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146 results in Drama and Theatre: general interest

Page 1 of 8

The Year that Made the Musical
  • 1924 and the Glamour of Musical Theatre
  • William A. Everett
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2024
    Print publication:
    30 June 2024

Democracy, Theatre and Performance
  • From the Greeks to Gandhi
  • David Wiles
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2024
    Print publication:
    30 April 2024
  • Democracy, argues David Wiles, is actually a form of theatre. In making his case, the author deftly investigates orators at the foundational moments of ancient and modern democracy, demonstrating how their performative skills were used to try to create a better world. People often complain about demagogues, or wish that politicians might be more sincere. But to do good, politicians (paradoxically) must be hypocrites - or actors. Moving from Athens to Indian independence via three great revolutions – in Puritan England, republican France and liberal America – the book opens up larger questions about the nature of democracy. When in the classical past Plato condemned rhetoric, the only alternative he could offer was authoritarianism. Wiles' bold historical study has profound implications for our present: calls for personal authenticity, he suggests, are not an effective way to counter the rise of populism.

The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945
  • Edited by Jen Harvie, Dan Rebellato
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2024
    Print publication:
    29 February 2024
  • British theatre underwent a vast transformation and expansion in the decades after World War II. This Companion explores the historical, political, and social contexts and conditions that not only allowed it to expand but, crucially, shaped it. Resisting a critical tendency to focus on plays alone, the collection expands understanding of British theatre by illuminating contexts such as funding, unionisation, devolution, immigration, and changes to legislation. Divided into four parts, it guides readers through changing attitudes to theatre-making (acting, directing, writing), theatre sectors (West End, subsidised, Fringe), theatre communities (audiences, Black theatre, queer theatre), and theatre's relationship to the state (government, infrastructure, nationhood). Supplemented by a valuable Chronology and Guide to Further Reading, it presents up-to-date approaches informed by critical race theory, queer studies, audience studies, and archival research to demonstrate important new ways of conceptualising post-war British theatre's history, practices and potential futures.

The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies
  • Edited by Tracy C. Davis, Paul Rae
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2024
    Print publication:
    29 February 2024
  • We often know performance when we see it – but how should we investigate it? And how should we interpret what we find out? This book demonstrates why and how mixed methods research is necessary for investigating and explaining performance and advancing new critical agendas in cultural study. The wide range of aesthetic forms, cultural meanings, and social functions found in theatre and performance globally invites a corresponding variety of research approaches. The essays in this volume model reflective consideration of the means, processes, and choices for conducting performance research that is historical, ethnographic, aesthetic, or computational. An international set of contributors address what is meant by planning or designing a research project, doing research (locating and collecting primary sources or resources), and the ensuing work of interpreting and communicating insights. Providing illuminating and necessary guidance, this volume is an essential resource for scholars and students of theatre, performance, and dance.

Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire
  • Logan J. Connors
  • Published online:
    09 November 2023
    Print publication:
    23 November 2023
  • This is the first study of French theater and war at a time of global revolutions, colonial violence, and radical social transformation. Analyzing France and its largest Caribbean colony (Saint-Domingue), and spanning the Old Regime and Revolution, Logan Connors presents an ambitious, richly interdisciplinary argument, grounded in theater and performance studies, literary analysis of drama, and cultural, military, and gender history. Demonstrating how war and soldiering catalyzed new drama types and fostered theater's expansion into France's geographical and social peripheries, the study also shows how theater emerged as a dynamic space in which military practices could be re-imagined. This major scholarly intervention provides unparalleled insight into theater's engagement with international and domestic war efforts during a transformational period in global history.

The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre of the First World War
  • Edited by Helen E. M. Brooks, Michael Hammond
  • Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    19 October 2023
  • This is the first comprehensive guide to British theatre's engagement with the First World War over the last century, from 1900 to the Armistice Day centenary in 2018. Considering theatre as both an industry and literary-cultural artform, it provides a contextual grounding in the prelude to the conflict and coverage of post-war plays as well as wartime performances. Lively chapters from leading scholars explore diverse genres and practices, from Shakespeare to melodrama, while focusing on topics including regionality, national identity, propaganda, commemoration, gender, censorship and international influences. Presenting original scholarship in an accessible and engaging manner, this Companion establishes theatre as a vital means of understanding wartime experiences, and a central feature in commemoration and remembrance.

State of the Arts
  • An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration
  • Jonas Tinius
  • Published online:
    03 August 2023
    Print publication:
    17 August 2023
  • This is a bold and wide-ranging account of the unique German public theatre system through the prism of a migrant artistic institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region. State of the Arts analyses how artistic traditions have responded to social change, racism, and cosmopolitan anxieties and recounts how critical contemporary cultural production positions itself in relation to the tumultuous history of German state patronage, difficult heritage, and self-cultivation through the arts. Jonas Tinius' fieldwork with professional actors, directors, cultural policy makers, and activists unravels how they constitute theatre as a site for extra-ordinary ethical conduct and how they grapple with the pervasive German cultural tradition of Bildung, or self-cultivation through the arts. Tinius shows how anthropological methods provide a way to understand the entanglement of cultural policy, institution-building, and subject-formation. An ambitious and interdisciplinary study, the work demonstrates the crucial role of artistic intellectuals in society.

Performance and Translation in a Global Age
  • Edited by Avishek Ganguly, Kélina Gotman
  • Published online:
    10 August 2023
    Print publication:
    29 June 2023
  • This global overview of how translation is understood as a performative practice across genres, media and disciplines illuminates the broad impact of the 'performance turn' in the arts and humanities. Combining key concepts in comparative literature, performance studies and translation theory, the volume provides readers with a dynamic account of the ways in which these fields fruitfully interact. The chapters display interdisciplinary thinking in action across a wide spectrum of performance practices and media from around the world, from poetry and manuscripts to theatre surtitles, audio description, archives, installations, dialects, movement and dance. Paying close attention to questions of race, gender, sexuality, embodiment and accessibility, the collection's rich array of methodological approaches and experiments with scholarly writing demonstrate how translation as a performative practice can enrich our understanding of language and politics.

The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre
  • 2nd edition
  • Edited by Harvey Young
  • Published online:
    08 June 2023
    Print publication:
    22 June 2023
  • This new edition provides an expanded, comprehensive history of African American theatre, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Including discussions of slave rebellions on the national stage, African Americans on Broadway, the Harlem Renaissance, African American women dramatists, and the New Negro and Black Arts movements, the Companion also features fresh chapters on significant contemporary developments, such as the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the mainstream successes of Black Queer Drama and the evolution of African American Dance Theatre. Leading scholars spotlight the producers, directors, playwrights, and actors who have fashioned a more accurate appearance of Black life on stage, revealing the impact of African American theatre both within the United States and around the world. Addressing recent theatre productions in the context of political and cultural change, it invites readers to reflect on where African American theatre is heading in the twenty-first century.

Liberal Lives and Activist Repertoires
  • Political Performance and Victorian Social Reform
  • Tracy C. Davis
  • Published online:
    19 May 2023
    Print publication:
    01 June 2023
  • This ambitious study traces the strategies of human rights activists to show how world-changing reform movements were shaped by women and men from modest backgrounds who were deeply attuned to the power of performance. Tracy C. Davis explores nineteenth-century reform campaigns through the pioneering work of a family of activists – prominent anti-slavery lecturer George Thompson, his daughter Amelia (the first female theatre and music critic for a British daily newspaper) and her husband, the political organizer Frederick Chesson. Engaging in some of the most important social struggles of the late Georgian and Victorian periods – including abolition, enfranchisement, and anti-genocide - this book reveals how two generations' insights into performance consolidated into activist tactics that persist today. Characterised by a skilful deployment of performance theory alongside deep and wide-ranging historical knowledge, this ground-breaking work demonstrates what 'dramaturgy' can teach us about 'history'.

Chinese TV in the Netflix Era
  • Edited by Xiaying Xu, Hui Liu
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    18 November 2023
    Print publication:
    04 April 2023
  • Subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) services are available on many online video streaming platforms (VSPs) in China, such as iQiyi, Youku, and Tencent Video, backed by Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent groups (BAT), respectively. The video content on these platforms can be the same shows as those broadcasted on national or provincial television stations, or originally produced and exclusively streamed on the VSP. Meanwhile, VSPs purchase the distribution rights of foreign films and television series to enrich the content pool. This book aims to provide an account of Chinese television, particularly online drama series, or webisodes, with an awareness of the existence and competition of Netflix, covering topics on business strategies of VSPs, original content production trends, trans-media stories telling cases, practitioner insights, and audiences behavior.

Yul Brynner
  • Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism and Screen Masculinity
  • Susanna Paasonen
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    31 March 2023
  • Yul Brynner's star image was built on cosmopolitan flair, shifting tales of origin, baldness, as well as film roles as foreign rulers, freedom fighters, army officials, gunslingers and secret agents of ever-shifting ethnicities. Whether Cossacks, marauding pirate captains or cross-dressing torch singers, Brynner's characters were invariably stand-outs.

    This book explores his exotic and masculine star image and its transformations from lavish Orientalist Hollywood spectacles of the 1950s to 1960s European co-productions, 1970s action films and scifi. Extensively researched, it covers the actor's entire film catalogue, his rumoured yet unrealised projects, television work and stage appearances, as well as their international media reception. Thematically organised, the book inquires after racial casting politics, the construction of sex symbols, Brynner's humanitarian work and the recurring poses and gestures that characterised his performance style.

Motswasele II
  • Leetile Disang Raditladi
  • Introduction by Sabata-mpho Mokae
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    24 November 2023
    Print publication:
    01 December 2022
  • In Motswasele II, the first historical drama written by a Motswana author and originally published in the Bantu (later, African) Treasury Series by the University of the Witwatersrand Press, in 1945, Leetile Disang Raditladi explores the concept of bogosi (chieftainship) and what it means to be a good chief through the characters of two powerful men, Moruakgomo and Motswasele. According to the history of the Bakwena, the two men vied for the throne. Raditladi critiques the tyranny of Motswasele, whose actions are those of a greedy dictator with no regard for his people. His iron-fisted rule, disregard for advice from his council, and the fact that he helps himself to his subjects' cattle at will cause great unhappiness. He surrounds himself with untrustworthy people who are not of royal blood and know nothing about power. In contrast, Moruakgomo is portrayed as a true leader who is caring, brave, wise, visionary and not above taking advice.

    In the drama, Motswasele is cautioned against wronging people he may need in the future, and being swayed by false songs of praise. Motswasele II highlights the importance of traditional rule, and the need for a chief to dispense power judiciously and to resolve conflicts where these arise.

The Brecht Yearbook / Das Brecht-Jahrbuch 47
  • Edited by Markus Wessendorf
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 June 2023
    Print publication:
    22 November 2022
  • An annual volume, this time with special attention to the relevance of Brecht's work in today's world of resurgent authoritarianism and the need for resistance.

Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America
  • Revolution, Race and Popular Performance
  • Peter Reed
  • Published online:
    18 November 2022
    Print publication:
    01 December 2022
  • American culture maintained a complicated relationship with Haiti from its revolutionary beginnings onward. In this study, Peter P. Reed reveals how Americans embodied and re-enacted their connections to Haiti through a wide array of performance forms. In the wake of Haiti's slave revolts in the 1790s, generations of actors, theatre professionals, spectators, and commentators looked to Haiti as a source of both inspiring freedom and vexing disorder. French colonial refugees, university students, Black theatre stars, blackface minstrels, abolitionists, and even writers such as Herman Melville all reinvented and restaged Haiti in distinctive ways. Reed demonstrates how Haiti's example of Black freedom and national independence helped redefine American popular culture, as actors and audiences repeatedly invoked and suppressed Haiti's revolutionary narratives, characters, and themes. Ultimately, Haiti shaped generations of performances, transforming America's understandings of race, power, freedom, and violence in ways that still reverberate today.

Yeats and Revisionism
  • A Half Century of the Dancer and the Dance
  • Daniel O'Hara
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    08 June 2023
    Print publication:
    08 November 2022
  • The books collects Daniel T. O'Hara's half century of essays and review-essays on Yeats and his major poetry an drama and how leading critics and theorists have sought to revise their reception for their periods of time and indeed for the future. Its aim is to trace a critical history of the last fifty years, even as it opens the prospects for the future of critical reading of Yeats and modern poetry.

Screen Acting
  • A Cognitive Approach
  • Dan Leberg
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    06 June 2023
    Print publication:
    30 September 2022
  • This book approaches film and television acting from an actor's perspective rather than that of an audience member, and therefore theorizes how screen acting works as a process that engages an actor's memory, imagination, emotions, and physical body in the creation of a character. It argues that film actors strive to perform profound empathetic connections with their characters and fellow actors, and then put themselves out there through performing to make those connections clear to the eventual audience. It combines interviews with working professional film and television actors, key insights and methods from Film, Television, and Theatre Studies, and theories of imagination and embodiment to show that screen actors are more than just 'the moving parts' of the mise-en-scene.

Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors
  • A Psycho-Semiotic Analysis
  • Arthur Asa Berger
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2023
    Print publication:
    13 September 2022
  • Arthur Asa Berger is Professor Emeritus of Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts at San Francisco State University where he taught from 1965 until 2003. He has published more than one hundred articles and eighty books on popular culture, media, semiotics, and humor. Among his books on humor are Li’l Abner: A Study in American Satire, An Anatomy of Humor, The Art of Comedy Writing, Blind Men and Elephants, The Genius of the Jewish Joke, Jewish Jesters and Humor, Psyche and Society.

Kunqu Masters on Chinese Theatrical Performance
  • Yip Siu Hing
  • Edited by Josh Stenberg
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2023
    Print publication:
    13 September 2022
  • Kunqu, recognised by UNESCO in 2001 as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, is among the oldest and most refined traditions of the family of genres known as xiqu (music-drama or 'Chinese opera'). Today, the art form's musical and performance traditions are being passed on by senior artists in several major cities of the Yang-tze River basin as well as Beijing. This book consists of twelve explanatory narrations, selected and translated from among an expansive collective endeavour in Chinese.

    Each performer narration sheds light on the human processes that create and transmit pieces of theatre, allowing actors' voices to be heard for the first time in English. Meanwhile, annotations place these narratives in historical, literary, discursive and aesthetic contexts.

    Close critical attention shows how concepts such as 'tradition' are in fact the sites of constant elaboration and negotiation, and reveal kunqu as a living and changing art form. Methodologically, this work breaks new ground by centering the performers' perspective rather than text, providing a complement and a challenge to performance-analysis, ideological, sociological, or plot-based perspectives on xiqu.

Visualising Lost Theatres
  • Virtual Praxis and the Recovery of Performance Spaces
  • Joanne Tompkins, Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, Liyang Xia
  • Published online:
    18 August 2022
    Print publication:
    25 August 2022
  • This pioneering study harnesses virtual reality to uncover the history of five venues that have been 'lost' to us: London's 1590s Rose Theatre; Bergen's mid-nineteenth-century Komediehuset; Adelaide's Queen's Theatre of 1841; circus tents hosting Cantonese opera performances in Australia's goldfields in the 1850s; and the Stardust showroom in 1950s Las Vegas. Shaping some of the most enduring genres of world theatre and cultural production, each venue marks a significant cultural transformation, charted here through detailed discussion of theatrical praxis and socio-political history. Using virtual models as performance laboratories for research, Visualising Lost Theatres recreates the immersive feel of venues and reveals performance logistics for actors and audiences. Proposing a new methodology for using visualisations as a tool in theatre history, and providing 3D visualisations for the reader to consult alongside the text, this is a landmark contribution to the digital humanities.

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