics Series)
by Karen Brazell James T. ArakiThis is a collection of the most important genres of Japanese performance -- noh, kyogen, kabuki, and bamrili puppet theater -- in one comprehensive, authoritative volume. <P><P>Organized by genre, each section features a rich selection of representative plays and explorations into each theatrical style and is prefaced by an illustrative essay covering a wide range of subjects, from stage direction to musical accompaniment. <P><P>With classic and new translations of more than thirty plays and scenes -- along with Brazell's detailed, historically rich supplementary material and copious illustrations -- no better anthology exists for students of this most fascinating and diverse dramatic tradition.
Traditional Medicine in the Irish Literary Revival: The Works of W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, and J. M. Synge (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature)
by Holly May Walker-DunseithThis book explores representations of traditional medicine and healing practices in Irish Revival-era literature spanning from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Specifically, the book focuses on the work of William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and John Millington Synge. The author examines folk medical practices and analyses how folk medicine appears in literature, bringing to light fresh contexts and materials including diaries, letters, folklore collections, and medical texts. By writing the first book to explore the place of traditional medicine in Irish literature, Walker-Dunseith sheds light on a distinctive area of Irish life and practice that gestures towards the possibility of a culture and nation in the act of healing itself and questioning nationalistic discourses.
Traditioneller Fortschritt: Das Stuttgarter Hoftheater, die elektrische Moderne und die Großstadt (1851-1912) (Szene & Horizont. Theaterwissenschaftliche Studien #7)
by Miriam HöllerDie Studie über das Stuttgarter Hoftheater denkt Theater und Stadt zur Zeit der Elektrifizierung um 1900 zusammen. Welchen Einfluss hatte die Theatertechnik auf die werdende Großstadt? Wie wurde umgekehrt das Theater durch die Urbanisierung und Technisierung der Stadt geprägt? Die Studie untersucht anhand historischer Quellen diese Wechselbeziehung über die Analyse neuer räumlich-materieller Vernetzungen. Außerdem analysiert sie kollektive Großstadt-Imaginationen, die zwischen 1902 und 1912 bei der Planung eines Theaterneubaus in Stuttgart aufkamen und die insbesondere über die Architektur und Technik des Theaters verhandelt wurden. Zentral war dabei eine Aushandlung im Spannungsfeld von Tradition und Moderne. So zeigt die Studie, dass auch ein Hoftheater fern der Metropolen als Ort der Moderne erfahren werden konnte, und leistet somit am Schnittpunkt von Theater-, Technik-, Stadt- und Kulturgeschichte einen Beitrag zur Erforschung der Vielfalt des deutschen Theaters um 1900.
Traditions of Medieval English Drama (Routledge Library Editions: Medieval Culture, Society, & Religion)
by Stanley J. KahrlOriginally published in 1974, this book examines in detail some of the finest plays from the great cycles of York, Wakefield and Chester. By considering the plays as plays rather than literary relics of a past age, he throws new light both on their aims and intentions as drama and on the intriguing problems of stage techniques. The major morality plays of the period are discussed not only for the interest of their content but for their effectiveness as theatre. Throughout the book the author stresses the richness and strength of a drama which, despite its small corpus of plays, survived as popular drama for several hundred years.
Tragedy (The Critical Idiom Reissued #1)
by Clifford LeechFirst published in 1969, this work examines the genre of Tragedy from its origins in ancient Greece, to the modern day. Beginning with an overview of the meaning of tragedy in Europe through the ages, it goes on to explore common aspects of tragedies such as the tragic hero, the chorus and unities, catharsis, peripeteia, anagnorisis and suffering. This book will be of interest to anyone studying European drama and literature.
Tragedy (The New Critical Idiom)
by John DrakakisTragedy is one of the oldest and most resilient forms of narrative. Considering texts from ancient Greece to the present day, this comprehensive introduction shows how tragedy has been re-imagined and redefined throughout Western cultural history. Tragedy offers a concise history of tragedy tracing its evolution through key plays, prose, poetry and philosophical dimensions. John Drakakis examines a wealth of popular plays, including works from the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Sarah Kane and Tom Stoppard. He also considers the rewriting and appropriating of ancient drama though a wide range of authors, such as Chaucer, George Eliot, Ted Hughes and Colm Tóibín. Drakakis also demystifies complex philosophical interpretations of tragedy, including those of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Benjamin. This accessible resource is an invaluable guide for anyone studying tragedy in literature or theatre studies.
Tragedy (The\critical Idiom Reissued Ser. #1)
by Clifford LeechProfessor Leech considers the significance of the term ‘Tragedy’ as it has been used from classical times to the present day. He gives examples of tragic writing from a wide variety of dramatic literatures and relates theoretical writings on tragedy and the tragedies that have been contemporaneous with them. Free reference is made to critics from Aristotle to these of the present. Special stress is laid on the tragedies of the Greeks, of Renaissance writers and of our immediate contemporaries, notably Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. There is also discussion of tragic writing in the modern novel.
Tragedy And Philosophy
by Walter KaufmannA critical re-examination of the views of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Nietzsche on tragedy. Ancient Greek tragedy is revealed as surprisingly modern and experimental, while such concepts as mimesis, catharsis, hubris and the tragic collision are discussed from different perspectives.
Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama
by Matthew S. BuckleyTragedy Walks the Streets challenges the conventional understanding that the evolution of European drama effectively came to a halt during France's Revolutionary era. In this interdisciplinary history on the emergence of modern drama in European culture, Matthew S. Buckley contends that the political theatricality of the Revolution tested and forced the evolution of dramatic forms, supplanting the theater itself as the primary stage of formal development. Drawing on a wide range of texts and images, he demonstrates how the social and political enlistment of dramatic theatricality inflected rising social and political tensions in pre-Revolutionary France, shaped French Revolutionary political culture, conditioned British political and cultural responses to the Revolution, and served as the impetus for Büchner’s radical formal innovations of the 1830s. Setting aside traditional boundaries of literary scholarship, Buckley pursues instead a history of dramatic form that encompasses the full range of dramatic activity in the changing cultural life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, including art, architecture, journalism, political performance, and social behavior. Surveying this expanded field of inquiry, Buckley weaves together a coherent formal genealogy of the drama during this period and offers a new, more continuous generic history of modern drama in its first and most turbulent phase of development.
Tragedy and Enlightenment: Athenian Political Thought and the Dilemmas of Modernity (Classics and Contemporary Thought #4)
by Christopher RoccoThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.
Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (Routledge Research in Aesthetics)
by Richard GaskinThis book offers a unique interpretation of tragic literature in the Western tradition, deploying the method and style of Analytic philosophy. Richard Gaskin argues that tragic literature seeks to offer moral and linguistic redress (compensation) for suffering. Moral redress involves the balancing of a protagonist’s suffering with guilt (and vice versa): Gaskin contends that, to a much greater extent than has been recognized by recent critics, traditional tragedy represents suffering as incurred by avoidable and culpable mistakes of a cognitive nature. Moral redress operates in the first instance at the level of the individual agent. Linguistic redress, by contrast, operates at a higher level of generality, namely at the level of the community: its fundamental motor is the sheer expressibility of suffering in words. Against many writers on tragedy, Gaskin argues that language is competent to express pain and suffering, and that tragic literature has that expression as one its principal purposes. The definition of tragic literature in this book is expanded to include more than stage drama: the treatment stretches from the Classical and Medieval periods through to the early twentieth century. There is a special focus on Sophocles, but Gaskin takes account of most other major tragic authors in the European tradition, including Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, Seneca, Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Büchner, Ibsen, Hardy, Kafka, and Mann; lesser-known areas, such as Renaissance neo-Latin tragedy, are also covered. Among theorists of tragedy, Gaskin concentrates on Aristotle and Bradley; but the contributions of numerous contemporary commentators are also assessed. Tragedy and Redress in Western Literature: A Philosophical Perspective offers a new and genuinely interdisciplinary perspective on tragedy that will be of considerable interest both to philosophers of literature and to literary critics.
Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama)
by Mathew R. MartinContending that criticism of Marlowe’s plays has been limited by humanist conceptions of tragedy, this book engages with trauma theory, especially psychoanalytic trauma theory, to offer a fresh critical perspective within which to make sense of the tension in Marlowe’s plays between the tragic and the traumatic. The author argues that tragedies are trauma narratives, narratives of wounding; however, in Marlowe’s plays, a traumatic aesthetics disrupts the closure that tragedy seeks to enact. Martin’s fresh reading of Massacre at Paris, which is often dismissed by critics as a bad tragedy, presents the play as deliberately breaking the conventions of the tragic genre in order to enact a traumatic aesthetics that pulls its audience into one of the early modern period’s most notorious collective traumatic events, the massacre of French Huguenots in Paris in 1572. The chapters on Marlowe’s six other plays similarly argue that throughout Marlowe’s drama tragedy is held in tension with-and disrupted by-the aesthetics of trauma.