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Analysing Gender in Performance
by J. Paul Halferty Cathy LeeneyAnalysing Gender in Performance brings together the fields of Gender Studies and Performance Analysis to explore how contemporary performance represents and interrogates gender. This edited collection includes a wide range of scholarly essays, as well as artists’ voices and their accounts of their works and practices. The Introduction outlines the book’s key approaches to concepts in English language gender discourses and gender’s intersectionalities, and sets out the approaches to performance analysis and methods of research employed by the various contributors. The book focuses on performances from the Global North, staged over the past fifty years. Case studies are diverse, ranging from site-specific, dance theatre, speculative drag, installation, and music video performances to Mabou Mines, Churchill, Shakespeare and Ibsen. Contributors explore how gender intersects with sexuality, social class, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, culture and history. Read individually or in tension with one another, the essays confront the contemporary complexities of analysing gender in performance.
Shakespeare in Cuba: Caliban’s Books (Global Shakespeares)
by Donna Woodford-GormleyShakespeare in Cuba: Caliban’s Books explores how Shakespeare is consumed and appropriated in Cuba. It contributes to the underrepresented field of Latin American Shakespeares by applying the lens of cultural anthropophagy, a theory with Latin American roots, to explore how Cuban artists ingest and transform Shakespeare’s plays. By consuming these works and incorporating them into Cuban culture and literature, Cuban writers make the plays their own while also nourishing the source texts and giving Shakespeare a new afterlife.
A History of East African Theatre, Volume 2: Central East Africa (Transnational Theatre Histories)
by Jane PlastowThis second volume of A History of East African Theatre focuses on central East Africa; on Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. The first chapter is concerned with francophone theatres, comparatively studying work coming out of Burundi and Rwanda alongside a focus on French language theatre in Djibouti. The chapter is particularly concerned to explore how French and Belgian cultural policies impacted theatre during the colonial period and how the French ideas of Francafrique and promotion of elite, French language art have continued to resonate in the post-colonial present. Chapters Two and Three look comparatively at the rich theatre histories of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and are divided between a study of British East African colonial impact and an analysis of the post-colonial period illustrating how divergent political thought and societal make-up led to exponential differentiation in national theatres. The final chapter, on Theatre for Development and related social action theatre, covers the whole East African region, offering the first ever historicised analysis of this mode of theatre making which, since the 1980s, has come to dominate funding and opportunity in performance arts.
The Shakespearean Death Arts: Hamlet Among the Tombs (Palgrave Shakespeare Studies)
by Grant Williams William E. EngelThis is the first book to view Shakespeare’s plays from the prospect of the premodern death arts, not only the ars moriendi tradition but also the plurality of cultural expressions of memento mori, funeral rituals, commemorative activities, and rhetorical techniques and strategies fundamental to the performance of the work of dying, death, and the dead. The volume is divided into two sections: first, critically nuanced examinations of Shakespeare’s corpus and then, second, of Hamlet exclusively as the ultimate proving ground of the death arts in practice. This book revitalizes discussion around key and enduring themes of mortality by reframing Shakespeare’s plays within a newly conceptualized historical category that posits a cultural divide—at once epistemological and phenomenological—between premodernity and the Enlightenment.
Sinophone Adaptations of Shakespeare: An Anthology, 1987-2007 (Global Shakespeares)
by Alexa Alice JoubinShakespeare’s tragedies have been performed in the Sinophone world for over two centuries. Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear are three of the most frequently adapted plays. They have been re-imagined as political theatre, comedic parody, Chinese opera, avant-garde theatre, and experimental theatre in Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan. This ground-breaking anthology features the first English translations of seven influential adaptations from 1987 to 2007 across a number of traditional and modern performance genres in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taipei. Each of the book's three sections offers a pair of two contrasting versions of each tragedy - in two distinct genres - for comparative analysis. This anthology is an indispensable tool for the teaching and research of Sinophone theatre's engagement with Western classics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Uday Shankar and His Transcultural Experimentations: Dancing Modernity (Transnational Theatre Histories)
by Urmimala Sarkar MunsiThis monograph presents a specific experience of modernity within the context of Indian dance by looking at the transcultural journey of Indian dancer / choreographer Uday Shankar (1900b – 1977d). His popularity in Europe and America as an Oriental male dancer in the first half of the 20th century, and his worldwide recognition as the Ambassador of Indian culture, are brought into a historiographical perspective within the cultural and social reforms of early twentieth century India. By exploring his artistic journey beyond India in the period between the two world wars, and his experience of dance making, presentational technique and representation of India through various phases of his life, a path is forged to understanding the emergence of modernity in Indian dance.
Speed and Flight in Shakespeare
by Matthew SteggleShakespeare's plays are fascinated by the problems of speed and flight. They are repeatedly interested in humans, spirits, and objects that move very fast; become airborne; and in some cases even travel into space. In Speed and Flight in Shakespeare, the first study of any kind on the subject, Steggle looks at how Shakespeare’s language explores ideas of speed and flight, and what theatrical resources his plays use to represent these states. Shakespeare has, this book argues, an aesthetic of speed and flight. Featuring chapters on The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Macbeth and The Tempest, this study opens up a new field around the ‘historical phenomenology’ of early modern speed.
Communities, Performance and Practice: Enacting Communities
by Kerrie SchaeferThis book examines how a predominantly negative view of community has presented a challenge to critical analysis of community performance practice. The concept of community as a form of class-based solidarity has been hollowed out by postmodernism’s questioning of grand narratives and poststructuralism’s celebration of difference. Alongside the critique of a notion of community has been a critical re-signification of community, following the thinking of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy who conceives of community not as common being but as being-in-common. The concept of community as being-in-common generates questions that have been taken up by feminist geographers, J.K. Gibson-Graham, in theorising a post-capitalist approach to community-based development. These questions and approaches guide the analyses in researched case studies of community performance practice. The book revises theoretical debates that have defined the field of community theatre and performance. It asks how the critical re-signification of community aligns with these debates and, at the same time, opens new modes of critical analysis of community theatre and performance practice.
Language and Metadrama in Major Barbara and Pygmalion: Shavian Sisters (Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries)
by Jean ReynoldsThis book focuses on two important topics in Shaw’s Major Barbara and Pygmalion that have received little attention from critics: language and metadrama. If we look beyond the social, political, and economic issues that Shaw explored in these two plays, we discover that the stories of the two “Shavian sisters”— Barbara Undershaft and Eliza Doolittle—are deeply concerned with performance and what Jacques Derrida calls “the problem of language.” Nearly every character in Major Barbara produces, directs, or acts in at least one miniature play. In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins is Eliza’s acting coach and phonetics teacher, as well as the star of an impromptu, open-air phonetics show. The language content in these two plays is just as intriguing. Did Eliza Doolittle have to learn Standard English to become a complete human being? Should we worry about the bad grammar we hear at Barbara Undershaft’s Salvation Army shelter? Is English losing its precision and purity? Meanwhile, in the background, Shaw keeps reminding us that language and theatre are always present in our everyday lives—sometimes serving as stabilizing forces, and sometimes working to undo them.
Time in Romantic Theatre
by Frederick BurwickThe shift in temporal modalities of Romantic Theatre was the consequence of internal as well as external developments: internally, the playwright was liberated from the old imperative of “Unity of Time” and the expectation that the events of the play must not exceed the hours of a single day; externally, the new social and cultural conformance to the time-keeping schedules of labour and business that had become more urgent with the industrial revolution. In reviewing the theatre of the Romantic era, this monograph draws attention to the ways in which theatre reflected the pervasive impact of increased temporal urgency in social and cultural behaviour. The contribution this book makes to the study of drama in the early nineteenth century is a renewed emphasis on time as a prominent element in Romantic dramaturgy, and a reappraisal of the extensive experimentation on how time functioned.
Modernist Circumnavigations: Around the World in Jules Verne's Wake
by Kevin RiordanThis book shows how Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days changed the global imagination. Through his novel, the world was converted into a personal itinerary, scaled to the individual traveller and, by extension, to the individual reader. Exploring Verne’s modern legacy, this study shows how subsequent generations of artists and writers took on Around the World in Eighty Days as an adaptable guidebook to the modern world. It investigates how Verne’s work leads its reader beyond the book itself. It considers Verne’s place in world literature, traces some of the many real reenactments of Verne’s itinerary, and recalls the theatrical adaptations of Verne’s story. Published to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the first circumnavigation and the 150th anniversary of Verne’s novel, this book offers new insights into the largely overlooked influence of Verne on twentieth-century literature and culture and on the field of global modernism.
Hamlet after Deconstruction (Adaptation in Theatre and Performance)
by Aneta MancewiczPost-war European adaptations of Hamlet are defined by ambiguities and inconsistencies. Such features are at odds with the traditional model of adaptation, which focuses on expanding and explaining the source. Inspired by Derrida’s deconstruction, this book introduces a new interpretative paradigm. Central to this paradigm is the idea that an act of adaptation consists in foregrounding gaps and incoherencies in the source; it is about questioning rather than clarifying. The book explores this paradigm through seven representative European adaptations of Hamlet produced between the 1960s and the 2010s: dramatic texts, live theatre productions, and a mixed reality performance. They systematically challenge the post-Romantic idea of Hamlet as a tragedy of great passions and heroic deeds. What does this say about Hamlet’s impact on post-war theatre and culture? The deconstructive analyses offered in this book show how adaptations of Hamlet capture crucial anxieties and concerns of post-war Europe, such as political disillusionment, postmodern scepticism, and feminist resistance, revealing exciting connections between European traditions.
Alternative Comedy Now and Then: Critical Perspectives (Palgrave Studies in Comedy)
by Oliver Double Sharon LockyerAlternative Comedy Now and Then: Critical Perspectives is the first academic collection focusing on the history and legacy of the alternative comedy movement in Britain that began in 1979 and continues to influence contemporary stand-up comedy. The collection examines the contexts, performances and reception of alternative comedy in order to provide a holistic approach to examining the socio-political impact and significance of alternative comedy from its historical roots through to present day performances. As alternative comedy celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2019, critically reflecting on its impact and significance is a timely endeavour. The book adopts a distinctive interdisciplinary approach, synthesizing theory, concepts and methodologies from comedy studies, theatre and performance, communication and media studies, sociology, political sciences and anthropology. This approach is taken in order to fully understand and examine the dynamics and nuances of the alternative comedy movement which would not be possible with a single-discipline approach.
Bernard Shaw and the Spanish-Speaking World (Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries)
by Gustavo A. Rodríguez MartínThis book explores, through a multidisciplinary approach, the immense influence exerted by Bernard Shaw on the Spanish-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic. This collection of essays encompasses the reception and dissemination of his ideas; the translation of his works into Spanish; the performance history of his plays in Spain and Latin America; and Shaw’s influence on many key figures of literature in Spanish. It begins by delving into Shaw’s knowledge of Spanish literature and gauging his acquaintance with the Spanish cultural milieu throughout his tenure as an art, music, and theatre critic. His early exposure to Spanish-speaking culture later made the return trip in the form of profuse critical reception and theatrical success in countries like Spain, Argentina, Mexico, and Uruguay. This allows for a more detailed investigation into the unmistakable mark that Bernard Shaw left in the oeuvre of leading Spanish-speaking authors like Ramiro de Maeztu, Jorge Luis Borges or Nemesio Canales. This volume also assesses the translations of Shaw’s works into Spanish—while also providing a detailed publication history of these translations.
Applied Theatre and Intercultural Dialogue: Playfully Approaching Difference (Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development)
by Elliot LefflerThis book examines applied theatre projects that bring together diverse groups and foster intercultural dialogue. Based on five case studies and informed by play theory, it argues that the playful elements of theatre processes nurture a unique intimacy among diverse people. However, this playful quality can also dampen explicit conversations about participants’ cultural differences, and defer an interrogation of people’s own entrenchment in systemic power imbalances. As a result, addressing these differences and imbalances in applied theatre contexts may require particular strategies.
Unions, Strikes, Shaw: "The Capitalism of the Proletariat" (Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries)
by Bernard F. DukoreUnions, Strikes, Shaw: ‘The Capitalism of the Proletariat’ is the first book to treat Bernard Shaw—socialist, dramatist, public speaker and union member—in relation to unions and strikes. For over half a century he urged workers to join unions, which he called, paradoxically, “the Capitalism of the Proletariat,” because as capitalists try to get as much labor as possible from workers while paying them as little as possible, unions try to gain as high wages as possible from employers while working as little as possible. He opposed general strikes as destined to fail, since owners can hold out longer than workers, whose unions have less money to support them during strikes. This book offers background on major strikes in and before Shaw’s time —including the Colorado Coalfield War and the Dublin Lockout, both in 1913—before analyzing the causes, day-by-day events and consequences of Britain’s 1926 General Strike. It begins and ends with examinations of their and Shaw’s relevance to actions on unions and strikes in our own time.
Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)
by Hannah SimpsonBeckett’s plays have attracted a striking range of disability performances – that is, performances that cast disabled actors, regardless of whether their roles are explicitly described as ‘disabled’ in the text. Grounded in the history of disability performance of Beckett’s work and a new theorising of Beckett’s treatment of the impaired body, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance examines four contemporary disability performances of Beckett’s plays, staged in the UK and US, and brings the rich fields of Beckett studies and disability studies into mutually illuminating conversation. Pairing original interviews with the actors and directors involved in these productions alongside critical analysis underpinned by recent disability and performance theory, this book explores how these productions emphasise or rework previously undetected indicators of disability in Beckett’s work. More broadly, it reveals how Beckett’s theatre compulsively interrogates alternative embodiments, unexpected forms of agency, and the extraordinary social interdependency of the human body.
Bernard Shaw on the American Stage: A Chronicle of Premieres and Notable Revivals (Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries)
by L. W. ConollyBernard Shaw on the American Stage is the first comprehensive study of the production of Bernard Shaw’s plays in America. During his lifetime (1856-1950), Shaw was America’s most popular living playwright; productions of his plays were outnumbered only by Shakespeare. Forty-four of Shaw’s plays were staged in America before his death, eight more posthumously. Eleven of the productions were world premieres. Bernard Shaw on the American Stage tells the story of the fifty-two premieres, which, apart from a few fragments, is his total dramatic oeuvre. The book also includes, again for the first time, production data and concise overviews of dozens of the most notable American revivals of the plays, from the 1890s to the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. Illustrations—production photographs, programmes, theatre buildings, playbills, actors’ studio portraits— inform the study throughout.
Screening Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama (Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture)
by R. Barton Palmer Marc C. Conner Julie GrossmanIn this book, each chapter explores significant Irish texts in their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. With an introduction that establishes the multiple critical contexts for Irish cinema, literature, and their adaptive textual worlds, the volume addresses some of the most popular and important late 20th-Century and 21st Century works that have had an impact on the Irish and global cinema and literary landscape. A remarkable series of acclaimed and profitable domestic productions during the past three decades has accompanied, while chronicling, Ireland’s struggle with self-identity, national consciousness, and cultural expression, such that the story of contemporary Irish cinema is in many ways the story of the young nation’s growth pains and travails. Whereas Irish literature had long stood as the nation’s foremost artistic achievement, it is not too much to say that film now rivals literature as Ireland’s key form of cultural expression. The proliferation of successful screen versionings of Irish fiction and drama shows how intimately the contemporary Irish cinema is tied to the project of both understanding and complicating (even denying) a national identity that has undergone radical change during the past three decades. This present volume is the first to present a collective accounting of that productive synergy, which has seen so much of contemporary Irish literature transferred to the screen.
Digital Shakespeares from the Global South (Global Shakespeares)
by Amrita SenDigital Shakespeares from the Global South re-directs current conversations on digital appropriations of Shakespeare away from its Anglo-American bias. The individual essays examine digital Shakespeares from South Africa, India, and Latin America, addressing questions of accessibility and the digital divide. This book will be of interest to students and academics working on Shakespeare, adaptation studies, digital humanities, and media studies.Included in this volume, the chapter on “Finding and Accessing Shakespeare Scholarship in the Global South: Digital Research and Bibliography” by Heidi Craig and Laura Estill is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine)
by Martina ZamparoThis book explores the role of alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Hermetic philosophy in one of Shakespeare’s last plays, The Winter’s Tale. A perusal of the vast literary and iconographic repertory of Renaissance alchemy reveals that this late play is imbued with several topoi, myths, and emblematic symbols coming from coeval alchemical, Paracelsian, and Hermetic sources. It also discusses the alchemical significance of water and time in the play’s circular and regenerative pattern and the healing role of women. All the major symbols of alchemy are present in Shakespeare’s play: the intertwined serpents of the caduceus, the chemical wedding, the filius philosophorum, and the so-called rex chymicus. This book also provides an in-depth survey of late Renaissance alchemy, Paracelsian medicine, and Hermetic culture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. Importantly, it contends that The Winter’s Tale, in symbolically retracing the healing pattern of the rota alchemica and in emphasising the Hermetic principles of unity and concord, glorifies King James’s conciliatory attitude.
Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism (New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)
by Nick WoltermanSamuel Beckett’s work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett’s own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides. Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Beckett’s ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks to current understandings not only of Beckett’s techniques and ambitions, but also of modernism’s experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social world. Beckett’s uniquely anxious audience-targeting brings out similarly self-doubting strategies in the work of other experimental twentieth-century writers and artists in whom he is interested: his corpus proves emblematic of a modernism that understands its inability to achieve transformative social effects all at once, but that nevertheless judiciously complicates too-neat distinctions drawn within ongoing culture wars. For its re-evaluations of four key points of orientation for understanding Beckett’s artistic ambitions—his arch critical pronouncements, his postwar conflations of value and valuelessness, his often-ambiguous self-commentary, and his sardonic metatheatrical play—as well as for its running dialogue with wider debates around modernism as a social phenomenon, this book is of interest to students and researchers interested in Beckett, modernism, and the relations between modern and contemporary artistic and social developments.
Shakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice (Shakespeare in Practice)
by Erin SullivanShakespeare and Digital Performance in Practice explores the impact of digital technologies on the theatrical performance of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century, both in terms of widening cultural access and developing new forms of artistry. Through close analysis of dozens of productions, both high-profile and lesser known, it examines the rise of live broadcasting and recording in the theatre, the growing use of live video feeds and dynamic projections on the mainstream stage, and experiments in born-digital theatre-making, including social media, virtual reality, and video-conferencing adaptations. In doing so, it argues that technologically adventurous performances of Shakespeare allow performers and audiences to test what they believe theatre to be, as well as to reflect on what it means to be present—with a work of art, with others, with oneself—in an increasingly online world.
Doing Dramaturgy: Thinking Through Practice (New Dramaturgies)
by Maaike BleekerThis book explores how doing dramaturgy is informed by today’s highly diverse field of theatre, dance and performance. It does so in dialogue with fourteen performances and their makers, tracing the thinking-through-practice that underlies these creations. The first part of the book looks at how dramaturgs participate in practices of thinking-making and introduces a dramaturgical mode of looking at performances and the processes in which they are created. The second part of the book discusses the performances and creative processes of Manuela Infante, Julian Hetzel, Ivo van Hove, Anouk van Dijk, Falk Richter, Milo Rau, Kris Verdonck, Death Centre, Hotel Modern, Jr.cE.sA.r , Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten, Dries Verhoeven, the LGB Society of Mind, Sanja Mitrović, and Amanda Piña. Showing how ways of making and ways of doing dramaturgy mutually inform each other, this book is an essential resource for students and others aspiring to develop their own dramaturgical practice.
Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe
by Mariko Hori Tanaka Yoshiki Tajiri Michiko TsushimaSamuel Beckett and Catastrophe is a groundbreaking collection of original essays that explore the relation between Samuel Beckett and catastrophe in terms of war, the Holocaust, nuclear disasters and ecological crisis. Responding to the post-catastrophic situations in the twentieth century, Beckett created characters who often seem to have been through an unknown catastrophe. Although the importance of catastrophe in Beckett has been noted sporadically, there has been no substantial attempt to discuss his aesthetics and work in relation to it. This collection will therefore serve as the first sustained study to explore the theme of catastrophe in Beckett and will be a highly significant contribution to Beckett studies.