The Twentieth Century Performance Reader is the key introductory text to all types of performance. Extracts from over fifty practitioners, critics and theorists from the fields of dance, drama, music, theatre and live art make up an essential sourcebook for students, researchers and practitioners.
This new third edition places a renewed focus on contributions from the world of music, as well as privileging the voices of practitioners themselves ahead of more theoretical writing. A bestseller...
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony for Best Musical, South Pacific flourished as the golden musical of Broadway's post-WWII golden era. Nearly 60 years after its 1949 premiere, South Pacific returned to Broadway in Lincoln Center Theater's glorious Tony-winning production, setting box office records and bringing this timely and timeless musical to new generations. With a score by Rodgers & Hammerstein and a book by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan, based on James A. Michener's Puli...
Broadway's biggest musical comedy hit of the 1940s, this was one for the ages and built by a "dream team" - songwriter Irving Berlin, librettists Dorothy and Herbert Fields, producers Rodgers & Hammerstein, and star Ethel Merman - telling the improbable but true story of sharpshooter Annie Oakley. A staple of the touring and summer stock circuit for years, Annie Get Your Gun kept hitting bull's-eyes, with a film version, two television productions, and thousands of stage revivals over the years...
Laurents passed away early in 2011 but not before writing The Rest of the Story, in which he revealed all that had happened in his life since Original Story By, filled with the wisdom he gained by growing older and a new perspective brought on by Laurents' experience of deep personal loss, including the death of his longtime companion, Tom Hatcher. Laurents' style remains engrossing and brutally honest. His voice is still highly intelligent, loving, generous, and gracious. He remained committed ...
From one of the most famous and influential acting teachers of her time, of all time--whose generations of students include Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Warren Beatty, Meryl Streep, Jerome Robbins, Annette Bening, Peter Bogdanovich, Sydney Pollack, and Mark Ruffalo--the long-awaited companion volume to her book On Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov ("Evidence," wrote John Guare, "that Stella Adler is hands down the greatest acting teacher America has produced...Nobody with a serious in...
A wide-ranging, inspiring documentary history of the American theater movement as told, at the time of its making, by the visionaries who goaded it into being. This anthology collects over forty essays, manifestos, letters, and speeches that are each introduced and placed in historical context by the noted writer and arts commentator Todd London, who spent nearly a decade assembling this collection. The founding visions of theaters from across the country are represented here, including: Arena ...
Embodied Acting is a crucial, pragmatic intervention in the study of how neuroscience can be applied to theatre studies. Examining the nature of the acting process from the perspective of cognitive science, author Rick Kemp re-examines familiar questions of how an actor develops a character, and what is actually involved - physically, mentally - in training, rehearsing and performing. The result is an elegant blend of theory, practice and cutting-edge science, making a compelling case for disca...
Argues that performance is a crucial way of understanding the affective intercultural impact of the disappearance of John Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition in 1845.
Applause is proud to continue the series that for over 70 years has been the standard of excellence for one-act plays in America. As previous series editor Ramon Delgado wrote in his introduction to The Best American Short Plays of 1989, the choice of entries for each edition has been based on the same goal: "to include a balance among three categories of playwrights: 1) established playwrights who continue to practice the art and craft of the short play, 2) emerging playwrights whose record of...
Three new works from José Rivera, a writer known for his lush language, open heart, and stylistic flirting with the surreal. Boleros for the Disenchanted is the moving story of the playwrights own parents: their sweet courtship in 1950s Puerto Rico, and then forty years later in more difficult times in America. With Brainpeople, Rivera explores the troubled minds of three women in a post-apocalyptic setting who feast on a freshly slaughtered tiger. In School of the Americas, he imagines Che Guev...
It's not an exaggeration to say that The Sound of Music is the most beloved film musical of all time. It has touched more than one generation, as over the years, many parents have shared the magic of this wonderful movie with their children. Seven very special children experienced The Sound of Music firsthand: the seven young actors cast as the von Trapp children. Now, for the first time, they tell their stories about making this celebrated film, from their auditions to rehearsals in Los Angeles...
In February 1999, Steven Sater conceived the radical notion of creating a rock musical from Frank Wedekind's notorious Symbolist drama, Fruhlings Erwachen, and he enlisted his friend and writing partner Duncan Sheik in the enterprise. That night, Sater came home and began writing the first lyric of Spring Awakening: "Mama Who Bore Me" - a lyric which still stands, verbatim, just as he first wrote it. Ten years later, in the wake of the enormous international success of this groundbreaking, mult...
Before "Fred and Ginger," there was "Fred and Adele," a show-business partnership and cultural sensation like no other. In our celebrity-saturated era, it's hard to comprehend what a genuine phenomenon these two siblings from Omaha were. At the height of their success in the mid-1920s, the Astaires seemed to define the Jazz Age. They were Gershwin's music in motion, a fascinating pair who wove spellbinding rhythms in song and dance.
In this book, the first comprehensive study of their theatr...
A short, clear, critical study of David Hare's work for theatre, film and television, concentrating on questions of staging, performance and narrative and dramatic form.
All roads lead to London - and to the West End theatre. This book presents a new history of the beginnings of the modern world of London entertainment. Putting female-centred, gender-challenging managements and styles at the centre, it redraws the map of performance history in the Victorian capital of the world. Bratton argues for the importance in Victorian culture of venues like the little Strand Theatre and the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street in the experience of mid-century London, ...
New Playwriting Strategies has become a canonical text in the study and teaching of playwriting, offering a fresh and dynamic insight into the subject. This thoroughly revised and expanded second edition explores and highlights the wide spread of new techniques that form contemporary theatre writing, as well as their influence on other dramatic forms.
Paul Castagno builds on the innovative plays of Len Jenkin, Mac Wellman, and the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to investigate groundbreaking new ...
Alan Hughes presents a new complete account of production methods in Greek comedy. The book summarises contemporary research and disputes, on such topics as acting techniques, theatre buildings, masks and costumes, music and the chorus. Evidence is re-interpreted and traditional doctrine overthrown. Comedy is presented as the pan-Hellenic, visual art of theatre, not as Athenian literature. Recent discoveries in visual evidence are used to stimulate significant historical revisions. The author ha...
Maria Irene Fornes provides an enlightening introduction to a pivotal figure in both Hispanic-American and experimental theater. From her theatrical origins in 1960s Cuba to her precedent plays for the US stage, this book presents an important guide of work to this politically-charged playwright.
Drama at the Heart of the Secondary School provides a rationale for the curricular centrality of drama together with rich and detailed examples of cross-phase thematic projects which are drama-led, but which promote learning across a wide range of curriculum areas, from the humanities and other arts, to English and literacy, science and PSHE.
Each unit explores relevant and stimulating themes and topics that will engage the students, promote empathy, pose questions, and produce creative respo...
This book examines the intersection of religion and theatrical performance in modernity/postmodernity. Religion, no longer sequestered in the "private sphere," has become an explicitly public force. It stimulates and complicates public actions; it is a crucial component of performance.
The writings here suggest that performance studies and religious studies can inform one another, leading to innovative and deepened understandings within and between the disciplines. Religion must receive its ...
Modern international studies of world theatre and drama have begun to acknowledge the Arab world only after the contributions of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Within the Arab world, the contributions of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco to modern drama and to post-colonial expression remain especially neglected, a problem that this book addresses.
Performance Affects, now in paperback and with a new preface, explores performance projects in disaster and war zones to argue that joy, beauty and celebration should be the inspiration for the politics of community-based or participatory performance practice. Applied Theatre has traditionally concentrated on effects - impacts, themes communicated or 'truths' revealed. Performance Affects challenges this orientation by suggesting that an affective realm needs to be the focus for a renewed aesthe...
An Actor's Craft is a handbook for acting students that provides critical approaches and guidance.
Speaking passionately about the art of acting, David Krasner illuminates the multifaceted job of an actor. Combining technique with personal examples, he demonstrates how to achieve excellence in performance, how to recognize quality acting, and how to use the technique of acting in an advanced way.
This volume analyzes major French plays of the 1830s, focusing on their theatricality, and on the ways in which they expose the workings of the theatre rather than conceal them. Through an examination of performance within these plays, the study posits that the stage is a privileged site of demonstration, a literal "proving ground" that lends a physical reality to abstract values announced in the text and shared or questioned by the audience. Negotiating between the literary study of drama and p...
Embodying Difference: Scripting Social Images of the Female Body in US Latina Theatre explores contemporary theatrical productions by Latina dramatists in the United States and focuses on the effects that neoliberal politics, global market strategies, gender formation, and racial and ethnical marginalization have had on Latinas. Through the analysis of select plays by dramatists Nao Bustamante, Coco Fusco, Anne García-Romero, Josefina López, Cherríe Moraga, Linda Nieves-Powell, Dolores Prida, an...
Now in its Third Edition, Scenic Art for the Theatre: History, Tools and Techniques continues to be the most trusted source for both student and professional scenic artists. With new information on scenic design using Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and other digital imaging softwares this test expands to offer the developing artist more step-by-step instuction and more practical techniques for work in the field. It goes beyond detailing job functions and discussing techniques to serve as a trouble-sh...
This collection documents and examines political and protest theatre produced between the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and Obama’s election in 2008 by British and American artists responding to their own governments’ actions and policies during this time. The plays take up topics such as the ongoing wars on terror, Blair’s support of U.S. policies, the flawed intelligence that led to the Iraq war, and illegal detentions and torture at Abu Ghraib. The authors argue that engaged artists faced a radically...
..Matos's important book provides a well-researched, well-written ,and fascinating discussion of the notion of contagion from Ibsen and into Pineo and Jones. Professor Gregory Tague, St Francis College, editor of Origins of English Literary Modernism,1870-1914 The Independent Theatre's production of Ghosts at the Royalty Theatre, London in 1891 precipitated one of the most famous theatrical quarrels in European theater history. Although many have commented on the extremity of the response from t...
While award-winning author Rudolfo Anaya is known primarily as a novelist, his genius is also evident in dramatic works performed regularly in his native New Mexico and throughout the world. Billy the Kid and Other Plays collects seven of these works and offers them together for the first time.
Like his novels, many of Anaya’s plays are built from the folklore of the Southwest. This volume opens with The Season of La Llorona, in which Anaya fuses the Mexican legend of the dreaded “crying wom...
A new boxed set from Knopf featuring Stephen Sondheim lyric books: Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes and Look I Made a Hat: with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Wafflings, Diversions and Anecdotes.
This exciting new work argues for the exploration of drama as a conduit to deep emotional learning that has the ability to change the somatic identity of performers and audiences alike. Rokotnitz suggests that the preference for reciprocity exhibited by human physiological systems also extends into psychological and cognitive processes. Modeling her epistemological inquiry upon the paradigms instantiated by our biological architecture, she argues that effective knowledge acquisition and interper...
Through a collection of original essays and case studies, this book introduces ideas and raises questions about building dynamic, theoretically minded production work. Artists and scholars grapple with the shifting value and function of theory in theatre, exploring the multi-faceted and complex relationship between theory and theatre practice.
The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights is an authoritative guide to the work of twenty-five playwrights who have risen to prominence since the 1980s. Written by an international team of scholars , it provides an illuminating survey and analysis of each writer's plays and will be invaluable to anyone interested in, studying or teaching contemporary drama.
Among the many playwrights whose work is examined are Sarah Daniels, Terry Johnson, Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, Anthony Nei...
Stage technicians or “teckies” traditionally apprentice for knowledge about their craft. This is a new, unique practical guide for teckies that can be read or used as a reference manual for all aspects of stage lighting, from equipment to lighting a performance space to special effects and design.
Information is easily accessed through tabbed sections and keywords. The information in each chapter is presented at three levels: “A Quick Start,” enough basic information to get started; “More In...
Provides a comparative approach to the internationally wide-spread phenomenon of the contemporary director-auteur in the theatre, urging a historical and theoretical exploration of the visions, methods, and stage idioms in the work of established artists. Sidiropoulou examines prominent examples of both older and more recent director-auteur work, aiming at re-asserting – to its artistic and academic audience – the value of balancing the established emphasis on the diegetic aspects of theatre wit...
In the early 1890s, black performer Bob Cole turned blackface minstrelsy on its head with his nationally recognized whiteface creation, a character he called Willie Wayside. Just over a century later, hiphop star Busta Rhymes performed a whiteface supercop in his hit music video "Dangerous." In this sweeping work, Marvin McAllister explores the enduring tradition of "whiting up," in which African American actors, comics, musicians, and even everyday people have studied and assumed white racial i...
Far too often young theater and film artists, as well as educators, make the jump from film to theater without being fully aware of the ways in which the qualities of each medium affect content and artistic expression. Starting with a history of the relationship between theater and film, the collection includes essays from a variety of writers, directors, and theorists by examining the differences between working in, and creating for, drama and film. The playwright Bernard Shaw looks at the ways...
From her early work with such writers as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and John Osborne, to her time with Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre, Jocelyn Herbert (1917–2003) pioneered a simple yet atmospheric set design style that remains influential today. Britain’s leading stage designer brought her innovative approach to the big screen on such films as Lindsay Anderson’s Isadora. Published for the first time, Herbert’s sketchbooks provide an intimate portrait of her life and work. Illustr...
This book is a guide to introducing the craft of playwriting into the secondary English curriculum at key stage 3, using the TEEP (Teacher Effectiveness Enhancement Programme) framework. The authors also provide a particular focus on applying this versatile scheme of work to other areas of the curriculum, including Citizenship and PSHE.
Playwriting Across the Curriculum also contains schemes of work for:
• pupils with special educational needs (SEN)
• pupils with English as an additiona...
Claire Cochrane maps the experience of theatre across the British Isles during the twentieth century through the social and economic factors which shaped it. Three topographies for 1900, 1950 and 2000 survey the complex plurality of theatre within the nation-state which at the beginning of the century was at the hub of world-wide imperial interests and after one hundred years had seen unprecedented demographic, economic and industrial change. Cochrane analyses the dominance of London theatre, bu...
Presenting an innovative approach to performance studies and literary history, Soyica Colbert argues for the centrality of black performance traditions to African American literature, including preaching, dancing, blues and gospel, and theatre itself, showing how these performance traditions create the 'performative ground' of African American literary texts. Across a century of literary production using the physical space of the theatre and the discursive space of the page, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zo...
This volume offers transdisciplinary approaches to discuss acting in moving-image culture. It assembles international scholars from dance, theatre, film, media and cultural studies, art and philosophy, who scrutinie both the actor’s presence and art in analog and digital film from historical, generic, and particularly theoretical perspectives: phenomenology, Deleue studies, new media theory to cognitive research, along with re-animated classical approaches and case studies. Each perspective inte...
Over the past two decades, theatre practitioners across the West have turned to documentary modes of performance-making to confront new socio-political realities. This has led to an astonishing range of performance styles, ways of working and modes of intervention in varied sites of theatrical production. The essays in this collection place this work in context, exploring historical and contemporary examples of documentary and 'verbatim' theatre, and applying a range of critical perspectives tha...
This critical introduction to Performance Studies provides undergraduates with an accessible way into terminology and context. Using an innovative tripartite structure that combines the voices of artists, critics and teachers, it addresses a variety of practices moving through body, space, time, technology, interactivity and organization.
Over the last hundred years, musical theatre artists--from Berlin to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim--have developed a form that corresponds directly to the Americanization of the increasingly Jewish New York audience; and that audience’s aspirations and concerns have played out in the shows themselves. Musicals thus became a paradigm which instructed newcomers in how to assimilate while correspondingly envisioning "American Dream" America as democratic and inclusive. Broadway musicals still...
Stephen Sondheim returns with the second volume of his collected lyrics, giving us another remarkable glimpse into his life’s work, and into his life.
As he did in the acclaimed and best-selling Finishing the Hat (one of The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2010), Sondheim richly annotates his lyrics with personal and theater history, discussions of his collaborations, and exacting, charming dissections of his work — both the successes and the failures. Picking up where he left off in Finishi...
