You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
How are masculinities enacted in Australian theatre? How do Australian playwrights depict masculinities in the present and the past, in the bush and on the beach, in the city and in the suburbs? How do Australian plays dramatise gender issues like father-son relations, romance and intimacy, violence and bullying, mateship and homosexuality, race relations between men, and men’s experiences of war and migration? Men at Play explores theatre’s role in presenting and contesting images of masculinity in Australia. It ranges from often-produced plays of the 1950s to successful contemporary plays – from Dick Diamond’s Reedy River, Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Richard Beyn...
Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance asks: in what ways do physical bodies in live performance present vital and compelling expressions of ideas? This collection contains critical analyses of cultural spectacle and social identity by eighteen major Australian scholars and practitioners. It discusses and describes bodies in contemporary performance, theatre, visual art and dance; in circus and ethnographic shows; in performance training, butoh and wrestling; at gay and lesbian dance parties; and in relation to digital images. It explores historical and theoretical issues of gender and postcoloniality, technology, and the location of bodies in architectural, social and virtual spaces. Artistes and groups discussed include Sydney Front, Open City, The Performance Space, Meryl Tankard’s Australian Dance Theatre, Chrissie Parrott, the Bell Shakespeare Company, Tess De Quincey, Yumi Umiumare, Gilgul Theatre, Lyndal Jones, Stelarc, Death Defying Theatre, colonial circus, ethnographic displays, the horse as performer, and wrestling legends Gorgeous George and Ravishing Ricky Rude.
The theatre is full of borders and boundaries: between the "real" and "illusionary" conditions of the stage, between the way one acts onstage and in "real" life, between stage and audience, performance and reception. As such, theatre offers a unique opportunity to examine the construction, representation, and functioning of borders. This is the task undertaken by the authors of this volume, the first to apply the lexicon and concepts of border theory to theatre history and performance theory. The contributors, highly regarded theatre historians, theorists, and practitioners, address a wide range of border-related themes. Their topics include the construction of "America" in the sixteenth century, theatre practices in eighteenth-century England, American Latino playwrights, performances of gender and sexuality, cyborg technologies, and fashion.
In each area, the authors discuss a range of issues by applying and debating key critical approaches to Shakespeare including new historicism, cultural materialism, feminism, and postcolonialism."--BOOK JACKET.
Showcasing a wide array of recent, innovative and original research into Shakespeare and learning in Australasia and beyond, this volume argues the value of the 'local' and provides transferable and adaptable models of educational theory and practice.
Today, globalization, migration and political polarization complicate the individual’s search for a cohesive identity, making identity formation and transformation key issues in everyday life. This collection of essays highlights a number of the dimensions of identity, including cultural hybridity, religion, ethnicity, profession, gender, sexuality, and childhood, and explores how they are thematized in different narratives. The stories discussed are set in Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, France, Germany, Great Britain, Haiti, India, Israel, Japan, Polynesia, Norway, Romania, Spain and South Africa, emphasizing today’s international focus on identity. The majority of the contributions here focus on literary texts, while others investigate identity formations in interviews, language corpora, student reading logs, film, theatre and pathographies.
Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook is an inspired handbook of ideas and arguments on theatre. Richard Drain gathers together a uniquely wide-ranging selection of original writings on theatre by its most creative practitioners - directors, playwrights, performers and designers, from Jarry to Grotowski and Craig. These key texts span the twentieth century, from the onset of modernism to the present, providing direct access to the thinking behind much of the most stimulating theatre the century has had to offer, as well as guidelines to its present most adventurous developments. Setting theory beside practice, these writings bring alive a number of vital and continuing concerns, each of wh...
Beaches are places of contact, play, confrontation and friction: first comers always arrive on a beach. After Europeans moved into the Antipodes, the coast was the first frontier to be defined. Flinders' circumnavigation in 1802 had mapped 'Australia', revealing the land as 'girt by sea', as the national anthem continues to remind us. All kinds of ideas about the coast, beaches, sea changes, holiday places and islands swirl and eddy in this unique collection of writing.
Suzuki is Japan's best-known director. He has been internationally acclaimed for his postmodern adaptations of classics by Nanboku, Euripides, Shakespeare and Chekhov since the 1970s, including The Trojan Women, King Lear and Three Sisters and, equally, for his powerful actor training system, which combines elements of Noh and Kabuki with Western realism. Inviting artists from around the world to perform at his Toga and Shizuoka International Festivals, Suzuki has fostered productive exchanges with Jean-Louis Barrault, Robert Wilson, Kanze Hisao, Ashikawa Yoko and numerous others. This 2004 book traces Suzuki's rise from Little Theatre director to international festival celebrity, links his unique Surrealist dramaturgy with his intercultural training system, and gives in-depth descriptions of his most acclaimed productions.
Christos Tsiolkas is one of the most recognizable and internationally successful literary novelists working in Australia today. He is also one of the country’s most politically engaged writers. These terms – recognition, commercial success, political engagement – suggest a relationship to forms of public discourse that belies the extremely confronting nature of much of Tsiolkas’s fiction and his deliberate attempt to cultivate a literary persona oriented to notions of blasphemy, obscenity and what could broadly be called a pornographic sensibility.