Bøger i Theatre and Performance Theory serien

Reading the Material Theatre, first published in 2004, demonstrates a method of theatrical performance analysis taking into account the entire theatre experience, from production to reception. It includes five case studies of the cultural work performed by repertory and touring theatre companies and by international festivals.

This collection of specially-commissioned, accessible, essays explores that element of performance theory known as theatricality. Six case studies use historically specific circumstances to illustrate how and why the concept of theatricality is used. Provides a first-step guide for those discovering the complex yet rewarding world of performance theory.

Theatre history has been interpreted in ways which highlight and often omit key elements. Using case studies from nineteenth-century British theatre, Bratton examines the difference between the existence of 'the drama' and 'the stage' and offers a new perspective on theatre history and the discipline.

Professing Performance, first published in 2004, explores the institutional history of performance in the US academy in order to revise current debates around the role of the arts and humanities in higher education. Shannon Jackson analyses long-standing debates between the world of the scholar and the world of the artist.

This collection of specially-commissioned, accessible, essays explores that element of performance theory known as theatricality. Six case studies use historically specific circumstances to illustrate how and why the concept of theatricality is used. Provides a first-step guide for those discovering the complex yet rewarding world of performance theory.

Things nearly always go wrong in the theatre. This study looks at the things that shouldn't happen: stage fright, embarrassment, animals on stage, getting the giggles and bumping into the furniture. All these turn out to be neither anomalies nor accidents, but are instead what makes theatre, theatre.

This 2010 book presents the neglected yet compelling and necessary story of local activists in South Saharan Africa who employ modes of performance as tactics of resistance and intervention in their day-to-day struggles for human rights. The dynamic relationship between performance and activism are illustrated in three case studies.

Copyright for performances of theater and music was invented in the nineteenth century. Courtroom battles over new laws helped define the value of dramatic and musical performances both economically and artistically. Scholars of theater and performance, music, and law will learn how copyright changes the artistic forms it seeks to control.

From forgetting lines to watching Phantom of the Opera, this book uses a range of musicals, plays and experimental performances to show what theatre is made of and how we experience it. Its broad scope will appeal to theatre-goers, while its performance analyses, informed by assemblage theory, will be invaluable for students and theatre scholars.

Theatre in Market Economies explores the complex relationship between theatre and the market economy since the 1990s. Bringing together research from the arts and social sciences, the book proposes that theatre has increasingly taken up the mission of the 'mixed economy' by seeking to combine economic efficiency with social security while promoting liberal democracy. McKinnie situates this analysis within a wider context, in which the welfare state's tools have been used to regulate, ever more closely, the lives of citizens rather than the operations of markets. In the process, the book invites us to think in new ways about longstanding economic and political problems in and through the theatre: the nature of industry, productivity, citizenship, security and economic confidence. Theatre in Market Economies depicts a theatre that is not only a familiar cultural institution but is, in unexpected and often ambiguous ways, an exemplary political-economic one as well.

Ric Knowles' study is a politically urgent, erudite intervention into the ecology of theatre and performance festivals in an international context. Since the 1990s there has been an exponential increase in the number and type of festivals taking place around the world. Events that used merely to be events are now 'festivalized': structured, marketed, and promoted in ways that stress urban centres as tourist destinations and "e;creative cities"e; as targets of corporate enterprise. Ric Knowles examines the structure, content, and impact of international festivals that draw upon and represent multiple cultures and the roles they play in one of the most urgent processes of our times: intercultural negotiation and exchange. Covering a vast geographical sweep and exploring festival models both new and ancient, the work sets compelling new standards of practice for post-pandemic festivals.

This global overview of how translation is understood as a performative practice across genres, media and disciplines illuminates the broad impact of the 'performance turn' in the arts and humanities. Combining key concepts in comparative literature, performance studies and translation theory, the volume provides readers with a dynamic account of the ways in which these fields fruitfully interact. The chapters display interdisciplinary thinking in action across a wide spectrum of performance practices and media from around the world, from poetry and manuscripts to theatre surtitles, audio description, archives, installations, dialects, movement and dance. Paying close attention to questions of race, gender, sexuality, embodiment and accessibility, the collection's rich array of methodological approaches and experiments with scholarly writing demonstrate how translation as a performative practice can enrich our understanding of language and politics.