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The ArtsSeptember 2020Science in performance
Theatre and the politics of engagement
by Simon Parry
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book is about science in theatre and performance. It explores how theatre and performance engage with emerging scientific themes from artificial intelligence to genetics and climate change. The book covers a wide range of performance forms from Broadway musicals to educational theatre, from Somali drama to grime videos. It features work by pioneering companies including Gob Squad, Headlong Theatre and Theatre of Debate as well as offering fresh analysis of global blockbusters such as Wicked and Urinetown. The book offers detailed description and analysis of theatre and performance practices as well as broader commentary on the politics of theatre as public engagement with science. Science in performance is essential reading for researchers, students and practitioners working between science and the arts within fields such as theatre and performance studies, science communication, interdisciplinary arts and health humanities.
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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2023Politics, performance and popular culture
Theatre and society in nineteenth-century Britain
by Peter Yeandle, Katherine Newey, Jeffrey Richards
This collection brings together studies of popular performance and politics across the nineteenth century, offering a fresh perspective from an archivally grounded research base. It works with the concept that politics is performative and performance is political. The book is organised into three parts in dialogue regarding specific approaches to popular performance and politics. Part I offers a series of conceptual studies using popular culture as an analytical category for social and political history. Part II explores the ways that performance represents and constructs contemporary ideologies of race, nation and empire. Part III investigates the performance techniques of specific politicians - including Robert Peel, Keir Hardie and Henry Hyndman - and analyses the performative elements of collective movements.
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The ArtsJune 2021Genre and performance: film and television
by Christine Cornea
Looking at contemporary film and television, this book explores how popular genres frame our understanding of on-screen performance. Previous studies of screen performance have tended to fix upon star actors, directors, or programme makers, or they have concentrated upon particular training and acting styles. Moving outside of these confines, this book provides a truly interdisciplinary account of performance in film and television and examines a much neglected area in our understanding of how popular genres and performance intersect on screen. Each chapter concentrates upon a particular genre or draws upon generic case studies in examining the significance of screen performance. Individual chapters examine contemporary film noir, horror, the biopic, drama-documentary, the western, science fiction, comedy performance in 'spoof news' programmes and the television 'sit com' and popular Bollywood films.
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The ArtsSeptember 2020Science in performance
by Maggie B. Gale, Maria M. Delgado, Peter Lichtenfels, Simon Parry
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Literature & Literary StudiesJuly 2024Thomas Nashe and literary performance
by Chloe Kathleen Preedy, Rachel Willie
As an instigator of debate and a defender of tradition, a man of letters and a popular hack, a writer of erotica and a spokesman for bishops, an urbane metropolitan and a celebrant of local custom, the various textual performances of Thomas Nashe have elicited, and continue to provoke, a range of contradictory reactions. Nashe's often incongruous authorial characteristics suggest that, as a 'King of Pages', he not only courted controversy but also deliberately cultivated a variety of public personae, acquiring a reputation more slippery than the herrings he celebrated in print. Collectively, the essays in this book illustrate how Nashe excelled at textual performance but his personae became a contested site as readers actively participated and engaged in the reception of Nashe's public image and his works.
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Literature & Literary StudiesApril 2001Women, theatre and performance
New histories, new historiographies
by Kate Dorney, Maggie B. Gale, Susan Williams
The first in a new annual series, Women, Theatre and Performance that will consist of themed volumes on diverse aspects of women's engagement with theatre and performance. Ranging across three hundred years the essays in this volume address key questions in women's theatre history and retrieve a number of hitherto 'hidden' histories of women performers. Resituates women's, largely neglected, creative contribution within theatre and cultural history and seeks to challenge orthodox readings of both history and text. Topics include: Susanna Centlivre and the notion of intertheatricality; gender and theatrical space; the repositioning of women performers such as Wagner's Muse, Willhelmina Schröder-Devrient, the Comédie Français' 'Mademoiselle Mars', Mme Arnould-Plessey, and the actresses of the Russian serf theatre. ;
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The ArtsFebruary 1996Analysing performance
A critical reader
by Patrick Campbell
Each chapter in this important critical reader tackles the theory and practice of modern performance work, and enables students and teachers to see what is at stake in analysing dance, drama, music and videos using contemporary critical theories. Including Elizabeth Wright on psychoanalysis, Baz Kershaw on the politics of performance, Jatinder Verma on multiculturalism, E. Ann Kaplan on MTV and video, Lizabeth Goodman on feminism and AIDS, Stephen Connor on postmodernism and many others. ;
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The ArtsApril 2025The theatrical orchestra
British music ensembles experiment with performance
by Adrian Curtin
The Theatrical Orchestra analyses experimental performances by British music ensembles in the twenty-first century. Orchestras are reconceiving how concerts are programmed and presented, how musicians perform, where performance can occur, and the role of the audience in the co-creation of the live event. They are embracing theatricality, thereby realising music more fully as a multi-sensory performance art. This book explains how and why orchestras are thinking theatrically about performance, and uses the work of British music ensembles as exemplars. It analyses performances by Aurora Orchestra, London Contemporary Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Manchester Collective, Multi-Story Orchestra, Paraorchestra, Scottish Ensemble, and Southbank Sinfonia. The book bridges musicology and theatre studies to analyse the theatrical orchestra on the concert stage and beyond, addressing such topics as visuality, storytelling, physical performance, site-engaged performance, and immersive performance.
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The ArtsJuly 2024Theatre, activism, subjectivity
Searching for the Left in a fragmented world
by Bishnupriya Dutt, Silvija Jestrovic
Through the lens of performance and politics, this collection zooms in on the context-specific dimensions, analogies, and micro-histories of the Left to better understand the larger picture. It proposes a search for the Left not from totalising Leftist ideological positions and partisan politics but from ethical dimensions through smaller-scale Left-leaning struggles; not from the political to the aesthetic, but from the potentiality of art to offer new political imagination and critique; not from the individual subordinated to the collective, but from the dialectics of subjectivity and collectivity. This is not an attempt at a sweeping global overview of Leftist cultures either, but a collection that brings together culture-specific and comparative perspectives. This book searches for fragments of and on the Left, past and present, through which to rethink and patch a fragmented world.
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The ArtsApril 2024Hyde Park
by James Shirley
by Eugene Giddens
Hyde Park (1632) is one of the best-loved comedies of James Shirley, considered to be one of the most important Caroline dramatists. The play showcases strong female characters who excel at rebuking the outlandish courtship of various suitors. Shirley's comic setting, London's Hyde Park, offers ample opportunity for witty dialogue. This is the first critical edition of the play, including a wide-ranging introduction and extensive commentary and textual notes. Paying special attention to the culture of Caroline London and its stage, the volume unpicks Shirley's politics of courtship and consent while also underlining the play's dynamics of class and power. A detailed performance history traces productions from 1632, across the Restoration to the present day, including that of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987. A textual history of the play's first quarto determines how it was printed and what relationship Hyde Park has to other texts by Shirley.
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The ArtsMay 2022Hyde Park
by James Shirley
by Helen Ostovich, Eugene Giddens
Hyde Park (1632) is one of the best-loved comedies of James Shirley, considered to be one of the most important Caroline dramatists. The play showcases strong female characters who excel at rebuking the outlandish courtship of various suitors. Shirley's comic setting, London's Hyde Park, offers ample opportunity for witty dialogue and sport - including foot and horse races - across three love plots. This is the first critical edition of the play, including a wide-ranging introduction and extensive commentary and textual notes. Paying special attention to the culture of Caroline London and its stage, the Revels Plays edition unpicks Shirley's politics of courtship and consent while also underlining the play's dynamics of class and power. A detailed performance history traces productions from 1632, across the Restoration to the present day, including that of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987. A textual history of the play's first quarto determines how it was printed and what relationship Hyde Park has to other texts by Shirley from the same publishers.
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The ArtsFebruary 2022"I am Jugoslovenka!"
Feminist performance politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism
by Jasmina Tumbas, Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon
"I am Jugoslovenka" argues that queer-feminist artistic and political resistance were paradoxically enabled by socialist Yugoslavia's unique history of patriarchy and women's emancipation. Spanning performance and conceptual art, video works, film and pop music, lesbian activism and press photos of female snipers in the Yugoslav wars, the book analyses feminist resistance in a range of performative actions that manifest the radical embodiment of Yugoslavia's anti-fascist, transnational and feminist legacies. It covers celebrated and lesser-known artists from the 1970s to today, including Marina Abramovic, Sanja Ivekovic, Vlasta Delimar, Tanja Ostojic, Selma Selman and Helena Janecic, along with music legends Lepa Brena and Esma Redzepova. "I am Jugoslovenka" tells a unique story of women's resistance through the intersection of feminism, socialism and nationalism in East European visual culture.
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The ArtsMay 2024Adaptation and resilience in the performing arts
The pandemic and beyond
by Pascale Aebischer, Rachael Nicholas
This book offers insights into some of the digital innovations, structural adaptations and analogue solutions that enabled live performance in the UK to survive through the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides evidence of values-led policies and practices that have improved the wellbeing of the creative workforce and have increased access to live performance. Through sections that address digital innovations, workforce resilience and programming live performances outdoors and in community settings, this book provides practical insights into the challenges live performance faced during the pandemic. It shows how, in order to survive, individuals and companies within the sector drew on the creativity and resourcefulness of its workforce, and on new and existing networks. In these accounts, the pandemic functioned as catalyst for technological innovations, stock-taking regarding exploitative industry structures, and a re-valuing of the role of live performance for community-building.
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Literature & Literary StudiesNovember 2021Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe
by Laura Kalas, Laura Varnam, David Matthews, Anke Bernau, James Paz
This innovative critical volume brings the study of Margery Kempe into the twenty-first century. Structured around four categories of 'encounter' - textual, internal, external and performative - the volume offers a capacious exploration of The Book of Margery Kempe, characterised by multiple complementary and dissonant approaches. It employs a multiplicity of scholarly and critical lenses, including the intertextual history of medieval women's literary culture, medical humanities, history of science, digital humanities, literary criticism, oral history, the global Middle Ages, archival research and creative re-imagining. Revealing several new discoveries about Margery Kempe and her Book in its global contexts, and offering multiple ways of reading the Book in the modern world, it will be an essential companion for years to come.
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Literature & Literary StudiesApril 2023
Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe
by Laura Kalas, Laura Varnam
This innovative critical volume brings the study of Margery Kempe into the twenty-first century. Structured around four categories of 'encounter' - textual, internal, external and performative - the volume offers a capacious exploration of The Book of Margery Kempe, characterised by multiple complementary and dissonant approaches. It employs a multiplicity of scholarly and critical lenses, including the intertextual history of medieval women's literary culture, medical humanities, history of science, digital humanities, literary criticism, oral history, the global Middle Ages, archival research and creative re-imagining. Revealing several new discoveries about Margery Kempe and her Book in its global contexts, and offering multiple ways of reading the Book in the modern world, it will be an essential companion for years to come.
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Humanities & Social SciencesDecember 2023Transitional justice in process
Plans and politics in Tunisia
by Mariam Salehi
After the fall of the Ben Ali regime in 2011, Tunisia swiftly began dealing with its authoritarian past and initiated a comprehensive transitional justice process, with the Truth and Dignity Commission as its central institution. However, instead of bringing about peace and justice, transitional justice soon became an arena of contention. Through a process lens, the book explores why and how the process evolved, and explains how it relates to the country's political transition. Based on extensive field research in Tunisia and the US, and interviews with a broad range of international stakeholders and decision-makers, this is the first book to comprehensively study the Tunisian transitional justice process. It provides an in-depth analysis of a crucial period, examining the role of justice professionals in different stages, as well as the alliances and frictions between different actor groups that cut across the often-assumed local-international divide.
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The ArtsNovember 2011The limits of performance in the French Romantic theatre
by Susan McCready, Mike Thompson
This volume analyses major French plays of the 1830s, focusing on their theatricality, and on the ways in which they expose the workings of the theatre rather than conceal them. Through an examination of performance within these plays, the study posits that the stage is a privileged site of demonstration, a literal 'proving ground' that lends a physical reality to abstract values announced in the text and shared or questioned by the audience. Negotiating between the literary study of drama and performance theory, this work breaks new ground in nineteenth-century theatre scholarship while proposing a fresh direction in the study of text and performance. The limits of performance 'challenges conventional wisdom', offering 'a novel take on the mal du siècle, that thematic hardy perennial of French Romanticism and the nineteenth century in general', combined with 'eminently readable and, therefore, compelling' analysis of plays - 'a thought-provoking addition to work in the field' (Glyn Hambrook, Modern and Contemporary France, November 2008). ;
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Literature & Literary StudiesNovember 2011Three seventeenth-century plays on women and performance
by Paul Edmondson, Hero Chalmers, Julie Sanders, Sophie Tomlinson, Martin White
This is a ground-breaking edition of three seventeenth-century plays that all engage in diverse and exciting ways with questions of gender and performance. The collection, edited by three pioneering scholars of elite female culture and early modern drama, makes the texts of three much-discussed plays - John Fletcher's The Wild-Goose Chase, James Shirley's The Bird in a Cage and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure - available together in a full scholarly edition for the first time. The Wild Goose Chase (1621) and The Bird in a Cage (1633) were both performed in the commercial London theatres in the Jacobean and Caroline periods respectively. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) is a so-called 'closet' drama, designed primarily for reading but drawing on a tradition of aristocratic theatricals. In a wide-ranging co-authored introduction to the volume, the editors explore the concerns of these playtexts in relation to contemporary debates surrounding popular festivity and anti-theatricalism, as well as the agency of elite female culture in the Stuart period and the emergence of the professional female actor in the Restoration. The volume will be an invaluable teaching and research tool for students and scholars of early modern drama, women's writing and performance studies more generally, as well as providing a rich sourcebook for the reader interested in seventeenth-century theatrical culture. ;
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Literature & Literary StudiesMay 2024Medieval afterlives
Transforming traditions in Shakespeare and early English drama
by Daisy Black, Katharine Goodland
A collection of essays which show how early drama traditions were transformed, recycled, re-used and reformed across time to form new relationships with their audiences. Medieval afterlives brings new insight to the ways in which peoples in the sixteenth century understood, manipulated and responded to the history of their performance spaces, stage technologies, characterisation and popular dramatic tropes. In doing so, this volume advocates for a new understanding of sixteenth-seventeenth century theatre makers as highly aware of the medieval traditions that formed their performance practices, and audiences who recognised and appreciated the recycling of these practices between plays.
