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Multilingual Dramaturgies: Towards New European Theatre (New Dramaturgies)
by Kasia LechMultilingual Dramaturgies provides a study of dramaturgical practices in contemporary multilingual theatre in Europe. Featuring interviews with international theatremakers, the book gives an insight into diverse approaches towards multilingual theatre and its dramaturgy that reflect cultural, political, and economic landscapes of contemporary Europe, its inhabitants, and its theatres. First-hand accounts are contextualized to reveal a complex set of negotiations involved in the creative and political tasks of staging multilingualism and engaging the audience, as well as in practical issues like funding and developing working models. Using interviews with practitioners from a diverse range of theatrical backgrounds and career levels, and with various models of financial support, Multilingual Dramaturgies also offers an insight into different attitudes towards multilingualism in European theatres. The book illuminates not only the potential for multilingual dramaturgies, but also the practical and creative difficulties involved in making them. By bringing the voices of artists together and providing a critical commentary, the book reveals multilingual dramaturgies as webbed practices of differences that also offer new ways of understanding and performing identity in a European context. Multilingual Dramaturgies sheds light on an exciting theatre practice, argues for its central role in Europe and highlights potential directions for its further development.
Queering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio: Modernist Playwrights (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature)
by Zsuzsanna BalázsQueering W. B. Yeats and Gabriele D’Annunzio: Modernist Playwrights challenges the general resistance in scholarship and queer studies to approach Yeats and D’Annunzio through a queer lens because of their controversial affiliations with fascism and elitism, their heterosexuality and their venerated canonical status. This book provides the first fully theorised queer and comparative reading of Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s drama. It offers the novel contention that due to their increasing involvement in queer and feminist subcultures, their plays feature feelings that are associated with queer historiography and generate ideas that began to be theorised by queer studies more than half a century after the composition of the plays. Moreover, it uncovers an alert, subversive and often coded social commentary in eight key dramatic texts by each playwright and at the same time highlights the thus far neglected commonalities between the plays and the queer historical as well as cultural contexts of these two prominent modernists.
Punchdrunk on the Classics: Experiencing Immersion in The Burnt City and Beyond
by Emma ColePunchdrunk on the Classics: Experiencing Immersion in The Burnt City and Beyond draws attention to Punchdrunk’s use of ancient Greek literature in their creation of immersive theatre. The book documents and analyses the effects of utilising Greek tragedy within both Punchdrunk’s creative development windows, and the company’s final staged productions. It features material stretching from The House of Oedipus (2000) right through to The Burnt City (2022-23), on which the author worked as dramaturg. Chapters include rehearsal studies, explorations of how Greek literature can shape an audience’s experience in immersive theatre, and considerations of how The Burnt City might change our understanding of the poetics of immersion in antiquity. Overall, Punchdrunk on the Classics provides an unparalleled depth of insight into an individual Punchdrunk production, and highlights the until-now overlooked significance of antiquity within Punchdrunk’s practice.
Bernard Shaw, Paul Ricoeur, and the Jesusian Dialectics of Redemptive Living (Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries)
by Howard Ira EinsohnThis book explores a heretofore unremarked linkage between Bernard Shaw, the twentieth-century French thinker Paul Ricoeur, and Jesus of Nazareth. The ties that bind them are a foundational interest in the social teachings of the Nazarene and their use of a shared dialectics with respect to living the kind of compassionate life that holds out the promise in our contemporary world of achieving something approximating universal wellness on a healthy planet at peace with itself. This work argues that the three principal subjects of the study—independently of one another—used the same dialectical method to reach the same dialectically derived conclusion about how humans can live redemptively in a fractured world.
Contemporary Dance Choreography and Spectatorship: Embodied Emotion
by Lucía Piquero ÁlvarezThis book offers an approach which unites choreographic and spectatorial perspectives, and argues for dance itself—its materials, its structures—as a medium of emotional communication. Contemporary dance often seems to contend with issues of understanding, regularly being “read” in “languages” which alienate it. Even if emotion seems a significant part of people’s engagement with dance, its workings are often surrounded by an air of mysticism. Engaging with these issues, this study investigates the experience of emotion in Euro-American contemporary dance theatre. It questions its dependence on the artist’s personal emotions, and the assumption that it is mediated by representational meaning. Instead, this book proposes that the emotional import of dance emerges from an interplay between perceptual properties and symbolic elements in an embodied affective cognitive experience. This experience includes the background of the spectator as well as the context of work, choreographer, performer(s) and other creative agents.
Anglo-American Stage and Screen Drama: The Post-Democratic World Order
by Mike InghamAnglo-American Stage and Screen Drama analyses and discusses the contemporary role of stage and screen drama as a critical forum for progressive thinking in an increasingly polarised geopolitical world. The book addresses the cultural politics of socially engaged 21st century stage plays and films, and makes the case for drama as a sociopolitical forum, in which the complex and contentious issues that confront society can be explored and debated. It conceives of Anglophone political drama as a significant intervention in today’s culture wars, representing the latter as a convenient distraction from the ongoing depredations of neoliberalism. In the main part of the book selected case-study plays and films from each of the first two decades illustrate drama’s capacity to influence critical debate on social justice issues. All of the case-study texts under discussion express a powerful aesthetics of resistance to right-wing ideology, and promote inclusive and enlightened values. This broader orientation underlines drama’s role as a channel for critical agency in today’s putative post-socialist, post-democratic climate.
Applied Shakespeare: A Transformative Encounter?
by Adelle HulsmeierThis book speaks to those interested in where and why Shakespeare’s work is used to capture the transformative intentions of different areas of Applied Theatre practice (Prison, Disability, Therapy), representing a foundational study which considers subsequent histories and potential challenges when engaging with Shakespeare’s work. This is grounded in a case study analysis of three salient British Theatre Companies: The Education Shakespeare Company (prison), the Blue Apple Theatre Company (Disability), and the Combat Veteran Players (therapy).
Auseinandersetzung mit Brecht: Theater machen im einundzwanzigsten Jahrhundert
by Bill GelberDieses Buch ist ein Plädoyer für Bertolt Brechts anhaltende Bedeutung in einer Zeit, in der die Ereignisse des 21. Jahrhunderts nach einer studierten Art und Weise schreien, Theater für den sozialen Wandel zu produzieren. Hier wird ein einzigartiger Schritt-für-Schritt-Prozess für die Umsetzung von Brechts Arbeitsweisen auf der Bühne vorgestellt, wobei die 2015 an der Texas Tech University entstandene Produktion von Brechts "Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder" als Modell für die Erkundung dient. Besondere Brecht-Konzepte - das Epos, die Verfremdung, die Fabel, der Gestus, die Historisierung, die Literarisierung, das "Nicht...aber", das Arrangement und die Trennung der Elemente - werden erläutert und auf Szenen und Stücke angewendet. Brechts komplizierte Beziehung zu Konstantin Stanislawski wird auch in Bezug auf ihre unterschiedlichen Ansichten über das Schauspiel erforscht. Für Theaterpraktiker und -pädagogen ist dieser Band eine Aufzeichnung des pädagogischen Engagements, eine empirische Studie von Brechts Werk in der Aufführung an einer höheren Bildungseinrichtung mit Studenten und Absolventen.
Bernard Shaw, Automata, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence (Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries)
by Kay LiThis project is the first to explore how Bernard Shaw intersects constructively with automata, robots and artificial intelligence (AI). Shaw was born in the golden age of the automaton. His Bible on the Life Force and Creative Evolution, Back to Methuselah, was written when Karel and Josef Čapek coined the word “robot.” Shaw’s life ran in parallel with the rise of AI, and the big names in AI were his contemporaries. Moreover, empirical analyses of Shavian texts and images using AI uncovers possibilities for new interpretations, demonstrating how future renditions of his works may make use of these advanced technologies to broaden Shaw’s audience, readership and scholarship.
Staging Restoration Comedy: The Royal Shakespeare Company, 1967-2019
by David RobertsSince its 1967 production of Vanbrugh’s The Relapse, the Royal Shakespeare Company has been the world’s leading producer of Restoration Comedies. This book is the first to document and critique the company’s history of engagement with that repertoire. It reviews the spaces in which productions have been performed, design principles, casting, voicing, textual adaptation, musical direction, actor perspectives, and the problems of how to confront, adopt or depart from received notions of Restoration style. It goes on to posit that, for all the RSC’s explorations of Restoration Comedy, the company has maintained the repertoire as a fringe interest played out in niche spaces, while recycling many of the assumptions it claims to challenge, and that what is needed is the writer-led intervention seen in RSC and National Theatre adaptations of French drama from the same period. Only then can Restoration Comedy begin to engage wider audiences in new sites of political, historical andcultural meaning.
Coward the Dramatist: Morals and Manners (Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries)
by Roger KojeckyDiscussions of Coward’s achievement in the theatre between 1920 and 1966 have tended to stay with the colourful biography. The more analytical literary approach adopted here places Coward’s success in its wider theatrical context, making the connections with the work of other dramatists. He developed his technique according to what worked with theatre audiences. Taking up the well-made play, he brought in a more colloquial dialogue, explored, for instance, the morality and psychology of marriage and free love, and frequently exploited the dramatic possibilities of characters grouped into two camps. The book considers both the ‘pleasant’ and ‘unpleasant’ plays (to use the Shavian terms), and the episodic patriotic plays. It Includes Coward’s ambivalent approach to the ‘theatre of war’ in the 20th century. (123)
The Irish Repertory Theatre: Celebrating Thirty-Five Years Off-Broadway (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature)
by Maria SzaszThe Irish Repertory Theatre: Celebrating Thirty-Five Years Off-Broadway is the first book-length history of the multi-award winning Off-Broadway Irish Repertory Theatre Company, from its beginning in 1988 to its thirty-fifth season in 2023. The book considers how the Irish Rep’s plays and musicals reflect the Irish diaspora, the relationship between Ireland and America, and what it means to be Irish and Irish American, both historically, and in the twenty-first century, including how the Irish Rep is showcasing more diverse voices and experiences, from women, the LGBTQIA+ community, and Irish and Irish American people of color.
Tennessee Williams and Italy
by Alessandro ClericuzioThis book reveals for the first time the import of a hugenetwork of connections between Tennessee Williams and the country closest to his heart, Italy. America's most thought-provoking playwright loved Italy morethan any other country outside the U. S. and was deeply influenced by itsculture for most of his life. Anna Magnani's film roles in the 1940s, ItalianNeo-realist cinema, the theatre of Eduardo De Filippo, as well as the actualexperience of Italian life and culture during his long stays in the countrywere some of the elements shaping his literary output. Through his lover FrankMerlo, he also had first-hand knowledge of Italian-American life in Brooklyn. Tracing the establishment of his reputation with theItalian intelligentsia, as well as with theatre practitioners and withgenerations of audiences, the book also tells the story of a momentouscollaboration in the theatre, between Williams and Luchino Visconti, who had todefy the unceasing control Italian censorship exerted on Williams for decades.
Complicite, Theatre and Aesthetics: From Scraps of Leather
by Tomasz WiśniewskiThis book presents a pioneering critical study of Complicite's work throughout the years. Drawing on an extensive overview of the available research material - including interviews, manuscripts and the company's own archive - the book is framed within a clearly defined research perspective and explores the singularity of theatre communication. The book results from an encounter between the London-based - but cosmopolitan in scope - company, and a fresh application of the form-oriented scholarship of Eastern Europe, Yuri Lotman's semiosphere in particular. Focused on the aesthetics of Complicite, this study achieves a critical distance and undertakes multidimensional scrutiny of the available research material. By identifying the principles of Complicite's aesthetics, the book attempts to grasp the company's artistic paradigm. It focuses on ways of creating, preserving, and decoding meanings, rather than on the nuances of performance or contextual issues.
Women of Words in Le Morte Darthur
by Siobhán M. WyattOffering a new reading of Malory's famed text, Le Morte Darthur, this book provides the first full-length survey of the alterations Malory made to female characters in his source texts. Through detailed comparisons with both Old French and Middle English material, Siobh#65533;n M. Wyatt discusses how Malory radically altered his French and English source texts to create a gendered pattern in the reliability of speech, depicting female discourse as valuable and truthful. Malory's authorial crafting indicates his preference for a certain "type" of female character: self-governing, opinionated, and strong. Simultaneously, the portrayal of this very readable "type" yields characterization. While late medieval court records indicate an increasingly negative attitude towards female speech and a tendency to punish vociferous women as "scolds," Malory makes the words of chiding damsels constructive. While his contemporary writers suppress the powers of magical women, Malory empowers his enchantress characters; while the authors of his French source texts accentuate Guinevere's flaws, Malory portrays her with sympathy.
Ethnotheatre and Creative Methods for Teacher Leadership
by Jerome Cranston Kristin KusanovichThis book addresses the lived challenges to teacher leadership. It illustrates an arts-based research approach that effectively highlights the broader context of relational dynamics between adults at school, using one-act plays to open up difficult conversations on complex issues. School leadership has, ostensibly, a performative dimension. Teacher leaders enact leadership from a more vulnerable platform than those with administrative positions, while they try to thrive in roles which are not always clear from their pre-service preparation. Early-career teachers are often not aware of the very real hazards that can accompany their initial foray into leadership. This book encourages creative thinking about how to enact the teacher role to better embed and advocate for a supportive and just system.
Emergence in Interactive Art
by Jennifer SeevinckThis book is concerned with emergence, interaction, art and computing. It introduces a new focus for emergence in interactive art: the emergent experience. Emergence literature is discussed and an organising framework, the Taxonomy of Emergence in Interactive Art (TEIA) is provided together with case studies of digital, interactive art systems that facilitate emergence. Evidence from evaluations of people interacting with the works is analysed using the TEIA. Artworks from across the world are also reviewed to further illustrate the potential for emergence. Interactive art is, itself, still a young domain where audience influence, or interaction with the work is a defining aspect. Emergence in Interactive Art explores the rich opportunities for interactive experiences of digital art systems that are provided by looking through a 'lens' of emergence. And what better way to explore these potentials than through the open-ended domain of emergence, with its inherent affinity to the natural world? Through an integrated approach of practice, research and theory this book reveals design and analytical insights relating to emergence, interaction and interactive art to benefit artists, researchers and designers alike.
Revisiting Shakespeare’s Lost Play
by Deborah C. PayneThis collection of essays centres on Double Falsehood, Lewis Theobald's 1727 adaptation of the "lost" play of Cardenio, possibly co-authored by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. In a departure from most scholarship to date, the contributors fold Double Falsehood back into the milieu for which it was created rather than searching for traces of Shakespeare in the text. Robert D. Hume's knowledge of theatre history permits a fresh take on the forgery question as well as the Shakespeare authorship controversy. Diana Solomon's understanding of eighteenth-century rape culture and Jean I. Marsden's command of contemporary adaptation practices both emphasise the play's immediate social and theatrical contexts. And, finally, Deborah C. Payne's familiarity with the eighteenth-century stage allows for a reconsideration of Double Falsehood as integral to a debate between Theobald, Alexander Pope, and John Gay over the future of the English drama.
Theatre, Globalization and the Cold War
by Christopher B. Balme Berenika Szymanski-DüllThis book examines how the Cold War had a far-reaching impact on theatre by presenting a range of current scholarship on the topic from scholars from a dozen countries. They represent in turn a variety of perspectives, methodologies and theatrical genres, including not only Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook, but also Polish folk-dancing, documentary theatre and opera production. The contributions demonstrate that there was much more at stake and a much larger investment of ideological and economic capital than a simple dichotomy between East versus West or socialism versus capitalism might suggest. Culture, and theatrical culture in particular with its high degree of representational power, was recognized as an important medium in the ideological struggles that characterize this epoch. Most importantly, the volume explores how theatre can be reconceptualized in terms of transnational or even global processes which, it will be argued, were an integral part of Cold War rivalries.
Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb on Poverty and Equality in the Modern World, 1905–1914 (Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries)
by Peter GahanThis book investigates how, alongside Beatrice Webb's ground-breaking pre- World War One anti-poverty campaigns, George Bernard Shaw helped launch the public debate about the relationship between equality and democracy in a developed economy. The ten years following his great 1905 play on poverty Major Barbara present a puzzle to Shaw scholars, who have hitherto failed to appreciate both the centrality of the idea of equality in major plays like Getting Married, Misalliance, and Pygmalion, and to understand that his major political work, 1928's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism had its roots in this period before the Great War. As both the era's leading dramatist and leader of the Fabian Society, Shaw proposed his radical postulate of equal incomes as a solution to those twin scourges of a modern industrial society: poverty and inequality. Set against the backdrop of Beatrice Webb's famous Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law 1905-1909 - a publication which led to grass-roots campaigns against destitution and eventually the Welfare State - this book considers how Shaw worked with Fabian colleagues, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and H. G. Wells to explore through a series of major lectures, prefaces and plays, the social, economic, political, and even religious implications of human equality as the basis for modern democracy.
The Quest for Shakespeare
by Jeffrey KahanThis book traces the formation and impact of the New Shakspeare Society, created in 1873, which dedicated itself to solving the mysteries of Shakespeare's authorship by way of science. This promise, however, was undermined not only by the antics of its director, Frederick J. Furnivall, but also by the inexactitudes of the tests. Jeffrey Kahan puzzles out how a society geared towards science quickly devolved into a series of grudge matches. Nonetheless, the New Shakspere Society set the bibliographical and biographical agenda for the next century--an unusual legacy for an organization that was rife with intrigue, enmity, and incompetence; lives were ruined, lawyers consulted, and scholarship (mostly bad) produced and published.
Bernard Shaw, W. T. Stead, and the New Journalism
by Nelson O'Ceallaigh RitschelThis book explores Bernard Shaw’s journalism from the mid-1880s through the Great War—a period in which Shaw contributed some of the most powerful and socially relevant journalism the western world has experienced. In approaching Shaw’s journalism, the promoter and abuser of the New Journalism, W. T. Stead, is contrasted to Shaw, as Shaw countered the sensational news copy Stead and his disciples generated. To understand Shaw’s brand of New Journalism, his responses to the popular press’ portrayals of high profile historical crises are examined, while other examples prompting Shaw’s journalism over the period are cited for depth: the 1888 Whitechapel murders, the 1890-91 O’Shea divorce scandal that fell Charles Stewart Parnell, peace crusades within militarism, the catastrophic Titanic sinking, and the Great War. Through Shaw’s journalism that undermined the popular press’ shock efforts that prevented rational thought, Shaw endeavored to promote clear thinking through the immediacy of his critical journalism. Arguably, Shaw saved the free press.
Violent Women in Contemporary Theatres
by Nancy Taylor PorterThis book brings together the fields of theatre, gender studies, and psychology/sociology in order to explore the relationships between what happens when women engage in violence, how the events and their reception intercept with cultural understandings of gender, how plays thoughtfully depict this topic, and how their productions impact audiences. Truthful portrayals force consideration of both the startling reality of women's violence -- not how it's been sensationalized or demonized or sexualized, but how it is -- and what parameters, what possibilities, should exist for its enactment in life and live theatre. These women appear in a wide array of contexts: they are mothers, daughters, lovers, streetfighters, boxers, soldiers, and dominatrixes. Who they are and why they choose to use violence varies dramatically. They stage resistance and challenge normative expectations for women. This fascinating and balanced study will appeal to anyone interested in gender/feminism issues and theatre.
Musical Modernism and German Cinema from 1913 to 1933
by Francesco FinocchiaroThis book investigates the relationship between musical Modernism and German cinema. It paves the way for anunorthodox path of research, one which has been little explored up until now. The main figures of musical Modernism, from Alban Berg to Paul Hindemith, and from Richard Strauss to Kurt Weill, actually had a significant relationship with cinema. True, it was a complex and contradictory relationship in which cinema often emerged more as an aesthetic point of reference than an objective reality; nonetheless, the reception of the language and aesthetic of cinema had significant influence on the domain of music. Between 1913 and 1933, Modernist composers' exploration of cinema reached such a degree of pervasiveness and consistency as to become a true aesthetic paradigm, a paradigm that sat at the very heart of the Modernist project. In this insightful volume, Finocchiaro shows that the creative confrontation with the avant-garde medium par excellence can be regarded as a vector of musical Modernism: a new aesthetic paradigm for the very process - of deliberate misinterpretation, creative revisionism, and sometimes even intentional subversion of the Classic-Romantic tradition - which realized the "dream of Otherness" of the Modernist generation.
Adaptation in Visual Culture: Images, Texts, and Their Multiple Worlds (Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture)
by R. Barton Palmer Julie GrossmanThis book offers the first comprehensive discussion of the relationship between Modern Irish Literature and the Irish cinema, with twelve chapters written by experts in the field that deal with principal films, authors, and directors. This survey outlines the influence of screen adaptation of important texts from the national literature on the construction of an Irish cinema, many of whose films because of cultural constraints were produced and exhibited outside the country until very recently. Authors discussed include George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Liam O'Flaherty, Christy Brown, Edna O'Brien, James Joyce, and Brian Friel. The films analysed in this volume include THE QUIET MAN, THE INFORMER, MAJOR BARBARA, THE GIRL WITH GREEN EYES, MY LEFT FOOT, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, THE SNAPPER, and DANCING AT LUGHNASA. The introduction features a detailed discussion of the cultural and political questions raised by the promotion of forms of national identity by Ireland's literary and cinematic establishments.