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Goat Island are one of the world’s leading contemporary performance ensembles. Their intimate, low-tech, intensely physical performances represent a unique hybrid of strategies and techniques drawn from live art, experimental theatre and postmodern dance. Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island, is the first book to document and critique the company’s performances, processes, politics, aesthetics, and philosophies. It reflects on the company’s work through the critical lens of ecology – an emerging and urgent concern in performance studies and elsewhere. This collage text combines and juxtaposes writing by company members and arts commentators, to look in detail at...
This project focuses on the process and performance of three contemporary collective creation groups: Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma. I draw processual and aesthetic connections between collective creation methodologies and the consequences of those methodologies in performance, claiming that processes leave footprints that are ultimately visible to audiences, though their visibility requires new ways of seeing. Taking into account an American genealogy of collective creation, I outline the footprints of method through the images of everyday employment, instances of untrained bodies enacting danced gesture, and the speeds and velocities that characterize the work of these three contemporary groups. Through these aesthetics we can locate evidence of methodological principles that constitute a politics. In the work of Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service, and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, this politics does not play out through the ideological content of performance, but is embedded within collaborative acts of making.
The first comprehensive history of Off-Off Broadway
American poets’ theater emerged in the postwar period alongside the rich, performance-oriented poetry and theater scenes that proliferated on the makeshift stages of urban coffee houses, shared apartments, and underground theaters, yet its significance has been largely overlooked by critics. Acts of Poetry shines a spotlight on poets’ theater’s key groups, practitioners, influencers, and inheritors, such as the Poets’ Theatre, the Living Theatre, Gertrude Stein, Bunny Lang, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Carla Harryman, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Heidi R. Bean demonstrates the importance of poets’ theater in the development of twentieth-century theater and performance poetry, and especially evolving notions of the audience’s role in performance, and in narratives of the relationship between performance and everyday life. Drawing on an extensive archive of scripts, production materials, personal correspondence, theater records, interviews, manifestoes, editorials, and reviews, the book captures critical assessments and behind-the-scenes discussions that enrich our understanding of the intertwined histories of American theater and American poetry in the twentieth century.
Fifty Modern and Contemporary and Dramatists is a critical introduction to the work of some of the most important and influential playwrights from the 1950s to the present day. The figures chosen are among the most widely studied by students of drama, theatre and literature and include such celebrated writers as: • Samuel Beckett • Caryl Churchill • Anna Deavere Smith • Jean Genet • Sarah Kane • Heiner Müller • Arthur Miller • Harold Pinter • Sam Shephard Each short essay is written by one of an international team of academic experts and offers a detailed analysis of the playwright’s key works and career. The introduction provides an historical and theatrical context to the volume, which provides an invaluable overview of modern and contemporary drama.
Edward Albee as Theatrical and Dramatic Innovator offers eight essays and a major interview by important scholars in the field that explore this three-time Pulitzer prize-winning playwright’s innovations as a dramatist and theatrical artist. They consider not only Albee’s award-winning plays and his contributions to the evolution of modern American drama, but also his important influence to the American theatre as a whole, his connections to art and music, and his international influence in Spanish and Russian theatre. Contributors: Jackson R. Bryer, Milbre Burch, David A. Crespy, Ramon Espejo-Romero, Nathan Hedman, Lincoln Konkle, Julia Listengarten, David Marcia, Ashley Raven, Parisa Shams, Valentine Vasak
MAKING THE STAGE is a collection of essays that examines the role of theatre, drama, and performance in contemporary culture, a culture that is growing increasingly technological and isolated--seemingly at odds with the very nature of theatre, a collaborative and sometimes very primitive art form. Through the course of these essays, it is clear that theatre not only survives some of the challenges of the day but even defines discussions, particularly political ones which are prohibited by an increasingly manipulated media. The essays, from a diverse group of theatre scholars, examine the mechanics of theatre, from space to sound to the use of technology, the role of women in creating theatre, the relationship between theatre and literary art forms, the politics of theatre, science and theatre, and the role of performance art. Through them all, it is clear that theatre, drama, and performance continue to speak in significant ways.
In this performance criticism, the author examines his own work in the theatre as actor and director, as well as that of others. The book offers a topical approach to various issues, both artisitc and philosophical, involved in staging modern dramatists.
Vols. 9-17 include decisions of the War Labor Board.
This book explores the various manifestations of affects in British theatre of the 21st century. The introduction gives a concise survey of existing and emerging theoretical and research trends and argues in favour of a capacious understanding of affects that mediates between more autonomous and more social approaches. The twelve chapters in the collection investigate major works in Britain by playwrights and theatre makers including Mojisola Adebayo, Mike Bartlett, Alice Birch, Caryl Churchill, Tim Crouch and Andy Smith, Rachel De-lahay, Reginald Edmund, James Fritz, David Greig, Idris Goodwin, Zinnie Harris, Kieran Hurley, Lucy Kirkwood, Anders Lustgarten, Yolanda Mercy, Anthony Neilson, Lucy Prebble, Sh!t Theatre, Penelope Skinner, Stef Smith, Kae Tempest and debbie tucker green. The interpretations identify significant areas of tension as they relate affects to the fields of cognition, politics and hope. In this, the chapters uncover interrelations of thought, intention and empathy; they reveal the nexus between identities, institutions and ideology; and, finally, they explore how theatre can accomplish the transition from a sense of crisis to utopian visions.