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The Peony Pavilion: Mudan Ting
by Tang Xianzu Cyril Birch Catherine Crutchfield Swatek Xianzu TangThe celebrated English translation of this classic work of Chinese literature is now available in an updated paperback edition. Written in 1598 by Tang Xianzu, The Peony Pavilion is one of literature's most memorable love stories and a masterpiece of Ming drama. Cyril Birch has captured all the elegance, lyricism, and subtle, earthy humor of this panoramic tale of romance and Chinese society. When Indiana University Press first published the text in 1981, it seemed doubtful that the work would ever be performed in its entirety again, but several spectacular and controversial productions have toured the world in recent years. For this second edition, which contains a fully revised text of the translation, Cyril Birch and Catherine Swatek reflect on contemporary performances of the play in light of its history.
The People Speak: A Performance Piece
by Howard ZinnTo celebrate the millionth copy sold of Howard Zinn's great People's History of the United States, Zinn drew on the words of Americans -- some famous, some little known -- across the range of American history. These words were read by a remarkable cast at an event held at the 92nd Street YMHA in New York City that included James Earl Jones, Alice Walker, Jeff Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut, Alfre Woodard, Marisa Tomei, Danny Glover, Myla Pitt, Harris Yulin, and Andre Gregory.From that celebration, this book was born. Collected here under one cover is a brief history of America told through dramatic readings applauding the enduring spirit of dissent.Here in their own words, and interwoven with commentary by Zinn, are Columbus on the Arawaks; Plough Jogger, a farmer and participant in Shays' Rebellion; Harriet Hanson, a Lowell mill worker; Frederick Douglass; Mark Twain; Mother Jones; Emma Goldman; Helen Keller; Eugene V. Debs; Langston Hughes; Genova Johnson Dollinger on a sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan; an interrogation from a 1953 HUAC hearing; Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and member of the Freedom Democratic Party; Malcolm X; and James Lawrence Harrington, a Gulf War resister, among others.
The People vs. Mona
by Patricia MillerMusical / 3m, 5f (Doubling) / Unit Set / The People vs. Mona revolves around Mona Mae Katt, who is accused of murdering her husband on their wedding night. The resulting trial brings out the worst and the funniest of the citizens in the tiny town of Tippo in this love story, murder mystery, courtroom shenanigans, fate-of-a-small-town-hinging-on-the-verdict musical.
Père nazi, fils juif
by Lázaro Droznes Julien SaunierCette fiction dramatique raconte l’incroyable histoire basée sur une histoire vraie du fils d’un officier Allemand de la Wehrmacht, décoré pour son courage pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, qui s’est convertit au judaïsme, qui abandonna l’Allemagne et partit en Israël pour se convertir en citoyen israélien. Sa participation dans la guerre du Liban, et sa confrontation avec les palestiniens le mènent au même croisement qu’a dû affronter son père ans auparavant. Il doit affronter le dilemme de tout soldat : tous les ordres sont-ils légaux, et doit-on tous les respecter ? Quelle est la limite de l’obéissance ? La discipline militaire dispense-t-elle le combattant de ses droits moraux et éthiques ? Toute la responsabilité appartient à personne la plus haute gradée de l’organisation militaire, ou la responsabilité est partagée avec les niveaux intermédiaires ? Cette histoire confirme ce que les grecs savaient déjà : personne ne peut éviter son propre destin. Peut-importe ce que l’ont fait, il nous retrouve toujours.
A Perfect Bowl of Pho
by Nam NguyenNam, a procrastination-prone Vietnamese Canadian university student, sets out with the vague ambition to write a musical about his diaspora as embodied by food, particularly the world-famous noodle soup pho. What follows is pure meta musical, genre-bending through thousands of years of history, featuring rapping ancient kings, communist spies, dancing sharks and refugees, and awkward first dates in suburbia. However, Nam eventually finds himself caught between his different characters as each argues what pho (the food and the show) truly represents, and he struggles to find an answer that will satisfy everyone—in the end, isn’t this just a bunch of silly soup songs?
The Perfect Christmas
by Caroline AndersonEmotional trauma...The trauma of their first meeting set the tone of their relationship and established their heated attractioneven before new consulting surgeon David Armstrong reached Audley Memorial Hospital.Nurse Julia Revell felt acutely alive and distinctly nervous with him on staff. Having turned her life around after a difficult marriage, she couldn’t allow herself or her little daughter, Katie, to experience another emotional nightmare. David wanted them both so much and was happy to wait—but Julia’s courage finally ran out.Then came Christmas Eve. Katie was abducted, and Julia realized how much she really needed this man at her side....
Perfect Crime: A Thriller in Two Acts
by Warren ManziThis cat and mouse thriller is one of Off Broadway's longest running hits. Margaret Thorne Brent, psychiatrist and author, has returned to America with her husband, also a psychiatrist, and settled in an affluent Connecticut community where at least one bizarre murder has taken place. Inspector James Ascher, the local cop, becomes obsessed with Margaret, her patients and their sitting room, where he believes the solution to the murder lies.
A Perfect Match
by Joan ForsterComedy / 1m, 1f / Interior / On a snowy evening Alison is waiting for a date arranged through a computer dating service. Unbeknownst to her, he is delayed by the weather. A television repair man who didn't show up when he was supposed to arrives, dressed for a party and just making one last call. Alison thinks he is her date and he is surprised and charmed by the reception he receives. He soon realizes that she is waiting for someone else and tries, with much difficulty, to tell her the truth.
Perfect Match
by Hailey NorthWhile Not Looking For Mr. Right...Although she vows that she's locked her heart and thrown away the key, ravishing red-headed Lauren Stevens suddenly has several men vying to prove her wrong—and to win the right to set free her passionate self. Button-down banker Oliver Gotho seems like a good candidate, but it's Oliver's sexy brother Alistair who has invited the beautiful, penniless free spirit to share his living space—temporarily, of course. She thinks she should encourage the successful businessman brother, yet is it Alistair with the oh-so-sensual magic touch who holds the key to her happiness?Has She Found Her Perfect Match?Sexy, wise, and charismatic, Alistair has offered Lauren a place to stay out of the goodness of his heart—and certainly not because of her gorgeous eyes, luscious lips and enchanting body. Lauren may entrance him, but it's time for him to find a sensible woman to take to wife. And Lauren, with her penchant for peccadilloes, spells nothing but trouble. But spring is in the balmy New Orleans air, and so is love, as both Lauren and Alistair discover that the heart-pounding perfect match isn't always the one knocking at the door...
Perfect Pie
by Judith ThompsonIn the course of an afternoon's reunion between two long-estranged women, a buried memory, and two teenagers' wild secret, slams into the present. When Patsy invites her old friend Francesca, now a glamourous actress, to her home in Marmora after a thirty-year absence the two women reunite with a certain amount of unease. As the day progresses, we learn how their friendship blossomed in their adolescence and how, on one fateful day, it all ended.
Perfect Set-Up
by Jack SherComedy / 1 m, 2 f / Interior / A public relations man has a lovely wife in Westchester and a girl friend in New York City. When he then discovers his wife is seeing another man, she says she's only practicing his theory of marital freedom. And so our man bounces back and forth between the two ladies. Finally, he returns, contrite, to his wife and learns she's never loved anyone but him. / "Funny,engaging, tender, even poignant." N.Y. World Telegram and Sun.
The Perfect Stage Crew: The Complete Technical Guide for High School, College, and Community Theater
by John KalutaHere is a must-have book for anyone producing a stage show without a Broadway-sized budget. Written by a technical theater veteran, The Perfect Stage Crew explains the pitfalls to avoid and provides solutions to the most common-and the most complex-stage performance problems, even for theaters with a lack of resources. An invaluable guide for middle and high school theaters, college theaters, and community theaters, The Perfect Stage Crew teaches readers how to:Stock, organize, and store the essential backstage suppliesConceptualize, design, and build setsManage a stage crew effectivelyPaint scenery and backdropsTest, design, and hang lightingOperate and repair sound equipmentSet cuesPromote your showThis expanded second edition covers up-to-date technology, including for use with recording, sound, and lighting. Chapters also cover such crucial topics as running technical rehearsals, gathering props, and creating and selling tickets. Theater groups that need to learn the nuts and bolts of putting a show together will discover how to turn backstage workers into The Perfect Stage Crew.Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.
The Perfect Stage Crew: The Compleat Technical Guide for High School, College, and Community Theater
by John KalutaHere is an indispensable, nuts-and-bolts guide to putting on a stunning, low-budget show in less than 40 days! The Perfect Stage Crew explains the pitfalls to avoid and provides solutions to the most common as well as most complex stage performance problems. Readers without Broadway-size budgets and resources will learn the low-cost, low-tech approaches to painting scenery, building sets, hanging lights, setting cues, and operating sound. They'll also find crucial guidance for generating publicity, preparing tickets, technical rehearsals, and more.
Perfect Timing
by Kristi KaneComedy / 4m, 4f / "Effervescent" would be the best adjective to describe this contemporary British drawing room comedy, written by a contemporary non British author. Set in the mad cap household of glamorous and neurotic art critic Cornelia Thorndike, her German maid and her splendidly sane secretary, the comedy bubbles along with a delicious assortment of intruders, passers by, droppers in and long and short term lovers, all of whom invariably bump into each other in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance
by Jon McKenzie'Performance' has become one of the key terms for the new century. But what do we mean by 'performance'? In today's world it can refer to experimental art; productivity in the workplace; and the functionality of technological systems. Do these disparate fields bear any relation to each other?In Perform or Else Jon McKenzie asserts that there is a relationship cultural, organisational, and technological performance. In this theoretical tour de force McKenzie demonstrates that all three paradigms operate together to create powerful and contradictory pressures to 'perform...or else'. This is an urgent and important intervention in contemporary critical thinking. It will profoundly shape our understanding of twenty-first century structures of power and knowledge.
Performance: A Critical Introduction
by Marvin CarlsonThis comprehensively revised, illustrated edition discusses recent performance work and takes into consideration changes that have taken place since the book's original publication in 1996. Marvin Carlson guides the reader through the contested definition of performance as a theatrical activity and the myriad ways in which performance has been interpreted by ethnographers, anthropologists, linguists, and cultural theorists. Topics covered include: *the evolution of performance art since the 1960s *the relationship between performance, postmodernism, the politics of identity, and current cultural studies *the recent theoretical developments in the study of performance in the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and technology. With a fully updated bibliography and additional glossary of terms, students of performance studies, visual and performing arts or theatre history will welcome this new version of a classic text.
Performance: A Critical Introduction
by Marvin CarlsonSince its original publication in 1996, Marvin Carlson's Performance: A Critical Introduction has remained the definitive guide to understanding performance as a theatrical activity. It is an unparalleled exploration of the myriad ways in which performance has been interpreted, its importance to disciplines from anthropology to linguistics, and how it underpins essential concepts of human society. In this comprehensively revised and updated third edition, Carlson tackles the pressing themes and theories of our age, with expanded coverage of : the growth and importance of racial and ethnic performance; the emergence of performance concerned with age and disability; the popularity and significance of participatory and immersive theatre; the crucial relevance of identity politics and cultural performance in the twenty-first century. Also including a fully updated bibliography and glossary, this classic text is an invaluable touchstone for any student of performance studies, theatre history, and the performing and visual arts.
Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, Volume I (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Hanna B. Hölling Jules Pelta Feldman Emilie MagninThis book focuses on performance and performance-based artworks as seenthrough the lens of conservation, which has long been overlooked in the largertheoretical debates about whether and how performance remains. Unraveling the complexities involved in the conservation of performance,Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (vol. 1)brings this new understanding to bear in examining performance as an object ofstudy, experience, acquisition, and care. In so doing, it presents both theoreticalframeworks and functional paradigms for thinking about—and enacting—theconservation of performance. Further, while the conservation of performance isundertheorized, performance is nevertheless increasingly entering the artmarket and the museum, meaning that there is an urgent need for discourse onhow to care for these works long-term. In recent years, a few pioneering conservators,curators, and scholars have begun to create frameworks for the longtermcare of performance. This volume presents, explicates, and contextualizestheir work so that a larger discourse can commence. It will thus serve the needsof conservation students and professors, for whom literature on this subject issorely needed. This interdisciplinary book thus implements a novel rethinking of performancethat will challenge and revitalize its conception in many fields, such as art history,theater, performance studies, heritage studies, and anthropology.
Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, Volume II (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Hanna B. Hölling Jules Pelta Feldman Emilie MagninRepresenting the output of the research project "Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge," this volume brings together diverse voices, methods, and formats in the discussion and practice of performance conservation.Conservators, artists, curators and scholars explore the ontology of performance art through its creation and institutionalization into an astonishing range of methods and approaches for keeping performance alive and well, whether inside museum collections or through folk traditions. Anchored in the disciplines of contemporary art conservation, art history, and performance studies, the contributions range far beyond these to include perspectives from anthropology, musicology, dance, law, heritage studies, and other fields. While its focus is on performance as understood in the context of contemporary art, the book’s notion of performance is much wider, including other media such as music, theater, and dance as well as an open-ended concept of performance as a vital force across culture(s).While providing cutting-edge research on an emerging and important topic, this volume remains accessible to all interested readers, allowing it to serve as a singularly valuable resource for museum professionals, scholars, students, and practitioners.
Performance
by Diana Taylor"Performance" has multiple and often overlapping meanings that signify a wide variety of social behaviors. In this invitation to reflect on the power of performance, Diana Taylor explores many of its uses and iterations: artistic, economic, sexual, political, and technological performance; the performance of everyday life; and the gendered, sexed, and racialized performance of bodies. This book performs its argument. Images and texts interact to show how performance is at once a creative act, a means to comprehend power, a method of transmitting memory and identity, and a way of understanding the world.
The Performance: A Novel
by Claire Thomas'Quietly transformational'The Times 'A tour de force... I can't recommend this too highly'Patrick Gale'Innovative... an original, at-a-sitting read'Daily Mail'A potent meditation on the intensity of women's lives'Charlotte Wood, author of The Weekend'A miracle... Engaging and evocative'Washington Post'I loved and admired The Performance... Unmissable'Emma Stonex, author of The Lamplighters'Lively and intimate... The way Thomas plays with the reader is a sort of genius'Guardian'Thomas writes these women with such wisdom and compassion, that by the end we are all transformed'Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground The false cold of the theatre makes it hard to imagine the heavy wind outside in the real world, the ash air pressing onto the city from the nearby hills where bushfires are taking hold.The house lights lower.The auditorium feels hopeful in the darkness.As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play.Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone.As the performance unfolds, so does each woman's story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage.
Performance Across Chinese Borders (Routledge Contemporary China Series)
by Wei ZhangThis book examines the dynamic intermingling of Asian performance of theatre and dance across the borders of the ancient Silk Road, which connected China with cultures and countries throughout Asia, and beyond.Revealing the dynamic interweaving of cultures between China and its neighbors from the time of the ancient Silk Road to modern times, the book demonstrates how such interweaving has been reflected and embodied in the performance forms and genres of East, South, and Southeast Asia. Through individual explorations of the artistic expressions in these Asian countries, the book reveals the transformative impact of the dissemination and interfusion of religion, beliefs, and cultural practices on the development of performance arts/genres in Asia. The book effectively displays how this robust interfusion across borders left a profound and indelible imprint on the various forms of artistic expression.Representing a succinct analysis of the thousands of years of intercultural cross-fertilization and diffusion across borders of the performing arts in Asia, this book makes an important contribution to transcultural studies in theatre, dance, performance, literature.
Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers (Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development)
by Dan FriedmanThis is the first book length study of performance activism. While Performance Studies recognizes the universality of human performance in daily life, what is specifically under investigation here is performance as an activity intentionally entered into as a means of engaging social issues and conflicts, that is, as an ensemble activity by which we re-construct/transform social reality. Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers provides a global overview of the growing interface of performance with education, therapy, conflict resolution, civic engagement, community development and social justice activism. It combines an historical study of the processes by which, over the course of the 20th Century, performance has been loosened from the institutional constraints of the theatre with a mosaic-like overview of the diverse work/play of contemporary performance activists around the world. Performance Activism will be of interest to theatre and cultural historians, performance practitioners and researchers, psychologists and sociologists, educators and youth workers, community organizers and political activists.
Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Bruce McConachie F. Elizabeth HartThis anthology is the first of its kind. In addition to opening up fresh perspectives on theatre studies – with applications for dramatic criticism, performance analysis, acting practice, audience response, theatre history, and other important areas – the book sets the agenda for future work, helping to map the emergence of this new approach. Following a comprehensive introduction, the contributors examine: the interfaces between cognitive studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis, phenomenology and communication theory different ideas from cognitive studies that open up the meanings of several plays the process of acting and the work of Antonio Damasio theatrical response: the dynamics of perception, and the riots that greeted the 1907 production of The Playboy of the Western World. This original and authoritative work will be attractive to scholars and graduate students of drama, theatre, and performance.
Performance and Cultural Politics
by Elin DiamondPerformance and Cultural Politics is a groundbreaking collection of essays which explore the historical and cultural territories of performance, written by the foremost scholars in the field. The essays, exploring performance art, theatre, music and dance, range from Oscar Wilde to Eric Clapton; from the Rose Theatre to U.S. Holocaust museums. The topic includes: * Sex Play: Stereotype, Pose and Dildo * Grave Performances: The Cultural Politics of Memory * Genealogies: Critical Performances * Identity Politics: Passing, Carnival and the Law In the concluding section, `Performer's Performance', performance artist Robbie McCauley offers the practitioner's perspective on performance studies. Interdisciplinary, thought-provoking and rich in new ideas, Performance and Cultural Politics is a landmark in the emerging field of performance studies.