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Theatre and Boxing: The Actor who Flies (Routledge Icarus)

by Franco Ruffini

Theatre and Boxing focuses on a problem which is of paramount importance for any theatre practitioner and researcher: the actor’s believable body. This problem has been taken up by Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Artaud, Brecht, Decroux, Copeau, Grotowski, and many others. It is an essential hurdle for all who practice the theatrical craft or want to study it theoretically. This hurdle can be considered one of the foundations of theatre science and of the relationship between technique, politics and ethics. This book tells the story of a revolution in the work of the actor in the early- and mid-20th century, a period in which the focus of theatrical interest shifted from the emotions to the body. The actor’s body became a tool for purveying a dynamic set of actions which often transformed the very actor himself. This new centrality of the body also drew attention to those places in which the body is central: the gym, the boxing ring and the circus with its trapezes and tightropes became, together with the stage, laboratories for the theatre. Thus, in addition to the reformers of the theatre the pages of this book are filled with boxers, acrobats, gymnasts and wrestlers, pursuers of an utopia: the "actor who flies".

Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England, 1650-1737: From Leviathan to Licensing Act

by Catie Gill

Framed by the publication of Leviathan and the 1713 Licensing Act, this collection provides analysis of both canonical and non-canonical texts within the scope of an eighty-year period of theatre history, allowing for definition and assessment that uncouples Restoration drama from eighteenth-century drama. Individual essays demonstrate the significant contrasts between the theatre of different decades and the context of performance, paying special attention to the literary innovation and socio-political changes that contributed to the evolution of drama. Exploring the developments in both tragedy and comedy, and in literary production, specific topics include the playwright's relationship to the monarch, women writers' connection to the audience, the changing market for plays, and the rise of the bourgeoisie. This collection also examines aspects of gender and class through the exploration of women's impact on performance and production, masculinity and libertinism, master/servant relationships, and dramatic representations of the coffee house. Accompanied by a list of Spanish-English plays and a chronology of monarch's reigns and significant changes in theatre history, From Leviathan to Licensing Act is a valuable tool for scholars of Restoration and eighteenth-century performance, providing groundwork for future research and investigation.

Theatre and Dictatorship in the Luso-Hispanic World (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

by Diego Sánchez

Theatre and Dictatorship in the Luso-Hispanic World explores the discourses that have linked theatrical performance and prevailing dictatorial regimes across Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. These are divided into three different approaches to theatre itself - as cultural practice, as performance, and as textual artifact - addressing topics including obedience, resistance, authoritarian policies, theatre business, exile, violence, memory, trauma, nationalism, and postcolonialism. This book draws together a diverse range of methodological approaches to foreground the effects and constraints of dictatorship on theatrical expression and how theatre responds to these impositions.

Theatre and Event

by Adrian Kear

Theatre and Event: Staging the European Century, examines how, in these first decades of the twenty-first century, contemporary European theatre-makers have sought to consider the disastrous events of the twentieth century as the 'unfinished business' of the contemporary. Kear argues that by thinking through the logic of the event, and the theatre event especially, contemporary performance practice enables an affective interrogation of 'the event' of the European century. Examining the work of leading theatre companies, Theatre and Event: Staging the European Century offers detailed expositions and engaged analyses of key works by Needcompany (Belgium), Jaunais Rigas Teatris (Latvia), Societas Raffaello Sanzio (Italy), National Theatre Wales (UK), and Studios Kabako (France/Democratic Republic of the Congo). This book offers an original conception of the theatre event as an event which exists in relation to, and performatively historicises, other 'events', requiring a critical and creative practice of spectatorship to animate its political affects. "

Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance

by Alan Read

Alan Read asserts that there is no split between the practice and theory of theatre, but a divide between the written and the unwritten. In this revealing book, he sets out to retrieve the theatre of spontaneity and tactics, which grows out of the experience of everyday life. It is a theatre which defines itself in terms of people and places rather than the idealised empty space of avant garde performance. Read examines the relationship between an ethics of performance, a politics of place and a poetics of the urban environment. His book is a persuasive demand for a critical theory of theatre which is as mentally supple as theatre is physically versatile.

Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett

by Shepherd-Barr Kirsten

Reveals the deep, transformative entanglement among science, art, and culture in modern times

Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett

by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr

Evolutionary theory made its stage debut as early as the 1840s, reflecting a scientific advancement that was fast changing the world. Tracing this development in dozens of mainstream European and American plays, as well as in circus, vaudeville, pantomime, and "missing link" performances, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett reveals the deep, transformative entanglement among science, art, and culture in modern times.The stage proved to be no mere handmaiden to evolutionary science, though, often resisting and altering the ideas at its core. Many dramatists cast suspicion on the arguments of evolutionary theory and rejected its claims, even as they entertained its thrilling possibilities. Engaging directly with the relation of science and culture, this book considers the influence of not only Darwin but also Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, Wallace, Haeckel, de Vries, and other evolutionists on 150 years of theater. It shares significant new insights into the work of Ibsen, Shaw, Wilder, and Beckett, and writes female playwrights, such as Susan Glaspell and Elizabeth Baker, into the theatrical record, unpacking their dramatic explorations of biological determinism, gender essentialism, the maternal instinct, and the "cult of motherhood."It is likely that more people encountered evolution at the theater than through any other art form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Considering the liveliness and immediacy of the theater and its reliance on a diverse community of spectators and the power that entails, this book is a key text for grasping the extent of the public's adaptation to the new theory and the legacy of its representation on the perceived legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of scientific work.

Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity

by M. Luckhurst E. Morin

Theatre and Ghosts brings theatre and performance history into dialogue with the flourishing field of spectrality studies. Essays examine the histories and economies of the material operations of theatre, and the spectrality of performance and performer.

Theatre and Ghosts

by Mary Luckhurst

Theatre and Ghosts brings theatre and performance history into dialogue with the flourishing field of spectrality studies. Essays examine the histories and economies of the material operations of theatre, and the spectrality of performance and performer.

Theatre and Global Development: Performing Partnerships

by Bobby Smith

How do theatre and development partnerships operate? What issues impede collaborations between various institutions and individuals? Why do relations between global North and South partners often fail to reflect important values such as equality, reciprocity and mutual benefit? This is the first book to examine theatre and global development partnerships. It focusses on the UK and East African countries of Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, presenting the author’s own experiences, case study analyses and perspectives from practitioners and scholars involved in theatre and development. It argues that simplistic binaries pervade partnerships, whereby the global North is regarded as ‘modern’ and ‘developed’ versus the ‘under-developed’ global South. This results in unequal power relations between collaborators, less effective projects with communities, and a lack of reciprocity and mutual benefit. Consequently, this book revitalises how we conceptualise partnerships. Issues such as widening inequalities, conflict, health and the climate crisis impact all countries. How, then, can we work across borders to support interconnected learning and action on these challenges? In this regard, principles of solidarity and mutual responsibility, as well as critical openness, enable us to reflect honestly about the failures of the partnerships we participate in and move beyond simplistic binaries of global North and South. The book is of importance to applied and socially engaged performance scholars and practitioners, and to development workers interested in arts and social change.

Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500–1900: Democracy, Disorder and the State

by Tony Fisher

This book begins with a simple observation - that just as the theatre resurfaced during the late Renaissance, so too government as we understand it today also began to appear. Their mutually entwining history was to have a profound influence on the development of the modern British stage. This volume proposes a new reading of theatre's relation to the public sphere. Employing a series of historical case studies drawn from the London theatre, Tony Fisher shows why the stage was of such great concern to government by offering close readings of well-known religious, moral, political, economic and legal disputes over the role, purpose and function of the stage in the 'well-ordered society'. In framing these disputes in relation to what Michel Foucault called the emerging 'art of government', this book draws out - for the first time - a full genealogy of the governmental 'discourse on the theatre'.

Theatre and Human Rights: The Politics of Dramatic Form (ISSN)

by Gary M. English

This book develops theoretical intersections between theatre and human rights and provides methodologies to investigate human rights questions from within the perspective of theatre as a complex set of disciplines.While human rights research and programming often employ the arts as representations of human rights-related violations and abuses, this study focuses on dramatic form and structure, in addition to content, as uniquely positioned to interrogate important questions in human rights theory and practice. This project positions theatre as a method of examination in addition to the important purposes the arts serve to raise consciousness that accompany other, often considered more primary modes of analysis. A main feature of this approach includes emphasis on dialectical structures in drama and human rights and integration of applied theatre and critical ethnography with more traditional theatre. This integration will demonstrate how theatre and human rights operates beyond the arts as representation model, offering a primary means of analysis, activism, and political discourse.This book will be of great interest to theatre and human rights practitioners and activists, scholars, and students.

Theatre and Human Rights after 1945: Things Unspeakable

by Mary Luckhurst Emilie Morin

This volume investigates the rise of human rights discourses manifested in the global spectrum of theatre and performance since 1945. Essays address topics such as disability, discrimination indigenous rights, torture, gender violence, genocide and elder abuse.

Theatre and Human Rights after 1945: Things Unspeakable

by Mary Luckhurst Emilie Morin

This volume investigates the rise of human rights discourses manifested in the global spectrum of theatre and performance since 1945. Essays address topics such as disability, discrimination indigenous rights, torture, gender violence, genocide and elder abuse.

Theatre and Internationalization: Perspectives from Australia, Germany, and Beyond

by Ulrike Garde John R. Severn

Theatre and Internationalization examines how internationalization affects the processes and aesthetics of theatre, and how this art form responds dramatically and thematically to internationalization beyond the stage. With central examples drawn from Australia and Germany from the 1930s to the present day, the book considers theatre and internationalization through a range of theoretical lenses and methodological practices, including archival research, aviation history, theatre historiography, arts policy, organizational theory, language analysis, academic-practitioner insights, and literary-textual studies. While drawing attention to the ways in which theatre and internationalization might be contributing productively to each other and to the communities in which they operate, it also acknowledges the limits and problematic aspects of internationalization. Taking an unusually wide approach to theatre, the book includes chapters by specialists in popular commercial theatre, disability theatre, Indigenous performance, theatre by and for refugees and other migrants, young people as performers, opera and operetta, and spoken art theatre. An excellent resource for academics and students of theatre and performance studies, especially in the fields of spoken theatre, opera and operetta studies, and migrant theatre, Theatre and Internationalization explores how theatre shapes and is shaped by international flows of people, funds, practices, and works.

Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946: Sounding Modernities (Transnational Theatre Histories)

by MeLê Yamomo

This book examines the intersection between sound and modernity in dramatic and musical performance in Manila and the Asia-Pacific between 1869 and 1948. During this period, tolerant political regimes resulted in the globalization of capitalist relations and the improvement of transcontinental travel and worldwide communication. This allowed modern modes of theatre and music consumption to instigate the uniformization of cultural products and processes, while simultaneously fragmenting societies into distinct identities, institutions, and nascent nation-states.Taking the performing bodies of migrant musicians as the locus of sound, this book argues that the global movement of acoustic modernities was replicated and diversified through its multiple subjectivities within empire, nation, and individual agencies. It traces the arrival of European travelling music and theatre companies in Asia which re-casted listening into an act of modern cultural consumption, and follows the migration of Manila musicians as they engaged in the modernization project of the neighboring Asian cities.

Theatre and National Identity: Re-Imagining Conceptions of Nation (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

by Nadine Holdsworth

This book explores the ways that pre-existing ‘national’ works or ‘national theatre’ sites can offer a rich source of material for speaking to the contemporary moment because of the resonances or associations they offer of a different time, place, politics, or culture. Featuring a broad international scope, it offers a series of thought-provoking essays that explore how playwrights, directors, theatre-makers, and performance artists have re-staged or re-worked a classic national play, performance, theatrical form, or theatre space in order to engage with conceptions of and questions around the nation, nationalism, and national identity in the contemporary moment, opening up new ways of thinking about or problematizing questions around the nation and national identity. Chapters ask how productions engage with a particular moment in the national psyche in the context of internationalism and globalization, for example, as well as how productions explore the interconnectivity of nations, intercultural agendas, or cosmopolitanism. They also explore questions relating to the presence of migrants, exiles, or refugees, and the legacy of colonial histories and post-colonial subjectivities. The volume highlights how theatre and performance has the ability to contest and unsettle ideas of the nation and national identity through the use of various sites, stagings, and performance strategies, and how contemporary theatres have portrayed national agendas and characters at a time of intense cultural flux and repositioning.

Theatre and National Identity in Colonial India: Formation Of A Community Through Cultural Practice

by Sharmistha Saha

This book critically engages with the study of theatre and performance in colonial India, and relates it with colonial (and postcolonial) discussions on experience, freedom, institution-building, modernity, nation/subject not only as concepts but also as philosophical queries. It opens up with the discourse around ‘Indian theatre’ that was started by the orientalists in the late 18th century, and which continued till much later. The study specifically focuses on the two major urban centres of colonial India: Bombay and Calcutta of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It discusses different cultural practices in colonial India, including the initiation of ‘Indian theatre’ practices, which resulted in many forms of colonial-native ‘theatre’ by the 19th century; the challenges to this dominant discourse from the ‘swadeshi jatra’ (national jatra/theatre) in Bengal, which drew upon earlier folk and religious traditions and was used as a tool by the nationalist movement; and the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) that functioned from Bombay around the 1940s, which focused on the creation of one national subject – that of the ‘Indian’. The author contextualizes the relevance of the concept of ‘Indian theatre’ in today’s political atmosphere. She also critically analyses the post-Independence Drama Seminar organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in 1956 and its relevance to the subsequent organization of ‘Indian theatre’. Many theatre personalities who emerged as faces of smaller theatre committees were part of the seminar which envisioned a national cultural body. This book is an important contribution to the field and is of interest to researchers and students of cultural studies, especially Theatre and Performance Studies, and South Asian Studies.

Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography

by Jane Collins Andrew Nisbet

Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography is an essential resource for those interested in the visual composition of performance and related scenographic practices. Theatre and performance studies, cultural theory, fine art, philosophy and the social sciences are brought together in one volume to examine the principle forces that inform understanding of theatre and performance design. The volume is organised thematically in five sections: looking, the experience of seeing space and place the designer: the scenographic bodies in space making meaning This major collection of key writings provides a much needed critical and contextual framework for the analysis of theatre and performance design. By locating this study within the broader field of scenography – the term increasingly used to describe a more integrated reading of performance – this unique anthology recognises the role played by all the elements of production in the creation of meaning. Contributors include Josef Svoboda, Richard Foreman, Roland Barthes, Oscar Schlemmer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richard Schechner, Jonathan Crary, Elizabeth Wilson, Henri Lefebvre, Adolph Appia and Herbert Blau.

Theatre and Performance in Contemporary Scotland

by Trish Reid

This textbook offers a detailed and expansive account of theatre and performance in contemporary Scotland. It considers the underlying historical and cultural developments that have enabled the recent renaissance in Scottish theatre and the emergence of playwrights of international standing, such as David Greig, Zinnie Harris, David Harrower and Rona Munro as well as companies of significant international note. Some prominence is given to the National Theatre of Scotland, which was established in 2004 in the aftermath of Scottish devolution, and which has become a key organization in the creating and dissemination – nationally and internationally – of Scottish theatre and performance. The book aims to capture the diversity and eclecticism of Scotland’s contemporary performance culture by examining work across a spectrum from children’s theatre, community theatre, mainstream theatre for adult audiences and live and performance art.

Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: From Simulation to Embeddedness (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

by Matthew Causey

Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture examines the recent history of advanced technologies, including new media, virtual environments, weapons systems and medical innovation, and considers how theatre, performance and culture at large have evolved within those systems. The book examines the two Iraq wars, 9/11 and the War on Terror through the lens of performance studies, and, drawing on the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Martin Heidegger, alongside the dramas of Beckett, Genet and Shakespeare, and the theatre of the Kantor, Foreman, Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio and the Wooster Group, the book positions theatre and performance in technoculture and articulates the processes of aesthetics, metaphysics and politics. This wide-ranging study reflects on how the theatre and performance have been challenged and extended within these new cultural phenomena.

Theatre and Performance in East Africa

by Osita Okagbue Samuel Kasule

Theatre and Performance in East Africa looks at indigenous performances to unearth the aesthetic principles, sensibilities and critical framework that underpin African performance and theatre. The book develops new paradigms for thinking about African performance in general through the construction of a critical framework that addresses questions concerning performance particularities and coherences, challenging previous understandings. To this end, it establishes a common critical and theoretical framework for indigenous performance using case studies from East Africa that are also reflected elsewhere in the continent. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and performance, especially those with an interest in the close relationship between theatre and performance with culture.

Theatre and Performing Arts Collections

by Lee Ash

Here is an exciting book that provides detailed descriptions of dozens of the most important and unique collections of “theatricana” in the United States and Canada. In Theatre and Performing Arts Collections, distinguished theatre specialists, librarians, and curators describe the unique possessions of the best and largest collections in theatre and performing arts. Each chapter provides detailed descriptions of the collections, as well as important notes about their history--information that is not available in any other source!

Theatre and Postcolonial Desires (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies #No.1)

by Awam Amkpa

This book explores the themes of colonial encounters and postcolonial contests over identity, power and culture through the prism of theatre. The struggles it describes unfolded in two cultural settings separated by geography, but bound by history in a common web of colonial relations spun by the imperatives of European modernity. In post-imperial England, as in its former colony Nigeria, the colonial experience not only hybridized the process of national self-definition, but also provided dramatists with the language, imagery and frame of reference to narrate the dynamics of internal wars over culture and national destiny happening within their own societies. The author examines the works of prominent twentieth-century Nigerian and English dramatists such as Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan, Davd Edgar and Caryl Churchill to argue that dramaturgies of resistance in the contexts of both Nigerian as well as its imperial inventor England, shared a common allegiance to what he describes as postcolonial desires. That is, the aspiration to overcome the legacies of colonialism by imagining alternative universes anchored in democratic cultural pluralism. The plays and their histories serve as filters through which Ampka illustrates the operation of what he calls 'overlapping modernities' and reconfigures the notions of power and representation, citizenship and subjectivity, colonial and anticolonial nationalisms and postcoloniality. The dramatic works studied in this book embodied a version of postcolonial aspirations that the author conceptualises as transcending temporal locations to encompass varied moments of consciousness for progressive change, whether they happened during the hey day of English imperialism in early twentieth-century Nigeria, or in response to the exclusionary politics of the Conservative Party in Thatcherite England. Theatre and Postcolonial Desires will be essential reading for students and researchers in the areas of drama, postcolonial and cultural studies.

Theatre and Residual Culture: J.M. Synge and Pre-Christian Ireland

by Christopher Collins

This book considers the cultural residue from pre-Christian Ireland in Synge’s plays and performances. By dramatising a residual culture in front of a predominantly modern and political Irish Catholic middle class audience, the book argues that Synge attempted to offer an alternative understanding of what it meant to be “modern” at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book draws extensively on Synge’s archive to demonstrate how pre-Christian residual culture informed not just how he wrote and staged pre-Christian beliefs, but also how he thought about an older, almost forgotten culture that Catholic Ireland desperately wanted to forget. Each of Synge’s plays is considered in an individual chapter, and they identify how Synge’s dramaturgy was informed by pre-Christian beliefs of animism, pantheism, folklore, superstition and magical ritual.

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