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Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction: Problems in Postmodernism (New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)
by James BaxterSamuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction provides an overdue investigation into Beckett’s rich influences over American writing. Through in-depth readings of postmodern authors such as Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and Lydia Davis, this book situates Beckett’s post-war writing of exhaustion and generation in relation to the emergence of an explosive American avant-garde. In turn, this study provides a valuable insight into the practical realities of Beckett’s dissemination in America, following the author’s long-standing relationship with the countercultural magazine Evergreen Review and its dramatic role in redrawing the possibilities of American culture in the 1960s. While Beckett would be largely removed from his American context, this book follows his vigorous, albeit sometimes awkward, reception alongside the authors and institutions central to shaping his legacies in 20th and 21st century America.
Applied Theatre: Performing Health and Wellbeing (Applied Theatre)
by Veronica Baxter Katharine E. Low Michael Balfour Sheila PrestonApplied Theatre: Performing Health and Wellbeing is the first volume in the field to address the role that theatre, drama and performance have in relation to promoting, developing and sustaining health and wellbeing in diverse communities. Challenging concepts and understanding of health, wellbeing and illness, it offers insight into different approaches to major health issues through applied performance. With a strong emphasis on the artistry involved in performance-based health responses, situated within a history of the field of practice, the volume is divided into two sections:Part One examines some of the key questions around research and practice in applied performance in health and wellbeing, specifically addressing the different regional challenges that dominate the provision of health care and influence wellbeing: how the ageing population of the global north creates pressure on lifetime healthcare provision, while the global south is dominated by a higher birth rate and a larger population under 15 years old. Part Two comprises case studies and interviews from international practitioners that reflect the diversity of practices across the world and in particular differences between work in the northern and southern hemispheres. These case studies include a sanitation project in a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand in the 1980s, and the sanitation and rural development projects initiated by the travelling theatre troupes of a number of University theatre departments in Africa – Makerere in Kampala, Uganda; Botswana; Lesotho and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania – which began in the 1960s. It considers the emergence of Theatre for Development's use as a health approach, considering the work of Laedza Batanani and the influences of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed.
Applied Theatre: Performing Health and Wellbeing (Applied Theatre)
by Veronica Baxter Katharine E. Low Michael Balfour Sheila PrestonApplied Theatre: Performing Health and Wellbeing is the first volume in the field to address the role that theatre, drama and performance have in relation to promoting, developing and sustaining health and wellbeing in diverse communities. Challenging concepts and understanding of health, wellbeing and illness, it offers insight into different approaches to major health issues through applied performance. With a strong emphasis on the artistry involved in performance-based health responses, situated within a history of the field of practice, the volume is divided into two sections:Part One examines some of the key questions around research and practice in applied performance in health and wellbeing, specifically addressing the different regional challenges that dominate the provision of health care and influence wellbeing: how the ageing population of the global north creates pressure on lifetime healthcare provision, while the global south is dominated by a higher birth rate and a larger population under 15 years old. Part Two comprises case studies and interviews from international practitioners that reflect the diversity of practices across the world and in particular differences between work in the northern and southern hemispheres. These case studies include a sanitation project in a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand in the 1980s, and the sanitation and rural development projects initiated by the travelling theatre troupes of a number of University theatre departments in Africa – Makerere in Kampala, Uganda; Botswana; Lesotho and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania – which began in the 1960s. It considers the emergence of Theatre for Development's use as a health approach, considering the work of Laedza Batanani and the influences of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed.
Contemporary Dance Festivals in the Former Yugoslav Space: (in)dependent Scenes (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Alexandra BaybuttThis book expands the understanding of conditions defining the creation and circulation of contemporary dance that differ across Europe. It focuses on festival-making connected with the Balkan regional project ‘Nomad Dance Academy’ (NDA), and highlights collective approaches to sustain a theorisation of festivals using the concepts of dissensus and imperceptible politics. Drawing from anthropological methods, three festivals PLESkavica, Slovenia; Kondenz, Serbia and LocoMotion, North Macedonia, are explored through social, political and historical currents affecting curatorial practice. This book closely follows how festival-makers navigate the values of international development that during and after the Yugoslav wars looked to art as part of peacekeeping and nation-building processes. This coincided with increasing discourse and practices of contemporary dance that gained momentum in the 1980s alongside European festivalisation. I show how contemporary dance acts as an agent for transformation, but also a carrier of older forms of social organisation, reflecting methods and values of Yugoslav Worker Self-management that are deployed by the groups creating the festivals. This book will be of interest to dance scholars as well as researchers tracing the long-term effects of the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Contemporary Dance Festivals in the Former Yugoslav Space: (in)dependent Scenes (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Alexandra BaybuttThis book expands the understanding of conditions defining the creation and circulation of contemporary dance that differ across Europe. It focuses on festival-making connected with the Balkan regional project ‘Nomad Dance Academy’ (NDA), and highlights collective approaches to sustain a theorisation of festivals using the concepts of dissensus and imperceptible politics. Drawing from anthropological methods, three festivals PLESkavica, Slovenia; Kondenz, Serbia and LocoMotion, North Macedonia, are explored through social, political and historical currents affecting curatorial practice. This book closely follows how festival-makers navigate the values of international development that during and after the Yugoslav wars looked to art as part of peacekeeping and nation-building processes. This coincided with increasing discourse and practices of contemporary dance that gained momentum in the 1980s alongside European festivalisation. I show how contemporary dance acts as an agent for transformation, but also a carrier of older forms of social organisation, reflecting methods and values of Yugoslav Worker Self-management that are deployed by the groups creating the festivals. This book will be of interest to dance scholars as well as researchers tracing the long-term effects of the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein's Avant-Garde Theatre (Studies in Modern Drama)
by Sarah Bay-ChengMama Dada is the first book to examine Gertrude Stein's drama within the history of the theatrical and cinematic avant-gardes. Since the publication of Stein's major writings by the Library of America in 1998, interest in her dramatic writing has escalated, particularly in American avant-garde theaters. This book addresses the growing interest in Stein's theater by offering the first detailed analyses of her major plays, and by considering them within a larger history of avant-garde performance. In addition to comparing Stein's plays and theories to those generated by Dadaists, Surrealists, and Futurists, this study further explores the uniqueness of Stein via these theatrical movements, including discussions of her interest in American life and drama, which argues that a significant and heretofore unrecognized relationship exists among the histories of avant-garde drama, cinema, and homosexuality. By examining and explaining the relationship among these three histories, the dramatic writings of Stein can best be understood, not only as examples of literary modernism, but also as influential dramatic works that have had a lasting effect on the American theatrical avant-
Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein's Avant-Garde Theatre (Studies in Modern Drama)
by Sarah Bay-ChengMama Dada is the first book to examine Gertrude Stein's drama within the history of the theatrical and cinematic avant-gardes. Since the publication of Stein's major writings by the Library of America in 1998, interest in her dramatic writing has escalated, particularly in American avant-garde theaters. This book addresses the growing interest in Stein's theater by offering the first detailed analyses of her major plays, and by considering them within a larger history of avant-garde performance. In addition to comparing Stein's plays and theories to those generated by Dadaists, Surrealists, and Futurists, this study further explores the uniqueness of Stein via these theatrical movements, including discussions of her interest in American life and drama, which argues that a significant and heretofore unrecognized relationship exists among the histories of avant-garde drama, cinema, and homosexuality. By examining and explaining the relationship among these three histories, the dramatic writings of Stein can best be understood, not only as examples of literary modernism, but also as influential dramatic works that have had a lasting effect on the American theatrical avant-
Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field
by Sarah Bay-Cheng Jennifer Parker-Starbuck David Z. SaltzThis timely collaboration by three prominent scholars of media-based performance presents a new model for understanding and analyzing theater and performance created and experienced where time-based, live events, and mediated technologies converge–particularly those works conceived and performed explicitly within the context of contemporary digital culture. Performance and Media introduces readers to the complexity of new media-based performances and how best to understand and contextualize the work. Each author presents a different model for how best to approach this work, while inviting readers to develop their own critical frameworks, i.e., taxonomies, to analyze both past and emerging performances. Performance and Media capitalizes on the advantages of digital media and online collaborations, while simultaneously creating a responsive and integrated resource for research, scholarship, and teaching. Unlike other monographs or edited collections, this book presents the concept of multiple taxonomies as a model for criticism in a dynamic and rapidly changing field.
Shakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)
by Mark BayerShakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States extends the growing body of scholarship on Shakespeare’s appropriation by examining how the plays have been invoked during periods of extreme social, political, and racial turmoil. How do the ways that Shakespeare is adapted, studied, and discussed during periods of civil conflict differ from wars between nations? And how have these conflicts, in turn, affected how Shakespeare has been understood in these two countries that, more than any others, continue to be deeply shaped by Shakespeare’s complex, enduring, and multivalent legacy? The essays in this volume collectively disclose a fascinating genealogy of how Shakespeare became a dynamic presence in factional discourse and explore the "war of words" that has accompanied civil wars and other instances of domestic disturbance. Whether as part of violent confrontations, mutinies, rebellions, or within the universal struggle for civil rights, Shakespeare’s repeated appearance during such turbulent moments is more than mere historical coincidence. Rather, its inflections on the contested meanings of citizenship, community, and political legitimacy demonstrate the generative influence of the plays on our understanding of internecine strife in both countries.
Shakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)
by Mark Bayer Joseph NavitskyShakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States extends the growing body of scholarship on Shakespeare’s appropriation by examining how the plays have been invoked during periods of extreme social, political, and racial turmoil. How do the ways that Shakespeare is adapted, studied, and discussed during periods of civil conflict differ from wars between nations? And how have these conflicts, in turn, affected how Shakespeare has been understood in these two countries that, more than any others, continue to be deeply shaped by Shakespeare’s complex, enduring, and multivalent legacy? The essays in this volume collectively disclose a fascinating genealogy of how Shakespeare became a dynamic presence in factional discourse and explore the "war of words" that has accompanied civil wars and other instances of domestic disturbance. Whether as part of violent confrontations, mutinies, rebellions, or within the universal struggle for civil rights, Shakespeare’s repeated appearance during such turbulent moments is more than mere historical coincidence. Rather, its inflections on the contested meanings of citizenship, community, and political legitimacy demonstrate the generative influence of the plays on our understanding of internecine strife in both countries.
Posthuman Pedagogies in Practice: Arts based Approaches for Developing Participatory Futures
by Annouchka BayleyThis book investigates transdisciplinary, arts-based approaches to developing innovative and pertinent higher education pedagogy. Introducing timely critical thinking strategies, the author addresses some of the key issues facing educators today in an increasingly complex digital, technological and ecological world. The author combines emerging ideas in the New Materialism and Posthumanism schools of thought with arts-based teaching and learning, including Practice-as-Research, for Social Science contexts, thus exploring how this approach can be used to productively create new pedagogical strategies. Drawing on a rich repertoire of real-life examples, the volume suggests transferrable routes into practice that are suitable for lecturers, researchers and students. This practical and innovative volume will appeal to researchers and practitioners interested in Posthuman and New Materialist theories, and how these can be applied to the educational landscape in future.
Posthuman Pedagogies in Practice: Arts based Approaches for Developing Participatory Futures
by Annouchka BayleyThis book investigates transdisciplinary, arts-based approaches to developing innovative and pertinent higher education pedagogy. Introducing timely critical thinking strategies, the author addresses some of the key issues facing educators today in an increasingly complex digital, technological and ecological world. The author combines emerging ideas in the New Materialism and Posthumanism schools of thought with arts-based teaching and learning, including Practice-as-Research, for Social Science contexts, thus exploring how this approach can be used to productively create new pedagogical strategies. Drawing on a rich repertoire of real-life examples, the volume suggests transferrable routes into practice that are suitable for lecturers, researchers and students. This practical and innovative volume will appeal to researchers and practitioners interested in Posthuman and New Materialist theories, and how these can be applied to the educational landscape in future.
Shakespeare and Tragedy (Routledge Library Editions: Study of Shakespeare)
by John BayleyEvery generation develops its own approach to tragedy, attitudes successively influenced by such classic works as A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy and the studies in interpretation by G. Wilson Knight. A comprehensive new book on the subject by an author of the same calibre was long overdue. In his book, originally published in 1981, John Bayley discusses the Roman plays, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens as well as the four major tragedies. He shows how Shakespeare’s most successful tragic effects hinge on an opposition between the discourses of character and form, role and context. For example, in Lear the dramatis personae act in the dramatic world of tragedy which demands universality and high rhetoric of them. Yet they are human and have their being in the prosaic world of domesticity and plain speaking. The inevitable intrusion of the human world into the world of tragedy creates the play’s powerful off-key effects. Similarly, the existential crisis in Macbeth can be understood in terms of the tension between accomplished action and the free-ranging domain of consciousness. What is the relation between being and acting? How does an audience become intimate with a protagonist who is alienated from his own play? What did Shakespeare add to the form and traditions of tragedy? Do his masterpieces in the genre disturb and transform it in unexpected ways? These are the issues raised by this lucid and imaginative study. Professor Bayley’s highly original rethinking of the problems will be a challenge to the Shakespearean scholar as well as an illumination to the general reader.
Shakespeare and Tragedy (Routledge Library Editions: Study of Shakespeare)
by John BayleyEvery generation develops its own approach to tragedy, attitudes successively influenced by such classic works as A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy and the studies in interpretation by G. Wilson Knight. A comprehensive new book on the subject by an author of the same calibre was long overdue. In his book, originally published in 1981, John Bayley discusses the Roman plays, Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens as well as the four major tragedies. He shows how Shakespeare’s most successful tragic effects hinge on an opposition between the discourses of character and form, role and context. For example, in Lear the dramatis personae act in the dramatic world of tragedy which demands universality and high rhetoric of them. Yet they are human and have their being in the prosaic world of domesticity and plain speaking. The inevitable intrusion of the human world into the world of tragedy creates the play’s powerful off-key effects. Similarly, the existential crisis in Macbeth can be understood in terms of the tension between accomplished action and the free-ranging domain of consciousness. What is the relation between being and acting? How does an audience become intimate with a protagonist who is alienated from his own play? What did Shakespeare add to the form and traditions of tragedy? Do his masterpieces in the genre disturb and transform it in unexpected ways? These are the issues raised by this lucid and imaginative study. Professor Bayley’s highly original rethinking of the problems will be a challenge to the Shakespearean scholar as well as an illumination to the general reader.
Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures On Hamlet, Othello, King Lear And Macbeth (Barnes And Noble Library Of Essential Reading)
by John Bayley A. BradleyA.C. Bradley put Shakespeare on the map for generations of readers and students for whom the plays might not otherwise have become "real" at all' writes John Bayley in his foreword to this edition of Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.Approaching the tragedies as drama, wondering about their characters as he might have wondered about people in novels or in life, Bradley is one of the most liberating in the line of distinguished Shakespeare critics. His acute yet undogmatic and almost conversational critical method has—despite fluctuations in fashion—remained enduringly popular and influential. For, as John Bayley observes, these lectures give us a true and exhilarating sense of 'the tragedies joining up with life, with all our lives; leading us into a perspective of possibilities that stretch forward and back in time, and in our total awareness of things.
No Boys Play Here: A Story Of Shakespeare And My Family's Missing Men
by Sally Bayley‘Nobody writes like Sally Bayley’ Lemn Sissay ‘Original and moving … To be read by all educationalists’ Kate Clanchy From the brilliantly original and critically acclaimed Sally Bayley, a literary story of working class childhood, absent or broken men and the power of literature to save and rebuild a world.
A Pathognomy of Performance
by S. BaylyExploring the themes of the event, ephemerality and democracy that mark the encounter between performance and philosophy, this original study elaborates fresh perspectives on the experiences of undoing, fiasco and disaster that shadow both the both stage and everyday life.
Working with Actors: Meisner Technique for Directors and Actors
by Stephen BaylyWorking with Actors provides the key to unlocking the honest, dynamic performance every actor has within them. It offers a well-articulated formulation of the Meisner Technique easy for directors and actors to use within a working context.Through setting out an accessible training programme for practitioners working across stage and screen, this book establishes a clear-cut route to building a three-dimensional character in an organic, non-intellectual fashion, based squarely on the character's objectives.Few books in this field venture out of the training studio, while in this book - alongside offering an intense and concentrated Meisner training programme - the focus is more on the 'pay-off': the collaborative act of developing the role and how that plays out in rehearsal and performance.Beyond that, the books uniquely offers:> a new modality for script reading, analysis and rehearsal through which the character is born in relation to other characters;> a prioritisation of the key skills for coming alive in the moment – listening and putting one's attention wholly on the other character/actor;> a historical perspective on how Meisner's methods have evolved and why they provide the basis of truthful acting;> for directors, a format for analysis of the complete work based on Stanislavskian principles;> for actors, complementary methods, such as Uta Hagen's 'endowment', to enhance the 'reality of doing'
Working with Actors: Meisner Technique for Directors and Actors
by Stephen BaylyWorking with Actors provides the key to unlocking the honest, dynamic performance every actor has within them. It offers a well-articulated formulation of the Meisner Technique easy for directors and actors to use within a working context.Through setting out an accessible training programme for practitioners working across stage and screen, this book establishes a clear-cut route to building a three-dimensional character in an organic, non-intellectual fashion, based squarely on the character's objectives.Few books in this field venture out of the training studio, while in this book - alongside offering an intense and concentrated Meisner training programme - the focus is more on the 'pay-off': the collaborative act of developing the role and how that plays out in rehearsal and performance.Beyond that, the books uniquely offers:> a new modality for script reading, analysis and rehearsal through which the character is born in relation to other characters;> a prioritisation of the key skills for coming alive in the moment – listening and putting one's attention wholly on the other character/actor;> a historical perspective on how Meisner's methods have evolved and why they provide the basis of truthful acting;> for directors, a format for analysis of the complete work based on Stanislavskian principles;> for actors, complementary methods, such as Uta Hagen's 'endowment', to enhance the 'reality of doing'
Staging Politics and Gender: French Women’s Drama, 1880–1923
by C. BeachIn Staging Politics and Gender , Cecilia Beach examines the political and feminist plays of French playwrights who have largely been overlooked until now. Beach highlights the importance of theatrical endeavors which women perceived as a powerful way to promote political opinions. The author analyzes the work of Louise Michel, Nelly Roussel, Marie Leneru, Vera Starkoff, and Madeline Pelletier and discusses anarchist theatre and forms of social protest theatre at the turn of the century.
Adolphe Appia: Texts On Theatre (Contemporary Theatre Studies #Vol. 6)
by Richard C. BeachamFirst Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Adolphe Appia: Artist and Visionary of the Modern Theatre
by Richard C. BeachamFirst Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Lies Have Been Told: A Evening with Robert Maxwell (Oberon Modern Plays Ser.)
by Rod BeachamOn November 5th 1991, Robert Maxwell, who had used hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies and their pension funds to prop up his ailing empire, disappeared overboard from his yacht in the Canary Islands. His body was later found floating in the ocean. The official verdict was accidental drowning, but others suggested he had committed suicide or been murdered by secret agents or Russian mafia hit men.Was Robert Maxwell a monster or the victim of racism and snobbery? In the outstanding one-man production, Lies Have Been Told: An Evening With Robert Maxwell, Maxwell tries to persuade you of his point of view... if you can believe a word he says!Lies Have Been Told had a successful run at the New End Theatre in 2005 and transferred to the Trafalagar Studios in January 2006.
The Cambridge Companion To Medieval English Theatre (PDF)
by Richard BeadleThe drama of the English Middle Ages is perennially popular with students and theatre audiences alike. This book provides an authoritative introduction and an up-to-date, illustrated guide to the mystery cycles, morality drama and saints' plays which flourished from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The book emphasises regional diversity in the period and engages with the literary, and particularly the theatrical values of the plays. After a general introduction there are chapters devoted to each of the major regional cycles, the less-well known East Anglian and Cornish traditions, the morality drama and saints' plays. Two illustrated chapters are devoted to the performance of medieval plays, in their own time and in recent modern revivals. A full reference section includes a guide to scholarship and criticism, an extensive classified bibliography and a chronological table.
The Cambridge Companion To Medieval English Theatre (Cambridge Companions To Literature Ser. (PDF))
by Richard Beadle Alan J. FletcherThe drama of the English Middle Ages is perennially popular with students and theatre audiences alike, and this is an updated edition of a book which has established itself as a standard guide to the field. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, second edition continues to provide an authoritative introduction and an up-to-date, illustrated guide to the mystery cycles, morality drama and saints' plays which flourished from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The book emphasises regional diversity in the period and engages with the literary and particularly the theatrical values of the plays. Existing chapters have been revised and updated where necessary, and there are three entirely new chapters, including one on the cultural significance of early drama. A thoroughly revised reference section includes a guide to scholarship and criticism, an enlarged classified bibliography and a chronological table.