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A detailed examination of Beckett's dramas based on reductionist models in the arts and sciences. Various experimental aspects of composition and production are shown to reflect Beckett's search for a minimal theater of silence and inaction, as well as his epistemological uncertainty.
A selectively comprehensive bibliography of the vast literature about Samuel Beckett's dramatic works, arranged for the efficient and convenient use of scholars on all levels.
Examines the intersection of Samuel Beckett's thirty-second playlet Breath with the visual artsSamuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism. Key FeaturesExamines Beckett's ultimate venture to define the borders between a theatrical performance and purely visual representationJuxtaposes Beckett's Breath with breath-related artworks by prominent visual artists who investigate the far-reaching potential of the representation of respiration by challenging modernist essentialismThe focus on this primary human physiological function and its relation to arts and culture is highly pertinent to studies of human performance, the nature of embodiment and its relation to cultural expressionFacilitates new intermedial discourses around the nature and aesthetic possibilities of breath, the minimum condition of existence, at the interface between the visual arts and performance practices and their relation to questions of spectacle, objecthood and materiality
Exploring Beckett's relationship with the visual arts and its influence on his creative expression
Keir Elam showed how this new 'science' could provide a radical shift in our understanding of theatrical performance, one of our very richest and most complex forms of communication.
Winner, 2017 American Theater and Drama Society John W. Frick Book Award Winner, 2017 ASTR Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theater History Hillary Miller’s Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York offers a fascinating and comprehensive exploration of how the city’s financial crisis shaped theater and performance practices in this turbulent decade and beyond. New York City’s performing arts community suffered greatly from a severe reduction in grants in the mid-1970s. A scholar and playwright, Miller skillfully synthesizes economics, urban planning, tourism, and immigration to create a map of the interconnected urban landscape and to contextualize the struggle for resources. She reviews how numerous theater professionals, including Ellen Stewart of La MaMa E.T.C. and Julie Bovasso, Vinnette Carroll, and Joseph Papp of The Public Theater, developed innovative responses to survive the crisis. Combining theater history and close readings of productions, each of Miller’s chapters is a case study focusing on a company, a production, or an element of New York’s theater infrastructure. Her expansive survey visits Broadway, Off-, Off-Off-, Coney Island, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, community theater, and other locations to bring into focus the large-scale changes wrought by the financial realignments of the day. Nuanced, multifaceted, and engaging, Miller’s lively account of the financial crisis and resulting transformation of the performing arts community offers an essential chronicle of the decade and demonstrates its importance in understanding our present moment.
This volume revisits the most important issues that Anglo-American studies are facing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with regards to both research and teaching. Given the English language’s status as a lingua franca, the culture that produced it, and that has been changing it, the literature written in English, and relevant linguistic and literary discourse have come to largely dominate critical theory globally. Therefore, the subjects of Anglo-American studies, and their traditional and modern concepts, must be approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, and must also be problematized in, and determined by, other spheres of the world, especially at the universities at which they are studied. This book, consequently, approaches both mainstream cultural, literary, linguistic and academic achievements and, often by way of comparison, those smaller, more distant, and marginalized fields, traditionally subordinate studies, as well as instances of cultural hybridization. Given its concern with a broad field of culture, literature, linguistics, and methodology of teaching English as a foreign language, this book consists of two main parts comprising the closest research and teaching fields; one attending to culture and literature, and the other approaching linguistics and methodology.
Based on various models of metonymy, this book distinguishes metonymic drama structure from the metaphoric, symbolic, and allegorical. It applies Kristeva's theory of the "semiotic" to dramatic texts and Barker's observations on the private body to their potential theatrical representation in order to argue that there is a relationship between fragmented representations of the subject and metonymic drama structure.
The Art Gallery on Stage is the first book to consider the representation of the art gallery on the contemporary British stage and to discuss how playwrights have begun to regard it as inspiration, location, focus or theme in an ever-more intense game of cross-fertilization. The study analyzes the impact on dramatic form and theatrical presentation of what has been a paradigmatic shift in the way art galleries and museums display their collections and how these are perceived, establishing a hitherto unexplored connection between modes of exhibiting and modes of representation. It traces a trajectory from plays that were initially performed in traditional theatres in accordance with a naturalistic play structure to plays that favour of a radical reconfiguration of visual representation. Indeed, since the beginning of the new millennium, playwrights and theatre-makers have increasingly experimented with new dramatic forms and site-specific venues, while forging collaborations with art makers and curators. The book focuses on plays from the 1980s onwards, such as Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution, Nick Dear's The Art of Success, Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution, Timberlake Wertenbaker's Three Birds Alighting on a Field and The Line, David Edgar's Pentecost, Martin Crimp's Attempt on Her Life, Rebecca Lenkiewicz's Shoreditch Madonna and The Painter, David Leddy's Long Live the Little Knife, and Tim Crouch's My Arm, An Oak Tree and England, and considers the vital contribution to the field made by set designers. Ultimately, through this study, we come to understand how modern drama can offer a set of interpretative tools to enhance our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the social construction of art and, furthermore, the potential of theatre and the gallery space to question our fundamental cultural assumptions and values.