Books in the Theatre: Theory - Practice - Performance series

*Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated* proposes that the advent of new media forms, and the increasing integration of contemporary performance and media has generated new engagements, practices and understandings of presence.

This book explores the ways in which performance has given shape and form to wars on terror past and present, focusing on examples of performed violence from Northern Ireland and Iraq. It also investigates how theatre-makers and performance activists have resisited violence in times of terror.a. -- .

Witness Onstage is a detailed study of the remarkable growth of documentary theatre forms in Russian since the early 2000s. It draws on the author's work as a performer, producer, and researcher of documentary theatre both in Russia and internationally to provide new perspective on the mechanics of theatre as a venue for civic engagement. -- .

Performing the testimonial offers a new critical engagement with verbatim and testimonial theatre that draws on an analysis of a number of international contemporary verbatim and testimonial plays. Moving beyond discourses of the real, the book argues that testimonial theatre engages in acts of truth telling, performing new modes of witnessing. -- .

This book calls upon globalisation, queer, cinema, and affect studies to explore key Robert Lepage productions from 1984 to 2008, analysing the systems through which his work is produced and disseminated. -- .

Working memories explores how street theatre transforms industrial space into postindustrial space. -- .

As European theatre directors become a familiar presence on international stages and a new generation of theatre makers absorbs their impulses, this study develops fresh perspectives on Regie, the Continental European tradition of staging playtexts. -- .

This book provides an exceptional introduction to Polish theatre since the fall of communism, exploring how theatre goes beyond norms and nationalistic concepts to intersect with politics, feminism, queer identities, the rise in anti-Semitism, ethnicities and history. -- .

Situates Jean Genet's theatre within the wider social, spatial and political contexts of France in the 1950s and 1960s. This book argues that his theory and practice of political theatre have more in common with the affirmative ideas of thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou.

This book argues that memory functions as a key element in contemporary South African re-imagining of historical events and in constructing new definitions of national and personal identity. It compares two ways in which memory is embodied: in repertoires of practices, songs, dance, rituals, and in material archives, texts, documents, buildings. -- .

This book opens up innovative ways of reading philosophy 'theatrically', contributing to a new articulation of theatre and its relation to critical thought. -- .

This text is a detailed description of the intensive work process involved in the making of 'Toy Symphony', a new play by Michael Gow, directed by Neil Armfield and brought to the stage for the first time in December 2007 by Company B at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney.

Gathers the voices of unique artists from the worlds of theatre, music and performance to discuss process and the making of interdisciplinary work. -- .

This wide-ranging look at the state of contemporary theatre practice, economics, and issues related to identity, politics, and technology contains a snapshot dissection of where theatre is, where it has been and where it might be going.

Based on conversations with directors and actors who knew her, this book is a study of the British post-war dramatist, Sarah Kane. It covers all her major plays and productions, as well as unpublished material and reviews, and looks at her continuing influence after her tragic early death.

This work examines three major strands of the work Eugenio Barba, a leading theatre artist and theorist, working across cultures: his research at the International School of Theatre Anthropology; his use of performance as a means of exchange, and his relationship with Latin America.

This book argues that local performance events offer a way to read the world, and an opportunity to remake that world, helping to foster a global political consciousness. Surveying a wide array of theatre, dance, performance and visual art, as well as sporting contests, marriage ceremonies human rights protests, even acts of extreme weather. -- .

Making contemporary theatre reveals how some of the most significant international contemporary theatre is actually made. The book opens with an introductory chapter which contextualises recent trends in approaches to theatre-making. In the ensuing eleven chapters, eleven different writer-observers describe, contextualise and analyse the theatre-making practices of eleven different companies and directors, including Japan¿s Gekidan Kaitaisha and the Québécois director Robert Lepage. Each chapter is enriched with extensive illustrations as well as boxed-off ¿asides¿, giving the reader different perspectives on the work. Chapters usually focus on a single production, such as Complicite¿s 2003-04 The Elephant Vanishes, allowing detailed investigations of complex practices to emerge. The book concludes with a brief manifesto for making contemporary theatre by the editors, plus a bibliography suggesting further reading. Making contemporary theatre is a rich resource for the theatre-making student and the theatre-goer alike, full of diverse examples of how the most exciting theatre is actually made.

A major study of solo performance in the UK and Europe that examines the significance of exceptional lives in neoliberal times. With case studies drawn from theatre, comedy and live art, it combines insights from gender studies, politics and sociology to present a new queer account of subjectivity at the start of the twenty-first century. -- .

Extremity might suggest violence, pornography, criminality, misanthropy, danger, recklessness, eccentricity or obscurantism. How has art exceeded its own example through performance art? How have artists used performance to question and overextend the limits of form in the 1970s? And with what effects? -- .

This book analyses representations of death and dying in modern Western theatre from the late nineteenth century onward, examining how and why historically informed conceptions of mortality are dramatized and staged. -- .