Cross-disciplinary analysis of contemporary images and representations of hysteria We seem to be living in hysterical times. A simple Google search reveals the sheer bottomless well of “hysterical” discussions on diverse topics such as the #metoo movement, Trumpianism, border wars, Brexit, transgender liberation, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, and climate change, to name only a few. Against…
"In the two centuries since Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito was first performed, and the almost three centuries since Metastasio created the libretto, many rumours, myths and prejudiced opinions have gathered around the work, creating a narrative that Mozart, Mazzolà and their contemporaries would scarcely recognise. The essays in this book contribute ideas, facts and images that will draw the …
This collection of essays investigates elements of the human voice and performance, and their implications for gender and sexuality. The chapters address affect, pleasure, and memory in the enjoyment of musical and theatrical performance. Rosenberg also examines contemporary feminist performance, anti-racist interventions, activist aesthetics, and political agency especially with regard to femi…
This new edition of Núñez’s Anthropocosmic Theatre contains the text of the original English translation plus additional contributions from Núñez and others. In part one, Núñez traces his researches in Nahuatlan, Tibetan and western theatre, to arrive at his design for a theatre of the human in the cosmos. Part Two explores how this work has developed, during the last three decades, int…
Over the past 20 years European theatre underwent fundamental changes in terms of aesthetic focus, institutional structure and in its position in society. The impetus for these changes was provided by a new generation in the independent theatre scene. This book brings together studies on the state of independent theatre in different European countries, focusing on the fields of dance and perfor…
How do we recapture, or hold on to, the live performances we most love, and the talented artists and performers we most revere? Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss tells the story of how 18th-century actors, novelists, and artists, key among them David Garrick, struggled with these questions through their reenactments of Shakespearean plays. For these artists, the resurgence of Shakespeare, a pl…
This volume proposes the viral as a means of understanding socially engaged and transmedial performance practices since the mid-20th century. It rethinks the Living Theatre’s Artaudian revolution via the lens of affect theory, brings attention to General Idea’s media-savvy performances of the 70s, explores Franco and Eva Mattes and Critical Art Ensemble, and surveys the dramaturgies and pol…
The avant-garde posits the possibility of total rupture with the past. This book pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the edge of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this “unfinished art”—because of its weakness as a representative institution in Mexico and Brazil, where th…
Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage demonstrates the links made between excess of emotion and madness in the early modern period. It argues that the ways in which today's popular and theatrical cultures judge how much is too much can distort our understanding of early modern drama and theatre. It argues that permitting the excesses of the early modern drama onto the contemporary stage m…
Theaters of Citizenship investigates the Egyptian movement for free theater, arguing that it evolved from an avant-gardist movement to an undercommons of revolutionary cultural practice. Using historiography, ethnography, and performance analysis, the book tells a story of this avant-garde from 2004-2014, analyzing its staging of rights claims, generational identity politics, and post-revolutio…