Theatre and performance design : a reader in scenography
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Performing the Wound: Practicing a Feminist Theatre of Becoming
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This book offers a matrixial, feminist-centered analysis of trauma and performance, through examining the work of three artists: Ann Hamilton, Renée Green, and Cecilia Vicuña. Each artist engages in a multi-media, or "combination" performance practice; this includes the use of site, embodied performance, material elements, film, and writing. Each case study involves traumatic content, including the legacy of slavery, child sexual abuse and environmental degradation; each artist constructs an aesthetic milieu that invites rather than immerses--this allows an audience to have agency, as well as multiple pathways into their engagement with the art. The author Niki Tulk suggests that these works facilitate an audience-performance relationship based on the concept of ethical witnessing/wit(h)nessing, in which viewers are not positioned as voyeurs, nor made to risk re-traumatization by being forced to view traumatic events re-played on stage. This approach also allows agency to the art itself, in that an ethical space is created where the art is not objectified or looked at--but joined with. Foundational to this investigation are the writings of Bracha L. Ettinger, Jill Bennett and Diana Taylor--particularly Ettinger's concepts of the matrixial, carriance and border-linking. These artists and scholars present a capacity to expand and articulate answers to questions regarding how to make performance that remains compelling and truthful to the trauma experience, but not re-traumatizing. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, art history, visual arts, feminist studies, theatre, film, performance art, postcolonialism, rhetoric and writing.
Sound and music for the theatre : the art and technique of design
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The transformative power of performance : a new aesthetics
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Performance affects : applied theatre and the end of effect
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Black British Theatre Pioneers
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A Jamaican-born stage director, teacher and writer Yvonne Brewster stands among the most prominent British artists of Afro-Caribbean cultural heritage. A member of the Order of the British Empire, she co-founded Talawa, Britain's foremost black-led theatre company, as well as The Barn, Jamaica's first professional theatre company. This volume explores the many ways in which Brewster has used black experience and culture to enrich British theatre. After an overview of Brewster's career and a survey of black theatre in Britain, the work focuses on Brewster's productions of Shakespeare, including Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear and Othello. Also included is Brewster's nomination of 15 innovative Afro-Caribbean theatre practitioners in Britain between 1950 and 2000, a select group that represents black British theatre's pioneering first generation.
Inside the Rehearsal Room
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With an exclusive focus on text-based theatre-making, Inside the Rehearsal Room is both an instructional and conceptual examination of the rehearsal process. Drawing on professional practice and underpinned by theory, this book moves through each stage of rehearsals, considering the inter-connectivity between the actor, director, designers and the backstage team, and how the cumulative effect of the weeks in rehearsal influences the final production. The text also includes: - Auto-ethnographic and fully ethno-graphic case study approaches to different rehearsal rooms - Interviews with directors, actors, designers and actor trainers - A consideration of the ethics of the rehearsal room and material selected for production - Practical exercises on how to creatively read a text from an acting and directing perspective Informed by over 20 years of directing experience in the UK and Europe, Robert Marsden's book offers a practical guide that ultimately demystifies the rehearsal process and challenges how the rehearsal room should be run in the twenty-first century.
Reverberations across small scale British Theatre
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Scenes from the Revolution
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Political theatre thrives on turbulence. By turning the political issues of the day into a potent, dramatic art form, its practitioners hold up a mirror to our society - with the power to shock, discomfit and entertain.Scenes from the Revolution is a celebration of fifty years of political theatre in Britain. Including 'lost' scripts from companies including Broadside Mobile Workers Theatre, The Women's Theatre Group and The General Will, with incisive commentary from contemporary political theatre makers, the book asks the essential questions: What can be learnt from our rich history of political theatre? And how might contemporary practitioners apply these approaches to our current politically troubled world?Beginning with a short history of pre-1968 political theatre - covering Brecht, Joan Littlewood and Ewan McColl - the editors move on to explore agit-prop, working-class theatre, theatre in education, theatre and race, women's theatre and LGBTQ theatre. Featuring many of the leading voices in the field, then and now, Scenes from the Revolution is a must-read for anyone interested in politics in the arts.
Staging Trauma
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This book investigates contemporary British and Irish performances that stage traumatic narratives, histories, acts and encounters. It includes a range of case studies that consider the performative, cultural and political contexts for the staging and reception of sexual violence, terminal illness, environmental damage, institutionalisation and asylum. In particular, it focuses on 'bodies in shadow' in twenty-first century performance: those who are largely written out of or marginalised in dominant twentieth-century patriarchal canons of theatre and history. This volume speaks to students, scholars and artists working within contemporary theatre and performance, Irish and British studies, memory and trauma studies, feminisms, performance studies, affect and reception studies, as well as the medical humanities.
Trauma-Tragedy
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Trauma-tragedy investigates the extent to which performance can represent the 'unrepresentable' of trauma. Throughout, there is a focus on how such representations might be achieved and if they could help us to understand trauma on personal and social levels. In a world increasingly preoccupied with and exposed to traumas, this volume considers what performance offers as a means of commentary that other cultural products do not.The book's clear and coherent navigation of complex relations between performance and trauma and its analysis of key practitioners and performances (from Sarah Kane to Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Harold Pinter to Forced Entertainment, and Phillip Pullman to Franco B) make it accessible and useful to students of performance and trauma studies, yet rigorous and incisive for scholars and specialists. Duggan explores ideas around the phenomenological and socio-political efficacy and impact of performance in relation to trauma. Ultimately, the book advances a new performance theory or mode, 'trauma-tragedy', that suggests much contemporary performance can generate the sensation of being present in trauma through its structural embodiment in performance, or 'presence-in-trauma effects'.
