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Theatrical Design: An Introduction
by Kevin Lee AllenA theatrical designer must address two questions when designing a production: What is the play about and what is the play like? To find the metaphor within a play is to unlock inspired and unique design concepts. Theatrical Design: An Introduction is about how to find the design idea for a production and what to do with that idea once identified. This book emphasizes script analysis and interpretation specifically for designers: how to release meaning and design inspiration from lines and characterization in a script. It then explains the artistic elements and principles of design—the skills necessary to create the design visualized. Concepts are illustrated with examples from theatre, film, art, architecture, and fashion that explore professional and historic use of conceptualization and metaphor. Theatrical Design: An Introduction imparts the tools designers need to innovate off the page.
Theatrical Design And Production: An Introduction To Scene Design And Construction, Lighting, Sound, Costume, And Makeup
by J. GilletteTheatrical Design and Production is a comprehensive and practical survey that examines the technical and design aspects of play production, including scene design and construction, lighting, sound, costume, and makeup. Design is presented as both an art closely integrated with the director’s, actor’s, and playwright’s visions, and a craft that provides practical solutions for the physical manipulation of stage space.
The Theatrical Event: A Mythos, A Vocabulary, A Perspective
by David ColeDavid Cole explains what the theatrical event is and is not. To do this, he presents aspects of the theater’s devolvement, explains the contributions of the actor, the audience, scenic design. He also describes the ways in which the modern theater has departed from the author’s description of the theatrical event. He provides support for his themes by drawing on many religious and psychological theories and by examining the works of numerous playwrights.
The Theatrical Firearms Handbook
by Kevin InouyeThe Theatrical Firearms Handbook is the essential guide to navigating the many decisions that are involved in the safe and effective use of firearm props for both the stage and screen. It is an invaluable resource for fight choreographers, props designers, backstage crew, directors, actors, stage managers, and more, at all levels of experience. Written in an informal and entertaining manner, with over 100 illustrations, it establishes baseline safety protocol while empowering performers and designers to tell their story of conflict in a way that makes the most of both established convention and current tools of the trade. Within these pages you'll find practical instruction couched in the language of theatre and film, making firearms technology and concepts approachable to dramatic artists without any dumbing-down of the subject material. This handbook is equally at home within the worlds of academic training, professional performance, and independent or community theatre and video productions.
The Theatrical Legacy of Thomas Middleton, 1624–2024 (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)
by William David Green Anna L. Hegland Sam JermyThis volume celebrates Thomas Middleton’s legacy as a dramatist, marking the 400th anniversary of Middleton’s final and most contentious work for the public theatres, A Game at Chess (1624).The collection is divided into three sections: ‘Critical and Textual Reception’, ‘Afterlives and Legacies’, and ‘Practice and Performance’. This division reflects the book’s holistic approach to Middleton’s canon, and its emphasis on the continuing significance of Middleton’s writing to the study of early modern English drama. Each section offers an assessment of the place of Middleton’s drama in culture, criticism, and education today through a range of critical approaches.Featuring work from a range of voices (from early career, independent, and seasoned academics and practitioners), the collection will be appropriate for both specialists in early modern literature and drama who are interested in both theory and practice, and students or scholars researching Middleton’s historical significance to the study of early theatre.
Theatrical Makeup: Basic Application Techniques
by Sharon SobelIn many theatrical productions, it falls to the performers to apply their own makeup, with minimal or no instruction. Theatrical Makeup clearly and concisely explains the basics of theatrical makeup techniques to allow stage actors to put their best face forward! You will gain understanding of the physiology of the human face and, using cream based makeup, as well as commercial cosmetics, learn how to contour it to suit your character with the use of highlight and shadow. Hundreds of full color images and step-by-step instructions illustrate how to visually manipulate bone structure and apparent age, apply simple facial hair and wounds, and create glamorous and natural stage makeup. Also covered are the tools you will need to apply your own makeup, along with critical health and hygiene tips.
Theatrical Makeup: Basic Application Techniques
by Sharon SobelTheatrical Makeup clearly and concisely explains the basics of theatrical makeup techniques to allow stage actors to put their best face forward! Readers will gain understanding of the physiology of the human face and, using cream based makeup, as well as commercial cosmetics, learn how to contour it to suit the character with the use of highlight and shadow. Hundreds of full color images and step-by-step instructions illustrate how to visually manipulate bone structure and apparent age, apply simple facial hair and wounds, and create glamorous and natural stage makeup. Also covered are the tools readers will need to apply their own makeup, along with critical health and hygiene tips. This book is suitable for beginner Theatrical Makeup courses and for stage actors of all levels.
Theatrical Nation
by Michael RagussisPerhaps the most significant development of the Georgian theater was its multiplication of ethnic, colonial, and provincial character types parading across the stage. In Theatrical Nation, Michael Ragussis opens up an archive of neglected plays and performances to examine how this flood of domestic and colonial others showcased England in general and London in particular as the center of an increasingly complex and culturally mixed nation and empire, and in this way illuminated the shifting identity of a newly configured Great Britain.In asking what kinds of ideological work these ethnic figures performed and what forms were invented to accomplish this work, Ragussis concentrates on the most popular of the "outlandish Englishmen," the stage Jew, Scot, and Irishman. Theatrical Nation understands these stage figures in the context of the government's controversial attempts to merge different ethnic and national groups through the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland, the Jewish Naturalization Bill of 1753, and the Act of Union with Ireland of 1800.Exploring the significant theatrical innovations that illuminate the central anxieties shared by playhouse and nation, Ragussis considers how ethnic identity was theatricalized, even as it moved from stage to print. By the early nineteenth century, Anglo-Irish and Scottish novelists attempted to deconstruct the theater's ethnic stereotypes while reimagining the theatricality of interactions between English and ethnic characters. An important shift took place as the novel's cross-ethnic love plot replaced the stage's caricatured male stereotypes with the beautiful ethnic heroine pursued by an English hero.
Theatrical Performance and the Forensic Turn: Naked Truth (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by James FriezeContemporary theatre, like so much of contemporary life, is obsessed with the ways of which information is detected, packaged and circulated. Running through forms as diverse as neo-naturalistic playwriting, intimately immersive theatre, verbatim drama, intermedial performance, and musical theatre, a common thread can be observed: theatre-makers have moved away from assertions of what is true and focussed on questions about how truth is framed. Commentators in various disciplines, including education, fine art, journalism, medicine, cultural studies, and law, have identified a ‘forensic turn’ in culture. The crucial role played by theatrical and performative techniques in fuelling this forensic turn has frequently been mentioned but never examined in detail. Political and poetic, Theatrical Performance and the Forensic Turn is the first account of the relationship between theatrical and forensic aesthetics. Exploring a rich variety of works that interrogate and resist the forensic turn, this is a must-read not only for scholars of theatre and performance but also of culture across the arts, sciences and social sciences.
The Theatrical Professoriate: Contemporary Higher Education and Its Academic Dramas
by Emily RoxworthyThis book argues that today’s professoriate has become increasingly theatrical, largely as a result of neoliberal policies in higher education, but also in response to an anti-intellectual scrutiny that has become pervasive throughout the Western world. The Theatrical Professoriate: Contemporary Higher Education and Its Academic Dramas examines how the Western professoriate increasingly finds itself enacting command performances that utilize scripting, characterization, surrogation, and spectacle—the hallmarks of theatricality—toward neoliberal ends. Roxworthy explores how the theatrical nature of today’s professoriate and the resultant glut of performances about academia on stage and screen have contributed to a highly ambivalent public fascination with academia. She further documents the "theatrical turn" witnessed in American higher education, as academic institutions use performance to intervene in the diversity issues and disciplinary disparities fueled by neoliberalism. By analyzing academic dramas and their audience reception alongside theoretical approaches, the author reveals how contemporary academia drives the professoriate to perform in what seem like increasingly artificial ways. Ideal for practitioners and students of education, ethnic, and science studies, The Theatrical Professoriate deftly intervenes in Performance Studies’ still-unsettled debates over the differential impact of live versus mediated performances.
The Theatrical Public Sphere
by Christopher B. BalmeThe concept of the public sphere, as first outlined by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, refers to the right of all citizens to engage in debate on public issues on equal terms. In this book, Christopher B. Balme explores theatre's role in this crucial political and social function. He traces its origins and argues that the theatrical public sphere invariably focuses attention on theatre as an institution between the shifting borders of the private and public, reasoned debate and agonistic intervention. Chapters explore this concept in a variety of contexts, including the debates that led to the closure of British theatres in 1642, theatre's use of media, controversies surrounding race, religion and blasphemy, and theatre's place in a new age of globalised aesthetics. Balme concludes by addressing the relationship of theatre today with the public sphere and whether theatre's transformation into an art form has made it increasingly irrelevant for contemporary society.
The Theatrical Spectaculum: An Anthropological Theory (Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology)
by Tova GamlielThis book offers a new mythic perspective on the secret of the allure and survival of a current-archaic institution—the Western theatre—in an era of diverse technological media. Central to the theory is the spectaculum—a stage “world” that mirrors a monotheistic cosmic order. Tova Gamliel here not only alerts the reader to the possibility of the spectaculum’s existence, but also illuminates its various structural dimensions: the cosmological, ritual, and sociological. Its cosmo-logical meaning is a Judeo-Christian monotheistic consciousness of non-randomness, an exemplary order of the world that the senses perceive. The ritual meaning denotes the centrality of the spectaculum, as the theatre repeatedly reenacts the mythical and paradigmatic event of Biblical revelation. Its social meaning concerns any charismatic social theory that is anchored in the epitomic structure of social sovereignty—stage and audience—that the Western theatre advances in an era characterized by hypermedia.
Theatrical Speech Acts: Politics, Translations, Embodiments
by Erika Fischer-Lichte Torsten Jost Saskya Iris JainTheatrical Speech Acts: Performing Language explores the significance and impact of words in performance, probing how language functions in theatrical scenarios, what it can achieve under particular conditions, and what kinds of problems may arise as a result. Presenting case studies from around the globe—spanning Argentina, Egypt, Germany, India, Indonesia, Korea, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand, the UK and the US—the authors explore key issues related to theatrical speech acts, such as (post)colonial language politics; histories, practices and theories of translation for/in performance; as well as practices and processes of embodiment. With scholars from different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds examining theatrical speech acts—their preconditions, their cultural and bodily dimensions as well as their manifold political effects—the book introduces readers to a crucial linguistic dimension of historical and contemporary processes of interweaving performance cultures. Ideal for drama, theater, performance, and translation scholars worldwide, Theatrical Speech Acts opens up a unique perspective on the transformative power of language in performance.
Theatrical Unrest: Ten Riots in the History of the Stage, 1601-2004
by Sean McEvoyShortlisted for the 2017 Theatre Book Prize What is it about theatre, compared to other kinds of cultural representation, which provokes such a powerful reaction? Theatrical Unrest tells the compelling tales of ten riots whose cause lies on stage. It looks at the intensity and evanescence of the live event and asks whether theatre shares its unrepeatable quality with history. Tracing episodes of unrest in theatrical history from an Elizabethan uprising over Shakespeare's Richard II to Sikhs in revolt at Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's Behzti, Sean McEvoy chronicles a selection of extreme public responses to this inflammatory art form. Each chapter provides a useful overview of the structure and documentation of one particular event, juxtaposing eyewitness accounts with newspaper reports and other contemporary narratives. Theatrical Unrest is an absorbing account of the explosive impact of performance, and an essential read for anyone interested in theatre’s often violent history.
Theatrical Violence Design: Safety, Illusion, and Story in Stage Combat Choreography
by Richard Gilbert David BarefordTheatrical Violence Design offers the reader a complete education in the theory and practice of designing violence for the theater. From swordfights to exchanges of gunfire to domestic violence, the theater abounds in physical conflict. The artists who design that violence, sometimes called fight directors or choreographers, will find in this book an invaluable resource for becoming more expert at their craft. In the chapters of this book, they will encounter the core principles of creating violent effects, the body of knowledge with which they should be familiar, and the nuts and bolts of the process of design work from the first meeting with a director through closing night.This book is written for the student of stage combat to transition into violence design and will also be of interest to experienced violence designers and choreographers.
Theatricality and Performativity: Writings On Texture From Plato's Cave To Urban Activism (Performance Philosophy)
by Teemu PaavolainenThis book defines theatricality and performativity through metaphors of texture and weaving, drawn mainly from anthropologist Tim Ingold and philosopher Stephen C. Pepper. Tracing the two concepts’ various relations to practices of seeing and doing, but also to conflicting values of novelty and normativity, the study proceeds in a series of intertwining threads, from the theatrical to the performative: Antitheatrical (Plato, the Baroque, Michael Fried); Pro-theatrical (directors Wagner, Fuchs, Meyerhold, Brecht, and Brook); Dramatic (weaving memory in Shaffer’s Amadeus and Beckett’s Footfalls); Efficient (from modernist “machines for living in” to the “smart home”); Activist (knit graffiti, clown patrols, and the Anthropo(s)cene). An approach is developed in which ‘performativity’ names the way we tacitly weave worlds and identities, variously concealed or clarified by the step-aside tactics of ‘theatricality’.
Theatricality as Medium
by Samuel WeberEver since Aristotle's Poetics, both the theory and the practice of theater have been governed by the assumption that it is a form of representation dominated by what Aristotle calls the "mythos," or the "plot." This conception of theater has subordinated characteristics related to the theatrical medium, such as the process and place of staging, to the demands of a unified narrative. This readable, thought-provoking, and multidisciplinary study explores theatrical writings that question this aesthetical-generic conception and seek instead to work with the medium of theatricality itself. Beginning with Plato, Samuel Weber tracks the uneasy relationships among theater, ethics, and philosophy through Aristotle, the major Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Freud, Benjamin, Artaud, and many others who develop alternatives to dominant narrative-aesthetic assumptions about the theatrical medium. His readings also interrogate the relation of theatricality to the introduction of electronic media. The result is to show that, far from breaking with the characteristics of live staged performance, the new media intensify ambivalences about place and identity already at work in theater since the Greeks. Praise for Samuel Weber: “What kind of questioning is primarily after something other than an answer that can be measured . . . in cognitive terms? Those interested in the links between modern philosophy nd media culture will be impressed by the unusual intellectual clarity and depth with which Weber formulates the . . . questions that constiture the true challenge to cultural studies today. . . . one of our most important cultural critics and thinkers”—MLN
Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship
by Emma WillisTheatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent Others builds upon recent literature concerning theatre and ethics and offers a uniquely interdisciplinary approach. With a focus on spectatorship, the book brings together analysis of dark tourism – travel to sites of death and disaster – and theatrical performances. At dark tourism sites, objects and architecture are often personified, imagined to speak on behalf of absent victims. Spectatorsare drawn into this dialogical scenario in that they are asked to 'hear' the voices of the dead. Theatrical performances that depict grievous histories often gain power through paradoxically demonstrating the limits of their representational ability: spectators are asked to attune themselves to absences and incomprehensibilities. This study asks whether playing the part of the listener can be understood in ethical terms. Sites surveyed span a broad geographical scope – Germany, Poland, Vietnam, Cambodia, New Zealand and Rwanda – and are brought into contrast with performances including: Jerzy Grotowski's Akropolis, Catherine Filloux's Photographs from S21, Adrienne Kennedy's An Evening with Dead Essex and Erik Ehn's Maria Kizito.
The Theban Plays: Sophocles
by David Grene Charles Segal James Hogan(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)The legends surrounding Oedipus of Thebes and his ill-fated offspring provide the subject matter for Sophocles' three greatest plays, which together represent Greek drama at the pinnacle of its achievement.Oedipus the King, the most famous of the three, has been characterized by critics from Aristotle to Coleridge as the perfect exemplar of the art of tragedy, in its unforgettable portrayal of a man's failed attempt to escape his fate. In Oedipus at Colonus, the blind king finds his final release from the sufferings the gods have brought upon him, and Antigone completes the downfall of the House of Cadmus through the actions of Oedipus's magnificent and uncompromising daughter defending her ideals to the death. All three of The Theban Plays, while separate, self-contained dramas, draw from the same rich well of myth and showcase Sophocles' enduring power.Translated by David Grene.From the Hardcover edition.
The Theban Plays: Antigone, King Oidipous and Oidipous at Colonus (Focus Classical Library)
by SophoclesThis anthology includes English translations of three plays of Sophocles' Oidipous Cycle: Antigone, King Oidipous, and Oidipous at Colonus. The trilogy includes an introductory essay on Sophocles life, ancient theatre, and the mythic and religious background of the plays. Each of these plays is available from Focus in a single play edition. Focus Classical Library provides close translations with notes and essays to provide access to understanding Greek culture.
The Theban Plays: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone (Johns Hopkins New Translations from Antiquity)
by SophoclesSophocles’ Theban Plays—Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone—lie at the core of the Western literary canon. They are extensively translated, universally taught, and frequently performed. Chronicling the downfall of Oedipus, the legendary king of Thebes, and his descendants, the Theban Plays are as relevant to present-day thought about love, duty, patriotism, family, and war as when they were written 2,500 years ago.Recent translations of the plays, while linguistically correct, often fail to capture the beauty of Sophocles’ original words. In combining the skills of a distinguished poet, Ruth Fainlight, and an eminent classical scholar, Robert J. Littman, this new edition of the Theban Plays is both a major work of poetry and a faithful translation of the original works. Thoughtful introductions, extensive notes, and glossaries frame each of the plays within their historical contexts and illuminate important themes, mythological roots, and previous interpretations.This elegant and uncommonly readable translation will make these seminal Greek tragedies accessible to a new generation of readers.
The Theban Plays: Antigone - Oedipus The King - Oedipus At Colonus (hardcover)
by SophoclesKing Oedipus/Oedipus at Colonus/AntigoneThree towering works of Greek tragedy depicting the inexorable downfall of a doomed royal dynastyThe legends surrounding the house of Thebes inspired Sophocles to create this powerful trilogy about humanity's struggle against fate. King Oedipus is the devastating portrayal of a ruler who brings pestilence to Thebes for crimes he does not realize he has committed and then inflicts a brutal punishment upon himself. Oedipus at Colonus provides a fitting conclusion to the life of the aged and blinded king, while Antigone depicts the fall of the next generation, through the conflict between a young woman ruled by her conscience and a king too confident of his own authority.Translated with an Introduction by E. F. WATLING
The Theban Plays: "Oedipus the Tyrant"; "Oedipus at Colonus"; "Antigone"
by Sophocles Peter J. Ahrensdorf Thomas L. PangleThe timeless Theban tragedies of Sophocles--Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone--have fascinated and moved audiences and readers across the ages with their haunting plots and their unforgettable heroes and heroines. Now, following the best texts faithfully, and translating the key moral, religious, and political terminology of the plays accurately and consistently, Peter J. Ahrensdorf and Thomas L. Pangle allow contemporary readers to study the most literally exact reproductions of precisely what Sophocles wrote, rendered in readily comprehensible English.These translations enable readers to engage the Theban plays of Sophocles in their full, authentic complexity, and to study with precision the plays' profound and enduring human questions. In the preface, notes to the plays, and introductions, Ahrensdorf and Pangle supply critical historical, mythic, and linguistic background information, and highlight the moral, religious, political, philosophic, and psychological questions at the heart of each of the plays. Even readers unfamiliar with Greek drama will find what they need to experience, reflect on, and enjoy these towering works of classical literature.
The Theban Plays
by Sophocles David Grene Charles SegalThe legends surrounding Oedipus of Thebes and his ill-fated offspring provide the subject matter for Sophocles' three greatest plays, which together represent Greek drama at the pinnacle of its achievement. Oedipus the King, the most famous of the three, has been characterized by critics from Aristotle to Coleridge as the perfect exemplar of the art of tragedy, in its unforgettable portrayal of a man's failed attempt to escape his fate. In Oedipus at Colonus, the blind king finds his final release from the sufferings the gods have brought upon him, and Antigone completes the downfall of the House of Cadmus through the actions of Oedipus's magnificent and uncompromising daughter defending her ideals to the death. All three of The Theban Plays, while separate, self-contained dramas, draw from the same rich well of myth and showcase Sophocles' enduring power. Translated by David Grene.
The Theban Plays
by Sophocles E. F. WatlingThe legends surrounding the royal house of Thebes inspired Sophocles (496-406 BC) to create a powerful trilogy of mankind's struggle against fate. King Oedipus tells of a man who brings pestilence to Thebes for crimes he does not realise he has committed, and then inflicts a brutal punishment upon himself. With profound insights into the human condition, it is a devastating portrayal of a ruler brought down by his own oath. Oedipus at Colonus provides a fitting conclusion to the life of the aged and blinded king, while Antigone depicts the fall of the next generation, through the conflict between a young woman ruled by her conscience and a king too confident in his own authority. E. F. Watling's masterful translation is accompanied by an introduction, which examines the central themes of the plays, the role of the Chorus, and the traditions and staging of Greek tragedy.