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Few individuals have positioned their work more controversially or consequently than Richard Schechner within the pivotal debates that define Performance Studies. The Rise of Performance Studies is the first collection of essays to critically examine the profound contributions that Schechner has made to Performance Studies as a discipline.
Claire Dobbin, Helen Garner, Evelyn Krape, Jude Kuring and Yvonne Marini mocked the ocker character beloved by Pram Factory playwrights, and performed monologues about men, sex, and how they felt "as a woman". Directed by Kerry Dwyer and produced by the Carlton Women's Liberation group, the play's frank revelations stunned audiences and shocked the Pram Factory world. Set against a backdrop of moratorium marches, inner-city cafes and share houses, and the rising tide of sexual liberation and countercultural movements, Kath Kenny uses interviews and archival material to tell the story of Betty Can Jump. On the 50th anniversary of this ground-breaking play, she considers its ongoing impact on Australian culture, and asks why the great cultural renaissance of women's liberation has been largely forgotten. She sets out her stake in this story, as a theatre reviewer today and as a child born into the revolutionary early 1970s. And she asks why feminism keeps getting stuck in mother-daughter battles, rethinking her own experience as a young feminist who clashed with Garner over the publication of The First Stone.
German-speaking playwrights have exercised a considerable if subtle influence on Australian theatre history. Presenting a range of paradigmatic case studies, this book offers a detailed account of Australian productions of German-language drama between 1945 and 1996. The reception of Bertolt Brecht is used as a touchstone for analysing stagings of plays by writers such as Max Frisch, Rolf Hochhuth, Peter Handke and Franz Xaver Kroetz. In addition, more recent developments in the reception of German drama on the Australian stage are discussed.
This is the first systematic study of networks of performance collaboration in the contemporary Chinese-speaking world and of their interactions with the artistic communities of the wider East Asian region. It investigates the aesthetics and politics of collaboration to propose a new transnational model for the analysis of Sinophone theatre cultures and to foreground the mobility and relationality of intercultural performance in East Asia. The research draws on extensive fieldwork, interviews with practitioners, and direct observation of performances, rehearsals, and festivals in Asia and Europe. It offers provocative close readings and discourse analysis of an extensive corpus of hitherto untapped sources, including unreleased video materials and unpublished scripts, production notes, and archival documentation.
The first book to focus specifically on the late German artist Christoph Schlingensief's theatre work, it subversively merges art, politics and everyday life to imbue his productions both inside and outside the theatre with a re-energized concept of the political in art. Scheer traces Schlingensief's artistic lineage as a filmmaker with no formal training in theatre, whose work does not correspond to theoretical frameworks such as postdramatic theatre, Regietheater, or established categories of political theatre such as Brechtian, community, and agit-prop theatre. She explores how his work instead draws upon the highly performative gestures of the historical and post-Cold War avant-gardes as...
Theatre and Internationalization examines how internationalization affects the processes and aesthetics of theatre, and how this art form responds dramatically and thematically to internationalization beyond the stage. With central examples drawn from Australia and Germany from the 1930s to the present day, the book considers theatre and internationalization through a range of theoretical lenses and methodological practices, including archival research, aviation history, theatre historiography, arts policy, organizational theory, language analysis, academic-practitioner insights, and literary-textual studies. While drawing attention to the ways in which theatre and internationalization might...
In Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre, Richard Murphet presents a close analysis of the theatre practice of two ground-breaking artists – Richard Foreman and Jenny Kemp – active over the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century. In addition, he tracks the development of a form of ‘epileptic’ writing over the course of his own career as writer/director. Murphet argues that these three auteurs have developed subversive alternatives to the previously dominant forms of dramatic realism in order to re-think the relationship between theatre and reality. They write and direct their own work, and their artistic experimentation is manifest in the tension created between their content and their form. Murphet investigates how the works are made, rather than focusing upon an interpretation of their meaning. Through an examination of these artists, we gain a deeper understanding of a late modernist paradigm shift in theatre practice.
This book examines sexuality, gender and race in Australia’s vibrant independent theatre and performance culture. It analyses selected feminist and queer performances that interrogate the cultural construction of sexuality and gender, challenge the normative trends of mainstream Australian society and culture and open up spaces for alternative representations of gender identity and sexual expression. Offering the first full-length study on sexuality and gender in Australian theatre since 2005, this book reveals a resurgence of feminist themes in independent performance and explores the intersection of feminist and queer politics. Ranging across drag, burlesque, cabaret, theatre and performance art, the book provides an accessible and engaging account of some of the most innovative, entertaining and politically subversive Australian theatrical works from the past decade.
In setting foot on stage, every performer risks the possiblity of failure. Indeed, the very performance of any human action is inextricable from its potential not to succeed. This inherent potential has become a key critical trope in contemporary theatre, performance studies, and scholarship around visual cultures. Beyond Failure explores what it means for our understanding not just of theatrical practice but of human social and cultural activity more broadly. The essays in this volume tackle contemporary debates around the theory and poetics of failure, suggesting that in the absence of success can be found a defiance and hopefulness that points to new ways of knowing and being in the world. Beyond Failure offers a unique and engaging approach for students and practitioners interested not only in the impact of failure on the stage, but what it means for wider social and cultural debates.
The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature explores the interplay between the domination of nature and the oppression of women, as well as liberatory alternatives, bringing together essays from leading academics in the field to facilitate cutting-edge critical readings of literature. Covering the main theoretical approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: Examination of ecofeminism through the literatures of a diverse sampling of languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish; native speakers of Tamil, Vietnamese, Turkish, Slovene, and Icelandic Analysis of core issues and topics, offering innovative approaches to interpreting literature, includ...