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Dancing Women: Female Bodies Onstage
by Sally BanesDancing Women: Female Bodies Onstage is a spectacular and timely contribution to dance history, recasting canonical dance since the early nineteenth century in terms of a feminist perspective. Setting the creation of specific dances in socio-political and cultural contexts, Sally Banes shows that choreographers have created representations of women that are shaped by - and that in part shape - society's continuing debates about sexuality and female identity. Broad in its scope and compelling in its argument Dancing Women: * provides a series of re-readings of the canon, from Romantic and Russian Imperial ballet to contemporary ballet and modern dance * investigates the gaps between plot and performance that create sexual and gendered meanings * examines how women's agency is created in dance through aspects of choreographic structure and style * analyzes a range of women's images - including brides, mistresses, mothers, sisters, witches, wraiths, enchanted princesses, peasants, revolutionaries, cowgirls, scientists, and athletes - as well as the creation of various women's communities on the dance stage * suggests approaches to issues of gender in postmodern dance Using an interpretive strategy different from that of other feminist dance historians, who have stressed either victimization or celebration of women, Banes finds a much more complex range of cultural representations of gender identities.
Dangerous Border Crossers
by Guillermo Gomez-PenaThis anthology of Gómez-Peña's performance chronicles, diary entries, poems, essays, and texts, sheds an extraordinary light on the life and work of this migrant provocateur.
Danny, King of the Basement: Revised Second Edition
by David S. CraigIn two years, Danny and his mom have moved more often than most kids lose teeth... When Danny moves into a new basement apartment, the kids he meets seem to have way more problems than just being hungry. But Danny’s imagination creates a community that allows his friends to cope with their problems and ultimately to help Danny—because his crisis isn’t losing a home. It’s gaining one…
Daring to Play: A Brecht Companion
by Manfred WekwerthTranslated into English for the first time, Daring To Play: A Brecht Companion is the study of Bertolt Brecht’s theatre by Manfred Wekwerth, Brecht’s co-director and former director of the Berliner Ensemble. Wekwerth aims to challenge prevailing myths and misconceptions of Brecht’s theatre, instead providing a refreshing and accessible approach to his plays and theatrical craft. The book is rich in information, examples and anecdotal detail from first-hand acquaintance with Brecht and rehearsal with the Berliner Ensemble. Wekwerth provides a detailed practical understanding of how theatre operates with a clear perspective on the interface between politics and art. Warm and engaging, whilst also being provocative and challenging, Daring to Play displays the continued vitality of Brecht’s true approach to theatre makers today.
The Dark Flower
by John GalsworthyThe keen insight and multidimensional characters that enliven the works of English novelist John Galsworthy, such as The Forsyte Saga, are also brought to bear in The Dark Flower. This emotionally gripping tale focuses on the intertwined fates of four women, each of whom is facing a critical juncture in her life.
The Dark Lady of the Sonnets
by Bernard ShawThe Dark Lady of the Sonnets is a 1910 short comedy by George Bernard Shaw in which William Shakespeare, intending to meet the "Dark Lady", accidentally encounters Queen Elizabeth I and attempts to persuade her to create a national theatre.
Dark Matter: Invisibility In Drama, Theater, And Performance
by Andrew SoferDark Matter maps the invisible dimension of theater whose effects are felt everywhere in performance. Examining phenomena such as hallucination, offstage character, offstage action, sexuality, masking, technology, and trauma, Andrew Sofer engagingly illuminates the invisible in different periods of postclassical western theater and drama. He reveals how the invisible continually structures and focuses an audience’s theatrical experience, whether it’s black magic in Doctor Faustus, offstage sex in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, masked women in The Rover, self-consuming bodies in Suddenly Last Summer, or surveillance technology in The Archbishop’s Ceiling. Each discussion pinpoints new and striking facets of drama and performance that escape sight. Taken together, Sofer’s lively case studies illuminate how dark matter is woven into the very fabric of theatrical representation. Written in an accessible style and grounded in theater studies but interdisciplinary by design, Dark Matter will appeal to theater and performance scholars, literary critics, students, and theater practitioners, particularly playwrights and directors.
Dark of the Moon
by Howard Richardson William BerneyAs the tale unfolds, a witch boy tarries in a mountain community in love with a beautiful girl named Barbara Allen. The superstitious townspeople resent their happiness and their subsequent meddling ends in violence and tragedy. This play was proclaimed a Broadway hit.
Dark Road
by Ian Rankin and Mark ThomsonIt’s been 25 years since Alfred Chalmers was convicted of the gruesome murder of four young women in Edinburgh. Isobel McArthur, Scotland’s first Chief Superintendent, was the woman responsible for putting him behind bars, but the case has haunted her ever since.
Dark Road: A play
by Ian Rankin Mark ThomsonFirst performed at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre, the first stage play from the SUNDAY TIMES No.1 bestselling author of A SONG FOR THE DARK TIMESIt's been 25 years since Alfred Chalmers was convicted of the gruesome murder of four young women in Edinburgh. Isobel McArthur, Scotland's first Chief Constable, was the woman responsible for putting him behind bars, but the case has haunted her ever since.Now, with her retirement approaching, McArthur decides the time has come for answers. To uncover the truth, she revisits the case and interviews Chalmers for the first time in decades. But her decision rips opens old wounds and McArthur is soon caught up in a web of corruption, psychological mind-games and deceit that threatens not only her own life, but those of her fellow officers and even her own daughter.Tense, gritty and hard-hitting, DARK ROAD is the first ever stage play from bestselling crime writer Ian Rankin, co-written by the Royal Lyceum's Artistic Director Mark Thomson.
The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy (Palgrave Studies in Comedy)
by Patrice A. Oppliger Eric ShouseThis book focuses on the “dark side” of stand-up comedy, initially inspired by speculations surrounding the death of comedian Robin Williams. Contributors, those who study humor as well as those who perform comedy, join together to contemplate the paradoxical relationship between tragedy and comedy and expose over-generalizations about comic performers’ troubled childhoods, addictions, and mental illnesses. The book is divided into two sections. First, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore comedians’ onstage performances, their offstage lives, and the relationship between the two. The second half of the book focuses on amateur and lesser-known professional comedians who reveal the struggles they face as they attempt to hone successful comedy acts and likable comic personae. The goal of this collection is to move beyond the hackneyed stereotype of the sad clown in order to reveal how stand-up comedy can transform both personal and collective tragedies by providing catharsis through humor.
Dark Sonnets of the Lady
by Don NigroDrama / Characters: 4 male, 4 femaleScenery: Unit set. A finalist for the National Play Award, this funny drama takes place in Vienna, 1900. A beautiful and brilliant young girl enters the office of Sigmund Freud to begin the most famous and controversial encounter in psychoanalysis. Dora is funny, suspicious, sarcastic and elusive. Freud becomes obsessed by her and he moves like a detective through the mystery of her mind, finding a lecherous father, an obsessed mother, an irritating brother, a sinister admirer with a seductive wife, and a lost little governess. Nightmares, fantasies, hallucinations and memories materialize on stage in a kaleidoscopic tapestry as Freud moves closer and closer to the truth about Dora's murky past. Is Dora sick or is the corrupt patriarchal society in which she and Freud are trapped the source of a complex group neurosis that binds the characters together in a web of desperate erotic relationships? The play becomes a war between Dora and Freud over the nature of truth and the uneasy truce between men and women. This tragic love story is laced with haunting Strauss waltzes.
The Dark Theatre: A Book About Loss
by Alan ReadThe Dark Theatre is an indispensable text for activist communities wondering what theatre might have to do with their futures, students and scholars across Theatre and Performance Studies, Urban Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Economy and Social Ecology. The Dark Theatre returns to the bankrupted warehouse in Hope (Sufferance) Wharf in London’s Docklands where Alan Read worked through the 1980s to identify a four-decade interregnum of ‘cultural cruelty’ wreaked by financialisation, austerity and communicative capitalism. Between the OPEC Oil Embargo and the first screening of The Family in 1974, to the United Nations report on UK poverty and the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017, this volume becomes a book about loss. In the harsh light of such loss is there an alternative to the market that profits from peddling ‘well-being’ and pushes prescriptions for ‘self-help’, any role for the arts that is not an apologia for injustice? What if culture were not the solution but the problem when it comes to the mitigation of grief? Creativity not the remedy but the symptom of a structural malaise called inequality? Read suggests performance is no longer a political panacea for the precarious subject but a loss adjustor measuring damages suffered, compensations due, wrongs that demand to be put right. These field notes from a fire sale are a call for angry arts of advocacy representing those abandoned as the detritus of cultural authority, second-order victims whose crime is to have appealed for help from those looking on, audiences of sorts.
Darkbeast
by Morgan KeyesA girl's love for her raven may put her life in jeopardy in this gripping tale.In Keara's world, every child has a darkbeast--a creature that takes dark emotions like anger, pride, and rebellion. Keara's darkbeast is Caw, a raven, and Keara can be free of her worst feelings by transferring them to Caw. He is her constant companion, and they are magically bound to each other until Keara's twelfth birthday. For on that day Keara must kill her darkbeast--that is the law. Refusing to kill a darkbeast is an offense to the gods, and such heresy is harshly punished by the feared Inquisitors. But Keara cannot imagine life without Caw. And she finds herself drawn to the Travelers, actors who tour the country performing revels. Keara is fascinated by their hints of a grand life beyond her tiny village. As her birthday approaches, Keara readies herself to leave childhood--and Caw--behind forever. But when the time comes for the sacrifice, will she be able to kill the creature that is so close to her? And if she cannot, where will she turn, and how can she escape the Inquisitors?
Darkbeast Rebellion
by Morgan KeyesBetrayal threatens everything Keara dreams of in this fast-paced, exciting sequel to Darkbeast. Keara, her friend Goran, and the wily old actor, Taggart, are fleeing for their lives. They have all spared their darkbeasts, the creatures that take on their darker deeds and emotions and lift their spirits. But their actions defy the law, which dictates that all citizens must kill their darkbeasts on their twelfth birthdays. There are rumors of safe havens, groups of people called Darkers who spared their darkbeasts and live outside the law. To find the Darkers, the trio must embark on a dangerous journey—and evade the Inquisitors who are searching for them everywhere. In the middle of winter, freezing and exhausted, Keara and her companions are taken to an underground encampment that seems the answer to all their hopes. But are these Darkers really what they appear to be?
Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance
by Stephanie Leigh BatisteIn Darkening Mirrors, Stephanie Leigh Batiste examines how African Americans participated in U.S. cultural imperialism in Depression-era stage and screen performances. A population treated as second-class citizens at home imagined themselves as empowered, modern U.S. citizens and transnational actors in plays, operas, ballets, and films. Many of these productions, such as the 1938 hits Haiti and The "Swing" Mikado recruited large casts of unknown performers, involving the black community not only as spectators but also as participants. Performances of exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism are inevitably linked to issues of embodiment, including how bodies signify blackness as a cultural, racial, and global category. Whether enacting U.S. imperialism in westerns, dramas, dances, songs, jokes, or comedy sketches, African Americans maintained a national identity that registered a diasporic empowerment and resistance on the global stage. Boldly addressing the contradictions in these performances, Batiste challenges the simplistic notion that the oppressed cannot identify with oppressive modes of power and enact themselves as empowered subjects. Darkening Mirrors adds nuance and depth to the history of African American subject formation and stage and screen performance.
The Darkest Hour
by Charles GeorgeDrama / 3m, 2f / One of the most powerful stories ever condensed into a one act play, The Darkest Hour tells the story of young John Madison, within four hours of his execution for murder, having been found guilty on circumstantial evidence. He is innocent, but has no way of proving it, as appearances have been too strongly against him. His sorrowing mother comes to pay her last visit before the State exacts its toll. He reiterates his innocence and relates the entire circumstances to her in this heartbreaking tale.
Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864 (Kabuki Plays On-Stage #3)
by James R. Brandon Samuel L. LeiterDarkness and Desire, 1804-1864, is the third volume in a monumental new series-the first collection of kabuki play translations to be published in nearly a quarter of a century. Fifty-one plays, published in four volumes, vividly trace kabuki's changing relations to Japanese society during the premodern era. <p><p>The fourteen plays translated in Volume 3, Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864, mark an extreme point in the development of kabuki dramaturgy. The plays are remarkable, even within kabuki, for their intense theatricality, gutsy individualism of character, cold-blooded and ferocious violence, realism pushed into fantasy and grotesquery, a novelty for its own sake, sexual aggressiveness, and assertion of female will. The plays depict a society in extremis, the end of an era, a time often marked by unmitigated darkness and desire.
Darkside
by Ken JonesDrama / 3m, 2f / Two American astronauts are stranded in a lunar landing module on the dark side of the moon while a third orbits in the command module. As they work with ground control toward rescue, flashbacks reveal their stories.
Darling Judi: A Celebration of Judi Dench
by VariousA celebration of Britain's favourite actress, Judi DenchThe very name Judi Dench encourages a warm and admiring response from the public and fellow actors alike. Her wide-ranging career includes numerous Shakespearean performances (most recently in ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL at the RSC) and contemporary theatre (in plays by, among others, David Hare and Hugh Whitemore); on television (in the series A FINE ROMANCE and AS TIME GOES BY) and in the cinema (MRS BROWN, her Oscar-winning performance in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, THE SHIPPING NEWS, IRIS, and in four James Bond films as 'M').Judi Dench is as popular as she is talented - when she and Maggie Smith appeared together in a David Hare play last year all seats were sold for the entire run within 24 hours.John Miller, her biographer, invited fellow actors, writers, and people of the theatre, film and television, to illustrate her genius and her character from their own experience and perspective. With contributors ranging from Billy Connolly to Hugh Whitemore, Bob Larbey to Tim Pigott-Smith, this is a unique portrait of the legend that is Dame Judi Dench.
Darling Judi: A Celebration of Judi Dench
by VariousA celebration of Britain's favourite actress, Judi DenchThe very name Judi Dench encourages a warm and admiring response from the public and fellow actors alike. Her wide-ranging career includes numerous Shakespearean performances (most recently in ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL at the RSC) and contemporary theatre (in plays by, among others, David Hare and Hugh Whitemore); on television (in the series A FINE ROMANCE and AS TIME GOES BY) and in the cinema (MRS BROWN, her Oscar-winning performance in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, THE SHIPPING NEWS, IRIS, and in four James Bond films as 'M').Judi Dench is as popular as she is talented - when she and Maggie Smith appeared together in a David Hare play last year all seats were sold for the entire run within 24 hours.John Miller, her biographer, invited fellow actors, writers, and people of the theatre, film and television, to illustrate her genius and her character from their own experience and perspective. With contributors ranging from Billy Connolly to Hugh Whitemore, Bob Larbey to Tim Pigott-Smith, this is a unique portrait of the legend that is Dame Judi Dench.
Darrell Dennis: Tales of An Urban Indian / The Trickster of Third Avenue East
by Darrell DennisTales of an Urban Indian is a one-person play that follows the trials and tribulations of Simon Douglas, a young First Nations man who moves from his rural reservation to the big city of Vancouver. This dark comedy examines the issues of race, identity, and assimilation that drive young Indigenous men to self-destruction. In The Trickster of Third Avenue East, Roger and Mary are spiralling out of control but are too scared to let each other go. Enter J.C., a mysterious visitor who turns their lives upside down and forces them to confront their darkest secrets. J.C. pushes Roger and Mary into the realm of the supernatural and past the brink of sanity.
Das Leben ist voller Überraschungen: Das Leben ist voller Überraschungen
by Giuseppina Valla InnocentiDas Leben ist voller Überraschungen von Giuseppina Valla Innocenti Ada, eine Sechzigjährige aus Turin, eine ehemalige Buchhändlerin, wird Zielscheibe eines Anrufs, der ihr keine Ruhe lässt. Nach einer ganzen Existenz, die der Arbeit gewidmet ist, sieht sie sich einem Schicksal gegenüber, das ihr den Rücken kehren wird. Der Geschmack einer alten und neuen Freundschaft gibt Sinn zurück Das Leben ist voller Überraschungen Ada analysiert ihren Lebensweg und verspürt den starken Wunsch, zurückzugehen und wie in einer Art Schiebetür eine Entscheidung zu ändern, wobei sie das Risiko eingeht, alles umzuwerfen. Dann kommt wie durch Zauberei das Leben mit seinen unentwirrbaren Regeln, die alles verändern und uns lehren, wie klein und oft unbedeutend unsere Wünsche sind. Das ist dem Protagonisten von ”Das Leben ist voller Überraschungen“ passiert.
Das Theater der Elektrizität: Technologie und Spektakel im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert (Szene & Horizont. Theaterwissenschaftliche Studien #6)
by Ulf OttoDas Theater der Moderne gründet sich auf ästhetische Energien. Seit den 1880er Jahren aber sind es elektrische Energien, aus fossilen Brennstoffen in Kraftwerken erzeugt, die im Theater zu zirkulieren beginnen. Installiert wird eine mysteriöse Entität, die noch als Lebenskraft gehandelt wird und schon für Fortschritt durch Technik steht. Mit der Elektrifizierung des Theaters wird Elektroindustrie respektabel und Bühnenkunst modernistisch. Entsorgt werden die Kulissen, die im Scheinwerferlicht nur noch verstaubt erscheinen, und aus der Bildermaschine wird Raumkunst. Doch wichtiger sind die institutionellen Transformationen, die sich in bislang unbeachteten Koalitionen, Kontinuitäten und Konkurrenzen von technischen und ästhetischen Dingen abspielen. Ingenieurswissen, Kontrolltechniken und Versorgungssysteme ändern, wie Theater und Gesellschaft verschaltet sind. Der Interaktionsraum (zwischen-)menschlicher Leiblichkeit des 20. Jahrhunderts entpuppt sich als eine technische Konstellation.