Within this landmark collection, original voices from the field of drama provide rich analysis of a selection of the most exciting and remarkable plays and productions of the twenty-first century.
Combining a range of content with self-reflexive examination by scholars and practitioners, this edited volume interrogates the contemporary significance of the avant-garde.
Theatre as Voyeurism (re)defines voyeurism as an 'exchange' between performers and audience members, privileging pleasure (erotic and aesthetic) as a crucial factor in contemporary theatre.
Performance, Transport and Mobility is an investigation into how performance moves, how it engages with ideas about movement, and how it potentially shapes our experiences of movement.
Focusing on Glasgow's earliest surviving music hall, the Britannia, later the Panopticon, this book explores the role of one of the city's most iconic cultural venues within the cosmopolitan entertainment market that emerged in British cities in the nineteenth century.
This volume gathers contributions from a range of international scholars and geopolitical contexts to explore why people organise themselves into performance communities in sites of crisis and how performance - social and aesthetic, sanctioned and underground - is employed as a mechanism for survival.
This book illustrates how local awareness of Western cultural hegemonic entities such as Broadway and Shakespeare have been implemented within South Korean theatre in the global era.
This is the first comprehensive study of the English crime play, presenting a survey of 250 plays performed in the London West End between 1900 and 2000.
This book considers the relationship between the vogue for putting the Ottoman Empire on the English stage and the repertory system that underpinned London playmaking.
This collection of essays explores how historians of theatre apply ethical thinking to the attempt to truthfully represent their subject - whether that be the life of a well-known performer, or the little known history of colonial theatre in India - by exploring the process by which such histories are written, and the challenges they raise.
Performing Cities is an edited volume of contributions by a range of internationally renowned academics and performance makers from across the globe, each one covering a particular city and examining it from the dynamic perspectives of performances occurring in cities and the city itself as performance.
Gao Xingjian has been lauded for his inventive use of Chinese culture in his paintings, plays, and cinema, however he denies that his current work participates in any notion of Chinese.
A study of the 30-year collaboration between playwright Samuel Beckett and director Alan Schneider, Bianchini reconstructs their shared American productions between 1956 and 1984.
This book reflects on the aftermath of shifts encountered in the maturing of digital culture in areas of critical theory and artistic practices, focusing on the awareness that contemporary subjectivity is one that dwells within both the virtual and the real.
The earliest complete morality play in English, The Castle of Perseverance depicts the culture of medieval East Anglia, a region once known for its production of artistic objects.
This book examines British playwrights' responses to the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries since 1945, from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to Sarah Kane's Blasted and Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem.
This interdisciplinary project draws on a wealth of sources (visual, material, literary and theatrical) to examine Austen's depiction of female performance, display and desire through her deployment of a culturally and symbolically charged accessory: the muff.
As the first collection of essays about Oscar Wilde's comedies, the contributors re-evaluate Oscar Wilde's society plays as 'comedies of manners"e; to see whether this is actually an apt way to read Wilde's most emblematic plays.
The fat female body is a unique construction in American culture that has been understood in various ways during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
This book rethinks historical and contemporary theatre, performance, and cultural events by scrutinizing and theorizing the objects and things that activate stages, venues, environments, and archives.
History, Memory, Performance is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring performances of the past in a wide range of trans-national and historical contexts.
Through seven key case studies from Khan's oeuvre, this book demonstrates how Akram Khan's 'new interculturalism' is a challenge to the 1980s western 'intercultural theatre' project, as a more nuanced and embodied approach to representing Othernesses, from his own position of the Other.
This book traces the history of 'girls' aesthetics,' where adult Japanese women create art works about 'girls' that resist motherhood, from the modern to the contemporary period and their manifestation in Japanese women's theatrical and dance performance and visual arts including manga, film, and installation arts.
In the beginning of the 21st century, European theatre-makers have sought to consider the disastrous events of the 20th century as the unfinished business of the contemporary.
Discussing crises through diverse examples, including the UK's National Theatre, public art installations, Occupy LSX, repatriation ceremonies and performances of the everyday, this book asks how performance captures and resists what is considered (politically, ideologically, culturally or socially) 'inside' or 'outside' Europe.
A cinema without cameras, without actors, without screen frames and without narratives almost seems like an antithetical impossibility of what is usually expected from a cinematic spectacle.
This new study of one of Britain's greatest modern playwrights represents the first major, extended discussion of Edward Bond's work in over twenty years.
Theatre-Making explores modes of authorship in contemporary theatre seeking to transcend the heritage of binaries from the Twentieth century such as text-based vs.
By tracing the effects of unprecedented immigration, the advent of the new woman, and the little-known vaudeville careers of performers like the Elinore Sisters, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers, DesRochers examines the relation between comedic vaudeville acts and progressive reformers as they fought over the new definition of "e;Americanness.
