You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Celebrates the San Francisco Mime Troupe with scripts representative of the troupe's work
"F*ck the Army! resurrects the history of the FTA, an antiwar variety show led by Jane Fonda in 1971, building a new theory of revolutionary activism out of the theatrical acts of solidarity and resistance that soldiers and civilians performed together, on stage and off, as they sought to end the U.S. war in Vietnam by connecting struggles for liberation across the lines of race, gender, and nationality"--
This book is a study of grassroots performances and activism in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, documenting efforts toward establishing truce between warring street gangs, networks of support by mothers of incarcerated youth, and the theatrical production of Anna Deavere Smith's Twighlight: Los Angeles 1992. It situates these developments in the inter-disciplinary context of performance studies rooted in the history and political economy of Los Angeles.
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.
As the media have increasingly become the lens through which we see the world, media styles have shaped even the fine arts, and contemporary theatre is particularly indebted to mass media's dramatic influence. In order to stay culturally and financially viable, theatre producers have associated theatrical productions and their promotion with film, television, and the Internet by adopting new theatrical practices that mirror the form and content of mass communication. This work demonstrates how mediatization, or the adoption of the semantics and the contexts of mass media, has changed the way American theatre is produced, performed, and perceived. Early chapters use works like Robert Wilson's...
A dynamic exploration of eight radical theater collectives from the 1960s and 70s, and their influence on contemporary performance
Here is an animated and wonderfully engaging work of cultural history that lays out America’s unruly past by describing the ways in which cutting loose has always been, and still is, an essential part of what it means to be an American. From the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Americans have defied their stodgy rules and hierarchies with pranks, dances, stunts, and wild parties, shaping the national character in profound and lasting ways. In the nation’s earlier eras, revelers flouted Puritans, Patriots pranked Redcoats, slaves lampooned masters, and forty-niners bucked the saddles of an increasingly uptight middle class. In the twentieth century, fun-loving Americans celebrat...
Winner, Distinguished Book Award, American Alliance for Theatre & Education, 2009 In today's multicultural world there is an urgent need for more plays and books that represent a diverse array of ethnic groups. Theatre and book critics, scholars, and theatre professionals have long campaigned for a broader representation of minorities in book and play publishing. In this anthology, renowned theatre expert Coleman A. Jennings has compiled a selection of plays by Jos� Cruz Gonz�lez that meets these multicultural demands head-on. Gonz�lez is a foremost voice in theatre for children and youth whose plays address themes, often through imaginary lands and extraordinary characters, faced by c...
First Published in 1996. Part of a series of ‘Studies in Modern Drama’, Volume 7 This volume Studies in Modern Drama collects essays on contemporary theatre which reveal the changing face of the world, as well as challenges to the boundaries of traditional stage production. Authors examine familiar texts in new settings, discovering what editor Judy Lee Oliva calls “the effect of cultural- specific gestures, stances and the nuance of words,” so that audiences and critics are forced to recognize stereotypes and re-evaluate older critical methods. Topics range from directing gay and working-class theatre in Scotland to producing American and British drama in Holland, Belgium, and Poland. New voices in the theatre are heard, and old ones are put to new tests. What remains is the power of performance to inspire emotional and intellectual response. Writers, directors, costume designers, producers, and critics provide an uncommon range of perspectives to the changing roles of theatre in an increasingly global community.
Unfinished Business argues that U.S. deindustrialization cannot be separated from race, specifically from choreographed movements of African Americans that represent or resist normative or aberrant relationships to work and capital in transitional times.