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African Battle Traditions of Insult: Verbal Arts, Song-Poetry, and Performance (African Histories and Modernities)
by Tanure OjaideThis book explores the “battles” of words, songs, poetry, and performance in Africa and the African Diaspora. These are usually highly competitive, artistic contests in which rival parties duel for supremacy in poetry composition and/or its performance. This volume covers the history of this battle tradition, from its origins in Africa, especially the udje and halo of the Urhobo and Ewe respectively, to its transportation to the Americas and the Caribbean region during the Atlantic slave trade period, and its modern and contemporary manifestations as battle rap or other forms of popular music in Africa. Almost everywhere there are contemporary manifestations of the more traditional, older genres. The book is thus made up of studies of contests in which rivals duel for supremacy in verbal arts, song-poetry, and performance as they display their wit, sense of humor, and poetic expertise.
Performing Identity: Actor Training, Self-Commodification and Celebrity
by Barry KingThis book examines how the persistent and deepening casualization and precarity of acting work, coupled with market pressures, has affected the ways in which actors are trained in the US and UK. It reviews the existing state of training, looking at various theories of what the actor does, debates about casting, and the impact of reality television and social media. In the increasing effort to find ways to overcome the precarious labour market for actors and other performers, the traditional emphasis on theatrical character has been replaced by the celebration of the persona – a public image of the performer as a personal brand. As a result, a physiocratic elite, that literally incorporates the collective labour of cultural workers into the star or celebrity body, has formed. This book explores how the star or celebrity’s appearance and comportment are positioned as the rule of nature, formed and abiding outside capitalism as a mode of production. This book will be of interest to those studying theatre studies and performance, contemporary stardom and celebrity and the impact of technology on the formation of identity.
Culture, History, and the Reception of Tennessee Williams in China (Chinese Literature and Culture in the World)
by Shouhua QiThis book is the first comprehensive study of the reception of Tennessee Williams in China, from rejection and/or misgivings to cautious curiosity and to full-throated acceptance, in the context of profound changes in China’s socioeconomic and cultural life and mores since the end of the Cultural Revolution. It fills a conspicuous gap in scholarship in the reception of one of the greatest American playwrights and joins book-length studies of Chinese reception of Shakespeare, Ibsen, O’Neill, Brecht, and other important Western playwrights whose works have been eagerly embraced and appropriated and have had catalytic impact on modern Chinese cultural life.
Brian Friel's Models of Influence
by Zosia KuczyńskaThe Brian Friel Papers at the National Library of Ireland are a record of a life’s work in progress. They represent a way of working and of making art over a period spanning more than fifty years. This book is the first of its kind in its attempt to interrogate the role of the Brian Friel Papers in Friel’s legacy as a working artist with a richly developed creative practice. By means of an unprecedented focus on Friel’s artistic process, Kuczyńska asks not only how and by whom Friel was being influenced and inspired, but also how and for whom Friel’s praxis might come to be an inspiration. Combining forensic archival scholarship with original, collaborative practice-based research, this study remains focused on the ‘how’ of influence, showcasing an approach to literary archives that foregrounds live practices of access in the spirit of creative encounter. Whether uncovering forgotten source materials for Friel’s plays or working with current practitioners in the arts, Kuczyńska reveals how an approach to literary archives grounded in artistic practice might provide the tools for setting a major creative legacy not in stone but rather in motion.
Innovation in Learning-Oriented Language Assessment (New Language Learning and Teaching Environments)
by Sin Wang Chong Hayo ReindersThis edited book documents practices of learning-oriented language assessment through practitioner research and research syntheses. Learning-oriented language assessment refers to language assessment strategies that capitalise on learner differences and their relationships with the learning environments. In other words, learners are placed at the centre of the assessment process and its outcomes. The book features 17 chapters on learning-oriented language assessment practices in China, Brazil, Turkey, Norway, UK, Canada, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Spain. Chapters include teachers’ reflections and practical suggestions. This book will appeal to researchers, teacher educators, and language teachers who are interested in advancing research and practice of learning-oriented language assessment.
The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration
by Yana Meerzon S. E. WilmerThe Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration provides a wide survey of theatre and performance practices related to the experience of global movements, both in historical and contemporary contexts. Given the largest number of people ever (over one hundred million) suffering from forced displacement today, much of the book centres around the topic of refuge and exile and the role of theatre in addressing these issues. The book is structured in six sections, the first of which is dedicated to the major theoretical concepts related to the field of theatre and migration including exile, refuge, displacement, asylum seeking, colonialism, human rights, globalization, and nomadism. The subsequent sections are devoted to several dozen case studies across various geographies and time periods that highlight, describe and analyse different theatre practices related to migration. The volume serves as a prestigious reference work to help theatre practitioners, students, scholars, and educators navigate the complex field of theatre and migration.
Engaging with Brecht: Making Theatre in the Twenty-first Century
by Bill GelberThis book makes the case for Bertolt Brecht’s continued importance at a time when events of the 21st century cry out for a studied means of producing theatre for social change. Here is a unique step-by-step process for realizing Brecht’s ways of working onstage using the 2015 Texas Tech University production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children as a model for exploration. Particular Brecht concepts—the epic, Verfremdung, the Fabel, gestus, historicization, literarization, the “Not…but,” Arrangement, and the Separation of the Elements—are explained and applied to scenes and plays. Brecht’s complicated relationship with Konstantin Stanislavsky is also explored in relation to their separate views on acting. For theatrical practitioners and educators, this volume is a record of pedagogical engagement, an empirical study of Brecht’s work in performance at a higher institution of learning using graduate and undergraduate students.
Losing It: Staging the Cultural Conundrum of Dementia and Decline in American Theatre
by Dorothy ChanskyThis monograph is a study of American (U.S.) stage representations of dementia mounted between 1913 and 2019. Its imbricated strands are playtexts; audiences as both the targets of the productions (artifacts in the marketplace) and as anticipated determinants of legibility; and medical science, both as has been (and is) known to researchers and, more importantly, as it has been (and is) known to educated general audiences. As the Baby Boom generation finds itself solidly in the category of “Senior,” interest in plays that address personal and social issues around cognitive decline as a potentially frightening and expensive experience, no two iterations of which are identical, have, understandably, burgeoned. This study shines a spotlight on eleven dementia plays that have been produced in the United States over the past century, and seeks, in the words of medical humanities scholar Anne Whitehead, to “open up, and to hold open, central ethical questions of responsiveness, interpretation, responsibility, complicity and care.”
Performance in the Field: Interdisciplinary Practice-as-Research
by David OverendThis book makes a compelling case for ‘performance fieldwork’ as a vital new approach to interdisciplinary collaboration. Refocussing the histories and practices of field research, it shows how creative methods and artistic processes can contribute to an embodied and situated knowledge of complex landscapes and environments. The book brings together case studies of innovative research in the fields of ecology, clubbing, heritage, mobility and deep time, which took place in the United Kingdom between 2009 and 2021. These accessible and engaging field notes connect to international and intercultural contexts, with attention to alternative experiences and perspectives throughout. Together, they provide a critically informed ‘toolbox’ of playful and exploratory strategies for working with a diverse range of urban and rural sites – including a river, a museum, a nightclub, a motorway and a cave. This is a timely methodology that reaches across disciplines to demonstrate how performance continually plays out ‘in the field’.
Re-Situating Public Theatre in Contemporary France: Theatres and Their Publics
by Ifigenia GonisThis book examines the dynamics of the relational and spatial politics of contemporary French theatrical production, with a focus on four theatres in the Greater Paris region. It situates these dynamics within the intersection of the histories of the public theatre and theatre decentralization in France, and the dialogues between live performances and the larger frameworks of artistic direction and programming as well as various imaginations of the “public”. Understanding these phenomena, as well as the politics that underscore them, is key to understanding not only the present status of the public theatre in France, but also how theatre as a publicly funded institution interacts with the notion of the plurality, rather than the homogeneity, of its publics.
Persia in Early Modern English Drama, 1530–1699: The Imagined Empire (New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800)
by Chloë HoustonThis book is a study of the representation of the Persian empire in English drama across the early modern period, from the 1530s to the 1690s. The wide focus of this book, encompassing thirteen dramatic entertainments, both canonical and little-known, allow it to trace the changes and developments in the dramatic use of Persia and its people across one and a half centuries. It explores what Persia signified to English playwrights and audiences in this period; the ideas and associations conjured up by mention of ‘Persia’; and where information about Persia came from. It also considers how ideas about Persia changed with the development of global travel and trade, as English people came into people with Persians for the first time. In addressing these issues, this book provides an examination not only of the representation of Persia in dramatic material, but of the broader relationship between travel, politics and the theatre in early modern England.
Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue
by Julia PrestThe French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was home to one of the richest public theatre traditions of the colonial-era Caribbean. This book examines the relationship between public theatre and the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue—something that is generally given short shrift owing to a perceived lack of documentation. Here, a range of materials and methodologies are used to explore pressing questions including the ‘mitigated spectatorship’ of the enslaved, portrayals of enslaved people in French and Creole repertoire, the contributions of enslaved people to theatre-making, and shifting attitudes during the revolutionary era. The book demonstrates that slavery was no mere backdrop to this portion of theatre history but an integral part of its story. It also helps recover the hidden experiences of some of the enslaved individuals who became entangled in that story.
Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century: Communities of Sentiment (Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions)
by Glen McGillivrayThis book offers an innovative account of how audiences and actors emotionally interacted in the English theatre during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a period bookended by two of its stars: David Garrick and Sarah Siddons. Drawing upon recent scholarship on the history of emotions, it uses practice theory to challenge the view that emotional interactions between actors and audiences were governed by empathy. It carefully works through how actors communicated emotions through their voices, faces and gestures, how audiences appraised these performances, and mobilised and regulated their own emotional responses. Crucially, this book reveals how theatre spaces mediated the emotional practices of audiences and actors alike. It examines how their public and frequently political interactions were enabled by these spaces.
Teaching Shakespeare Beyond the Major
by M. Tyler Sasser Emma K. AtwoodThis edited collection considers the task of teaching Shakespeare in general education college courses, a task which is often considered obligatory, perfunctory, and ancillary to a professor’s primary goals of research and upper-level teaching. The contributors apply a variety of pedagogical strategies for teaching general education students who are often freshmen or sophomores, non-majors, and/or non-traditional students. Offering instructors practical classroom approaches to Shakespeare’s language, performance, and critical theory, the essays in this collection explicitly address the unique pedagogical situations of today’s general education college classroom.
Representations of Policing in Northern Irish Theatre: 1921 – 2021 (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature)
by T. W. SaundersThis monograph provides the first sustained, chronological account of Northern Irish police officers’ representation in theatre. Importantly, its scope comprises a critical period of national and organisational development, beginning with the Partition of Ireland in 1921 and the founding of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) one year later in 1922. It progresses through the relevant theatrical and historical events of the century, through the period after the RUC’s dissolution and replacement with the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in 2001, and concludes in 2021 to coincide with the centenary of Partition. As such, this project is distinctive in its ability to trace paradigm shifts in perceptions of the police over time, as they intersect with relevant historical events and milestones of political conflict in the province.
Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting: "How much home does a person need?"
by Helene GrønThis book explores the notion of home in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis, and asks how home and belonging can be rethought through the act of creative practices and collective writing with refugees and asylum seekers. Where Giorgio Agamben calls the refugee ‘the figure of our time’, this study places the question of home among those who experience its ruptures. Veering away from treating the refugee as a conceptual figure, the lived experiences and creative expressions of seeking asylum in Denmark and the United Kingdom are explored instead. The study produces a theoretical framework around home by drawing from a cross-disciplinary field of existential and political philosophy, narratology, performance studies and anthropology. Moreover, it argues that theatre studies is uniquely positioned to understand the performative and storied aspects of seeking asylum and the compromises of belonging made through the asylum process.
British Socialist and Workers Theatre: Red Stages
by Robert LeachThis book provides an overview of the inception, development and achievements of British socialist and workers theatre – a feat which has not been attempted before. It explores the connections between politics and culture (specifically theatre) and between political theory and cultural (theatrical) expression. The book is organized chronologically and uncovers much in labour and theatre history which is in danger of being lost. It can also be seen as a way into different moments in its subject’s story (e.g. post-Ibsen naturalism; agitprop theatre; ‘fringe’ theatre of the 1970s) and the relationship of such forms to specific political events and ideas at specific points in history.
Representing the Rural on the English Stage: Performance and Rurality in the Twenty-First Century
by Gemma EdwardsThis book explores how the English rural has been represented in contemporary theatre and performance. Exploring a range of plays, forms, and contexts of theatre production, Representing the Rural celebrates the lively engagement with rurality on English stages since 2000, constituting the first full study of theatrical representations of rural life. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book draws on political philosophy and cultural geography in its definitions of rurality and Englishness, and works with key theoretical concepts such as nostalgia and ethnonationalism. Covering a range of perspectives from the country garden in Mike Bartlett’s Albion to agricultural labour in Nell Leyshon’s The Farm, the enclosure acts in D.C. Moore’s Common to Black rural history in Testament’s Black Men Walking, the book shows how theatre and performance can open up different ways of reading rural geographies, histories, and lives. While Representing the Rural is aimed at students and researchers of theatre and performance, its interdisciplinary scope means that it has wider appeal to other disciplines in the arts and humanities, including geography, politics, and history.
William Forsythe’s Postdramatic Dance Theater: Unsettling Perception (Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance)
by Freya VassThis book takes choreographer William Forsythe’s choreographic and scenographic processes as a holistic lens through which to view dance as a fundamentally visuo-sonic art form and choreography as a form of perceptual experimentation. In doing so, it reveals how the made worlds within which postdramatic dance is situated influence how choreography is perceived. Resonating with ecological perspectives but also drawing on an extensive range of cognitive research approaches, the volume’s choreo-scenographic perspective emphasizes the importance of considering the expanded scenography of lighting, sound, space, scenic elements, costume, and performer movement when analyzing the sensory and cognitive perception of dance. The volume provides a first book-length cognitive study of both an individual choreographer and the aesthetics of postdramatic theatre. It also satisfies a need for more dedicated scholarship on Forsythe, whose extensive and varied array of groundbreaking ballets and dance theater works for the Ballett Frankfurt (1984-2004), The Forsythe Company (2005-15), and as an independent choreographer have made him a key figure in 20th/21st century dance.
Shakespeare, Tragedy and Menopause: The Anxious Womb (Palgrave Shakespeare Studies)
by Victoria L. McMahonShakespeare was not only aware of the socio-cultural fears and anxieties generated by the older woman’s body but with the characterization of his tragic ageing females, Shakespeare becomes the first literary giant to explore the physiological and psychosocial condition that we have come to know as ‘menopause’. Although ‘menopause’ was not defined as a medical, physiological or sociocultural event for the early moderns, this book argues that such a medical and cultural transition can, in fact, be identified by sub-textual clues distinguished by various embodied anxieties. It explores several ageing women of the Shakespearean tragedies as they transition through this liminal menopausal period. Theoretically underscored by humoral theory, the analysis is metonymically centered upon the womb as the seat of menopausal anxiety. These menopausal undercurrents, not only permeate the dramatic action of each play, but also emanate outward to reflect the medical, physiological, cultural, social, and religious concerns generated by the ageing woman of the early modern period at large.
Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language: Thinking in Micromovement (New World Choreographies)
by Megan V. NicelyThis book is about dance’s relationship to language. It investigates how dance bodies work with the micromovements elicited by language’s affective forces, and the micropolitics of the thought-sensations that arise when movement and words accompany one another within choreographic contexts. Situating itself where theory meets practice—the zone where ideas arise to be tested, the book draws on embodied research in practices within the lineages of American postmodern dance and Japanese butoh, set in dialog with affect-based philosophies and somatics. Understanding that language is felt, both when uttered and when unspoken, this book speaks to the choreographic thinking that takes place when language is considered a primary element in creating the sensorium.
Dance Practices as Research: Approaches to the Safeguarding and Transmission of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Dance (Heritage Studies)
by Vicky KämpfeThis book contributes to the growing scientific literature on ‘intangible cultural heritage’ – determined by UNESCO to be particularly worthy of safeguarding and transmission – by advancing a theoretical-analytical framework for the (in)tangible cultural heritage of dance. By exploring the potential of the ‘intangible materiality’ of dance practice the book argues that implementing the concept of a ‘performative dance-archive’ creates a new analytic field: research in praxis. The concept of the ‘performative dance-archive’ draws out the potential for safeguarding and transmission of dance heritage, but also the challenges of the opposition between living heritage and the codifying of cultural inventories. This book uses the formal and contextual transformation of Argentine tango and German modern dance to discuss this ambiguity of intangible heritage and how the “performative dance-archive” creates a cognitive, empractical approach to determine, archive, and distribute dance knowledge. This is a timely methodological intervention in the context of the increasing importance of the intangible cultural heritage. It enables us to re-revise the concept of (im)materiality and the specific knowledges within cultural practice as a necessary fundamental category for research-processes and societal growth. This book is directed both to researchers in the field of intangible cultural heritage and to practitioners and researchers searching for new ways of investigating methods and perspectives to understand 'immaterial materialities'.
Directing Desire: Intimacy Choreography and Consent in the Twenty-First Century
by Kari BarclayDirecting Desire explores the rise of consent-based and trauma-informed approaches to staging sexually and sensually charged scenes for theater in the contemporary U.S., known as intimacy choreography. From 2015 to 2020, intimacy choreography transformed from a grassroots movement in experimental and regional theaters into a best practice accepted in Hollywood and on Broadway. Today, intimacy choreographers have become a veritable "intimacy industry" in the cultural sphere, sparking attention from Rolling Stone to The New York Times to the sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live. This book analyzes the forces that have led to intimacy choreography’s meteoric rise and asks what implications the field has for theater practice more broadly. Building a theoretical framework for intimacy directing, Directing Desire also strives to reorient the conversation in the field so that artists understand not only best practices in consent but also intersectional frameworks that expand and rework consent.
Slavery and the Forensic Theatricality of Human Rights in the Spanish Empire (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights)
by Karen-Margrethe SimonsenThis book is a study of the forensic theatricality of human rights claims in literary texts about slavery in the sixteenth and the nineteenth century in the Spanish Empire. The book centers on the question: how do literary texts use theatrical, multisensorial strategies to denunciate the violence against enslaved people and make a claim for their rights? The Spanish context is particularly interesting because of its early tradition of human rights thinking in the Salamanca School (especially Bartolomé de Las Casas), developed in relation to slavery and colonialism. Taking its point of departure in forensic aesthetics, the book analyzes five forms of non-narrative theatricality: allegorical, carnivalesque, tragicomic, melodramatic and tragic.
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.