Books in the Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies series

This book provides a timely intervention in the fields of performance studies and theatre history, and to larger issues of global cultural exchange. The authors offer a provocative argument for rethinking the scholarly assessment of how diverse performative cultures interact, are interwoven, and are dependent upon each other. While the term `intercultural theatre¿ as a concept points back to postcolonialism and its contradictions, this book explores global developments in the performing arts that cannot be explained and understood using postcolonial theory. The authors challenge the dichotomy `the West and the rest¿, as well as ideas of national culture and cultural ownership.

This collection documents and examines political and protest theatre produced between the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and Obamäs election in 2008 by British and American artists responding to their own governments¿ actions and policies during this time. The plays take up topics such as the ongoing wars on terror, Blair¿s support of U.S. policies, the flawed intelligence that led to the Iraq war, and illegal detentions and torture at Abu Ghraib. The authors argue that engaged artists faced a radically different sociopolitical context for their work after 9/11 compared to earlier social protest movements and new forms of theatre, and different emotional strategies were necessary to meet the challenges. The subtitle Patriotic Dissent suggests the double stance of many artists-- influenced by patriotic expressions of national solidarity, yet critical of the ways that patriotic language was put to use against others. The articles represent a broad range of theatre: Broadway musicals, documentary theatre, adaptations of classical theatre, new plays by British playwrights, street performances and installations, and musical concerts. The contributors¿ case studies evaluate the effectiveness of important instances of political theatre and protest from this decade, arguing for the significance, relevance, and continuing necessity for evolving forms of political theatre today.

This volume focuses on the highly debated topic of theatrical translation, one brought on by a renewed interest in the idea of performance and translation as a cooperative effort on the part of the translator, the director, and the actors.

This book offers dynamic perspectives on the concept of liveness in the performing arts, engaging with liveness through the particular analytical focus of audiences and experience. With contributions from theatre, music, dance, and performance art, it explores how liveness is produced through processes of audiencing, and how it becomes materialized in acts of performance, making, archiving, and remembering. Theoretical chapters and practice-based reflections visit topics such as fandom, embodiment, documentation, technological mediation, and commodity exchange, showing how the relationship between audience and event is rarely singular and more often malleable and multiple.

This book offers a timely discussion of the interventions and tensions between two contentious fields, performance and phenomenology. Acknowledging the history and critical polemics against phenomenological methodology and against performance as a field of study and category of artistic production, Performance and Phenomenology provides an introduction to core thinkers and an expansion on their ideas in a wide range of international case studies that map an emerging 21st century terrain of critical and performance practice. Each chapter explores a world comprised of embodied action and thought, addressing the use of dead animals in performance, actor training, the legal implications of thinking phenomenologically about how we walk, and the intertwining of digital and analog perception.The scholars contributing to the volume develop insights central to the phenomenological tradition while expanding on the work of contemporary theorists and performers. In asking why performance and phenomenology belong in conversation together, the book suggests how they can transform each other in the process and what is at stake in this transformation.

This book considers the hundred years of re-writes of Anton Chekhov¿s work, presenting a wide geographical landscape of Chekhovian influences in drama. The volume examines the elusive quality of Chekhov¿s dramatic universe as an intricate mechanism, an engine in which his enigmatic characters exist as the dramatic and psychological ciphers we have been de-coding for a century, and continue to do so. Examining the practice and the theory of dramatic adaptation both as intermedial transformation (from page to stage) and as intramedial mutation, from page to page, the book presents adaptation as the emerging genre of drama, theatre, and film. This trend marks the performative and social practices of the new millennium, highlighting our epoch¿s need to engage with the history of dramatic forms and their evolution. The collection demonstrates that adaptation as the practice of transformation and as a re-thinking of habitual dramatic norms and genre definitions leads to the rejuvenation of existing dramatic and performative standards, pioneering the creation of new traditions and expectations. As the major mode of the storytelling imagination, adaptation can build upon and drive the audience¿s horizons of expectations in theatre aesthetics. Hence, this volume investigates the original and transformative knowledge that the story of Chekhov¿s drama in mutations offers to scholars of drama and performance, to students of modern literatures and cultures, and to theatre practitioners worldwide.

This collection explores the issues of how children fit into national discourse on international stages. The authors focus on national performances by/for/with youth and examine a wide range of performances from across the globe, from parades and protests to devised and traditional theatre. Nationalism and Youth in Theatre and Performance rethinks how national performance is defined and offers previously unexplored historical and theoretical discussions of political youth performance.

This book explores the ways that pre-existing `national¿ works or `national theatre¿ sites can offer a rich source of material for speaking to the contemporary moment because of the resonances or associations they offer of a different time, place, politics, or culture. Featuring a broad international scope, it offers a series of thought-provoking essays that explore how playwrights, directors, theatre-makers, and performance artists have re-staged or re-worked a classic national play, performance, theatrical form, or theatre space in order to engage with conceptions of and questions around the nation, nationalism, and national identity in the contemporary moment, opening up new ways of thinking about or problematizing questions around the nation and national identity. Chapters ask how productions engage with a particular moment in the national psyche in the context of internationalism and globalization, for example, as well as how productions explore the interconnectivity of nations, intercultural agendas, or cosmopolitanism. They also explore questions relating to the presence of migrants, exiles, or refugees, and the legacy of colonial histories and post-colonial subjectivities. The volume highlights how theatre and performance has the ability to contest and unsettle ideas of the nation and national identity through the use of various sites, stagings, and performance strategies, and how contemporary theatres have portrayed national agendas and characters at a time of intense cultural flux and repositioning.

This book discusses the centrality of identity politics to theatre and performance studies. The essays pose questions about identity and the subjectivity, relationality, and the politics of aesthetics, visiting visual arts practice, digital culture, music, public events, experimental theatre, and performance to investigate questions about representation, metaphysics, and politics.

Offers an analysis of how the intersection of technique, memory, and imagination inform performance. This title redirects the intercultural debate by focusing exclusively on the actor at work. It draws from original interviews with Ang Gey Pin (formerly with the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards) and Roberta Carreri (Odin Teatret).

This is the first volume to focus specifically on Rabindranath Tagore¿s dramatic literature, visiting translations and adaptations of his drama, and cross-cultural encounters in his works. It offers a re-exploration of his plays, visiting issues such as his contribution to Indian drama, drama and environment, feminist readings, postcolonial engagements, cross-cultural encounters, drama as performance, translational and adaptation modes, the non-translated Tagore drama, 21st century drama, and Indian film. This resource on the criticism of Tagore drama and will appeal to a range of Theatre and Performance scholars as well as those interested in Indian theatre, literature, and film.

This book offers dynamic perspectives on the concept of liveness in the performing arts, engaging with liveness through the particular analytical focus of audiences and experience. With contributions from theatre, music, dance, and performance art, it explores how liveness is produced through processes of audiencing, and how it becomes materialized in acts of performance, making, archiving, and remembering. Theoretical chapters and practice-based reflections visit topics such as fandom, embodiment, documentation, technological mediation, and commodity exchange, showing how the relationship between audience and event is rarely singular and more often malleable and multiple.

Ritual can be encountered in the midst of catastrophic and transforming events. The essays collected here reassess relationships between ritual and politics, ritual and everyday life, ritual and art making as well as ritual and disaster. This work is useful for graduate courses in Anthropology, Art, History, Theater, or Performance Studies.

This collection asks what¿s at stake when a theatrical space is created and when a performance takes place: under what circumstances the topology of theatre becomes political. It visits a politics of inclusion and exclusion, of distributions and placements, and of spatial appropriation and utopian concepts in theatre history and contemporary performance.

This collection argues that religion is an explicitly public force that stimulates and complicates public actions. In short, it is a crucial aspect of much performance. This collection is both a means of, and urgent argument for, expanding the attention paid to religion as a critical point of concern within theatre and performance studies.

That Shakespeare thematized time thoroughly, almost obsessively, in his plays is well established: time is, among other things, a 'devourer' ("Love's Labour's Lost"), one who can untie knots ("Twelfth Night"), or, perhaps most famously, simply 'out of joint' ("Hamlet"). This book offers an investigation of time in Shakespearean theatre.

This book offers a timely discussion of the interventions and tensions between two contentious fields, performance and phenomenology. Acknowledging the history and critical polemics against phenomenological methodology and against performance as a field of study and category of artistic production, Performance and Phenomenology provides an introduction to core thinkers and an expansion on their ideas in a wide range of international case studies that map an emerging 21st century terrain of critical and performance practice. Each chapter explores a world comprised of embodied action and thought, addressing the use of dead animals in performance, actor training, the legal implications of thinking phenomenologically about how we walk, and the intertwining of digital and analog perception.The scholars contributing to the volume develop insights central to the phenomenological tradition while expanding on the work of contemporary theorists and performers. In asking why performance and phenomenology belong in conversation together, the book suggests how they can transform each other in the process and what is at stake in this transformation.

This book explores how people play and why their play matters, with a particular interest in how ludic experiences are often constructed and controlled by the interests of institutions, including corporations, non-profit organizations, government agencies, religious organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Scholars of performance studies, leisure studies, media studies and sociology will find this book an essential reference when studying facets of play.

A critical reassessment of the theory and theatre of Bertold Brecht, examining the influences of Brecht's aesthetics on the pre-eminent materialist critics of the 20th century. Carney argues that an appreciation of Brecht's theory and theatre is essential to an understanding of contemporary critical theory.