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Theater and Human Flourishing (The Humanities and Human Flourishing)
The Humanities and Human Flourishing series publishes edited volumes that explore the role of human flourishing in the central disciplines of the humanities, and whether and how the humanities can increase human happiness. This volume presents essays on the significance of theater to wellbeing and human flourishing. Combining scholarship in psychology and positive psychology with new perspectives in theater and performance studies, the volume features eleven prominent theater and performance studies scholars who offer original, previously unpublished examinations of the social benefits of theater and performance. This volume explores the questions: Why is theater considered a "social good"? And what makes theater a valuable contribution to happiness and wellbeing? Contributors point to theater as a rich source of community and examine the unique value of live, theatrical performance as a medium through which trauma as well as socio-political differences can be expressed. The personal, societal, and artistic benefits of theater are examined through chapters on actors' suffering and acting training, community theater, theater and trauma, breaking social barriers through theater, etiquette in the theater, and the theatrical community as a refuge for minoritized groups. Like other titles in this series, Theater and Human Flourishing uses an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach, which here breaches the divide between science-focused fields that study human flourishing and the artistry of theatrical performance.
Theatre Responds to Social Trauma: Chasing the Demons (Routledge Series in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Theatre and Performance)
This book is a collection of chapters by playwrights, directors, devisers, scholars, and educators whose praxis involves representing, theorizing, and performing social trauma.Chapters explore how psychic catastrophes and ruptures are often embedded in social systems of oppression and forged in zones of conflict within and across national borders. Through multiple lenses and diverse approaches, the authors examine the connections between collective trauma, social identity, and personal struggle. We look at the generational transmission of trauma, socially induced pathologies, and societal re-inscriptions of trauma, from mass incarceration to war-induced psychoses, from gendered violence through racist practices. Collective trauma may shape, protect, and preserve group identity, promoting a sense of cohesion and meaning, even as it shakes individuals through pain. Engaging with communities under significant stress through artistic practice offers a path towards reconstructing the meaning(s) of social trauma, making sense of the past, understanding the present, and re-visioning the future.The chapters combine theoretical and practical work, exploring the conceptual foundations and the artists’ processes as they interrogate the intersections of personal grief and communal mourning, through drama, poetry, and embodied performance.
The Theatrical Legacy of Thomas Middleton, 1624–2024 (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)
This 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.
Three Yiddish Plays by Women: Female Jewish Perspectives, 1880-1920 (Yiddish Voices)
This is an unprecedented collection of three newly translated Yiddish plays written by women in the period from 1880 to 1920. Taken together, these plays provide a fascinating insight into female Jewish perspectives on a range of women's issues prevalent at the time and, in some cases, still prevalent today. The works explore topics such as the Jewish law of the 'chained widow', pregnancy out of wedlock, and birth control, amongst many others.Three Yiddish Plays by Women includes an incisive contextual introduction which provides historical context for each individual work, summaries and discussion of the texts and stage histories for two of the three that have them. The introduction offers biographical information about each playwright and looks at what ambit they were each active in, taking into consideration gender norms. It also engages an array of recent sources and angles on intersecting questions of theater and gender in a landmark volume of vital significance to students of women's history, modern Jewish history, cultural history and theatre history.
Toward A Just Pedagogy Of Performance: Historiography, Narrative, And Equity In Dramatic Practice (Routledge Series in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Theatre and Performance)
This book is a compendium of resources largely by and for artists and scholars interested in engaging in conversations of justice, diversity, and historiography in the fields of theatre and performance studies. For these students, and for the future instructors in our field who will use this book, we hold a tripartite hope: to expand, to enable, and to provide access. In its whole, we intend for this book to provoke its readers to question the narratives of history that they’ve received (and that they may promulgate) in their artistic and scholarly work. We aim to question methods and ethics of reading present in the western mode of studying drama and performance history. The contributions in the book—not traditional chapters, but manifestos, experiences, articles, conversations, and provocations—raise questions and illuminate gaps, and they do not speak in a unified voice or from a static position. These pieces are written by artists, graduate students, teachers, administrators, and undergraduates; these are expressions of hope and of experience, and not of dogma. This book is aimed toward instructors of undergraduates, both graduate students and faculty at all levels of seniority within theatre and performance studies, as well as at artists and practitioners of the art that wish to find more just ways of viewing history.
Transnational German Studies (Transnational Modern Languages #5)
This volume consists of a series of essays, written by leading scholars within the field, demonstrating the types of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities underpinning German-language culture and history as these travel right around the globe. Contributions discuss the inherent cross-pollination of different languages, times, places and notions of identity within German-language cultures and the ways in which their construction and circulation cannot be contained by national or linguistic borders. In doing so, it is not the aim of the volume to provide a compendium of existing transnational approaches to German Studies or to offer its readers a series of survey chapters on different fields of study to date. Instead, it offers novel research-led chapters that pose a question, a problem or an issue through which contemporary and historical transcultural and transnational processes can be seen at work. Accordingly, each essay isolates a specific area of study and opens it up for exploration, providing readers, especially student readers, not just with examples of transnational phenomena in German language cultures but also with models of how research in these areas can be configured and pursued. Contributors: Angus Nicholls, Anne Fuchs, Benedict Schofield, Birgit Lang, Charlotte Ryland, Claire Baldwin, Dirk Weissmann, Elizabeth Anderson, James Hodkinson, Nicholas Baer, Paulo Soethe, Rebecca Braun, Sara Jones, Sebastian Heiduschke, Stuart Taberner and Ulrike Draesner.
Trauma and Embodied Healing in Dramatherapy, Theatre and Performance
This edited volume explores the singularity of embodiment and somatic approaches in the healing of trauma from a dramatherapy, theatre and performance perspective.Collating voices from across the fields of dramatherapy, theatre and performance, this book examines how different interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches offer unique and unexplored perspectives on the body as a medium for the exploration, expression and resolution of chronic, acute and complex trauma as well as collective and intergenerational trauma. The diverse chapters highlight how the intersection between dramatherapy and body-based approaches in theatre and performance offers additional opportunities to explore and understand the creative, expressive and imaginative capacity of the body, and its application to the healing of trauma.The book will be of particular interest to dramatherapists and other creative and expressive arts therapists. It will also appeal to counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists and theatre scholars.
The Valiant Black Man in Flanders / El valiente negro en Flandes: by Andrés de Claramonte (Aris & Phillips Hispanic Classics)
A play about defiance of systemic racism. Juan de Mérida, an Afro-Spanish soldier aspires to social advancement in the Netherlands during the Eighty Years' War (1566-1648). His main enemies are not Dutch rebels but his white countrymen, whom he defeats at every attempt to humiliate him. In this play one encounters military culture, upward mobility, mistaken identities, defying destiny, royal pageantry, swordfights, cross-dressing, revenge, homosexual anxiety, and inter-racial marriage. Andrés de Claramonte’s El valiente negro en Flandes (c.1625) is an Afrodiasporic play that enjoyed great success and multiple stagings in Spain and in Latin America. Its 1938 negrista performance in Havana, Cuba, and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, attest to the power of this play to illuminate contemporary racial dynamics. This is the first annotated, critical edition and English translation of El valiente negro en Flandes with a comprehensive introduction, three critical essays, the critical apparatus comparing the eleven extant versions of the play, and an appendix with alternative scenes and related historical documents. A tool for scholars of early modern European literature and a pedagogical aid to discuss the early discourses on Blackness in Spain and its trans-Atlantic empire.
White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture and the Elite
What part did Shakespeare play in the construction of a 'white people' and how has his work been enlisted to define and bolster a white cultural and racial identity?Since the court of Queen Elizabeth I, through the early modern English theatre to the storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, white people have used Shakespeare to define their cultural and racial identity and authority. White People in Shakespeare unravels this complex cultural history to examine just how crucial Shakespeare's work was to the early modern development of whiteness as an embodied identity, as well as the institutional dissemination of a white Shakespeare in contemporary theatres, politics, classrooms and other key sites of culture. Featuring contributors from a wide range of disciplines, the collection moves across Shakespeare's plays and poetry and between the early modern and our own time to interrogate these relationships. Split into two parts, 'Shakespeare's White People' and 'White People's Shakespeare', it explores a variety of topics, ranging from the education of the white self in Hamlet, or affective piety and racial violence in Measure for Measure, to Shakespearean education and the civil rights era, and interpretations of whiteness in more contemporary work such as American Moor and Desdemona.
William Shakespeare and 21st-Century Culture, Politics, and Leadership: Bard Bites (New Horizons in Leadership Studies series)
William Shakespeare and 21st-Century Culture, Politics, and Leadership examines problems, challenges, and crises in our contemporary world through the lens of William Shakespeare’s plays, one of the best-known, most admired, and often controversial authors of the last half-millennium. As perhaps the most oft-cited author in the West outside of the Judeo-Christian Bible, Shakespeare has often been considered a sage, providing manifold insights into our shared human qualities and experiences across time and geography. The editors and authors of this accessible book leverage the now global scope of that sibylline reputation to explore what the Bard might tell us about ourselves, our politics, our leaders, and our societies today. The chapters are written with critical rigor and will appeal to scholars and students in leadership and literary studies but are accessible to non-Shakespeare experts. Anyone looking to explore the ongoing relevance of Shakespeare's work will find this volume enlightening and entertaining.
Women Performers in Bengal and Bangladesh: Caught up in the Culture of South Asia (1795-2010s)
Covering nearly 225 years, this volume tries to capture a broad spectrum of the situation of women performers from Gerasim Lebedeff's time (1795), who are considered to be the first performers in modern Bengali theatre, to today's time. The moot question is whether the role of women as performers evolved down the centuries. Whether this question will lead us to their subjugation to their male counterparts, producers, and directors has been explored here to give readers an understanding of when, where, by whom the politics began, and, by tracing the footprints, we have tried to understand if the politics has changed, or remains unchanged, or metamorphosed with regard to the woman's question in the performance discourse. We have explored, in this regard, how her body, mind, and sexuality interacted with and negotiated the phallocentric hierarchy. The essays included are on (i) Baiji/Tawaif culture in eastern and western Bengal; (ii) prostitute/'fallen' women/ patita, beshya performers; (iii) IPTA and the Naxalbari movement; (iv) group and commercial/professional theatre of Kolkata; (v) women's position in the theatre of Bangladesh; (vi) Cabaret (with an interview with Miss Shefali) (vii) Jatra; (viii) Baul tradition. (ix) Besides, there are chapters on English, Anglo-Indian, Jew, Nachni performers and the illustrious dancer Amala Shankar, and film-music-dance in general.
Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England
This collection reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books, from those who worked in the book trade to those who composed, selected, collected and annotated books. Women gathered rags for paper production, invested in books and oversaw the presses that printed them. Their writing and reading had an impact on their contemporaries and the developing literary canon. A focus on women's work enables these essays to recognize the various forms of labour -- textual and social as well as material and commercial -- that women of different social classes engaged in. Those considered include the very poor, the middling sort who were active in the book trade, and the elite women authors and readers who participated in literary communities. Taken together, these essays convey the impressive work that women accomplished and their frequent collaborations with others in the making, marking, and marketing of early modern English books.
A Wonderful Guy: Conversations with the Great Men of Musical Theater
Fascinating, never-before-published interviews with Broadway's leading men offer behind-the-scenes looks at the careers of some of the most beloved perfomers today. In A Wonderful Guy, a follow up to Nothing Like a Dame: Conversations with the Great Women of Musical Theater, theatre journalist Eddie Shapiro sits down for intimate, career-encompassing conversations with nineteen of Broadway's most prolific and fascinating leading men. Full of detailed stories and reflections, his conversations with such luminaries as Joel Grey, Ben Vereen, Norm Lewis, Gavin Creel, Cheyenne Jackson, Jonathan Groff and a host of others dig deep into each actor's career; together, these chapters tell the story of what it means to be a leading man on Broadway over the past fifty years. Alan Cumming described Nothing Like a Dame, as "an encyclopedia of modern musical theatre via a series of tender meetings between a diehard fan and his idols. Because of Eddie Shapiro's utter guilelessness, these women open up and reveal more than they ever have before, and we get to be the third guest at each encounter." A Wonderful Guy brings more fly-on-the-wall opportunities for fans to savour, students to study, and even the unindoctrinated to understand the life of the performing artist.
The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre: Volume 5: Asia/Pacific
This new paperback edition provides a unique examination of theatre in Asia and the Pacific and is written by leading experts from within the countries covered. Its far-reaching scope and broad interpretation of theatre (to include all types of performance) set it apart from any other similar publication. Entries on 33 Asian countries are featured in this volume, preceded by introductory essays on Asian Theatre, Theatre in the Pacific, History and Culture, Cosmology, Music, Dance, Theatre for Young Audiences, Mask Theatre and Puppetry.The volume contains approximately 300,000 words and includes national essays of up to 25,000 words each. The countries include:Afghanistan * Australia * Bangladesh * Bhutan * Brunei * Cambodia * India * Indonesia * Iran * Japan * Kazakhstan *Kirghizia * Laos * Malaysia * Myanmar * Mongolia * Nepal *New Zealand * Pakistan * Papua New Guinea * PhilippinesNew Zealand * Pakistan * Papua New Guinea * Philippines *Singapore * South Korea * South Pacific * Sri Lanka * Tadjikistan * Thailand * Turkmenistan * Vietnam