Books in the Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies series

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 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.

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.