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Staging Modernist Lives: H.D., Mina Loy, Nancy Cunard, Three Plays and Criticism
by Sasha ColbyThree modernist women, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), Mina Loy (1882-1966), and Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), came to define the interwar avant-garde through their experimental writing and unconventional pursuits. In Staging Modernist Lives, Sasha Colby dramatizes these women’s lives and writing in three new plays that traverse the origins of modernism, Parisian literary circles, two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and race and gender relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Leveraging each writer’s autobiographical materials, the plays explore the work of H.D., Loy, and Cunard as artists, publishers, and activists, their quests for self-definition amid political and historical upheaval, and their development as modernists among mentors, detractors, lovers, and friends including Bryher Ellerman, Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Arthur Cravan, D.H. Lawrence, and Pablo Neruda. Navigating the emerging field of research-creation, Staging Modernist Lives maps the critical terrain for dramatized literary inquiry. Bridging scholarship and creative practice, extant biographical drama and the possibilities of research-theatre, Staging Modernist Lives demonstrates how performance can deliver literary history to new audiences - and how research in turn reinvigorates itself through performance.
Staging Modernist Lives: H.D., Mina Loy, Nancy Cunard, Three Plays and Criticism
by Sasha ColbyThree modernist women, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), Mina Loy (1882-1966), and Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), came to define the interwar avant-garde through their experimental writing and unconventional pursuits. In Staging Modernist Lives, Sasha Colby dramatizes these women’s lives and writing in three new plays that traverse the origins of modernism, Parisian literary circles, two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and race and gender relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Leveraging each writer’s autobiographical materials, the plays explore the work of H.D., Loy, and Cunard as artists, publishers, and activists, their quests for self-definition amid political and historical upheaval, and their development as modernists among mentors, detractors, lovers, and friends including Bryher Ellerman, Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Arthur Cravan, D.H. Lawrence, and Pablo Neruda. Navigating the emerging field of research-creation, Staging Modernist Lives maps the critical terrain for dramatized literary inquiry. Bridging scholarship and creative practice, extant biographical drama and the possibilities of research-theatre, Staging Modernist Lives demonstrates how performance can deliver literary history to new audiences - and how research in turn reinvigorates itself through performance.
Staging A Musical: An Essential Guide (Stage And Costume Ser.)
by Matthew WhiteIn Staging a Musical, Matthew White describes all the elements involved in putting on a musical production, including: how to choose the right show, budgets and schedules, auditions, rehearsals, and performances.
Staging Muslims in Britain: Playwriting, Performance, and Representation (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Önder ÇakırtaşThis scholarly volume delves into the manner in which British Muslims articulate their cultural, social and religious identities through theatrical productions in 21st-century Britain and examines their portrayal within these performances.The study investigates the factors influencing the emergence and evolution of Islamic theatre in Britain, providing an in-depth analysis of plays by British playwrights of both Muslim and non-Muslim origins that have shaped the trajectory of British Islamic theatre from the late 20th century to the present. Önder Çakırtaş critically examines how British playwrights, predominantly of Muslim origin but also including some of non-Muslim origin, depict Muslim identity and culture from their unique perspectives, particularly in the context of post-9/11 society. Adopting a comprehensive approach to Islamic playwriting and performance, this book highlights the accomplishments and contributions of contemporary British playwrights, primarily from Muslim backgrounds.This study will be of significant interest to scholars and students in theatre studies, as well as related disciplines such as Islamic studies, sociology and political science.
Staging "The Mysterious Mother" (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)
by Cynthia E. Roman, Jill Campbell, and Jonathan KramnickThe first book-length study of Horace Walpole&’s scandalous The Mysterious Mother, including critical essays, an abridged script, and a facsimile edition Horace Walpole&’s five-act tragedy The Mysterious Mother (1768), a sensational tale of incest and intrigue, was initially circulated only among the author&’s friends. Walpole never permitted it to be performed during his lifetime except as a private theatrical. He described his play as a &“delicious entertainment for the closet&” and claimed that he &“did not think it would do for the stage.&” Yet the essays in this volume trace a history of private readings, amateur theatricals, and even early public performances, demonstrating that the play was read and performed more than Walpole&’s protests suggest. Exploring a wide variety of topics—including the play&’s crypto-Catholicism, its treatments of incest, guilt, motherhood, orphans, and scientific spectacle, and the complex relations between print and performance—the essays demonstrate the rich relevance of The Mysterious Mother to current critical discussions. The volume includes the proceedings of a mini-conference hosted at Yale University in 2018 on the occasion of a staged reading of the play. Also included are the director&’s reflections, an abridged script, a facsimile of Walpole&’s own copy of the full-length play, and reproductions of the illustrations he commissioned from Lady Diana Beauclerk.
Staging Personhood: Costuming in Early Qing Drama
by Guojun WangAfter toppling the Ming dynasty, the Qing conquerors forced Han Chinese males to adopt Manchu hairstyle and clothing. Yet China’s new rulers tolerated the use of traditional Chinese attire in performances, making theater one of the only areas of life where Han garments could still be seen and where Manchu rule could be contested.Staging Personhood uncovers a hidden history of the Ming–Qing transition by exploring what it meant for the clothing of a deposed dynasty to survive onstage. Reading dramatic works against Qing sartorial regulations, Guojun Wang offers an interdisciplinary lens on the entanglements between Chinese drama and nascent Manchu rule in seventeenth-century China. He reveals not just how political and ethnic conflicts shaped theatrical costuming but also the ways costuming enabled different modes of identity negotiation during the dynastic transition. In case studies of theatrical texts and performances, Wang considers clothing and costumes as indices of changing ethnic and gender identities. He contends that theatrical costuming provided a productive way to reconnect bodies, clothes, and identities disrupted by political turmoil. Through careful attention to a variety of canonical and lesser-known plays, visual and performance records, and historical documents, Staging Personhood provides a pathbreaking perspective on the cultural dynamics of early Qing China.
Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy
by David Krasner David Z. SaltzScholars of drama, philosophy, and literature apply insights from current philosophical theories to performance theory. Writing for non-specialists in the philosophy of performance, they consider such topics as critical realism and performance strategies, the ontology of presence reconsidered, and the Black arts movement and logo-centrism. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc. , Portland, OR (booknews. com)
Staging Power in Tudor and Stuart English History Plays: History, Political Thought, and the Redefinition of Sovereignty
by Kristin M.S. BezioStaging Power in Tudor and Stuart English History Plays examines the changing ideological conceptions of sovereignty and their on-stage representations in the public theaters during the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods (1580-1642). The study examines the way in which the early modern stage presented a critical dialogue concerning the nature of sovereignty through the lens of specifically English history, focusing in particular on the presentation and representation of monarchy. It presents the subgenre of the English history play as a specific reaction to the surrounding political context capable of engaging with and influencing popular and elite conceptions of monarchy and government. This project is the first of its kind to specifically situate the early modern debate on sovereignty within a 'popular culture' dramatic context; its purpose is not only to provide an historical timeline of English political theory pertaining to monarchy, but to situate the drama as a significant influence on the production and dissemination thereof during the Tudor and Stuart periods. Some of the plays considered here, notably those by Shakespeare and Marlowe, have been extensively and thoroughly studied. But others-such as Edmund Ironside, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and King John and Matilda-have not previously been the focus of much critical attention.
Staging Prison Theatre in Canada: Setting the Spotlight on William Head on Stage
by Mme Thana Ridha Professeure Sylvie FrigonFor over forty years, William Head on Stage (WHoS) has operated as an inmate-run prison theatre, making it one of Canada’s longest-standing prison arts initiatives.Staging Prison Theatre in Canada: Setting the Spotlight on William Head on Stage delves into the story of WHoS through the voices of the men involved, offering a unique criminological perspective that situates their experiences within the prison context.The analysis explores how WHoS creates an alternative space within the social and emotional realities of incarceration. By unlocking participants’ capacities, skills, and confidence, the initiative fosters a sense of agency and community both inside the prison and beyond. WHoS becomes a space for transformation, offering men opportunities to re-imagine themselves and build meaningful connections.This work underscores the broader significance of arts-based initiatives like WHoS, not only within prisons but also in the fields of criminology, theatre, and community engagement. It offers valuable insights for correctional administrators, criminologists, theatre practitioners, scholars, students, and anyone interested in the intersection of art and rehabilitation.
Staging Rebellion in the Musical, Hair: Marginalised Voices in Musical Theatre (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Sarah Elisabeth BrowneThis volume provides a comprehensive survey of the musical Hair and will offer critical analysis which focuses on giving voice to those who are historically considered to be on the margins of musical theatre history. Sarah Browne interrogates key scenes from the musical which will seek to identify the relationship between performance and the cultural moment. Whilst it is widely acknowledged that Hair is a product of the sixties counter-culture, this study will place the analysis in its socio-historical context to specifically reveal American values towards race, gender, and adolescence. In arguing that Hair is a rebellion against the established normative values of both American society and the art form of the musical itself, this book will suggest ways in which Hair can be considered utopian: not only as a utopian ‘text’ but in the practices and values it embodies, and the emotions it generates in its audiences. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of music, musical theatre, popular music, American studies, film studies, gender studies, or African American studies.
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.
Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre (Transdisciplinary Souths)
by Amina ElHalawaniThe book explores how theatre, with its performative capacity, has the power to engage with and affect the politics of its day. It sets the stage for the reader to discover the revolutionary traditions of Egyptian and Irish theatre, very distinct in their histories and cultures, and understand their enduring relevance in today’s world. The volume takes Ireland as a case study of the interplay between cultural nationalism and politically engaged theatre and compares it to the role of the theatre in Egypt during its Golden era in the 1960s.Through a selection of Egyptian plays by Tawfiq al-Hakim, Mikhail Roman, Yusuf Idris, and Salah Abdul-Saboor, alongside Irish plays by Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Christina Reid, and Samuel Beckett, it maps the political aesthetics of unsteady times and seemingly disparate places to reflect on the dynamics of revolt as a staged act in and of itself. Further, the book examines how playwrights from both nations have engaged with theatre as a medium, focusing on how their contemplations, hesitations, frustrations, and protest have been translated onto the stage in their various plays, and comprehends the transformative role the theatre has always played in politics in shaping history across time and space.Bridging together discussions on transnational modernisms with nuanced cultural histories of protest, this critical work will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary studies, identity politics, cultural studies, theatre and performance studies, and political studies.
Staging Science: Scientific Performance on Street, Stage and Screen (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine)
by Martin WillisThis book considers scientific performances across two centuries, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Performances include demonstrations of technologies, experiments that look like theatre, theatre that looks like science, tourist representations and natural history film-making. Its key aim is to open debate on how scientific activity, both historical and contemporary, might be understood in the context of performance studies and the imaginative acts required to stage engaging performances.Scientific performances have become increasingly of interest to historians of science, literature and science scholars, and in the field of science studies. As yet, however, no work has sought to examine a range of scientific performances with the aim of interrogating and illuminating the kinds of critical and theoretical practices that might be employed to engage with them. With scientific performance likely to become ever more central to scholarly study in the next few years this volume offer a timely, and early, intervention in the existing debates, and aims, too, to be a touchstone for future work.
Staging Sex: Best Practices, Tools, and Techniques for Theatrical Intimacy
by Chelsea PaceStaging Sex lays out a comprehensive, practical solution for staging intimacy, nudity, and sexual violence. This book takes theatre practitioners step-by-step through the best practices, tools, and techniques for crafting effective theatrical intimacy. After an overview of the challenges directors face when staging theatrical intimacy, Staging Sex offers practical solutions and exercises, provides a system for establishing and discussing boundaries, and suggests efficient and effective language for staging intimacy and sexual violence. It also addresses production and classroom specific concerns and provides guidance for creating a culture of consent in any company or department. Written for directors, choreographers, movement coaches, stage managers, production managers, professional actors, and students of acting courses, Staging Sex is an essential tool for theatre practitioners who encounter theatrical intimacy or instructional touch, whether in rehearsal or in the classroom.
Staging Shakespearean Theatre: The Essential Guide to Selecting, Interpreting, Producing and Directing Shakespe are
by Elaine NovakFrom auditions and rehearsals to publicity, this guide leads even inexperienced directors, producers, choreographers and actors through the complicated and sometimes fearsome task of staking Shakespeare. Comprehensive information is presented in a browsable format including historical background of the Elizabeth period, descriptions of major plays, a glossary of terms, suggestions for modern interpretations, step-by-step instruction for choreographing fight scenes, and a full treatment of Romeo & Juliet
Staging Shakespeare's Violence: My Cue to Fight, Domestic Fury
by Seth DuerrThis is the first book of its kind to provide an in-depth examination of how the greatest playwright in the English language employed not only psychological brutality but also physical violence throughout his works.My Cue to Fight is the first book of its kind to provide an in-depth examination of how the greatest playwright in the English language employed not only psychological brutality but also physical violence throughout his works. Written ideally for theatrical stage directors, fight directors, intimacy consultants, and actors as a technical scene-by-scene breakdown in staging combat during production of these plays, this publication is also for Shakespeare enthusiasts who want to learn more about the blood, sweat, and viscera hidden just underneath the poetry. A writer utilizes violence, like song or dance, in moments where the story requires more than just words. But addressing how the violence will be staged tends either to be neglected or utterly gratuitous, both of which serve to separate the audience from the story and kill the whole venture. The answer rests in approaching violence the same way we do scenework. The plays of William Shakespeare seek to engage audiences with all of the characters’ blood, tears, sweat, and guts. These works are not flowery poems meant to be mumbled in a classroom, or histrionically declaimed in frilly costumes. There is nothing light and fluffy about 'rape' and 'murder’s rages', or 'carving' someone as a dish fit for the gods, or fighting till from one’s bones one’s 'flesh be hacked'. Making matters more complicated is the ambiguity and sometimes even complete lack of stage directions. Modern texts typically possess clear directions whenever violence is to occur in the action, but playscripts were quite different four centuries ago. Such denotations were both rare and inconsistent in Elizabethan and Jacobean printings. The potential violence we will examine is not appropriate for all productions or scene partners. We’re here to question and inspire rather than provide catch-all solutions. Actors, directors, fight directors, and intimacy consultants must work together to find the most effective way for their production to communicate the playwright’s story to the audience.
Staging The Slums, Slumming The Stage
by J. Chris WestgateDrawing on traditional archival research, reception theory, cultural histories of slumming, and recent work in critical theory on literary representations of poverty, Westgate argues that the productions of slum plays served as enactments of the emergent definitions of the slum and the corresponding ethical obligations involved therein.
Staging Strangers: Theatre and Global Ethics
by Barry FreemanTwenty-first-century media and political discourse sometimes makes "strangers" - refugees, immigrants, minorities - the scapegoats for social and economic disorder. In this heated climate, theatre has the potential to promote greater compassion and empathy for outsiders. A study of cultural difference in contemporary Canadian theatre, Staging Strangers considers how theatre facilitates an understanding of distant places and issues. Theatre in Canada, and especially in Toronto, has long been a place for communities to celebrate their traditions, but it is now emerging as a forum for staging stories that stretch beyond the local and the national. Combining archival research and performance analysis, Barry Freeman analyzes the possibilities and hazards of representing strangers, and the many ways the stranger on stage may be fetishized or domesticated, marked for assimilation, or turned into an object of fear. A fresh look at ways to cultivate ethical responsibility for global issues, Staging Strangers imagines a role for theatre in creating a more tolerant, caring, and cooperative world.
Staging Strangers: Theatre and Global Ethics
by Barry FreemanTwenty-first-century media and political discourse sometimes makes "strangers" - refugees, immigrants, minorities - the scapegoats for social and economic disorder. In this heated climate, theatre has the potential to promote greater compassion and empathy for outsiders. A study of cultural difference in contemporary Canadian theatre, Staging Strangers considers how theatre facilitates an understanding of distant places and issues. Theatre in Canada, and especially in Toronto, has long been a place for communities to celebrate their traditions, but it is now emerging as a forum for staging stories that stretch beyond the local and the national. Combining archival research and performance analysis, Barry Freeman analyzes the possibilities and hazards of representing strangers, and the many ways the stranger on stage may be fetishized or domesticated, marked for assimilation, or turned into an object of fear. A fresh look at ways to cultivate ethical responsibility for global issues, Staging Strangers imagines a role for theatre in creating a more tolerant, caring, and cooperative world.
Staging Strife
by Magdalena Kazubowski-HoustonConcerned with traditional power imbalances between researchers and participants, contemporary social science has begun using collaborative research as an empowering methodology that involves participants in key decisions. Collaborative research is a potentially revolutionary method for studying people and their cultures, but does it work in practice? Staging Strife looks at the limits of this methodology by examining a politically charged theatre performance undertaken with a group of Roma women in Poland. Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston describes a production she co-wrote and co-directed using collaborative methods. She had hoped this would result in more equitable research and raise community awareness about the violence and racism Roma women face. Instead, she found herself embroiled in ethically questionable power games in order to salvage the production. Staging Strife is the result of a painful re-examination of the experience, her motives as a researcher, and a long-overdue critique of collaborative research. Disarmingly honest, this exploration of innovative theatre techniques and social science methodologies will lead anthropologists to rethink the ways in which they work.
Staging Strife: Lessons from Performing Ethnography with Polish Roma Women (ISSN)
by Magdalena Kazubowski-HoustonConcerned with traditional power imbalances between researchers and participants, contemporary social science has begun using collaborative research as an empowering methodology that involves participants in key decisions. Collaborative research is a potentially revolutionary method for studying people and their cultures, but does it work in practice? Staging Strife looks at the limits of this methodology by examining a politically charged theatre performance undertaken with a group of Roma women in Poland.
Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theater (Studies In Performance And Early Modern Drama)
by Sara Morrison Deborah UmanOffering the first sustained and comprehensive scholarly consideration of the dramatic potential of the blazon, this volume complicates what has become a standard reading of the Petrarchan convention of dismembering the beloved through poetic description. At the same time, it contributes to a growing understanding of the relationship between the material conditions of theater and interpretations of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The chapters in this collection are organized into five thematic parts emphasizing the conventions of theater that compel us to consider bodies as both literally present and figuratively represented through languge. The first part addresses the dramatic blazon as used within the conventions of courtly love. Examining the classical roots of the Petrarchan blazon, the next part explores the violent eroticism of a poetic technique rooted in Ovidian notions of metamorphosis. With similar attention paid to brutality, the third part analyzes the representation of blazonic dismemberment on stage and screen. Figurative battles become real in the fourth part, which addresses the frequent blazons surfacing in historical and political plays. The final part moves to the role of audience, analyzing the role of the observer in containing the identity of the blazoned woman as well as her attempts to resist becoming an objectified spectacle.
Staging the Ottoman Turk: British Drama, 1656–1792
by Esin AkalınIn the wake of the fear that gripped Europe after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, English dramatists, like their continental counterparts, began representing the Ottoman Turks in plays inspired by historical events. The Ottoman milieu as a dramatic setting provided English audiences with a common experience of fascination and fear of the Other. The stereotyping of the Turks in these plays—revolving around complex themes such as tyranny, captivity, war, and conquests—arose from their perception of Islam. The Ottomans' failure in the second siege of Vienna in 1683 led to the reversal of trends in the representation of the Turks on stage. As the ascending strength of a web of European alliances began to check Ottoman expansion, what then began to dazzle the aesthetic imagination of eighteenth century England was the sultan's seraglio with images of extravaganza and decadence. In this book, Esin Akalin draws upon a selective range of seventeenth and eighteenth century plays to reach an understanding, both from a non-European perspective and Western standpoint, how one culture represents the other through discourse, historiography, and drama. The book explores a cluster of issues revolving around identity and difference in terms of history, ideology, and the politics of representation. In contextualizing political, cultural, and intellectual roots in the ideology of representing the Ottoman/Muslim as the West's Other, the author tackles with the questions of how history serves literature and to what extent literature creates history.
Staging the Past in the Age of Thatcher: The History We Haven't Had (Palgrave Studies In Theatre And Performance History Ser.)
by Anthony P. PenninoThis book investigates how the British theatrical community offered an alternative and oppositional historical narrative to the heritage culture promulgated by the Thatcher and Major Governments in the 1980s and early 1990s. It details the challenges the theatre faced, especially reductions in government funding, and examines seminal playwrights of the period – including but not limited to Caryl Churchill, Howard Brenton, Sarah Daniels, David Edgar, and Brian Friel – who dramatized a more inclusive vision of history that gave voice to traditionally marginalized communities. It employs James Baldwin’s concept of witnessing as the means by which history could be deployed to articulate an alternative and emergent political narrative: “the history we haven’t had”. This book will appeal to students and scholars of theatre and cultural studies as well as theatre practitioners and enthusiasts.
Staging the Peninsular War: English Theatres 1807-1815
by Susan ValladaresFrom Napoleon's invasion of Portugal in 1807 to his final defeat at Waterloo, the English theatres played a crucial role in the mediation of the Peninsular campaign. In the first in-depth study of English theatre during the Peninsular War, Susan Valladares contextualizes the theatrical treatment of the war within the larger political and ideological axes of Romantic performance. Exploring the role of spectacle in the mediation of war and the links between theatrical productions and print culture, she argues that the popularity of theatre-going and the improvisation and topicality unique to dramatic performance make the theatre an ideal lens for studying the construction of the Peninsular War in the public domain. Without simplifying the complex issues involved in the study of citizenship, communal identities, and ideological investments, Valladares recovers a wartime theatre that helped celebrate military engagements, reform political sympathies, and register the public’s complex relationship with Britain’s military campaign in the Iberian Peninsula. From its nuanced reading of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Pizarro (1799), to its accounts of wartime productions of Shakespeare, description of performances at the minor theatres, and detailed case study of dramatic culture in Bristol, Valladares’s book reveals how theatrical entertainments reflected and helped shape public feeling on the Peninsular campaign.