Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Insecurity
The early years of the twenty-first century have witnessed a proliferation of non-fiction, reality-based performance genres, including documentary and verbatim theatre, site-specific theatre, autobiographical theatre, and immersive theatre. Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real begins with the premise that although the inclusion of real objects and real words on the stage would ostensibly seem to increase the epistemological security and documentary truth-value of the presentation, in fact the opposite is the case. Contemporary audiences are caught between a desire for authenticity and immediacy of connection to a person, place, or experience, and the conditions of our postmodern world that render our lives insecure. The same conditions that underpin our yearning for authenticity thwart access to an impossible real. As a result of the instability of social reality, the audience, Jenn Stephenson explains, is unable to trust the mechanisms of theatricality. The by-product of theatres of the real in the age of post-reality is insecurity.
Performing Autobiography
Investigates the use of plays as a form of autobiography, looking at how the line between real-life and fiction can become blurred.
Who's Who in Research: Performing Arts
Increasingly, academic communities transcend national boundaries. “Collaboration between researchers across space is clearly increasing, as well as being increasingly sought after,” noted the online magazine Inside Higher Ed in a recent article about research in the social sciences and humanities. Even for those scholars who don’t work directly with international colleagues, staying up-to-date and relevant requires keeping up with international currents of thought in one’s field. But when one’s colleagues span the globe, it’s not always easy to keep track of who’s who—or what kind of research they’re conducting. That’s where Intellect’s new series comes in. A set of wor...
Play
From escape rooms to TikTok to Tim Horton's "Roll Up the Rim to Win" to DIY everything, participatory performance is ingrained in the very fabric of our contemporary society. Written in a series of alphabetical, standalone mini essays that activate the reader as a participant who chooses their own path, PLAY: Dramaturgies of Participation collects, describes, and analyzes live performances in which the audience become participants in the piece itself. Jenn Stephenson and Mariah Horner explore the parallels between participatory theatre and the interactive phenomenon where the passive consumer is now engaging with their content. In a world where participation is key to our social interaction, Stephenson and Horner find a unique approach to understanding our relationship with theatre, and by extension, each other.
In the Lurch
Some of theater’s most powerful works in the past thirty years fall into the category of "verbatim theater," socially engaged performances whose texts rely on word-for-word testimony. Performances such as Fires in the Mirror, The Laramie Project, and The Vagina Monologues have at their best demonstrated how to hold hard conversations about explosive subjects in a liberal democracy. But in this moment of what author Ryan Claycomb terms the “rightward lurch” of western democracies, does this idealized space of democratic deliberation remain effective? In the Lurch asks that question in a pointed and self-reflexive way, tracing the history of this branch of documentary theater with partic...
The Shakespearean International Yearbook
In 2002, for the second volume of this journal, Ian Lancashire reflected on the state of computing in Shakespeare. The decade since his review has seen dramatic change in the web of ‘digital Shakespeares’. This issue’s special section on Digital Shakespeares reflects on these developments and achievements, highlights current research in the field, and speculates on future directions.
Contemporary Opera in Flux
In twelve essays, Contemporary Opera in Flux discusses a series of shifts that, taken together, have radically redefined the production and reception of opera. Focusing on productions involving late twentieth- and twenty-first century scores and libretti, the contributors draw on conversations with members of creative teams and studies of archival material, dipping into a historical record that remains in flux as composers, librettists, directors, and designers revisit existing work and create anew. The contributors to this volume push the boundaries of contemporary opera scholarship by examining works that disrupt operatic conventions; tackle sociopolitical issues such as drug trafficking, ...
RE: Reading the Postmodern
It would be difficult to exaggerate the worldwide impact of postmodernism on the fields of cultural production and the social sciences over the last quarter century—even if the concept has been understood in various, even contradictory, ways. An interest in postmodernism and postmodernity has been especially strong in Canada, in part thanks to the country’s non-monolithic approach to history and its multicultural understanding of nationalism, which seems to align with the decentralized, plural, and open-ended pursuit of truth as a multiple possibility as outlined by Jean-François Lyotard. In fact, long before Lyotard published his influential work The Postmodern Condition in 1979, Canadian writers and critics were employing the term to describe a new kind of writing. RE: Reading the Postmodern marks a first cautious step toward a history of Canadian postmodernism, exploring the development of the idea of the postmodern and debates about its meaning and its applicability to various genres of Canadian writing, and charting its decline in recent years as a favoured critical trope.
Performing Ground
Performing Ground explores camouflage as a performance practice, arguing that the act of blending into one's environment is central to the ways we negotiate our identities through space. The book offers a critically rich investigation of how the performative practice of camouflage renders the politics of space, power, and gender (in)visible.
Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence
This book examines a series of contemporary plays where writers put theatre itself on stage. The texts examined variously dramatize how theatre falls short in response to the demands of violence, expose its implication in structures of violence—including racism and gender-based violence—and illustrate how it might effectively resist violence through reconfiguring representation. Case studies, which include Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present and Fairview, Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author, provide a range of practice-based perspectives on the question of whether theatre is capable of accounting for and expressing the complexities of structural and interpersonal violence as both lived in the body and borne out in society. The book will appeal to scholars and artists working in the areas of violence, theatre and ethics, witnessing, memory and trauma, spectatorship and contemporary dramaturgy, as well as to those interested in both the doubts and dreams we have about the role of theatre in the twenty-first century.
