Theatre category: 6638 books

During its impressive career over the last decades the term 'performative' has been attributed with many parallel meanings in the humanities, philosophy, arts, or economics. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats additionally applies the notion of the performative to the context of curating with the aim to unfold...

While there are costume and fashion dictionaries tied to specific countries or periods, none have been comprehensive. In The Complete Costume Dictionary, Elizabeth Lewandowski has collected from a variety of sources—including costume history texts, journal articles, historical publications, autobiographies,...

This book gives a new view on the legacy of Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999), one of the central, and yet misunderstood, figures who shaped 20th-century theatre, focusing on his least known last phase of work on ancient songs and the craft of the performer. Salata posits Grotowski’s work as philosophical...

The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance brings together for the first time a comprehensive collection of extracts from key writings on politics, ideology, and performance. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, and including new writings from leading scholars, the book provides...

Disability and Contemporary Performance presents a remarkable challenge to existing assumptions about disability and artistic practice. In particular, it explores where cultural knowledge about disability leaves off, and the lived experience of difference begins. Petra Kuppers, herself an award-winning...

How is performer-object interaction enacted and perceived in the theatre? How thereby are varieties of 'meaning' also enacted and perceived? Using cognitive theory and ecological ontology, Paavolainen investigates how the interplay of actors and objects affords a degree of enjoyment and understanding, whether or not the viewer speaks the language.

The Radical in Performance investigates the crisis in contemporary theatre, and celebrates the subversive in performance. It is the first full-length study to explore the link between a western theatre which, says Kershaw, is largely outdated and the blossoming of postmodern performance, much of which...

A collection of eighteen original essays on contemporary Canadian theatre by scholars and drama specialists in Canada, Great Britain, Europe, Australia, Hungary, and Japan. The international scope of the volume, reflected in its co-editors (Sherrill Grace from Canada, Albert-Reiner Glaap from Germany), confirms the new importance of Canadian plays on the world stage.

This is the first volume to focus specifically on Rabindranath Tagore’s dramatic literature, visiting translations and adaptations of Tagore’s drama, and cross-cultural encounters in his works. As Asia’s first Nobel Laureate, Tagore’s highly original plays occupy a central position in the...

Props are moving objects of attention: they can be part of theatre scenery, equal partners in performance, or autonomous things. This wide-ranging book brings together both theoretical and practical viewpoints on objects in performance, covering actor training, scenography, materials, construction techniques and object theatre.

No study of modern theater is complete without a thorough understanding of the enormous influence of visionary genius Edward Gordon Craig. Born in England in 1872, Craig went on to become famous world-wide as an actor, manager, director, playwright, designer, and most importantly an author and theorist,...

Why is it that in going to see plays we are also touched or moved by them, and is there more than metaphor involved in such claims? Considering these and other questions, this book examines a range of contemporary performance works in which performers and their audiences occupy a shared realm of feelings, in which the play is not always the thing.

Using examples of refugee arts and theatrical activity since the 1990s, this book examines how the 'refugee crisis' has conditioned all arts and cultural activity with refugees in a world where globalization and migration go hand in hand.

Voice Studies brings together leading international scholars and practitioners, to re-examine what voice is, what voice does, and what we mean by "voice studies" in the process and experience of performance. This dynamic and interdisciplinary publication draws on a broad range of approaches,...