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"Performing arts -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century"
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German-Speaking Exiles in the Performing Arts in Britain After 1933
This volume focuses on the contribution of German-speaking refugees from Nazism to the performing arts in Britain, evaluating their role in broadcasting, theatre, film and dance from 1933 to the present. It contains essays evaluating the role of refugee artists in the BBC German Service, including the actor Martin Miller, the writer Bruno Adler and the journalist Edmund Wolf. Miller also made a career in the English theatre transcending the barrier of language, as did the actor Gerhard Hinze, whose transition to the English stage is an instructive example of adaptation to a new theatre culture. In film, language problems were mitigated by the technical possibilities of the medium, although stars like Anton Walbrook received coaching in English. Certainly, technicians from Central Europe, like the cameraman Wolf Suschitzky, helped establish the character of British film in the 1950s and 1960s. In dance theatre, language played little role, facilitating the influence in Britain of dance practitioners like Kurt Jooss and Sigurd Leeder. Finally, evaluating the reverse influence of émigrés on Germany, two essays discuss Erich Fried's translations of Shakespeare and Peter Zadek's early theatre career in Germany.
eBook
Culture, democracy and the right to make art : the British community arts movement
\"Based on the words and experiences of the people involved, this book tells the story of the community arts movement in the UK, and, through a series of essays, assesses its influence on present day participatory arts practices. Part I offers the first comprehensive account of the movement, its history, rationale and modes of working in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales; Part II brings the work up to the present, through a scholarly assessment of its influence on contemporary practice that considers the role of technologies and networks, training, funding, commissioning and curating socially engaged art today. The community arts movement was a well-known but little understood and largely undocumented creative revolution that began as part of the counter-cultural scene in the late 1960s. A wide range of art forms were developed, including large processions with floats and giant puppets, shadow puppet shows, murals and public art, events on adventure playgrounds and play schemes, outdoor events and fireshows. By the middle of the 1980s community arts had changed and diversified to the point where its fragmentation meant that it could no longer be seen as a coherent movement. Interviews with the early pioneers provide a unique insight into the arts practices of the time. Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art is not simply a history because the legacy and influence of the community arts movement can be seen in a huge range of diverse locations today. Anyone who has ever encountered a community festival or educational project in a gallery or museum or visited a local arts centre could be said to be part of the on-going story of the community arts\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
British theatre in the Great War : a revaluation
British Theatre in the Great War deals with a theatrical phase customarily dismissed by those charting twentieth-century developments. What becomes clear is that assessment by unsuitable literary criteria has masked the importance of the war years in British theatrical history. In avoiding a texts bias, the book reveals a period of unsurpassed prosperity in which the stage's substantial contribution to the war effort is only one notable feature. That it also saw the commercial theater's absorption of Continental avant-gardeism by way of revue, the last great epoch of music hall, the rise of the Old Vic with a project in opera and Shakespeare, and the unprecedented popularity of opera everywhere--this was surely the most fruitful period of Thomas Beecham's theatrical career--is compelling argument for revaluation. In his reassessment of this period, Dr. Williams extensively examines scripts and press coverage, providing a comprehensive overview from popular pantomime to the specialist work of the private stage as well as discussion of such issues as working conditions and censorship.
eBook
British theatre companies, 1980- 1994 : Joint Stock Theatre Company, Gay Sweatshop, Théâtre de Complicité, Forced Entertainment, Women's Theatre Group, and Talawa
\"This series of three volumes provides a groundbreaking study of the work of many of the most innovative and important British theatre companies from 1965 to the present. It charts the movement of much of this work from the fringe to the mainstream of British theatre culture. Each volume provides an overview of the political and cultural context, an extensive survey of the variety of theatre companies from the period, and detailed case studies of six of the major companies.\"-- Publisher's description.
Book
British cinema : a very short introduction
This title explores the history of cinema in Britain, and considers what has made its films and techniques distinctive, especially in the context of British relations with America. Ranging across the 20th century, Barr's account looks at key British films and filmmakers within this context.
BOOK
Maximum Movies—Pulp Fictions
In the words of Richard Maltby . . . \"Maximum Movies--Pulp Fictions describes two improbably imbricated worlds and the piece of cultural history their intersections provoked.\" One of these worlds comprises a clutch of noisy, garish pulp movies--Kiss Me Deadly, Shock Corridor, Fixed Bayonets!, I Walked with a Zombie, The Lineup, Terror in a Texas Town, Ride Lonesome--pumped out for the grind houses at the end of the urban exhibition chain by the studios' B-divisions and fly-by-night independents. The other is occupied by critics, intellectuals, cinephiles, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Manny Farber, and Lawrence Alloway, who championed the cause of these movies and incited the cultural guardians of the day by attacking a rigorously policed canon of tasteful, rarified, and ossified art objects. Against the legitimate, and in defense of the illegitimate, in an insolent and unruly manner, they agitated for the recognition of lurid sensational crime stories, war pictures, fast-paced Westerns, thrillers, and gangster melodramas were claimed as examples of the true, the real, and the authentic in contemporary culture--the foundation upon which modern film studies sits.
eBook
The lasting influence of the war on postwar British film
\"Many of the most celebrated British films of the immediate post-war period (1945-55) seem to be occupied with \"getting on\" with life and offering distraction for postwar audiences. It is the time of the celebrated Ealing comedies, Hue and Cry (1946) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Dickens adaptations, and the most ambitious projects of the Archers. While the war itself is rarely mentioned in these films, the war and the conditions of postwar society lie at the heart of understanding them. While various studies have focused on lesser known realist films, few consider how deeply and completely the war affected British film. Michael W. Boyce considers the preoccupation of these films with profound anxieties and uncertainties about what life was going to be like for postwar Britain, what roles men and women would play, how children would grow up, even what it meant - and what it still means today - to be British\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Edinburgh companion to the First World War and the arts
This authoritative reference work examines literary and artistic responses to the war's upheavals across a wide range of media and genres, from poetry to pamphlets, sculpture to television documentary, and requiems to war reporting.
eBook