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Performing in Comedy: A Student's Guide
by Ian WilkieIan Wilkie contends that comic acting is a distinct art form, and as such demands a unique skillset. By exploring the ways in which performance choices and improvised moments can work in conjunction with texts themselves, Performing in Comedy offers an indispensable practical tool for enhancing comic performance. This volume is a must-read for any actors, directors or students who work with comic texts. Wilkie synthesises theories and principles of comedy with practical tips, and re-evaluates the ways in which these ideas can be used by the performer. Most importantly, these skills – timing, focus, awareness – are teachable rather than being innate talents. Exercises, interviews and guides to further resources enhance this comprehensive exploration of comic acting.
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.
Performing the Intercultural City
by Ric KnowlesIn 1971, Canada became the first country to adopt an official policy of multiculturalism. Performing the Intercultural City explores how Toronto—a representative global city in this multicultural country—stages diversity through its many intercultural theater companies and troupes. The book begins with a theoretical introduction to theatrical interculturalism. Subsequent chapters outline the historical and political context within which intercultural performance takes place; examine the ways in which Indigenous, Filipino, and Afro-Caribbean Canadian theater has developed play structures based on culturally specific forms of expression; and explore the ways that intercultural companies have used intermediality, modernist form, and intercultural discourse to mediate across cultures. Performing the Intercultural City will appeal to scholars, artists, and the theater-going public, including those in theater and performance studies, urban studies, critical multiculturalism studies, diaspora studies, critical cosmopolitanism studies, critical race theory, and cultural studies.
Performing the Nonhuman: Towards a Theatre of Transformation (ISSN)
by Conrad AlexandrowiczThis book radically reimagines theatre/performance pedagogy and dramaturgy in response to the accelerating climate crisis.This text is founded upon the principle that the theatre is the most anthropocentric of all the arts: the means of its representation, the human figure, is identical with its conventional object, the human narrative, broadly considered. In order to respond ethically to the climate crisis, it must expand its range to include performing as/in response to the nonhuman. Conrad Alexandrowicz concisely explores theoretical approaches to the other‑than‑human, found in the work of, among others, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, Rosi Braidotti, and Cary Wolfe. The implications of this move are far‑reaching and commence with displacing realism from its traditional position of dominance. The practices of 20th century physical theatre visionaries such as Tadeusz Kantor, Jacques Lecoq, and Jerzy Grotowski are revisited and reconsidered for their applicability to forms of theatre that might serve the needs of establishing storytelling deriving from nonhuman phenomena. This logically leads to the matter of responding appropriately to Indigenous ways of knowing and being. The work finds guidance in Indigenous, pre‑scientific ways of knowing and being, such as those articulated by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013). In contemplating our kinship with vegetative life, the work finds inspiration in the latest research into the ways tree communities communicate, collaborate, and share resources, including the work of Suzanne Simard (Finding the Mother Tree, 2021). It next imagines transformations in how theatre is situated, delivered, and received and considers the ways in which the performer/spectator binary may have to be reconfigured, with particular reference to Grotowski’s experiments in participatory theatre. It poses an even more provocative question: is such theorized performance work pointing in the direction of some re‑imagined version of ritual and ceremony that may find antecedents in pre‑Christian European belief and practice? Finally, it locates such eco‑theatre in the realm of healing: climate anxiety, depression, and grief on the part of instructors, students, and artists will require us to consider and activate the healing power of the art form; perhaps, the core purpose of all the arts will shift to support the need to generate solace in times of fear, anger, and uncertainty.This book is intended for instructors, both scholars and performance pedagogues, in theatre and performance studies, as well as graduate and undergraduate students in these areas.
Performing the Transition to Democracy: Theater and Performance in 1970s Spain (ISSN)
by David Rodríguez-SolásThis book examines troupes, plays, festivals, performative practices, and audiences active during the final years of the Franco dictatorship and the beginning of the transition to democracy.This period, spanning 1968 to 1982, is considered the historical moment that most directly shaped contemporary Spanish politics and society. The dominant narrative of the Transition has long portrayed it as a normalized, non-confrontational, and consensual process steered by political elites. But the world of Spanish theater tells a very different story - one in which ordinary Spaniards played a vital role in the transition to democracy. The chapters of this book draw on censorship files, photographs, audiovisual and textual material, and the author’s own interviews with more than a dozen audience and troupe members. Using these sources, David Rodriguez-Solas examines the notable experimentation during this period with theatrical performance and music; the establishment of performing spaces and festivals; the development of touring networks as a way to evade censorship; and the creation of networks of support that opposed diverse forms of violence and repression.This study will be of great interest to students and scholars interested in theater and the cultural and political history of Spain in the 1960s and 1970s.
Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands
by Chela Sandoval Arturo J. Aldama Peter J. GarcíaIn this interdisciplinary volume, contributors analyze the expression of Latina/o cultural identity through performance. With music theater, dance, visual arts, body art, spoken word, performance activism, fashion, and street theater as points of entry, contributors discuss cultural practices and the fashoning of identity in Latino/a communities throughout the US. Examining the areas of crossover between Latin and American cultures gives new meaning to the notion of "borderlands." This volume features senior scholars and up-and-coming academics from cultural, visual, and performance studies, folklore, and ethnomusicology.
Performing the Wound: Practicing a Feminist Theatre of Becoming (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Niki TulkThis book offers a matrixial, feminist-centered analysis of trauma and performance, through examining the work of three artists: Ann Hamilton, Renée Green, and Cecilia Vicuña. Each artist engages in a multi-media, or “combination” performance practice; this includes the use of site, embodied performance, material elements, film, and writing. Each case study involves traumatic content, including the legacy of slavery, child sexual abuse and environmental degradation; each artist constructs an aesthetic milieu that invites rather than immerses—this allows an audience to have agency, as well as multiple pathways into their engagement with the art. The author Niki Tulk suggests that these works facilitate an audience-performance relationship based on the concept of ethical witnessing/wit(h)nessing, in which viewers are not positioned as voyeurs, nor made to risk re-traumatization by being forced to view traumatic events re-played on stage. This approach also allows agency to the art itself, in that an ethical space is created where the art is not objectified or looked at—but joined with. Foundational to this investigation are the writings of Bracha L. Ettinger, Jill Bennett and Diana Taylor—particularly Ettinger’s concepts of the matrixial, carriance and border-linking. These artists and scholars present a capacity to expand and articulate answers to questions regarding how to make performance that remains compelling and truthful to the trauma experience, but not re-traumatizing. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, art history, visual arts, feminist studies, theatre, film, performance art, postcolonialism, rhetoric and writing.
Periferie Psichedeliche
by Andrea Giampaoli Mary FinniganDavid Bowie ha ispirato decine di biografie sul suo genio musicale, ma nessuna mai così ricca di particolari - e di foto inedite - come quella degli esordi dell’artista nella periferia londinese raccontanti dalla giornalista Mary Finnigan in Psychedelic Suburbia – David Bowie and The Beckenham Arts Lab, pubblicato da Jorvik Press . É la storia di un giovanissimo Bowie, ancora sconosciuto, in cerca di ingaggi per concerti nei club di Londra. Mary Finnigan racconta di averlo accolto nella sua casa nel quartiere londinese di Beckenham, sostenendolo economicamente e di esserne divenuta la sua amante. Insieme fondarono un folk club al pub Three Tuns di Beckenham, organizzando riunioni settimanali alle quali man mano partecipavano sempre più persone tra poeti, studenti di cinema e altri creativi. Il club divenne un vero e proprio laboratorio artistico, The Beckenham Arts Lab, tra arti visive, teatro, poesia e musica, una Factory proprio come quella che stava creando Andy Warhol a New York. Il tutto culminerà nel Free Festival del 1696, evento che Bowie canterà nella famosa canzone "Memory of a Free Festival". Traduzione a cura di Andrea Giampaoli
Peripheral Locations in European TV Crime Series (Palgrave European Film and Media Studies)
by Kim Toft Hansen Valentina ReThis book is a comprehensive study of peripheral locations in contemporary European TV crime series. Ambitiously, it covers the complete geography of Europe, and offers a nuanced image of a changing, dynamic, and unfinished continent. The chapters include analyses of the practical, creative approach to producing crime series in European peripheries and rural areas, evaluating a continent marked by an internal crisis between urban and rural Europe. The study includes readings of crime series such as Shetland, Bitter Daisies, Trom, Pagan Peak, and The Border, but presents such representative cases within broader tendencies on the European TV market, including challenges from streaming services, the influence of Nordic Noir, and changes within the cognitive geography of Europe. The authors position peripheral European crime series in a complex relationship between universal appeal and local recognisability and offer a comprehensive theoretical approach to the aesthetics of peripherality. Grounded in desktop production studies, the book presents an original scholarly approach to analysing European crime series from a continental point of view. Despite local differences, the spatio-generic orientations scrutinized in the book – Nordic Noir, Mediterranean Noir, Country Noir, Eastern Noir, and Brit Noir – show remarkable aesthetic similarities in series from territories otherwise normally unconnected in television production. Consequently, television crime series reveal a common tongue and voice for dialogue on a continent in a deepening crisis.
Permanent Astonishment: A Memoir
by Tomson HighwayCapricious, big-hearted, joyful: an epic memoir from one of Canada&’s most acclaimed Indigenous writers and performersTomson Highway was born in a snowbank on an island in the sub-Arctic, the eleventh of twelve children in a nomadic, caribou-hunting Cree family. Growing up in a land of ten thousand lakes and islands, Tomson relished being pulled by dogsled beneath a night sky alive with stars, sucking the juices from roasted muskrat tails, and singing country music songs with his impossibly beautiful older sister and her teenaged friends. Surrounded by the love of his family and the vast, mesmerizing landscape they called home, his was in many ways an idyllic far-north childhood. But five of Tomson's siblings died in childhood, and Balazee and Joe Highway, who loved their surviving children profoundly, wanted their two youngest sons, Tomson and Rene, to enjoy opportunities as big as the world. And so when Tomson was six, he was flown south by float plane to attend a residential school. A year later Rene joined him to begin the rest of their education. In 1990 Rene Highway, a world-renowned dancer, died of an AIDS-related illness. Permanent Astonishment: Growing Up in the Land of Snow and Sky is Tomson's extravagant embrace of his younger brother's final words: "Don't mourn me, be joyful." His memoir offers insights, both hilarious and profound, into the Cree experience of culture, conquest, and survival.
Pero ahora no es verano
by Ana María Del RíoComo todos los años, la casa de Mallara es más grande de lo que yo creía. Aérea, no parece afirmarse sobre base terrestre alguna, sino que se ve como si brotara del suelo, elevándose como una brusca espiga súbita sobre sus cuatro pisos. Es el tiempo de la reforma agraria y los campesinos se han tomado los caminos. Nadie entra ni sale de los confines del campo, que parece hundirse en el barro que todo lo cubre. La tragedia ronda en este singular y no poco mordaz fin de mundo. Pero ahora no es verano, una novela de amor y de prejuicios, nos conduce con enorme talento literario por derroteros de pasión, inocencia y traición.
Perpetrator Cinema: Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary (Nonfictions)
by Raya MoragPerpetrator Cinema explores a new trend in the cinematic depiction of genocide that has emerged in Cambodian documentary in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. While past films documenting the Holocaust and genocides in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere have focused on collecting and foregrounding the testimony of survivors and victims, the intimate horror of the autogenocide enables post–Khmer Rouge Cambodian documentarians to propose a direct confrontation between the first-generation survivor and the perpetrator of genocide. These films break with Western tradition and disrupt the political view that reconciliation is the only legitimate response to atrocities of the past. Rather, transcending the perpetrator’s typical denial or partial confession, this extraordinary form of “duel” documentary creates confrontational tension and opens up the possibility of a transformation in power relations, allowing viewers to access feelings of moral resentment.Raya Morag examines works by Rithy Panh, Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, and Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon, among others, to uncover the ways in which filmmakers endeavor to allow the survivors’ moral status and courage to guide viewers to a new, more complete understanding of the processes of coming to terms with the past. These documentaries show how moral resentment becomes a way to experience, symbolize, judge, and finally incorporate evil into a system of ethics. Morag’s analysis reveals how perpetrator cinema provides new epistemic tools and propels the recent social-cultural-psychological shift from the era of the witness to the era of the perpetrator.
Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common (Electronic Mediations #59)
by Harmony BenchA new exploration of how digital media assert the relevance of dance in a wired world How has the Internet changed dance? Dance performances can now be seen anywhere, can be looped endlessly at user whim, and can integrate crowds in unprecedented ways. Dance practices are evolving to explore these new possibilities. In Perpetual Motion, Harmony Bench argues that dance is a vital part of civil society and a means for building participation and community. She looks at how, after 9/11, it became a crucial way of recuperating the common character of public spaces. She explores how crowdsourcing dance contributes to the project of performing a common world, as well as the social relationships forged when we look at dance as a gift in the era of globalization. Throughout, she asks how dance brings people together in digital spaces and what dance&’s digital travels might mean for how we experience and express community. From original research on dance today to political economies of digital media to the philosophy of dance, Perpetual Motion provides an ambitious, invigorating look at a commonly shared practice.
Perpetual Movement: Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema)
by Neil BadmingtonThe first book-length study in English of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), Perpetual Movement offers both a production history that draws extensively upon little-known archival materials, including set drawings and drafts of the screenplay, and a close examination of the film in which Neil Badmington analyzes each of Rope's eleven shots. Writing in an accessible and engaging style, Badmington explores the film's treatment of space, sound, editing, sexuality, source material, design, intertexuality, narrative, and music. He looks at Hitchcock's struggle with censorship while planning, shooting, and distributing the film. Perpetual Movement also addresses Rope's reception and legacy, explaining why the film's unusual qualities provide such lasting appeal for viewers.
Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder (Film and Culture Series)
by David BordwellNarrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as “difficult” become familiar to audiences?In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another’s work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.
Perry Mason: Perry Mason
by Thomas LeitchAn exploration of the enduring popularity of the television series Perry Mason and its universal reputation as the most formulaic program in the history of broadcast television.
Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School & Camp: A History of Art in Nature (Landmarks)
by Dagny McKinleyIn 1914, Charlotte Perry and Portia Mansfield envisioned a secluded institution nestled in the mountains, where art and nature could intersect. By the 1920s, their remote Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School & Camp in Steamboat Springs was serving as a hub for top dancers such as José Limon and Harriette Ann Gray to hone their craft. In addition to training thousands of pointed toes and arched feet, the school showcased equestrian jumping and performed plays by masters, including Shakespeare, García Lorca and Tennessee Williams. The theater program eventually attracted budding actors like Julie Harris, Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Biel. Author Dagny McKinley presents the story of America's longest continuously running performing arts camp.
Persistently Postwar: Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan
by Blai Guarné Artur Lozano-Méndez Dolores P. MartinezFrom melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation’s social memory is articulated, disseminated, and contested. Through a series of stimulating case studies, this volume examines the political and cultural representations of Japan’s past, showing how they have reinforced personal and collective narratives while also formulating new cultural meanings, both on a local scale and in the context of transnational media production and consumption. Drawing upon diverse disciplinary insights and methodologies, these studies collectively offer a nuanced account in which mass media functions as much more than a simple ideological tool.
Persona – über die Funktion der Maske in den Künsten: Ein Vergleich zwischen Theater, Computerspiel und sozialem Rollenspiel (Simulatio. Theatertechniken in Literatur, Medien und Wissenschaft)
by Daniel Martin Feige Kirsten Dickhaut Sven Thorsten KilianDer Sammelband thematisiert Masken und Maskierungen. Im Vergleich der Künste untersucht er die funktionale Verwendung dieses Theaterrequisits, das eine Technik impliziert, und die Ausgestaltungen von Persona in den Künsten, Maskenverwendungen, -gestaltungen und -problematisierungen, die stets die Produktion von Fiktion und/oder Simulation reflektieren. Zehn Beiträge analysieren Beispiele seit dem 18. Jahrhundert der bildenden Kunst, des Digitalen, des Computerspiels, des Theaters, der erzählenden Literatur und der sozialen Rolle, die jeweils die Maske als Fiktions- oder Simulationsgenerator verstehen, thematisieren und kulturell vergleichend beschreiben. Pirandello stellt dabei grundsätzlich einen wichtigen, aber nicht den einzigen Referenzpunkt dar.
Personal Views: Explorations in Film
by Robin WoodRobin Wood, the renowned scholarly critic and writer on film, has prepared a new introduction and added three essays to his classic text Personal Views. This important book contains essays on a wide range of films and filmmakers and considers questions of the nature of film criticism and the critic. Wood, the proud "unreconstructed humanist," offers in this collection persuasive arguments for the importance of art, creativity, and personal response and also demonstrates these values in his analyses. Personal Views is the only book on cinema by Wood never to have been published in the United States. It contains essays on popular Hollywood directors such as Howard Hawks, Vincente Minnelli, and Leo McCarey; as well as pieces on recognized auteurs like Max Ophuls, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Josef von Sternberg; and essays on art-film icons Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Kenji Mizoguchi. The writings that make up Personal Views appeared duing a pivotal time in both film studies-during its academic institutionalization-and in the author's life. Throughout this period of change, Wood remained a stalwart anchor of the critical discipline, using theory without being used by it and always staying attentive to textual detail. Wood's overall critical project is to combine aesthetics and ideology in understanding films for the ultimate goal of enriching our lives individually and together. This is a major work to be read and reread not just by film scholars and students of film but by anyone with an interest in twentieth-century culture.
Personal Voice: A Practical Guide for Cinematic Storytellers and Beyond
by Katherine LindbergOffering a definitive approach by which any individual may learn to unleash the power of the personal, this book provides the reader with an exhaustive guide on how to tell the stories they’re uniquely qualified to tell.Anchored in process and skills acquisition, this book shifts the paradigm for all storytellers—seasoned and emerging—as it empowers them to increase their creative and business acumen. Guiding Creatives in recognizing the vital role of personal voice in their work, the book illuminates the process by which to discern and harness that voice, proffers the tools to incorporate voice into stories that resonate with audiences, and examines how voice translates to best industry practices in merging creative and business development. Unfolding in three parts, the chapters include practical exercises and mentor-like strategies to help transfer practice to industry. The text concludes with a revealing interview with a film industry expert, who sheds light on the knowledge and tools needed to thrive in an ever-evolving marketplace.This is the ideal guide for professionals and students alike, appealing to aspiring film and TV writers specifically.
Personality Presenters: Television's Intermediaries with Viewers
by Frances BonnerTelevision presenters are key to the sociability of the medium, speaking directly to viewers as intermediaries between audiences and those who are interviewed, perform or compete on screen. As targets of both great affection and derision from viewers and the subjects of radio, internet, magazine and newspaper coverage, many have careers that have lasted almost as long as post-war television itself. Nevertheless, as a profession, television presenting has received little scholarly attention. Personality Presenters explores the role of the television presenter, analysing the distinct skills possessed by different categories of host and the expectations and difficulties that exist with regard to the promotion of the various films, books, consumer and cultural products with which they are associated. The close involvement of presenters with the content that they present is examined, while the impact of the presenters' own celebrity on the tasks that they perform is scrutinised. With a focus on non-fiction entertainment shows such as game shows, lifestyle and reality shows, chat, daytime and talk shows, this book explores issues of consumer culture, advertising and celebrity, as well as the connection of presenters with ethical issues. Offering detailed case studies of internationally recognised presenters, as well comparisons between national presenters from the UK and Australia, Personality Presenters provides a rich discussion of television presenters as significant conduits in the movement of ideas. As such, it will appeal to sociologists as well as those working in the fields of popular culture, cultural and media studies and cultural theory.
Personen beschreiben, Leben erzählen: Die Fernsehporträts von Georg Stefan Troller und Hans-Dieter Grabe
by Christian HißnauerDas jeweils einzigartige Œuvre von Georg Stefan Troller und Hans-Dieter Grabe wird hier erstmals werk- und fernsehhistorisch umfassend analysiert. Ausführlich werden die dokumentarischen Methoden dieser wichtigen Wegbereiter des deutschen Fernsehdokumentarismus erläutert und ihre dramaturgischen und ästhetischen Konzepte beschrieben.
Personified Body Parts in Cinema, Literature, and Visual Culture (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies)
by Gilad Padva Yair Koren-MaimonPersonified Body Parts in Cinema, Literature, and Visual Culture investigates the power of personifying body parts in cinema, television, visual culture, literature, erotica, folklore, and mystique.Culturally, socially, and poetically exposing hidden aspects and subtleties of human existentialism, this book vigorously questions and problematizes numerous artistic, aesthetic, technological, naïve, and macabre manipulations of body parts for various purposes. A diverse team of authors explore how scribing human traits to limbs, eyes, brains, genitalia, hearts, and other inner organs is grotesque and aesthetic, repealing and appealing, intimidating and intimate, rude and enjoyable, material and spiritual, surprising and mundane. Personified organs are interrelated with bodily integrity, visceral aesthetics, distorted nature, social anxiety and acceptability, cultural classifications and hierarchies, and dissident innovativeness andradicalism.This interdisciplinary volume involves body studies; cinema, television, and media studies; literature studies; cultural, intercultural, and countercultural studies; mythology and folklore studies; gender, sexuality, trans and queer studies; ethnicities and postcolonialism; and art history.
Perspectives
by Hugh DownsEssays covering many subjects and interests by one of television's icons.