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Arguing that the commercial stage depended on the unprecedented demographic growth and commercial vibrancy of London to fuel its own development, Jean E. Howard posits a particular synergy between the early modern stage and the city in which it flourished. In London comedy, place functions as the material arena in which social relations are regulated, urban problems negotiated, and city space rendered socially intelligible. Rather than simply describing London, the stage participated in interpreting it and giving it social meaning. Each chapter of this book focuses on a particular place within the city-the Royal Exchange, the Counters, London's whorehouses, and its academies of manners-and examines the theater's role in creating distinctive narratives about each. In these stories, specific locations are transformed into venues defined by particular kinds of interactions, whether between citizen and alien, debtor and creditor, prostitute and client, or dancing master and country gentleman. Collectively, they suggest how city space could be used and by whom, and they make place the arena for addressing pressing urban problems: demographic change and the influx of foreigners and strangers into the city; new ways of making money and losing it; changing gender roles within the metropolis; and the rise of a distinctive \"town culture\" in the West End. Drawing on a wide range of familiar and little-studied plays from four decades of a defining era of theater history,Theater of a Cityshows how the stage imaginatively shaped and responded to the changing face of early modern London.

An inclusive history of the professionalization of American scenic design The figure of the American theatrical scenic designer first emerged in the early twentieth century.As productions moved away from standardized, painted scenery and toward individualized scenic design, the demand for talented new designers grew.

Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays. The study argues that playwrights were writing with foresight, inscribing the constraints and resources of the stages into their texts. It goes further, to posit that Shakespeare and his playwright-contemporaries adhered to a set of generic conventions, rather than specific local company practices, about how space and place were to be related in performance: the playwrights constituted thus an overarching virtual 'company' producing playtexts that shared features across the acting companies and playhouses. By clarifying a sixteenth- to seventeenth-century conception of theatrical place, Tim Fitzpatrick adds a new layer of meaning to our understanding of the plays. His approach adds a new dimension to these particular documents which-though many of them are considered of great literary worth-were not originally generated for any other reason than to be performed within a specific performance context. The fact that the playwrights were aware of the features of this performance tradition makes their texts a potential mine of performance information, and casts light back on the texts themselves: if some of their meanings are 'spatial', these will have been missed by purely literary tools of analysis.

Between the 1950s and the 1980s, Britain witnessed a theatre-building boom. Across the country, substantial new theatres were constructed in town and city centres, and on university campuses. The construction of many of these buildings was subsidized with public funds. As a result, many of them represented a range of agendas that went far beyond the practical needs of performers: they addressed such themes as the place of public buildings in Britain’s changing urban landscape, the role of culture and leisure in modern life, and the extent to which support for the arts could be understood as part of the evolving welfare state project. The book provides the first detailed history of these buildings, looking at projects which were never built as well as those that were completed. It is concerned not only with the planning and appearance of new theatres but also the ideas that shaped theatre architecture, and the organizations and processes that made new theatres possible. In this respect, it draws on a rich seam of archive material, much of which has not previously been studied. It explains how theatre architecture was transformed in post-war Britain while also pointing to significant continuities in conception and design. It also shows how these buildings functioned as vehicles through which to explore such ideas as modernity, identity, and community. In this respect, it concludes that Britain’s new theatres were not only significant in themselves but also that they shed light on the period’s social, urban, and political histories.

The collection, edited by Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight, features essays by scholars interested in exploring how the material culture of sixteenth and early seventeenth English theatrical culture influenced the creation and presentation of drama and how understanding this culture can enrich scholars’ current interactions with these plays as well as offer insights to actors and directors. The essays include discussions of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton as well as lesser known works and playwrights. This collection is unique in that it includes the body of the actor as a material object that is encountered and manipulated by other actors on the stage. These essays demonstrate how props, bodies and the architectural dimensions of early modern stages have both practical and symbolic registers.

In Place of a Show is a compelling account of Western theatre buildings in the 21st century: theatres stripped of their primary purpose, lying empty, preserved as museums, or demolished. Playfully combining first-person narratives, scholarly research and visual documents, Augusto Corrieri explores the material and imaginative potentials of these places, charting interconnections between humans, birds, vegetation, and the beguiling animations of inanimate things, such as walls, curtains and seats. Across four chapters we learn of the uncanny dismantling and reconstitution of a German Baroque auditorium during the Second World War; the phantasmal remains of a demolished music hall in London’s East End; a Renaissance Italian theatre, fleetingly transformed into an aviary by the appearance of a swallow; and a lavish opera house emerging from the Amazon rainforest. In these pages we are invited to discover theatres as sites of anomalous encounters and surprising coincidences: places that might reveal the performative entanglement of human and nonhuman worlds.

The extraordinary story of the 20th century's most recognisable building, with new insights into the people involved and the controversy that surrounded its construction.

Since its origin, opera has been identified with the performance and negotiation of power. Once theaters specifically for opera were established, that connection was expressed in the design and situation of the buildings themselves, as much as through the content of operatic works. Yet the importance of the opera house's physical situation, and the ways in which opera and the opera house have shaped each other, have seldom been treated as topics worthy of examination. Operatic Geographies invites us to reconsider the opera house's spatial production. Looking at opera through the lens of cultural geography, this anthology rethinks the opera house's landscape, not as a static backdrop, but as an expression of territoriality. The essays in this anthology consider moments across the history of the genre, and across a range of geographical contexts—from the urban to the suburban to the rural, and from the \"Old\" world to the \"New.\" One of the book's most novel approaches is to consider interactions between opera and its environments—that is, both in the domain of the traditional opera house and in less visible, more peripheral spaces, from girls' schools in late seventeenth-century England, to the temporary arrangements of touring operatic troupes in nineteenth-century Calcutta, to rural, open-air theaters in early twentieth-century France. The essays throughout Operatic Geographies powerfully illustrate how opera's spatial production informs the historical development of its social, cultural, and political functions.

Modern concert halls and opera houses are now very specialized buildings with special acoustical characteristics. With new contemporary case-studies, this updated book explores these characteristics as an important resource for architects, engineers and auditorium technicians. Supported by over 40 detailed case studies and architectural drawings of 75 auditoria at a scale of 1:500, the survey of each auditorium type is completed with a discussion of current best practice to achieve optimum acoustics. Michael Barron is a senior lecturer at the University of Bath Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering and partner of Fleming & Barron acoustic consultants. He has been involved over many years in acoustic consultancy and research, of which a key project was an Acoustic Survey of British Auditoria. In 2006 he received the Rayleigh medal, the premier award of the (British) Institute of Acoustics. 1. Introduction 2. Sound and Rooms 3. Acoustics for the Symphony Concert Hall 4. The Development of the Concert Hall 5. British Concert Halls and Conclusions for Concert Hall Acoustics 6. Chamber Music and Recital Halls 7. Acoustics for Speech 8. Theatre Acoustics 9. Acoustics for Opera 10. Acoustics for Multi-Purpose Use 11. Multi-Purpose Halls in Britain 12. The Art and Science of Acoustics Appendix A: Sound Reflection and Reverberation Calculation Appendix B: Objective Measures for Music Auditoria Appendix C: Further Objective Results in Concert Halls Appendix D: Objective Measures for Speech Auditoria

In this newly revised second edition, veteran stage designers and technical directors Dennis Dorn and Mark Shanda introduce industry-standard drafting and designing practices with step-by-step discussions, illustrations, worksheets, and problems to help students develop and refine drafting and other related skills needed for entertainment set production work. By incorporating the foundational principles of both hand- and computer-drafting approaches throughout the entire book, the authors illustrate how to create clear and detailed drawings that advance the production process.  Early chapters focus on the basics of geometric constructions, orthographic techniques, soft-line sketching applications, lettering, and dimensioning. Later chapters discuss real-life applications of production drawing and ancillary skills such as time and material estimation and shop-drawing nomenclature. Two chapters detail a series of design and shop drawings required to mount a specific design project, providing a guided path through both phases of the design/construction process. Most chapters conclude with one or more worksheets or problems that provide readers with an opportunity to test their understanding of the material presented.  The authors' discussion of universal CAD principles throughout the manuscript provides a valuable foundation that can be used in any computer-based design, regardless of the software. Dorn and Shanda treat the computer as another drawing tool, like the pencil or T-square, but one that can help a knowledgeable drafter potentially increase personal productivity and accuracy when compared to traditional hand-drafting techniques.  Drafting for the Theatre, second edition assembles in one book all the principal types of drawings, techniques, and conventional wisdom necessary for the production of scenic drafting, design, and shop drawings. It is richly illustrated with numerous production examples and is fully indexed to assist students and technicians in finding important information. It is structured to support a college-level course in drafting, but will also serve as a handy reference for the working theatre professional.