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Blue Door Venture: Blue Door 4 (Blue Door #4)
by Pamela BrownThe fourth book in the Blue Door series, which starts with The Swish of the Curtain, the classic story which inspired actors from Maggie Smith to Eileen Atkins.The seven young members of the Blue Door Theatre Company are, at long last, professional actors. And they are now proudly in charge of the first commercial theatre in their hometown of Fenchester. But the day-to-day pressures of financing the theatre and choosing box-office attractions are soon eclipsed by an event that threatens to close the theatre almost as soon as it has opened.Following the characters from the classic of children's literature The Swish of the Curtain on an adventure which takes them far from the stage of the Blue Door Theatre, Blue Door Venture is the fourth book in the Blue Door series.
The Blue Light
by Mieko OuchiLeni Riefenstahl, one hundred years old, is in the office of a young female Hollywood studio executive. Leni’s reason to be there is clear: to make one last desperate pitch to direct her first feature film in fifty years. A thought-provoking contemplation on art, politics, and the seduction of fascism, and a theatrical examination of a woman who danced one perfect dance with the devil and forever changed the way films are made.Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most remarkable and controversial women of the twentieth century. Dancer, actor, photographer, and filmmaker, Riefenstahl caught the eye of Adolf Hitler with her prodigious first film: The Blue Light. A cinematic innovator, her decision to direct Triumph of the Will, got her blacklisted as a filmmaker until her death in 2003 at 101, unrepentant and mostly forgotten.
Blue/Orange
by Joe PenhallWinner of the 2001 Olivier Award for Best New Play, Blue/Orange sets the stage for a clash of wills between two psychiatrists: one is a new, inexperienced doctor just starting out, the other is his well-established mentor. The diagnosis and treatment of a young black man named Chris, who claims to be the son of African dictator Idi Amin, sparks a conflict between the two doctors. As Chris becomes a pawn in their battle, listeners are left wondering who, if anyone, is sane in this dark, edgy comedy.
The Blue Room: A Play in Ten Intimate Acts (Books That Changed the World)
by David HareThe Tony Award–winning playwright and screenwriter delivers &“a witty, contemporary reworking of Arthur Schnitzler&’s nineteenth-century shocker La Ronde&” (The Mail on Sunday, four stars). Arthur Schnitzler described Reigen, his loose series of sexual sketches, as &“completely unprintable,&” and indeed, its premiere in 1921 spurred an obscenity suit. It was only when Max Ophüls made his famous film in 1950 that the work became better known as La Ronde. Now David Hare has reset these circular scenes of love and betrayal in the present day, with a cast of two actors playing a succession of characters whose sexual lives enmesh like a daisy chain. The Blue Room is a brilliant meditation on men and women, sex and social class, actors and the theater. With deft insight about the gap between the sexes, it takes the treacherous Freudian subject of projection and desire and reinvents it in a bittersweet landscape that is both eternal and completely up to date. &“[Hare&’s] play slides up on one insidiously—always suggesting more than they first suggest, planting depth charges in the mind, subtly laying a minefield in the self-confidence of one&’s first impressions.&” —New York Post &“In the jungle of this city, sex is a driving force, a commodity and a need . . . This play could almost be a vividly illustrated Freudian textbook: the erotic drive in action, amoral and ruthless. Hare&’s version is, in the deepest and most essential sense, completely faithful to Schnitzler.&” —The Sunday Times &“Hare—buttressed by Freud and Proust—has turned sexual disappointment into something more interesting, the idea that what we are in love with is part illusion.&” —The Observer
The Blue Touch Paper: A Memoir
by David Hare"Frank, moving, and beguiling, The Blue Touch Paper is the fascinating story of becoming a writer in the 1960s and 70s when Britain was changing even faster than the author."--Joan Didion David Hare has long been one of Britain's best-known screenwriters and dramatists. He's the author of more than thirty acclaimed plays that have appeared on Broadway, in the West End, and at the National Theatre. He wrote the screenplays for the hugely successful films The Hours, Plenty, and The Reader. Most recently, his play Skylight won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Revival on Broadway. Now, in his debut work of autobiography, "Britain's leading contemporary playwright" (Sunday Times) offers a vibrant and affecting account of becoming a writer amid the enormous flux of postwar England. In his customarily dazzling prose and with great warmth and humor, he takes us from his university days at Cambridge to the swinging 1960s, when he cofounded the influential Portable Theatre in London and took a memorable road trip across America, to his breakthrough successes as a playwright amid the political ferment of the '70s and the moment when Margaret Thatcher came to power at the end of the decade. Through it all, Hare sets the progress of his own life against the dramatic changes in postwar England, in which faith in hierarchy, religion, empire, and the public good all withered away. Filled with indelible glimpses of such figures as Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Tennessee Williams, Helen Mirren, and Joseph Papp, The Blue Touch Paper is a powerful evocation of a society in transition and a writer in the making.
Blue Yonder
by Kate AspengrenCharacters: 12 female (can be performed by 4f, or any number in between) Monologues & ScenesDramatic Comedy A familiar adage states, "Men may work from sun to sun, but women's work is never done." In BIue Yonder, the audience meets twelve mesmerizing and eccentric women including a flight instructor, a firefighter, a stuntwoman, a woman who donates body parts, an employment counselor, a professional softball player, a surgical nurse professional baseball player, and a daredevil who plays with dynamite among others. Through the monologues, each woman examines her life's work and explores the career that she has found. Or that has found her.
Bluebirds
by Vern ThiessenÉtaples, France, 1918. Nurses Christy, Maggie, and Bab have crossed oceans to care for wounded Canadian soldiers in the Great War. Despite the terrible injuries they must deal with, they manage to stay hopeful as the dangers of the front draw closer to their hospital. As each woman becomes accustomed to her duties and patients, they reveal more personal details to one another and through letters to loved ones. Maggie misses her close friend she lived with back home and worries for their future together. Christy writes to her soldier husband, but she knows there’s a difference between the life she should lead with him and the one she wants. Bab longs for what she can’t have: her beloved grandpa, a married soldier, a child. Through it all, the three women find friendship, independence, power, and influence in a place where men, once again, are trying to destroy the world.
Blues for Mister Charlie: A Play (Vintage International)
by James BaldwinAn award-winning play from one of America&’s most brilliant writers about a murder in a small Southern town, loosely based on the 1955 killing of Emmett Till. • "A play with fires of fury in its belly, tears of anguish in its eyes, a roar of protest in its throat." —The New York TimesJames Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated—and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion. In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence, James Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race.For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a "boy" like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. And centuries of brutality and fear, patronage and contempt, are about to erupt in a moment of truth as devastating as a shotgun blast.
The Blunderer
by MolièreMolière was a French playwright who is considered to be one of the greatest comedians in all of Western literature. With classics such as Tartuffe, The School for Wives, and The Misanthrope, Molière is one of the most widely read playwrights in history. This edition of The Blunderer includes a table of contents.
The Blunt Playwright: An Introduction to Playwriting
by Clem MartiniThe Blunt Playwright won’t tell you everything there is to know about playwriting. It won’t even try. What it will do is examine process, structure, dialogue, and character; provide classic and contemporary scenes to study; outline clever exercises to strengthen writing skills; and so much more. Highly regarded and used in schools everywhere, this updated edition cements its place as one of the best resources for playwrights. From organizing the structure of a script to developing characters’ voices, from employing visual effects on stage to writing comedy, or from self-promotion to getting produced and published, this guide has something for everyone, no matter the stage of their career.
A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics
by Jan Cohen-Cruz Mady SchutzmanThis carefully constructed and thorough collection of theoretical engagements with Augusto Boal’s work is the first to look ’beyond Boal’ and critically assesses the Theatre of the Opressed (TO) movement in context. A Boal Companion looks at the cultural practices which inform TO and explore them within a larger frame of cultural politics and performance theory. The contributors put TO into dialogue with complexity theory – Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, race theory, feminist performance art, Deleuze and Guattari, and liberation psychology – to name just a few, and in doing so, the kinship between Boal’s project and multiple fields of social psychology, ethics, biology, comedy, trauma studies and political science is made visible. The ideas generated throughout A Boal Companion will: expand readers' understanding of TO as a complex, interdisciplinary, multivocal body of philosophical discourses provide a variety of lenses through which to practice and critique TO make explicit the relationship between TO and other bodies of work. This collection is ideal for TO practitioners and scholars who want to expand their knowledge, but it also provides unfamiliar readers and new students to the discipline with an excellent study resource.
Boar's Head
by Don NigroThis big, colorful, uproariously funny and ultimately moving play tells the story of the Shakespearean characters who meet at the Boar's Head Tavern in East Cheap. We see the scenes Shakespeare tells us about but leaves out of HENRY IV, PARTS ONE AND TWO, HENRY V, and THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, , centering on Doll Tearsheet, her unrequited love for Ned Poins, Ned's sister Nell, impregnated by Prince Hal, and Robin, a girl masquerading as a tavern boy, also in love with Ned. Bardolph, Mistress Quickley, Justice Shallow, Pistol, Jane Nightwork and a host of other characters who live at the edge of Shakespeare move to the center in this play, along with Jack Falstaff and a dead Windmill Keeper who might be Shakespeare himself. The language is rich, the characterizations compelling, and the play has a surprisingly powerful resonance of its own. The latest of Nigro's ongoing investigations of Shakespeare and his worlds. See also LOVES LABOURS WONNE, THE GIRLHOOD OF SHAKESPEARE's HEROINES, THE CURATE SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT, THE BOHEMIAN SEACOAST and ARDY FAFIRSIN.
The Boar's Head Theatre: An Inn-yard Theatre of the Elizabethan Age (Routledge Revivals)
by C. J. SissonThe Boar’s Head Theatre, first published in 1972, provides an account of one of the Elizabethan inn-yard theatres. It is a reconstruction of considerable importance in our understanding of the performance conditions affecting Elizabethan drama, the mode of presentation and the nature of the audience. C. J. Sisson (1885-1966) was known especially for his research into Elizabethan court cases and the light they can throw on the literature and drama of the period. His discoveries included material on the Elizabethan inn-yard theatres which provides unquestionable evidence of great importance in relation to the evolution of the theatre in England. This book, which has been edited for publication by Stanley Wells, was to have been his major work on the subject. Historians of the theatre of this period will find this book indispensable, and those with a more general interest in the greatest age of English drama will be engrossed by the detailed and intimate glimpses of the theatre world which this story affords.
Bobby Baker: Redeeming Features of Daily Life
by Michèle Barrett Bobby BakerBobby Baker is one of most widely acclaimed and popular performance artists working today. Over the course of a thirty-five-year career she has toured the globe with her wildly stimulating explorations of 'Daily Life' and has been extensively written about and studied. This fully-illustrated book brings together for the first time an account of Baker's career as an artist – from her first sculptures at Central St Martins in the early 1970s to her most recent work, 'How to Live' and 'Diary Drawings' – with critical commentary by reviewers and academic practitioners. It includes: Bobby Baker's own 'Chronicle' of her work as artist and performer illuminating critical writing about Baker's shows transcripts of Baker's performances and other original materials reproduced here for the first time significant new essays by Michele Barrett and Griselda Pollock a new interview with Bobby Baker by Adrian Heathfield. Under the guiding editorial hand of distinguished cultural theorist Michèle Barrett, this volume is an essential text for students interested in performance, gender, and visual culture, and a hugely absorbing and accessible account of Baker's work.
Bodas de sangre | Yerma (Teatro completo #Volumen 3)
by Federico García LorcaBodas de sangre | Yerma es el sexto volumen de la Biblioteca Federico García Lorca y el tercero de los que reúnen su «Teatro completo». En este volumen se ofrecen al lector clásicos lorquianos como Bodas de sangre y Yerma. Asimismo, se incluyen conferencias y charlas ofrecidas por el poeta en torno a sus textos, lo que permite una aproximación aún más personal a su obra.La edición y los prólogos, a cargo de Miguel García-Posada, permiten al lector acercarse a la complejidad de su obra y disfrutar, a lo largo de los siete volúmenes que componen esta Biblioteca Federico García Lorca, de uno de los autores españoles más relevantes del siglo XX. «Una de las finalidades que persigo con mi teatro es precisamente aspaventar y aterrar un poco. Estoy seguro y contento de escandalizar. Quiero provocar revulsivos, a ver si se vomita de una vez todo lo malo del teatro actual.»Federico García Lorca --------------------------------------------------------------------------BIBLIOTECA FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA Poesía competa:1. Libro de poemas | Primeras canciones | Canciones2. Romancero gitano | Poema del cante jondo3. Poeta en Nueva York | SonetosTeatro completo:4. La zapatera prodigiosa | Mariana Pineda5. El público | Así que pasen cinco años6. Bodas de sangre | Yerma7. La casa de Bernarda Alba | Doña Rosita la soltera--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bodas de sangre | Yerma (Teatro completo #3)
by Federico García LorcaBodas de sangre | Yerma es el sexto volumen de la Biblioteca Federico García Lorca y el tercero de los que reúnen su «Teatro completo». En este volumen se ofrecen al lector clásicos lorquianos como Bodas de sangre y Yerma. Asimismo, se incluyen conferencias y charlas ofrecidas por el poeta en torno a sus textos, lo que permite una aproximación aún más personal a su obra. La edición y los prólogos, a cargo de Miguel García-Posada, permiten al lector acercarse a la complejidad de su obra y disfrutar, a lo largo de los siete volúmenes que componen esta Biblioteca Federico García Lorca, de uno de los autores españoles más relevantes del siglo XX. «Una de las finalidades que persigo con mi teatro es precisamente aspaventar y aterrar un poco. Estoy seguro y contento de escandalizar. Quiero provocar revulsivos, a ver si se vomita de una vez todo lo malo del teatro actual.»Federico García Lorca --------------------------------------------------------------------------BIBLIOTECA FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA Poesía competa:1. Libro de poemas | Primeras canciones | Canciones2. Romancero gitano | Poema del cante jondo3. Poeta en Nueva York | Sonetos Teatro completo:4. La zapatera prodigiosa | Mariana Pineda5. El público | Así que pasen cinco años6. Bodas de sangre | Yerma7. La casa de Bernarda Alba | Doña Rosita la soltera--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bodies and Transformance in Taiwanese Contemporary Theater
by Peilin LiangIn Bodies and Transformance in Taiwanese Contemporary Theater, Peilin Liang develops a theory of bodily transformation. Proposing the concept of transformance, a conscious and rigorous process of self-cultivation toward a reconceptualized body, Liang shows how theater practitioners of minoritized cultures adopt transformance as a strategy to counteract the embodied practices of ideological and economic hegemony. This book observes key Taiwanese contemporary theater practitioners at work in forging five reconceptualized bodies: the energized, the rhythmic, the ritualized, the joyous, and the (re)productive. By focusing on the development of transformance between the years of 2000–2008, a tumultuous political watershed in Taiwan’s history, the author succeeds in bridging postcolonialism and interculturalism in her conceptual framework. Ideal for scholars of Asian and postcolonial theater, Bodies and Transformance in Taiwanese Contemporary Theater shows how transformance, rather than performance, calibrates with far greater precision and acuity the state of the body and the culture that it seeks to create.
Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance
by Carrie Sandahl Philip Auslander"A testament to the synergy of two evolving fields. From the study of staged performances to examinations of the performing body in everyday life, this book demonstrates the enormous profitability of moving beyond disability as metaphor. . . . It's a lesson that many of our cultural institutions desperately need to learn. " -Martin F. Norden, University of Massachusetts-Amherst This groundbreaking collection imagines disabled bodies as "bodies in commotion"-bodies that dance across artistic and discursive boundaries, challenging our understanding of both disability and performance. In the book's essays, leading critics and artists explore topics that range from theater and dance to multi-media performance art, agit-prop, American Sign Language theater, and wheelchair sports. Bodies in Commotionis the first collection to consider the mutually interpretive qualities of these two emerging fields, producing a dynamic new resource for artists, activists, and scholars.
Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910
by Daphne A. BrooksIn Bodies in Dissent Daphne A. Brooks argues that from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, black transatlantic activists, actors, singers, and other entertainers frequently transformed the alienating conditions of social and political marginalization into modes of self-actualization through performance. Brooks considers the work of African American, Anglo, and racially ambiguous performers in a range of popular entertainment, including racial melodrama, spectacular theatre, moving panorama exhibitions, Pan-Africanist musicals, Victorian magic shows, religious and secular song, spiritualism, and dance. She describes how these entertainers experimented with different ways of presenting their bodies in public--through dress, movement, and theatrical technologies--to defamiliarize the spectacle of "blackness" in the transatlantic imaginary.Brooks pieces together reviews, letters, playbills, fiction, and biography in order to reconstruct not only the contexts of African American performance but also the reception of the stagings of "bodily insurgency" which she examines. Throughout the book, she juxtaposes unlikely texts and entertainers in order to illuminate the complicated transatlantic cultural landscape in which black performers intervened. She places Adah Isaacs Menken, a star of spectacular theatre, next to Sojourner Truth, showing how both used similar strategies of physical gesture to complicate one-dimensional notions of race and gender. She also considers Henry Box Brown's public re-enactments of his escape from slavery, the Pan-Africanist discourse of Bert Williams's and George Walker's musical In Dahomey (1902-04), and the relationship between gender politics, performance, and New Negro activism in the fiction of the novelist and playwright Pauline Hopkins and the postbellum stage work of the cakewalk dancer and choreographer Aida Overton Walker. Highlighting the integral connections between performance and the construction of racial identities, Brooks provides a nuanced understanding of the vitality, complexity, and influence of black performance in the United States and throughout the black Atlantic.
The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives (Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance)
by Selby Wynn SchwartzThe Bodies of Others explores the politics of gender in motion. From drag ballerinas to faux queens, and from butoh divas to the club mothers of modern dance, the book delves into four decades of drag dances on American stages. Drag dances take us beyond glittery one-liners and into the spaces between gender norms. In these backstage histories, dancers give their bodies over to other selves, opening up the category of realness. The book maps out a drag politics of embodiment, connecting drag dances to queer hope, memory, and mourning. There are aging étoiles, midnight shows, mystical séances, and all of the dust and velvet of divas in their dressing-rooms. But these forty years of drag dances are also a cultural history, including Mark Morris dancing the death of Dido in the shadow of AIDS, and the swans of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo sketching an antiracist vision for ballet. Drawing on queer theory, dance history, and the embodied practices of dancers themselves, The Bodies of Others examines the ways in which drag dances undertake the work of a shared queer and trans politics.
The Bodies That Were Not Ours: And Other Writings
by Coco FuscoInterdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco is one of North America's leading interpreters of intercultural theory and practice. This volume gathers together her finest writings since 1995 and includes critical essays by Jean Fisher and Caroline Vercoe that interpret her work.Engaging and provocative, these essays, interviews, performance scripts and fotonovelas take readers on a tour of our current multicultural landscape. Fusco explores such issues as sex tourism in Cuba as a barometer of the island's entry into the global economy, Frantz Fanon's theorization of metropolitan blackness, and artistic and net activist responses to the effects of free trade on the Mexican populace. She interviews such postcolonial personnae as Isaac Julien, Hilton Als and Tracey Moffatt. Approaching the dynamics of cultural fusion from many angles, Fusco's satires, commentaries, and sociological inquiries collapse boundaries, and form a sustained meditation on how the forces of globalization impact upon the making of art.
Body and Event in Howard Barker's Drama: From Catastrophe to Anastrophe in The Castle and Other Plays
by Alireza FakhrkonandehThis book explores questions of gender, desire, embodiment, and language in Barker’s oeuvre. With The Castle as a focal point, the scope extends considerably beyond this play to incorporate analysis and exploration of the Theatre of Catastrophe; questions of gender, subjectivity and desire; God/religion; aesthetics of the self; autonomy-heteronomy; ethics; and the relation between political and libidinal economy, at stake in 20 other plays by Barker (including Rome, The Power of the Dog, The Bite of the Night, Judith, Possibilities, I Saw Myself, Fence in Its Thousandth Year, The Gaoler’s Ache for the Nearly Dead, The Brilliance of the Servant, Golgo, among others).
The Body in Performance
by Patrick CampbellLively yet intriguing, The Body in Performance is a varied collection of essays about this much-discussed area. Posing the question "Why this current preoccupation with the performed body?" the collection of specially commissioned essays from both academics and practitioners - in some cases one and the same person - considers such cutting edge topics as the abject body and performance, censorship and live art, the presentation of violence on stage, carnal art, and the vexed issue of mimesis in the theatre. Drawing variously on the work of Franko B., Orlan, Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley, and Forced Entertainment, it concludes with a creative piece about a 'Famous New York Performance Artist.' Contributors include Rebecca Schneider whose book The Explicit Body in Performance is a key text in this area, and Joan Lipkin, director and writer.
The Body in Sound, Music and Performance: Studies in Audio and Sonic Arts
by Linda O KeeffeThe Body in Sound, Music and Performance brings together cutting-edge contributions from women working on and researching contemporary sound practice. This highly interdisciplinary book features a host of international contributors and places emphasis on developments beyond the western world, including movements growing across Latin America. Within the book, the body is situated as both the site and centre for knowledge making and creative production. Chapters explore how insightful theoretical analysis, new methods, innovative practises, and sometimes within the socio-cultural conditions of racism, sexism and classicism, the body can rise above, reshape and deconstruct understood ideas about performance practices, composition, and listening/sensing. This book will be of interest to both practitioners and researchers in the fields of sonic arts, sound design, music, acoustics and performance.
Body Movement: Coping with the Environment
by Irmgard Bartenieff Dori Lewis"'Irmgard Bartenieff has a profound knowledge of the human body and how it moves. I am delighted that this will now be made available to many more people.'." -- George Balanchine of Director, New York City Ballet"'Irmgard Bartenieff's pioneering work in the multiple applications of Labananalysis has had a transforming influence on many areas of movement training. Her careful and detailed development of the spatial principles into active corrective work has illuminated and altered the training of people as varied as dancers, choreographers, physical therapists, movement and dance therapists, and psychotherapists. Anthropologists and non-verbal communication researchers have found their world view necessarily altered by her fundamental innovations. The field of body/mind work will need to adapt to include her clear working through of basic principles.'." -- Kayla Kazahn Zalk of President, American Dance Guild