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Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom
by Cesar Lombardi Barber Stephen GreenblattIn this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity. "I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture."--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing that Shakespeare's Festive Comedy is as vital today as when it was originally published.
Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom
by Cesar Lombardi Barber Stephen GreenblattIn this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity. "I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture."--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing that Shakespeare's Festive Comedy is as vital today as when it was originally published.
Costume in Performance: Materiality, Culture, and the Body
by Donatella BarbieriThis beautifully illustrated book conveys the centrality of costume to live performance. Finding associations between contemporary practices and historical manifestations, costume is explored in six thematic chapters, examining the transformative ritual of costuming; choruses as reflective of society; the grotesque, transgressive costume; the female sublime as emancipation; costume as sculptural art in motion; and the here-and-now as history. Viewing the material costume as a crucial aspect in the preparation, presentation and reception of live performance, the book brings together costumed performances through history. These range from ancient Greece to modern experimental productions, from medieval theatre to modernist dance, from the 'fashion plays' to contemporary Shakespeare, marking developments in both culture and performance. Revealing the relationship between dress, the body and human existence, and acknowledging a global as well as an Anglo and Eurocentric perspective, this book shows costume's ability to cross both geographical and disciplinary borders. Through it, we come to question the extent to which the material costume actually co-authors the performance itself, speaking of embodied histories, states of being and never-before imagined futures, which come to life in the temporary space of the performance.With a contribution by Melissa Trimingham, University of Kent, UK
Costume in Performance: Materiality, Culture, and the Body (Bloomsbury Revelations Ser.)
by Donatella BarbieriThis beautifully illustrated book conveys the centrality of costume to live performance. Finding associations between contemporary practices and historical manifestations, costume is explored in six thematic chapters, examining the transformative ritual of costuming; choruses as reflective of society; the grotesque, transgressive costume; the female sublime as emancipation; costume as sculptural art in motion; and the here-and-now as history. Viewing the material costume as a crucial aspect in the preparation, presentation and reception of live performance, the book brings together costumed performances through history. These range from ancient Greece to modern experimental productions, from medieval theatre to modernist dance, from the 'fashion plays' to contemporary Shakespeare, marking developments in both culture and performance. Revealing the relationship between dress, the body and human existence, and acknowledging a global as well as an Anglo and Eurocentric perspective, this book shows costume's ability to cross both geographical and disciplinary borders. Through it, we come to question the extent to which the material costume actually co-authors the performance itself, speaking of embodied histories, states of being and never-before imagined futures, which come to life in the temporary space of the performance.With a contribution by Melissa Trimingham, University of Kent, UK
Directing Desire: Intimacy Choreography and Consent in the Twenty-First Century
by Kari BarclayDirecting Desire explores the rise of consent-based and trauma-informed approaches to staging sexually and sensually charged scenes for theater in the contemporary U.S., known as intimacy choreography. From 2015 to 2020, intimacy choreography transformed from a grassroots movement in experimental and regional theaters into a best practice accepted in Hollywood and on Broadway. Today, intimacy choreographers have become a veritable "intimacy industry" in the cultural sphere, sparking attention from Rolling Stone to The New York Times to the sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live. This book analyzes the forces that have led to intimacy choreography’s meteoric rise and asks what implications the field has for theater practice more broadly. Building a theoretical framework for intimacy directing, Directing Desire also strives to reorient the conversation in the field so that artists understand not only best practices in consent but also intersectional frameworks that expand and rework consent.
Performing Arts and Digital Humanities: From Traces to Data
by Clarisse BardiotDigital traces, whether digitized (programs, notebooks, drawings, etc.) or born digital (emails, websites, video recordings, etc.), constitute a major challenge for the memory of the ephemeral performing arts.Digital technology transforms traces into data and, in doing so, opens them up to manipulation. This paradigm shift calls for a renewal of methodologies for writing the history of theater today, analyzing works and their creative process, and preserving performances. At the crossroads of performing arts studies, the history, digital humanities, conservation and archiving, these methodologies allow us to take into account what is generally dismissed, namely, digital traces that are considered too complex, too numerous, too fragile, of dubious authenticity, etc.With the analysis of Merce Cunningham’s digital traces as a guideline, and through many other examples, this book is intended for researchers and archivists, as well as artists and cultural institutions.
Performing Arts and Digital Humanities: From Traces to Data
by Clarisse BardiotDigital traces, whether digitized (programs, notebooks, drawings, etc.) or born digital (emails, websites, video recordings, etc.), constitute a major challenge for the memory of the ephemeral performing arts.Digital technology transforms traces into data and, in doing so, opens them up to manipulation. This paradigm shift calls for a renewal of methodologies for writing the history of theater today, analyzing works and their creative process, and preserving performances. At the crossroads of performing arts studies, the history, digital humanities, conservation and archiving, these methodologies allow us to take into account what is generally dismissed, namely, digital traces that are considered too complex, too numerous, too fragile, of dubious authenticity, etc.With the analysis of Merce Cunningham’s digital traces as a guideline, and through many other examples, this book is intended for researchers and archivists, as well as artists and cultural institutions.
Hallelujah – The story of a musical genius and the city that brought his masterpiece to life: George Frideric Handel’s Messiah in Dublin
by Jonathan Bardon18 November, 1741. George Frideric Handel, one of the world’s greatest composers, arrives in Dublin – the second city of the Empire – to prepare his masterpiece, Messiah, for its maiden performance the following spring …In Hallelujah, Jonathan Bardon, one of Ireland’s leading historians, explores the remarkable circumstances surrounding the first performance of Handel’s now iconic oratorio in Dublin, providing a panoramic view of a city in flux – at once struggling to contain the chaos unleashed by the catastrophic famine of the preceding year while striving to become a vibrant centre of European culture and commerce.Brimming with drama, curiosity and intrigue, and populated by an unforgettable cast of characters, Hallelujah tells of how one charitable performance wove itself into the fabric of Ireland’s capital, changing the course of musical history and the lives of those who called the city home.
Personal Narratives, Peripheral Theatres: Essays on the Great War (Second Language Learning and Teaching)
by Anthony Barker Maria Eugénia Pereira Maria Teresa Cortez Paulo Alexandre Pereira Otília MartinsThis book is a collection of essays on neglected aspects of the Great War. It begins by asking what exactly was so "Great" about it, before turning to individual studies of various aspects of the war. These fall broadly into two categories. Firstly personal, micro-narratives that deal directly with the experience of war, often derived from contemporary interest in diaries and oral histories. Presenting both a close-up view of the viscerality, and the tedium and powerlessness of personal situations, these same narratives also address the effects of the war on hitherto under-regarded groups such as children and animals. Secondly, the authors look at the impact of the course of the war on theatres, often left out in reflections on the main European combatants and therefore not part of the regular iconography of the trenches in places such as Denmark, Canada, India, the Levant, Greece and East Africa.
Stowaway (Oberon Modern Plays)
by Hannah Barker Lewis HetheringtonA Boeing 777 begins its descent towards Heathrow. The wheels unfold out of the belly of the plane. The frozen body of a stowaway is tipped out and cuts through the clear morning sky. In the car park of B&Q, Andy looks up. Something is falling out of the sky. A man crash-lands on the ground in front of him. Stowaway is a story about a man from India who finds himself far from home and adrift from everything he knows. He hides in the wheel arch of a commercial airliner bound for the UK, in a bid to change his life. Stowaway is the story of an extraordinary journey in search of an impossible future. But what are the rules of telling someone’s story when they come from a world so different from our own?
2401 Objects (Oberon Modern Plays)
by Hannah Barker Lewis Hetherington Liam Jarvis2011 Fringe First Award Winner‘Henry, are you awake?’Henry lives each day like the last. Exactly like the last. Every day, he tries to make sense of the world around him; the girl sitting on the lawn outside his window, the pages of a book filled with the same sentence, the 80 year old man looking at him in the mirror.In 2009 Patient H.M.’s brain is dissected live on the internet to a global audience of 400,000 people, cut into carefully preserved slices: manuscripts of tissue like the pages of a book.In 1953 Henry Molaison emerges from experimental brain surgery without any recollection of the last two years of his life or the ability to form new memories.In 1935 nine-year old Henry is knocked over by a bike, leaving him unconscious for five minutes.Following Analogue's critically acclaimed Mile End and Beachy Head and inspired by the world’s most important neuroscientific case-study, 2401 Objects tells the remarkable story of a man who could no longer remember, but who has proven impossible to forget.‘I defy anyone not be drawn into this deeply moving examination of life, death and memory.’ - Telegraph‘2401 Objects is a solid, well-researched piece of theatre that adds to Analogue's ever-growing canon of work.’ - Total Theatre Review‘Beautifully-sculpted... an understated and outstandingly gentle piece of theatre’ -The Scotsman
Beachy Head: A Design Guide (Oberon Modern Plays)
by Hannah Barker Lewis Hetherington Liam JarvisIt has been a month since Stephen jumped. Amy collects her husband’s effects, the things he had with him gathered in a single box. There was no sign – no warning of what he would do. As fractured memories of their last night together rewind, replay and unravel, she is desperate to find out why.Joe and Matt are making a documentary. Whilst reviewing their footage they make a startling discovery that takes their film in an unexpected direction – the blurred image of a man jumping from the cliffs. Beachy Head is a powerful look at the ripple effects of one man’s decision to take his life.‘A quietly splendid production, magically well staged; it lingers long’ -The Observer‘Beachy Head treats its sombre core themes – mortality, grief and artistic responsibility – with a clever, caring and occasionally humorous theatrical intelligence. Well-researched and simply but fluidly staged, it is a skilful blend of text of technology. Analogue’s desire to probe the painful, mysterious emotions behind clinical facts is honourable.’ – Donald Hutera, The Times
Agnes Colander (Modern Plays)
by Harley Granville BarkerWe should all have been taught more of life and less good mannersIt is three years since Agnes, an artist, left her unfaithful husband Henry. Now he writes to her in her Kensington studio begging to reunite, but Agnes married young; her innocence has gone and her ambition and independence is growing. As she travels from London to France, Agnes finds herself torn between Otho, a worldly Danish artist and Alec, an infatuated younger suitor, between a longing to paint and be an independent woman and a yearning to be loved.This witty and compelling exploration of love, sexual attraction and independence was written in 1900 and unearthed among Granville Barker's papers in the British Library a century later. Revised by playwright and librettist Richard Nelson this edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Theatre Royal Bath in Spring 2018.
Agnes Colander (Modern Plays)
by Harley Granville BarkerWe should all have been taught more of life and less good mannersIt is three years since Agnes, an artist, left her unfaithful husband Henry. Now he writes to her in her Kensington studio begging to reunite, but Agnes married young; her innocence has gone and her ambition and independence is growing. As she travels from London to France, Agnes finds herself torn between Otho, a worldly Danish artist and Alec, an infatuated younger suitor, between a longing to paint and be an independent woman and a yearning to be loved.This witty and compelling exploration of love, sexual attraction and independence was written in 1900 and unearthed among Granville Barker's papers in the British Library a century later. Revised by playwright and librettist Richard Nelson this edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Theatre Royal Bath in Spring 2018.
Waste (Modern Plays)
by Harley Granville BarkerA scandal half-stifled is worse than a scandal. One is at everybody's mercy.Backstage at a hung parliament, visionary Independent Henry Trebell is co-opted by the Tories to push through a controversial Bill. Pursuing his cause with missionary zeal, he's barely distracted by his brief affair with a married woman until she suffers a lethal backstreet abortion. Threatened by public scandal, the Establishment closes ranks and coolly seals the fate of an idealistic man.Famously banned by the censors in 1907, Harley Granville Barker's controversial masterpiece gathers a large ensemble to expose a cut-throat, cynical world of sex, sleaze and suicide amongst the political elite of Edwardian England.This edition was published for the National Theatre's revival in November 2015.
Waste: A Tragedy, In Four Acts (Modern Plays)
by Harley Granville BarkerA scandal half-stifled is worse than a scandal. One is at everybody's mercy.Backstage at a hung parliament, visionary Independent Henry Trebell is co-opted by the Tories to push through a controversial Bill. Pursuing his cause with missionary zeal, he's barely distracted by his brief affair with a married woman until she suffers a lethal backstreet abortion. Threatened by public scandal, the Establishment closes ranks and coolly seals the fate of an idealistic man.Famously banned by the censors in 1907, Harley Granville Barker's controversial masterpiece gathers a large ensemble to expose a cut-throat, cynical world of sex, sleaze and suicide amongst the political elite of Edwardian England.This edition was published for the National Theatre's revival in November 2015.
Granville Barker on Theatre: Selected Essays (Theatre Makers)
by Harley Granville Barker Colin Chambers Richard NelsonGranville Barker on Theatre brings together some of the most important critical theatrical writings of Harley Granville Barker, a major figure of 20th-century British theatre. Known as a pioneer of the National Theatre and Repertory Movement, and remembered mainly for his Prefaces to Shakespeare, from the 1900s to his death in the 1940s Granville Barker commented enthusiastically in newspaper items, introductions to plays, articles, essays, articles, and published lectures on a range of topics: the nature of theatre as an art form and as a social medium, the need for ensemble playing in a repertory system, the relationship between the three chief constituents of theatre – the actor, the playwright and the audience. Granville Barker on Theatre makes available again these writings in which Barker dissects the state of theatre as he saw it, with coruscating critiques of the commercial system, the long run and censorship, the vitality of theatre outside Britain, and what he saw as the welcome renaissance of theatre in non-professional groups liberated from the profit motive. These writings show a master practitioner concerned with, above all, promoting a new type of drama; vital not only for its own sake but for the sake of the health of society at large.
Granville Barker on Theatre: Selected Essays (Theatre Makers)
by Harley Granville Barker Colin Chambers Richard NelsonGranville Barker on Theatre brings together some of the most important critical theatrical writings of Harley Granville Barker, a major figure of 20th-century British theatre. Known as a pioneer of the National Theatre and Repertory Movement, and remembered mainly for his Prefaces to Shakespeare, from the 1900s to his death in the 1940s Granville Barker commented enthusiastically in newspaper items, introductions to plays, articles, essays, articles, and published lectures on a range of topics: the nature of theatre as an art form and as a social medium, the need for ensemble playing in a repertory system, the relationship between the three chief constituents of theatre – the actor, the playwright and the audience. Granville Barker on Theatre makes available again these writings in which Barker dissects the state of theatre as he saw it, with coruscating critiques of the commercial system, the long run and censorship, the vitality of theatre outside Britain, and what he saw as the welcome renaissance of theatre in non-professional groups liberated from the profit motive. These writings show a master practitioner concerned with, above all, promoting a new type of drama; vital not only for its own sake but for the sake of the health of society at large.
Arguments for a Theatre (4th edition): (4th edition)
by Howard BarkerFor more than three decades Howard Barker has argued passionately against the deformation of English theatre by social realism. Insisting on the primacy of tragedy over all art forms in Western culture, his elaboration of a tragic form for our time – identified by him as The Theatre of Catastrophe – is the theme of this collection of lectures and essays. Barker’s repudiation of entertainment, his insistence on the sterility of debate in theatre, and his conviction that conscience is never an adequate pretext for dramatic action, mark him out as a unique and provocative voice in world theatre.
Barker: Plays Six (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerIncludes the plays Judith, (Uncle) Vanya, A House of Correction, Let Me and Lot and His GodBarker’s radical rewriting of Chekhov’s classic (Uncle) Vanya brought him more controversy than most of his other works put together. Interrogating not so much Chekhov’s text as the use to which society has put it, Barker turns Vanya’s defeat into victory and converts a play of sadness into a tragedy of desire. A House of Correction is a meditation on cause and effect. Set on the eve of a war which may destroy a society, the seemingly arbitrary arrival of a messenger with a vital communication sets off an agonizing train of events in the lives of three desperate women.Few works of drama can have plumbed the depths of solitude and rage that characterize Let Me, a nightmare set on the frontiers of the Roman Empire during the barbarian invasions. Biblical narratives serve as the origin of two shorter works, of which Judith is a contemporary classic of cultural conflict, a reinterpretation of the status of the heroine in Israel’s war of survival against the Assyrians. In Lot and His God, the imminent destruction of Sodom simultaneously licenses the moral decay of an angel and the erotic epiphany of an adored wife.
Barker: Plays Seven (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerUnd, a play for one woman and six trays, is a moving study of dignityand self-delusion. When a guest, perhaps a lover, fails to appear foran appointment, his hostess invents excuses for his neglect, evenwhen ill-manners degenerate into barbarity. The hostess is Jewish, theinvisible guest a Nazi officer.The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo is the twelfth marriage of a very old manto a young woman a fraction of his age. Their mutual fascination isintensified but also rendered ambiguous by the fact that both are blind.The intellectual and erotic manoeuvres conducted between them areakin to a dance, and what begins as a hypothesis becomes a painfulexposure of the many meanings of intimacy.12 Encounters with a Prodigy concentrates a theme Barker has exploredover many plays – the solitude of the precocious child. Kisster, an adoredorphan, has been taught to exploit the pity of the world for his ownadvantage. From inside his fortified personality, Kisster manipulates ahost of predatory characters, keeping at bay angels and vagrants in hisstruggle to survive.In Christ’s Dog the dying Lazar, arch-seducer and bigamist, treads out ajourney he feels compelled to undertake to reach accommodation withhis past. At every stage of his search, a different version of the untoldstory of Christ’s dog is proposed to him. Lazar understands that hisseemingly worthless life – akin to the mongrel that howls at the foot ofthe cross – is a critical element of human morality.Learning Kneeling is perhaps the most terrible of Barker’s works, a playof apparently unredeemed extremity, relieved by a wit and a scrupulousintensity of thought that renders it a tribute to human persistence andimagination. Sturdee, a legless man of property, finds his home andhis mistress seized by terrorists, the leader of whom, Demonstrator byname and instinct, leads him into a nightmare of ambiguities.
Barker: Plays Three (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerIncludes the plays Claw, Ursula, He Stumbled and The Love of a Good ManThe plays in this volume range over twenty years, beginning with Barker's first major work for the stage, Claw, a study of urban discontent and political impotence, developed over three stylistically contrasting acts. Its terrible conclusion marked the debut of a vivid dramatic imagination. In Ursula Barker's engagement with the pains of the past, and his way of reinvigorating ancient arguments reaches a high point in his treatment of the legend of St Ursula and the martyrdom of 11,000 virgins, where the virtues of celibacy and marriage are set against the catastrophic passion of a woman described as a 'perfect liar'. Barker's scrutiny of the body and its complex meanings is never more intense than in He Stumbled, the tragedy of a celebrated anatomist whose last dissection becomes his own. The body as a site of political and personal investment is also at the heart of The Love of a Good Man, an early work set on the empty battlefields of the Great War, where the burial of the dead becomes a pretext for private ambition as well as national grief.
Barker: Plays Eight (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerThe Trojan legend and the character of Helen form the basis for The Bite of the Night. As with all Barker’s mythical and historical works, it is overlaid and undermined by a contemporary narrative, in this instance the search for the origin of the erotic undertaken by the redundant university teacher Dr Savage and his nihilistic student, Hogbin. Through all twelve Troys, Savage and Helen struggle with a passion both intellectual and physical, and the idea of beauty is refined to a terrifying degree. In Brutopia Barker’s controversial portrait of the humanist Thomas More is shaped around his strained relationship with his daughter Cecilia, here discovered to be the author of a counter-text to her parent’s infamous Utopia. Cecilia’s wit and cruelty mark her out as one of Barker’s least compromising and heroic young women. The Forty is a significant departure from Barker’s dramatic practice, his investment in language reduced to a few phrases which punctuate detailed scenes of conflict and solitude. Physical movement, and intense concentration on gesture show the author’s flair for visuality in a new and surprising way. The theme of sacrifice features increasingly in Barker’s theatre, and in Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward it is a mother’s refusal to apologize for an act of passion – notwithstanding the dire consequence for her own child – that is at the heart of the argument. Set in a home for terminally-ill patients, many of whom create a hilarious chorus around the protagonists, Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward shows Barker’s imagination in its most startling form.
Barker: Plays Four (Oberon Modern Playwrights)
by Howard BarkerIncludes the plays I Saw Myself, The Dying of Today, Found in the Ground and The Road, the House, the RoadHoward Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. In I Saw Myself a woman's longing to understand her compulsion to transgress the laws of her society comes into collision with the conventions of an art form. In the weaving of a tapestry Barker's13th century heroine privileges private life over public responsibility. If she is cruelly punished she is also granted self-awareness. A critical moment in social decay is also at the centre of The Dying of Today, in which a stranger who luxuriates in the telling of bad news observes the effects of his devastating narrative on a humble barber. The barber's recovery from pain, and the beauty of his sensibility, bring the two strangers into an emotional proximity. Barker's most experimental work in form and content is probably Found in the Ground, a mobile, musical work set during the last days of an aged Nuremberg judge whose baying hounds and burning library form an uncanny background to his wayward daughter's struggle to make meaning from the atrocities of the 20th century. The contradictions of the humanist personality are explored in The Road, the House, the Road. Erasmus' obscure colleague Aventinus was found dead on a wintry road. How he arrived at his solitary death forms the subject of this speculation on scholarship, mischief and the murderer's vocation.
Barker: Plays One (Oberon Modern Playwright's Ser.)
by Howard BarkerIncludes the plays Victory, The Europeans, The Possibilities and Scenes from an Execution.Howard Barker is one of the most significant and controversial dramatists of his time. His plays challenge, unsettle and expose. These plays are among his best-known works, and their energy, poetic language and imagination have fixed them firmly in the international repertoire.Exploring the tragic form defined by Barker as Theatre of Catastrophe, three of the plays speculate on human behaviour in moments of historical crisis. Victory is set in the English Civil War and follows the ethical voyage of a widow towards personal reconstruction. The Europeans takes one of the great eruptions of Islamic imperialism as the background for a young woman's insistence on her right to her own identity. Scenes from an Execution shows the struggle of an independently-minded artist against the power of the Venetian state.The Possibilities, a disturbing series of short plays set in various times and cultures, reveals Barker's unconventional way with moral dilemmas.