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This new edition of the innovative and widely acclaimed Theatre Histories: An Introduction offers overviews of theatre and drama in many world cultures and periods together with case studies demonstrating the methods and interpretive approaches used by today's theatre historians. Completely revised and renewed in color, enhancements and new material include: a full-color text design with added timelines to each opening section a wealth of new color illustrations to help convey the vitality of performances described new case studies on African, Asian, and Western subjects a new chapter on modernism, and updated and expanded chapters and part introductions fuller definitions of terms and concepts throughout in a new glossary a re-designed support website offering links to new audio-visual resources, expanded bibliographies, approaches to teaching theatre and performance history, discussion questions relating to case studies and an online glossary.
In his richly detailed, beautifully illustrated history of Shakespeare's most popular play - the first comprehensive study of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the theatre - Gary Jay Williams covers four hundred years of landmark productions in Europe, the United States, and Canada as well as important opera, dance, and film adaptations. Williams shows how the visual and musical vocabularies of production can be read as cultural texts and how these mediative texts determine this play's available meanings from generation to generation. His account, then, is the story of our imaginative and astonishing uses of Shakespeare's play. Williams offers detailed theatrical and cultural analyses of the productions of David Garrick, Ludwig Tieck, Elizabeth Vestris, Charles Kean, Harley Granville-Barker, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Max Reinhardt, Peter Brook, Liviu Ciulei, and other artists. His engaging, intelligent study will be invaluable to scholars and teachers of Shakespeare and theatre history and to professional directors, designers, critics, and actors.
Early Modern Theatricality brings together some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the many conventions that characterized early modern theatricality. It generates fresh possibilities for criticism, combining historical, formal, and philosophical questions, in order to provoke our rediscovery of early modern drama.
Pronouncements such as “the avant-garde is dead,” argues James M. Harding, have suggested a unified history or theory of the avant-garde. His book examines the diversity and plurality of avant-garde gestures and expressions to suggest “avant-garde pluralities” and how an appreciation of these pluralities enables a more dynamic and increasingly global understanding of vanguardism in the performing arts. In pursuing this goal, the book not only surveys a wide variety of canonical and noncanonical examples of avant-garde performance, but also develops a range of theoretical paradigms that defend the haunting cultural and political significance of avant-garde expressions beyond what critics have presumed to be the death of the avant-garde. The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s) offers a strikingly new perspective not only on key controversies and debates within avant-garde studies but also on contemporary forms of avant-garde expression within a global political economy.
"Representing the Past is required reading for any serious scholar of theatre and performance historiography: original in its conception, global in its reach, thought-provoking and transformative in its effects."---Gay Gibson Cima, author, Early American Women Crities: Performance, Religion, Race --
The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq presents a thorough overview and analysis of Jacques Lecoq's life, work and philosophy of theatre. Through an exemplary collection of specially commissioned chapters from leading writers, specialists and practitioners, it draws together writings and reflections on his pedagogy, his practice, and his influence on the wider theatrical environment. It is a comprehensive guide to the work and legacy of one of the major figures of Western theatre in the second half of the twentieth century. In a four-part structure over fifty chapters, the book examines: The historical, artistic and social context out of which Lecoq's work and pedagogy arose, and its relat...
A fascinating insight into court entertainment - encompassing dance, music and performance - in the age of Shakespeare.
Drawing on debates around the global/local dimensions of cultural production, an international team of contributors explore the appropriation of Shakespeare’s plays in film and performance around the world. In particular, the book examines the ways in which adapters and directors have put Shakespeare into dialogue with local traditions and contexts. The contributors look in turn at ‘local’ Shakespeares for local, national and international audiences, covering a range of English and foreign appropriations that challenge geographical and cultural oppositions between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, and ‘big-time’ and ‘small-time’ Shakespeares. Responding to a surge of critical interest in the poetics and politics of appropriation, World-Wide Shakespeares is a valuable resource for those interested in the afterlife of Shakespeare in film and performance globally.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the best-loved of Shakespeare's plays, and certainly the one that children are likely to encounter first; its mixture of aristocrats, workers, and fairies meeting in a wood outside Athens has a magic of its own. Simple and engaging on the surface, it isnonetheless a highly original and sophisticated work, remarkable for both its literary and its theatrical mastery. The fact that it is one of the very few of Shakespeare's plays not to draw on a narrative source suggests the degree to which it reflects his deepest imaginative concerns.In his Introduction, defining the play in both the literary and theatrical traditions to which it belongs, Peter Holland pays particular attention to dreams and dreamers, tracing the materials out of which Shakespeare constructs his world of night and shadows in the strange but enchanting amalgam hemakes of them. Both here and in the detailed commentary he draws freely upon the play's extensive performance history to illustrate the wide range of interpretations of which it is capable.
The Anglican Communion is facing schism, ostensibly over the ordination of a non-celibate bishop and the blessing of same sex relationships. As Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams is committed to holding this fissiparous Communion together. This little book is an attempt at understanding Williams' determination to maintain unity while Anglicanism teeters on the brink of schism.