Bücher der Reihe Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

Considers theatrical practice through the lens of contemporary neuroscientific discoveries. This study lays the foundation for considering the physiological basis of the power of theatre practice to affect human behavior. It presents a basic summary of the ways that the senses function in relation to cognitive science and physiology.

This book considers the hundred years of re-writes of Anton Chekhov¿s work, presenting a wide geographical landscape of Chekhovian influences in drama. The volume examines the elusive quality of Chekhov¿s dramatic universe as an intricate mechanism, an engine in which his enigmatic characters exist as the dramatic and psychological ciphers we have been de-coding for a century, and continue to do so. Examining the practice and the theory of dramatic adaptation both as intermedial transformation (from page to stage) and as intramedial mutation, from page to page, the book presents adaptation as the emerging genre of drama, theatre, and film. This trend marks the performative and social practices of the new millennium, highlighting our epoch¿s need to engage with the history of dramatic forms and their evolution. The collection demonstrates that adaptation as the practice of transformation and as a re-thinking of habitual dramatic norms and genre definitions leads to the rejuvenation of existing dramatic and performative standards, pioneering the creation of new traditions and expectations. As the major mode of the storytelling imagination, adaptation can build upon and drive the audience¿s horizons of expectations in theatre aesthetics. Hence, this volume investigates the original and transformative knowledge that the story of Chekhov¿s drama in mutations offers to scholars of drama and performance, to students of modern literatures and cultures, and to theatre practitioners worldwide.

Ritual can be encountered in the midst of catastrophic and transforming events. The essays collected here reassess relationships between ritual and politics, ritual and everyday life, ritual and art making as well as ritual and disaster. This work is useful for graduate courses in Anthropology, Art, History, Theater, or Performance Studies.

This collection asks what¿s at stake when a theatrical space is created and when a performance takes place: under what circumstances the topology of theatre becomes political. It visits a politics of inclusion and exclusion, of distributions and placements, and of spatial appropriation and utopian concepts in theatre history and contemporary performance.

This collection argues that religion is an explicitly public force that stimulates and complicates public actions. In short, it is a crucial aspect of much performance. This collection is both a means of, and urgent argument for, expanding the attention paid to religion as a critical point of concern within theatre and performance studies.

That Shakespeare thematized time thoroughly, almost obsessively, in his plays is well established: time is, among other things, a 'devourer' ("Love's Labour's Lost"), one who can untie knots ("Twelfth Night"), or, perhaps most famously, simply 'out of joint' ("Hamlet"). This book offers an investigation of time in Shakespearean theatre.

This book offers a timely discussion of the interventions and tensions between two contentious fields, performance and phenomenology. Acknowledging the history and critical polemics against phenomenological methodology and against performance as a field of study and category of artistic production, Performance and Phenomenology provides an introduction to core thinkers and an expansion on their ideas in a wide range of international case studies that map an emerging 21st century terrain of critical and performance practice. Each chapter explores a world comprised of embodied action and thought, addressing the use of dead animals in performance, actor training, the legal implications of thinking phenomenologically about how we walk, and the intertwining of digital and analog perception.The scholars contributing to the volume develop insights central to the phenomenological tradition while expanding on the work of contemporary theorists and performers. In asking why performance and phenomenology belong in conversation together, the book suggests how they can transform each other in the process and what is at stake in this transformation.

This book explores how people play and why their play matters, with a particular interest in how ludic experiences are often constructed and controlled by the interests of institutions, including corporations, non-profit organizations, government agencies, religious organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Scholars of performance studies, leisure studies, media studies and sociology will find this book an essential reference when studying facets of play.

A critical reassessment of the theory and theatre of Bertold Brecht, examining the influences of Brecht's aesthetics on the pre-eminent materialist critics of the 20th century. Carney argues that an appreciation of Brecht's theory and theatre is essential to an understanding of contemporary critical theory.

This book provides a pioneering and provocative exploration of the rich synergies between adaptation studies and translation studies and is the first genuine attempt to discuss the rather loose usage of the concepts of translation and adaptation in terms of theatre and film.

Ibsen's plays rank among those most frequently performed world-wide, rivaled only by Brecht, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and the Greek tragedies. This book looks at the way performances of Ibsen's plays address problems typical to modern societies all over the world.

Focusing on the work of painter, choreographer and scenic designer Oskar Schlemmer, the 'Master Magician' and leader of the Theatre Workshop, this book explains this 'theatre of high modernism' and its historical role in design and performance studies. It is suitable for students and academics involved in the areas of 20th-century performance.

This book offers dynamic perspectives on the concept of liveness in the performing arts, engaging with liveness through the particular analytical focus of audiences and experience. With contributions from theatre, music, dance, and performance art, it explores how liveness is produced through processes of audiencing, and how it becomes materialized in acts of performance, making, archiving, and remembering. Theoretical chapters and practice-based reflections visit topics such as fandom, embodiment, documentation, technological mediation, and commodity exchange, showing how the relationship between audience and event is rarely singular and more often malleable and multiple.

Looking at European drama through an ecological lens, this book chronicles nature and the environment as primary topics in major plays from ancient to recent times. It focuses on the few, yet well-known plays in which nature is at stake in the action or the environment is a dramatic force.

The representation and experience of embodiment is a central preoccupation of Samuel Beckett's drama, one that he explored through diverse media. This title investigates a range of Beckett's dramatic canon for stage, radio, television and film, including early drama, and mimes.

Traces an evolutionary journey of actor training from the roots of the Russian tradition, Konstantin Stanislavsky, to the contemporary Muscovite director, Anatoly Vasiliev. This book explores two key developments that emerge from Stanislavsky's system - one linear, rational and empirical, while the other is fluid, organic and intuitive.

Traces the shaping of a resistant identity in memory, its direct expression in testimony, and its indirect elaboration in two different kinds of allegory. Chapters in this work focus on one contemporary playwright from each of four Southern Cone countries and compares the playwrights' aesthetic strategies for subverting ideologies of dictatorship.

This book strives to give a fair hearing to persistent, questioning voices about our nation's acting training as it stands, thereby contributing to the national dialogue the diverse perspectives and proposals needed to keep American actor training dynamic and germane, both within the U.S. and abroad.

Offers an analysis of the key principles and practices informing the movement training of actors in the modern era. Focusing on the cultural history of movement training, this title offers a conceptual framework for the understanding of key approaches to the training of the professional actor's body.

This volume focuses on the highly debated topic of theatrical translation, one brought on by a renewed interest in the idea of performance and translation as a cooperative effort on the part of the translator, the director, and the actors.

This book offers dynamic perspectives on the concept of liveness in the performing arts, engaging with liveness through the particular analytical focus of audiences and experience. With contributions from theatre, music, dance, and performance art, it explores how liveness is produced through processes of audiencing, and how it becomes materialized in acts of performance, making, archiving, and remembering. Theoretical chapters and practice-based reflections visit topics such as fandom, embodiment, documentation, technological mediation, and commodity exchange, showing how the relationship between audience and event is rarely singular and more often malleable and multiple.