You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This collection gathers a set of provocative essays that sketch innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to Genre Theory in the 21st century. Focusing on the interaction between tragedy and comedy, both renowned and emerging scholarly and creative voices from philosophy, theater, literature, and cultural studies come together to engage in dialogues that reconfigure genre as social, communal, and affective. In revisiting the challenges to aesthetic categorization over the course of the 20th century, this volume proposes a shift away from the prescriptive and hierarchical reading of genre to its crucial function in shaping thought and enabling shared experience and communication. In doing so, the various essays acknowledge the diverse contexts within which genre needs to be thought afresh: media studies, rhetoric, politics, performance, and philosophy.
Erika Fischer-Lichte's introduction to the discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies is a strikingly authoritative and wide ranging guide to the study of theatre in all of its forms. Its three-part structure moves from the first steps in starting to think about performance, through to the diverse and interrelated concerns required of higher-level study: Part 1 – Central Concepts for Theatre and Performance Research – introduces the language and key ideas that are used to discuss and think about theatre: concepts of performance; the emergence of meaning; and the theatrical event as an experience shared by actors and spectators. Part 1 contextualizes these concepts by tracing the histo...
This book examines the political alliances that are built across the diaspora in contemporary plays written by Black women playwrights in the UK. Through the concept of creative diasporic solidarity, it offers an innovative theoretical approach to examine the ways in which the playwrights respond creatively to the violence and marginalisation of Black communities, especially Black women. This study demonstrates that theatre can act as a productive space for the ethical encounter with the Other (understood in terms of alterity, as someone different from the self) by examining the possibilities of these plays to activate the spectators’ responsibility and solidarity towards different types o...
This book investigates the imaginative capacities of literature, art and culture as sites for reimagining human rights, addressing deep historical and structural forms of belonging and unbelonging; the rise of xenophobia, neoliberal governance, and securitization that result in the purposeful precaritization of marginalized populations; ecological damage that threatens us all, yet the burdens of which are distributed unequally; and the possibility of decolonial and posthuman approaches to rights discourses. The book starts from the premise that there are deep-seated limits to the political possibilities of state and individual sovereignty in terms of protecting human rights around the world. The essays explore how different forms, materials, perspectives, and aesthetics can help reveal the limits of normative human rights and contribute to the cultural production of new human rights imaginaries beyond the borders of state and self.
This book is devoted to tracing the variety of ways that theatre, theatricality, and performance are embedded in Hollywood cinema as screened stages. A screened stage is the literal or metaphorical appearance of a stage on screen. When the Hollywood style emerged in cinema history it traumatically severed the entwined relationship between film and theatre. The book makes the argument that cinema longs for theatre after that separation. The histories of stage and screen persistently crisscross one another making their separation problematic. The screened stage from the end of the nineteenth century until now offers a miniaturized version of cinema and theatre history. Moments of the stage within the screen compress historical styles and movements into saturated representations on film. Such examples overflow the cinematic screen into singular manifestations of presentness. Screened stages uncover what it means to be simultaneously present and absent. This book would be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, film, dance, and performance.
What does 'performance theory' really mean and why has it become so important across such a large number of disciplines, from art history to religious studies and architecture to geography? In this introduction Simon Shepherd explains the origins of performance theory, defines the terms and practices within the field and provides new insights into performance's wide range of definitions and uses. Offering an overview of the key figures, their theories and their impact, Shepherd provides a fresh approach to figures including Erving Goffman and Richard Schechner and ideas such as radical art practice, performance studies, radical scenarism and performativity. Essential reading for students, scholars and enthusiasts, this engaging account travels from universities into the streets and back again to examine performance in the context of political activists and teachers, countercultural experiments and feminist challenges, and ceremonies and demonstrations.
In this book, Erika Fischer-Lichte traces the emergence of performance as 'an art event' in its own right. In setting performance art on an equal footing with the traditional art object, she heralds a new aesthetics. The peculiar mode of experience that a performance provokes - blurring distinctions between artist and audience, body and mind, art and life - is here framed as the breeding ground for a new way of understanding performing arts, and through them even wider social and cultural processes. With an introduction by Marvin Carlson, this translation of the original sthetik des Performativen addresses key issues in performance art, experimental theatre and cultural performances to lay the ground for a new appreciation of the artistic event.
Entangled Performance Histories is the first book-length study that applies the concept of "entangled histories" as a new paradigm in the field of theater and performance historiography. "Entangled histories" denotes the interconnectedness of multiple histories that cannot be addressed within national frameworks. The concept refers to interconnected pasts, in which historical processes of contact and exchange between performance cultures affected all involved. Presenting case studies from across the world—spanning Africa, the Arab-speaking world, Asia, the Americas and Europe—the book’s contributors systematically expand, exemplify and examine the concept of "entangled histories," thus...
I Was Never Alone or Oporniki presents an original ethnographic stage play, based on fieldwork conducted in Russia with adults with disabilities. The core of the work is the script of the play itself, which is accompanied by a description of the script development process, from the research in the field to rehearsals for public performances. In a supporting essay, the author argues that both ethnography and theatre can be understood as designs for being together in unusual ways, and that both practices can be deepened by recognizing the vibrant social impact of interdependency animated by vulnerability, as identified by disability theorists and activists.
Performance creates a unique space for audience experience and influences how traditions, like the Gospels, are received and interpreted.