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What is a dramaturg? What is dramaturgy? What are the political implications for the way that plays produce meaning in performance? Over the last decade, the role of the dramaturg has become more common in the theatrical process, but it is still a new term for many theatre-goers. Theatre & Dramaturgy offers a working definition of what dramaturgy means, and asks how understanding theatre from the perspective of dramaturgy can help us understand the world around us. This concise study examines how western histories and practices of theatre have functioned to achieve their effects, through understanding dramaturgy as the arrangement or structure of the work in time and space both at the fictional level and in relation to performance. Exploring the relationship between plays and their meaning in production, this guide focuses on how understanding dramaturgy is critical to understanding how plays achieve their effects.
Increasingly the world around us is becoming ‘smart.’ From smart meters to smart production, from smart surfaces to smart grids, from smart phones to smart citizens. ‘Smart’ has become the catch-all term to indicate the advent of a charged technological shift that has been propelled by the promise of safer, more convenient and more efficient forms of living. Most architects, designers, planners and politicians seem to agree that the smart transition of cities and buildings is in full swing and inevitable. However, beyond comfort, safety and efficiency, how can ‘smart design and technologies’ assist to address current and future challenges of architecture and urbanism? Architectur...
An examination of neoliberal ideology’s ascendance in 1990s and 2000s British politics and society through its effect on state-supported performance practices Post-Thatcher, British cultural politics were shaped by the government’s use of the arts in service of its own social and economic agenda. Restaging the Future: Neoliberalization, Theater, and Performance in Britain interrogates how arts practices and cultural institutions were enmeshed with the particular processes of neoliberalization mobilized at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Louise Owen traces the uneasy entanglement of performance with neoliberalism's marketization of social life. Focusing on this...
Performance as Research (PAR) is characterised by an extraordinary elasticity and interdisciplinary drive. Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact celebrates this energy, bringing together chapters from a wide range of disciplines and eight different countries. This volume focuses explicitly on three critical, often contentious themes that run through much discussion of PaR as a discipline: Knowledge - the areas and manners in which performance can generate knowledge Methods - methods and methodologies for approaching performance as research Impact - a broad understanding of the impact of this form of research These themes are framed by four essays from the book's editors, contextualising their interrelated conversations, teasing out common threads, and exploring the new questions that the contributions pose to the field of performance. As both an intervention into and extension of current debates, this is a vital collection for any reader concerned with the value and legitimacy of performance as research.
Examining how technological developments in performance practices affect spectator experience of Shakespeare and early modern drama.
How does the world of theatre and the performing arts intersect with the climate and environmental crisis? This timely book is the first comprehensive account of the sector's response to the defining issue of our time. The book documents a sector in transition and presents theatre professionals, practitioners and organizations with a synthesis of information, knowledge and expertise to guide them to their own endorsement of sustainable thinking and practice. It is illustrated with inspiring case studies and interviews, from London's National Theatre, to Sydney Theatre Company, to the Göteborg Opera and the American Repertory Theatre. These foreground the work of pioneering institutions and ...
What sort of thing is a theatre image? How is it produced and consumed? Who is responsible for the images? Why do the images stay with us when the performance is over? How do we learn to speak of what we see and imagine? And how do we relate what we experience in the theatre to what we share with each other of the world? The Illuminated Theatre is a book about theatricality and spectatorship in the early twenty-first century. In a wide-ranging analysis that draws upon theatrical, visual and philosophical approaches, it asks how spectators and audiences negotiate the complexities and challenges of contemporary experimental performance arts. It is also a book about how European practitioners w...
This collection brings together researchers and scholars from across the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences who are actively exploring the many different ways in which time might be understood, imagined and used in qualitative research. Taken together, the contributions begin to trace the contours of what it might mean to work reflexively with time as an epistemologically constitutive element of research design. The book explores how the choice to work with pasts or futures, with speed or delay, with clocks or the time of the body, with utopias or failed futures (among other things) reframe how social and cultural phenomena are perceived and brought into existence in qualitative research. ...
This book addresses theatre’s contribution to the way we think about ecology, our relationship to the environment, and what it means to be human in the context of climate change. It offers a detailed study of the ways in which contemporary performance has critiqued and re-imagined everyday ecological relationships, in more just and equitable ways. The broad spectrum of ecologically-oriented theatre and performance included here, largely from the UK, US, Canada, Europe, and Mexico, have problematised, reframed, and upended the pervasive and reductive images of climate change that tend to dominate the ecological imagination. Taking an inclusive approach this book foregrounds marginalised perspectives and the multiple social and political forces that shape climate change and related ecological crises, framing understandings of the earth as home. Recent works by Fevered Sleep, Rimini Protokoll, Violeta Luna, Deke Weaver, Metis Arts, Lucy + Jorge Orta, as well as Indigenous activist movements such as NoDAPL and Idle No More, are described in detail.
Of all our blood relations, an aunt offers the most potential for uncomplicated friendship. The Complete Book of Aunts is an entertaining and touching exploration of aunts in all their guises and varieties, culled from real-life, literary and historical sources. Bewitching illustrations and anecdotes illuminate various aunt types: Bargain Aunts, Mothering Aunts, Damned Bad Aunts, and X-Rated Aunts. With stories and poems about famous or historical aunts, Christiansen and Brophy attempt to uncover what "aunt-ness" is.