Bücher der Reihe Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

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 book provides a timely intervention in the fields of performance studies and theatre history, and to larger issues of global cultural exchange. The authors offer a provocative argument for rethinking the scholarly assessment of how diverse performative cultures interact, are interwoven, and are dependent upon each other. While the term `intercultural theatre¿ as a concept points back to postcolonialism and its contradictions, this book explores global developments in the performing arts that cannot be explained and understood using postcolonial theory. The authors challenge the dichotomy `the West and the rest¿, as well as ideas of national culture and cultural ownership.

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.

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 study of Egyptian theatre and its narrative construction explores the ways representations of Egypt are created of and within theatrical means, from the 19th century to the present day. Essays address the narratives that structure theatrical, textual, and performative representations and the ways the rewriting process has varied in different contexts and at different times. Drawing on concepts from Theatre and Performance Studies, Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Diaspora Studies, scholars and practitioners from Egypt and the West enter into dialogue with one another, expanding understanding of the different fields. The articles focus on the ways theatre texts and performances change (are rewritten) when crossing borders between different worlds. The concept of rewriting is seen to include translation, transformation, and reconstruction, and the different borders may be cultural and national, between languages and dramaturgies, or borders that are present in peopleΓÇÖs everyday lives. Essays consider how rewritings and performances cross borders from one culture, nation, country, and language to another. They also study the process of rewriting, the resulting representations of foreign plays on stage, and representations of the Egyptian revolution on stage and in Tahrir Square. This assessment of the relationship between theatre practices, exchanges, and rewritings in Egyptian theatre brings vital coverage to an undervisited area and will be of interest to developments in theatre translation and beyond.

Putting food and theatre into direct conversation, this volume focuses on how food and theatre have operated for centuries as partners in the performative, symbolic, and literary making of meaning. Through case studies, literary analyses, and performance critiques, contributors examine theatrical work from a wide range of locations, addressing work from classical, popular, and contemporary theatre practices. This collection looks across dramatic genres, historical periods, and cultural contexts, and at food in all of its socio-political, material complexity to examine its use in live theatre, considering food as a transhistorical, global phenomenon across theatre genres.

Over a range of countries and political regimes, this book examines forms of theatre censorship in the 20th and 21st centuries. It revisits assumptions about prohibition and state control, examining theatre censorship as a continuum ranging from the unconscious self-censorship built into social structures and discursive practices, through bureaucratic regulation or unofficial influence, to detention and physical violence. Focusing on right-wing dictatorships, postcolonial regimes, communist systems, and Western democracies, essays analyze methods and discourses of censorship, identify the multiple agents involved, visit responses of theatremakers, and study political and cultural contexts.

Considering affect as mood, inclination, and manner, as well as emotion, and addressing affect as both an economic and cultural phenomenon, this collection of fourteen original essays showcases historical modes of affect within the formal productions of early modern English theater as well as its more informal entertainments and spectacles. It is therefore an important reference for students and scholars of theater studies, performance studies, early modern history, and literary theory.

This collection explores the issues of how children fit into national discourse on international stages. The authors focus on national performances by/for/with youth and examine a wide range of performances from across the globe, from parades and protests to devised and traditional theatre. Nationalism and Youth in Theatre and Performance rethinks how national performance is defined and offers previously unexplored historical and theoretical discussions of political youth performance.

This book discusses the centrality of identity politics to theatre and performance studies. The essays pose questions about identity and the subjectivity, relationality, and the politics of aesthetics, visiting visual arts practice, digital culture, music, public events, experimental theatre, and performance to investigate questions about representation, metaphysics, and politics.

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.

This is the first volume to focus specifically on Rabindranath Tagore¿s dramatic literature, visiting translations and adaptations of his drama, and cross-cultural encounters in his works. It offers a re-exploration of his plays, visiting issues such as his contribution to Indian drama, drama and environment, feminist readings, postcolonial engagements, cross-cultural encounters, drama as performance, translational and adaptation modes, the non-translated Tagore drama, 21st century drama, and Indian film. This resource on the criticism of Tagore drama and will appeal to a range of Theatre and Performance scholars as well as those interested in Indian theatre, literature, and film.

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.