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After live : possibility, potentiality, and the future of performance
Conceives of traditional dramatic theater as a place for taming the future and then conceptualizes how performance beyond this paradigm might stage the unruly nature of futurity. Chapters offer insights into the plays of Beckett, Churchill, Eno, and Gombrowicz, devised theater practices, and include an extended exploration of the Italian director Romeo Castellucci. Through the lens of potentiality, other chapters present novel approaches to minimalist sculpture and dance, then reflect on how the beholder him- or herself is called upon to perform when confronted by such work.
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Precarious Spectatorship: Theatre and Image in an Age of Emergencies
Precarious spectatorship is about the relationship between emergencies and the spectator. In the early twenty-first century, ‘emergencies’ are commonplace in the newsgathering and political institutions of western industrial democracies. From terrorism to global warming, the refugee crisis to general elections, the spectator is bombarded with narratives that seek to suspend the criteria of everyday life in order to address perpetual ‘exceptional’ threats. The book argues that repeated exposure to these narratives through the apparatuses of contemporary technology creates a ‘precarious spectatorship’, where the spectator’s ability to rationalise herself or her relationship with the object of her spectatorship is compromised. This precarity has become a destructive but too-often overlooked aspect of contemporary spectatorship.
eBook
Applied theatre : aesthetics
\"Applied Theatre: Aesthetics re-examines how the idea of 'the aesthetic' is relevant to performance in social settings. The disinterestedness that traditional aesthetics claims as a key characteristic of art makes little sense when making performances with ordinary people, rooted in their lives and communities, and with personal and social change as its aim. Yet practitioners of applied arts know that their work is not reducible to social work, therapy or education. Reconciling the simultaneous autonomy and heteronomy of art is the problem of aesthetics in applied arts. Gareth White's introductory essay reviews the field, and proposes an interdisciplinary approach that builds on new developments in evolutionary, cognitive and neuro-aesthetics alongside the politics of art. It addresses the complexities of art and the aesthetic as everyday behaviours and responses. The second part of the book is made up of essays from leading experts and new voices in the practice and theory of applied performance, reflecting on the key problematics of applying performance with non-performers. New and innovative practice is described and interrogated, and fresh thinking is introduced in response to perennial problems\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Think, Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human
This book examines Samuel Beckett's unique lesson in courage in the wake of humanism's postwar crisis--the courage to go on living even after experiencing life as a series of catastrophes. Rabate, a former president of the Samuel Beckett Society and a leading scholar of modernism, explores the whole range of Beckett's plays, novels, and essays. He places Beckett in a vital philosophical conversation that runs from Bataille to Adorno, from Kant and Sade to Badiou. At the same time, he stresses Beckett's inimitable sense of metaphysical comedy. Foregrounding Beckett's decision to write in French, Rabate inscribes him in a continental context marked by a \"writing degree zero\" while showing the prescience and ethical import of Beckett's tendency to subvert the \"human\" through the theme of the animal. Beckett's \"declaration of inhuman rights,\" he argues, offers the funniest mode of expression available to us today.
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The elements of theatrical expression
\"The Elements of Theatrical Expression puts forward fourteen essential elements that make up the basic building blocks of theatre. Is theatre a language? Does it have its own unique grammar? And if so, just what would the elements of such a grammar be? Brian Kulick asks readers to think of these elements as the rungs of a ladder, scaling one after the other to arrive at an aerial view of the theatrical landscape. From such a vantage point, one can begin to discern a line of development from the ancient Greeks, through Shakespeare and Chekhov, to a host of our own contemporary authors. He demonstrates how these elements may be transhistorical but are far from static, marking out a rich and dynamic theatrical language for a new generation of theatre makers to draw upon. Suitable for directors, actors, writers, dramaturges, and all audiences who yearn for a deeper understanding of theatre, The Elements of Theatrical Expression equips its readers with the knowledge that they need to see and hear theatre in new and more daring ways\"-- Provided by publisher.
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The Mind-Body Stage
Descartes's notion of subjectivity changed the way characters would be written, performed by actors, and received by audiences. His coordinate system reshaped how theatrical space would be conceived and built. His theory of the passions revolutionized our understanding of the emotional exchange between spectacle and spectators. Yet theater scholars have not seen Descartes's transformational impact on theater history. Nor have philosophers looked to this history to understand his reception and impact. After Descartes, playwrights put Cartesian characters on the stage and thematized their rational workings. Actors adapted their performances to account for new models of subjectivity and physiology. Critics theorized the theater's emotional and ethical benefits in Cartesian terms. Architects fostered these benefits by altering their designs.
The Mind-Body Stage provides a dazzlingly original picture of one of the most consequential and confusing periods in the histories of modern theater and philosophy. Interdisciplinary and comparatist in scope, it uses methodological techniques from literary study, philosophy, theater history, and performance studies and draws on scores of documents (including letters, libretti, religious jeremiads, aesthetic treatises, and architectural plans) from several countries.
eBook
Performing utopia
\"In her landmark study Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, Jill Dolan departs from historical writings on utopia, which suggest that social reorganization and the redistribution of wealth are utopian efforts, to argue instead that utopia occurs in fragmentary 'utopian moments', often found embedded within a theatrical performance. While Dolan focuses on the utopian performative within a theatrical context, this volume expands her theories to encompass performance in public life - from diasporic hip hop battles, Chilean military parades, commemorative processions, Blackfoot pow-wows and post-Hurricane Katrina Mardi Gras to the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, Festas Juninas in Brazil, the Renaissance Fairs in Arizona and neo-burlesque competitions. How do these performances rehearse and enact visions of a utopic world? What can the lens of utopia and dystopia illuminate about the potential of performing bodies to transform communities, identities, values and beliefs across time? Performing Utopia not only answers these questions but offers a diverse collection of case studies focusing on utopias, dystopias and heteropias enacted through the performing body.\" --Back cover.
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The Vakhtangov Sourcebook
'Scrupulously compiled and skillfully translated by Andrei Malaev-Babel, The Vakhtangov Sourcebook ... provides the most comprehensive addition to English readers' knowledge of the philosophy, pedagogy, and legacy of Vakhtangov.' - Modern Language Review
'An exceptionally valuable book that promises to be the definitive reference for Vakhtangov's work for years to come.' - Theatre Topics
Yevgeny Vakhtangov was the creator of Fantastic Realism, credited with reconciling Meyerhold's bold experiments with Stanislavski's naturalist technique. The Vakhtangov Sourcebook compiles new translations of his key writings on the art of theatre, making it the primary source of first hand material on this master of theatre in the English speaking world.
Vakhtangov's essays and articles are accompanied by:
Diary and Notebook excerpts
His lectures to the Vakhtangov Studio
In-depth accounts of Vakhtangov methods in rehearsal
Production photographs and sketches
Extensive bibliographies
Director's notes on key performances
An extensive introductory overview from editor Andrei Malaev-Babel explains Vakhtangov's creative life, his groundbreaking theatrical concepts and influential directorial works.
eBook
Theatricality as Medium
Ever since Aristotle's Poetics, both the theory and the practice of theater have been governed by the assumption that it is a form of representation dominated by what Aristotle calls the mythos,or the plot.This conception of theater has subordinated characteristics related to the theatrical medium, such as the process and place of staging, to the demands of a unified narrative. This readable, thought-provoking, and multidisciplinary study explores theatrical writings that question this aesthetical-generic conception and seek instead to work with the medium of theatricality itself. Beginning with Plato, Samuel Weber tracks the uneasy relationships among theater, ethics, and philosophy through Aristotle, the major Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Freud, Benjamin, Artaud, and many others who develop alternatives to dominant narrative-aesthetic assumptions about the theatrical medium. His readings also interrogate the relation of theatricality to the introduction of electronic media. The result is to show that, far from breaking with the characteristics of live staged performance, the new media intensify ambivalences about place and identity already at work in theater since the Greeks. Praise for Samuel Weber: What kind of questioning is primarily after something other than an answer that can be measured . . . in cognitive terms? Those interested in the links between modern philosophy nd media culture will be impressed by the unusual intellectual clarity and depth with which Weber formulates the . . . questions that constiture the true challenge to cultural studies today. . . . one of our most important cultural critics and thinkers-MLN
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