Actors and actresses play characters such as the embittered Medea, or the lovelorn Romeo, or the grieving and tearful Hecabe. The theatre audience holds its breath, and then sparks begin to fly. But what about the actor? Has he been affected by the emotions of the character he is playing? What's going on inside his mind? The styling of emotions in the theatre has been the subject of heated deba…
This book compiles lectures by the world's leading practitioners of postdramatic theatre from East Asia and the German-speaking world, which were given at Asia's only dramaturgy degree program at The Central Academy of Drama in Beijing 2018/19. It includes first-time English-language scripts of the discussed plays. The material is complemented by contextualizing essays by the program founder Li…
In How and Why We Teach Shakespeare, 19 distinguished college teachers and directors draw from their personal experiences and share their methods and the reasons why they teach Shakespeare. The collection is divided into four sections: studying the text as a script for performance; exploring Shakespeare by performing; implementing specific techniques for getting into the plays; and working in d…
Casting a Movement brings together US-based actors, directors, educators, playwrights, and scholars to explore the cultural politics of casting.Drawing on the notion of a "welcome table"—a space where artists of all backgrounds can come together as equals to create theatre—the book’s contributors discuss casting practices as they relate to varying communities and contexts, including Middl…
Black and Asian Theatre in Britain is an unprecedented study tracing the history of ‘the Other’ through the ages in British theatre. The diverse and often contradictory aspects of this history are expertly drawn together to provide a detailed background to the work of African, Asian, and Caribbean diasporic companies and practitioners.Colin Chambers examines early forms of blackface and oth…
Generally considered one of milestones in the development of modern drama, August Strindberg's chamber play The Ghost Sonata (1907) has variously been hailed as the first expressionist, surrealist and absurdist drama. rIn this monograph of the play as text and as performance - the first of its kind - Egil Törnqvist examines, in four chapters, the source text, various translations of it into En…
In this volume Strindbergs accomplishments as a dramatist are set against his achievements in other fields, as an autobiographer, painter, letter writer and theatre director.There are studies of individual plays, in which Strindbergs theatre is related both to naturalism and the theatre of the absurd, and of the role played by his life-long interest in historical drama. Other essays range from …
We all have an animal story—the pet we loved, the wild animal that captured our childhood imagination, the deer the neighbor hit while driving. While scientific breakthroughs in animal cognition, the effects of global climate change and dwindling animal habitats, and the exploding interdisciplinary field of animal studies have complicated things, such stories remain a part of how we tell the …
This volume examines afresh the impact upon acting and performance of digital technologies. It is concerned with how digital culture combines the traditional ‘liveness’ of theatre with media interfaces and internet protocols. The time and space of the ‘here and now’ are both challenged and adapted, just as barriers between theatre-makers and the ‘experiencers’ of events are broken d…
Artistic media seem to be in a permanent condition of mutation and transformation. Contemporary artists often investigate the limits and possibilities of the media they use and experiment with their crossing, upgrading and mutilation. Others explicitly explore the unknown space between existing media, searching for the hybrid beings that occupy these in-betweens. This fascinating volume explore…