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This study explores the ways in which playtexts have evolved in relation to the sociocultural and cognitive conditions of a mediatized age, and how they, in form and content, respond to this environment and open up new critical possibilities in text and performance. The study combines theatre and media theory through the innovative concept of 'mediatized dramaturgy' and offers conceptual reflections on the ways in which a playtext negotiates the new reality of contemporary culture. The book scrutinizes the form of playtexts and works through the exchange between text and performance by exploring contemporary works such as Simon Stephens's Pornography, Caryl Churchill's Love and Information, ...
Text and Performance in Contemporary British Theatre interrogates the paradoxical nature of theatre texts, which have been understood both as separate literary objects in their own right and as material for performance. Drawing on analysis of contemporary practitioners who are working creatively with text, the book re-examines the relationship between text and performance within the specific context of British theatre. The chapters discuss a wide range of theatre-makers creating work in the UK from the 1990s onwards, from playwrights like Tim Crouch and Jasmine Lee-Jones to companies including Action Hero and RashDash. In doing so, the book addresses issues such as theatrical authorship, art...
You will see no false nothing false tonight the Hypnotist Tim Crouch's second play collapses a tale of loss and grief into an exploration of theatrical representation, in a piece of theatre that is at once formally innovative and profoundly moving. Written for two actors, An Oak Tree depicts the fraught meeting of a grieving father and the stage hypnotist who was behind the wheel of the car that killed his daughter, with the father played by a different actor at each performance, walking on stage with no prior knowledge of the play. Catherine Love explores An Oak Tree's connections with conceptual art, the unique process of its creation, its interrogation of stage representation, its relationship with audiences, and its place as part of Crouch's ongoing body of work.
An examination of neoliberal ideology’s ascendance in 1990s and 2000s British politics and society through its effect on state-supported performance practices Post-Thatcher, British cultural politics were shaped by the government’s use of the arts in service of its own social and economic agenda. Restaging the Future: Neoliberalization, Theater, and Performance in Britain interrogates how arts practices and cultural institutions were enmeshed with the particular processes of neoliberalization mobilized at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Louise Owen traces the uneasy entanglement of performance with neoliberalism's marketization of social life. Focusing on this...
This book examines the surge of queer performance produced across Ireland since the first stirrings of the Celtic Tiger in the mid-1990s, up to the passing of the Marriage Equality referendum in the Republic in 2015.
This is a comprehensive overview of contemporary European theatre and performance as it enters the third decade of the twenty-first century. It combines critical discussions of key concepts, practitioners, and trends within theatre-making, both in particular countries and across borders, that are shaping European stage practice. With the geography, geopolitics, and cultural politics of Europe more unsettled than at any point in recent memory, this book’s combination of national and thematic coverage offers a balanced understanding of the continent’s theatre and performance cultures. Employing a range of methodologies and critical approaches across its three parts and ninety-four chapters...
Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age focuses on the ‘aural turn’ in contemporary theatre-making, examining a number of seemingly disparate trends that foreground speech and sound -- ‘post-verbatim’ theatre, 'amplified storytelling' (works using microphones and headphones), and ‘gig theatre’ that incorporates live music performance. Its main argument is that the dramaturgical underpinnings of these works contribute to an understanding of theatre as an extra-literary activity, greater than the centrality of the script that traditionally dominated many historical discussions. This quality is usually expressed in terms of the corporeality in dance and physical theatre,...
A captivating journey of the expansive world of medieval travel, from London to Constantinople to the court of China and beyond. Europeans of the Middle Ages were the first to use travel guides to orient their wanderings, as they moved through a world punctuated with miraculous wonders and beguiling encounters. In this vivid and alluring history, medievalist Anthony Bale invites readers on an odyssey across the medieval world, recounting the advice that circulated among those venturing to the road for pilgrimage, trade, diplomacy, and war. Journeying alongside scholars, spies, and saints, from Western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes and the ends of the earth, Bale provides indispensabl...
Examines how the politics of the theater can illuminate the theatricality of politics Theatricality is often dismissed as a distraction from “real” politics, as when cynical political gestures are derided as “pure theater” or “only theater.” But the artists and theater companies discussed in this book, including Back to Back Theatre, Tim Crouch, Rabih Mroué, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Christoph Schlingensief, take a different approach. Theron Schmidt argues that they represent a “theatricalist turn” that explores and tests the conditions of the theater itself. Across diverse contexts of political engagement, ranging from disability rights to representations of violence, these theatrical conditions are interconnected with political struggles, such as those over who is seen and heard, how labor is valued, and what counts as “political” in the first place. In a so-called post-political era, The Theatricalists argues that an examination of theater’s internal politics can expand our understanding of the theatricality of politics more broadly.