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Theatre is one of the longest-standing art forms of modern civilization. Taking a global look at how various forms of theatre - including puppetry, dance, and mime - have been interpreted and enjoyed, this book explores all aspects of the theatre, including its relationship with religion, literature, and its value worldwide.
This major introductory textbook is from one of the leading educators working in theatre today. What Is Theatre? will make its reader a better playgoer, responding more fully to performance, with a keener appreciation of all the resources of theatre-acting, design, direction, organization, theatre buildings, and audiences. By focusing on the best professional practice and the most helpful learning processes, Dr. Brown shows how to read a play-text and to see and hear its potential for performance. Throughout this book, suggestions are given for student essays and class discussions, to help both instructor and reader to clarify their thoughts on all aspects of theatre-going. While the main focus is on present-day theatre in North America, history is used to illuminate current practice. Theatres in Europe and Asia also feature in the discussion. A view is given of all contributors to performance, with special emphasis placed on actors and the plays they perform. This textbook is not tied to a few specific play-texts, but designed to be effective regardless of which play a student sees or reads. In Part Two, leading practitioners of different generations and cultural backgrounds describe their own work, providing a variety of perspectives on the contemporary theatre. All this is supplemented by nearly 100 black and white and color illustrations from productions, working drawings, and plans. This new text engages its readers in the realities of the theatre; it is up-to-date, comprehensive, and packed with practical advice for understanding how theatre works and how plays come alive in performance. John Russell Brown is professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has taught at a variety of colleges including New York and Stanford Universities. For 15 years he was an associate director of the National Theatre in London, and he has directed plays in many other theatres including Cincinnati Playhouse, the Empty Space in Seattle, and the Clurman Theatre in New York. Professor Brown has written extensively about theatre, especially about Shakespeare and contemporary theatre. He is editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre.
Provides an introductory and interactive look at the theatrical history, artists, skills and expertise needed to create live art to a new generation of theatre artists and audiences. The text contains unit objectives, web links (to articles and videos), and interviews with professionals to bring the content to life for the reader.
This volume explores the impact of printing on the European theatre in the period 1480-1880 and shows that the printing press played a major part in the birth of modern theatre.
The Dark Theatre is an indispensable text for activist communities wondering what theatre might have to do with their futures, students and scholars across Theatre and Performance Studies, Urban Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Economy and Social Ecology. The Dark Theatre returns to the bankrupted warehouse in Hope (Sufferance) Wharf in London’s Docklands where Alan Read worked through the 1980s to identify a four-decade interregnum of ‘cultural cruelty’ wreaked by financialisation, austerity and communicative capitalism. Between the OPEC Oil Embargo and the first screening of The Family in 1974, to the United Nations report on UK poverty and the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017, this volume becomes a book about loss. In the harsh light of such loss is there an alternative to the market that profits from peddling ‘well-being’ and pushes prescriptions for ‘self-help’, any role for the arts that is not an apologia for injustice? What if culture were not the solution but the problem when it comes to the mitigation of grief? Creativity not the remedy but the symptom of a structural malaise called inequality? Read suggests performance is no longer a political panacea for the precarious subject but a loss adjustor measuring damages suffered, compensations due, wrongs that demand to be put right. These field notes from a fire sale are a call for angry arts of advocacy representing those abandoned as the detritus of cultural authority, second-order victims whose crime is to have appealed for help from those looking on, audiences of sorts.
"Brings together a diverse range of voices and perspectives, appropriately conveying the sense of scholars and artists engaged in ongoing debate about a developing form. ... It is a style of performance I ahve had little direct experience with but the book made me want to hear and see more."--Jackie Smart for Theatre Research International.
A scholarly look at 4,500 years of theater, beginning with its Greek origins and concluding with a study of theater since 1970.
"An Introduction to Technical Theatre draws on the author's experience in both the theatre and the classroom over the last 30 years. Intended as a resource for both secondary and post-secondary theatre courses, this text provides a comprehensive overview of technical theatre, including terminology and general practices. Introduction to Technical Theatre's accessible format is ideal for students at all levels, including those studying technical theatre as an elective part of their education. The text's modular format is also intended to assist teachers approach the subject at their own pace and structure, a necessity for those who may regularly rearrange their syllabi around productions and space scheduling" -- From publisher website.
How dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it. Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendencethat kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between? A lot of plays are dull. And one dull play, it seems, can turn us off theatre for good. Playwright and theatre director Jordan Tannahill takes in the spectrum of English-language drama – from the flashiest of Broadway spectacles to productions mounted in scrappy storefront theatres – to consider where lifeless plays come from and why they persist. Having travelled the globe talking to theatre artists, critics, passionate patrons and the theatrically disillusioned, Tannahill addresses what he considers the culture of ‘risk aversion’ paralyzing the form. Theatre of the Unimpressed is Tannahill’s wry and revelatory personal reckoning with the discipline he’s dedicated his life to, and a roadmap for a vital twenty-first-century theatre – one that apprehends the value of ‘liveness’ in our mediated age and the necessity for artistic risk and its attendant failures. In considering dramaturgy, programming and alternative models for producing, Tannahill aims to turn theatre from an obligation to a destination. ‘[Tannahill is] the poster child of a new generation of (theatre? film? dance?) artists for whom "interdisciplinary" is not a buzzword, but a way of life.’ —J. Kelly Nestruck, Globe and Mail ‘Jordan is one of the most talented and exciting playwrights in the country, and he will be a force to be reckoned with for years to come.’ —Nicolas Billon, Governor General's Award–winning playwright (Fault Lines)
The Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim traces the thread of jouissance (the simultaneous experience of radical pleasure and pain) through three major theatre figures of the twentieth century. Gina Masucci MacKenzie's work engages theatrical text and performance in dialogue with the Lacanian Real, so as to re-envision modern theatre as the cultural site where author, actor, and audience come into direct contact with personal and collective traumas. By showing how a transgressively free subject may be formed through theatrical experience, MacKenzie concludes that modern theatre can liberate the individual from the socially constructed self. The Theatre of the Real revises views of modern theatre by demonstrating how it can lead to a collaborative effort required for innovative theatrical work. By foregrounding Yeats's "dancer" plays, the author shows how these intimate pieces contribute to the historical development of musical as well as modern theatre. Beckett's universal dramas then pave the way for Sondheim's postmodern cacophonies of idea and spirit as they introduce comic abjection into modernism's tragic mode. This exciting work from a new author will leave readers with fresh insight to theatrical performance and its necessity in our lives.