Theatre of Crisis


Book Description

Taylor (Spanish and comparative literature, Dartmouth College) draws on five Latin American plays written 1965-70 to illustrate how theatre both reflects and shapes political and economic events and movements. Of interest to students of either theatre or Latin America. All nations are translated. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Theatre in Crisis?


Book Description

Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century is a wide-ranging look at the state of contemporary theater practice, economics, and issues related to identity, politics, and technology. The volume offers a snapshot dissection of where theater is, where it has been and where it might be going through the voices of established and emerging theater artists and scholars from the UK, US, and elsewhere. Contributors: Maria M. Delgado & Caridad Svich • Oliver Mayer, Jorge Cortiñas, Neena Beber, & Craig Lucas • Jim Carmody • Roberta Levitow • Peter Lichtenfels & Lynette Hunter • Michael Billington • Claire H. Macdonald • Anna Furse • Phyllis Nagy • Max Stafford-Clark • Len Berkman • DD Kugler • Tori Haring-Smith • John London • Kia Corthron • Alice Tuan • Ricardo Szwarcer • Peter Sellars • Dragan Klaic • Lisa D’Amour • Paul Heritage • Matthew Causey • Andy Lavender • Jon Fosse • Erik Ehn • Matthew Maguire • Shelley Berc • Ruth Margraff • Martin Epstein • Mac Wellman • Goat Island




Theatre Institutions in Crisis


Book Description

Theatre Institutions in Crisis examines how theatre in Europe is beset by a crisis on an institutional level and the pressing need for robust research into the complex configuration of factors at work that are leading to significant shifts in the way theatre is understood, organised, delivered, and received. Balme and Fisher bring together scholars from different disciplines and countries across Europe to examine what factors can be said to be most common to the institutional crisis of European theatre today. The methods employed are drawn from systems theory, social-scientific approaches, economics and statistics, theatre and performance, and other interpretative approaches (hermeneutics), and labour studies. This book will be of great interest to researchers, students, and practitioners working in the fields of performance and theatre studies. It will be particularly relevant to researchers with a particular interest in European theatre and its networks. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.




Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration


Book Description

Obscured behind concrete and razor wire, the lives of the incarcerated remain hidden from public view. Inside the walls, imprisoned people all over the world stage theatrical productions that enable them to assert their humanity and capabilities. Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration offers a uniquely international account and exploration of prison theatre. By discussing a range of performance practices tied to incarceration, this book examines the ways in which arts practitioners and imprisoned people use theatre as a means to build communities, attain professional skills, create social change, and maintain hope. Ashley Lucas's writing offers a distinctive blend of storytelling, performance analysis, travelogue, and personal experience as the child of an incarcerated father. Distinct examples of theatre performed in prisons are explored throughout the main text and also in a section of Critical Perspectives by international scholars and practitioners.




Drop Dead


Book Description

Winner, 2017 American Theater and Drama Society John W. Frick Book Award Winner, 2017 ASTR Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theater History Hillary Miller’s Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York offers a fascinating and comprehensive exploration of how the city’s financial crisis shaped theater and performance practices in this turbulent decade and beyond. New York City’s performing arts community suffered greatly from a severe reduction in grants in the mid-1970s. A scholar and playwright, Miller skillfully synthesizes economics, urban planning, tourism, and immigration to create a map of the interconnected urban landscape and to contextualize the struggle for resources. She reviews how numerous theater professionals, including Ellen Stewart of La MaMa E.T.C. and Julie Bovasso, Vinnette Carroll, and Joseph Papp of The Public Theater, developed innovative responses to survive the crisis. Combining theater history and close readings of productions, each of Miller’s chapters is a case study focusing on a company, a production, or an element of New York’s theater infrastructure. Her expansive survey visits Broadway, Off-, Off-Off-, Coney Island, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, community theater, and other locations to bring into focus the large-scale changes wrought by the financial realignments of the day. Nuanced, multifaceted, and engaging, Miller’s lively account of the financial crisis and resulting transformation of the performing arts community offers an essential chronicle of the decade and demonstrates its importance in understanding our present moment.




Politics and Theater


Book Description

Moliére's anticlerical comedy Tartuffe is the unique prism through which Sheryl Kroen views postrevolutionary France in the years of the Restoration. Following the lead of the French men and women who turned to this play in the 1820s to make sense of their world, Kroen exposes the crisis of legitimacy defining the regime in these years and demonstrates how the people of the time made steps toward a democratic resolution to this crisis. Moving from the town squares, where state and ecclesiastical officials orchestrated their public spectacles in favor of the monarchy, to the theaters, where the French used Tartuffe to mock the restored monarch and the church, this cultural history of the Restoration offers a rich and colorful portrait of a period in which critical legacies of the revolutionary period were played out and cemented. While most historians have characterized the Restoration as a period of reaction and reversal, Kroen offers convincing evidence that the Restoration was a critical bridge between the emerging practices of the Old Regime, the Revolution, and the post-1830 politics of protest. She re-creates the atmosphere of Restoration France and at the same time brings major nineteenth-century themes into focus: memory and commemoration, public and private spheres, politics and religion, anticlericalism, and the formation of democratic ideologies and practices.




Theatre Pedagogy in the Era of Climate Crisis


Book Description

This volume explores whether theatre pedagogy can and should be transformed in response to the global climate crisis. Conrad Alexandrowicz and David Fancy present an innovative re-imagining of the ways in which the art of theatre, and the pedagogical apparatus that feeds and supports it, might contribute to global efforts in climate protest and action. Comprised of contributions from a broad range of scholars and practitioners, the volume explores whether an adherence to aesthetic values can be preserved when art is instrumentalized as protest and considers theatre as a tool to be employed by the School Strike for Climate movement. Considering perspectives from areas including performance, directing, production, design, theory and history, this book will prompt vital discussions which could transform curricular design and implementation in the light of the climate crisis. Theatre Pedagogy in the Era of Climate Crisis will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners of climate change and theatre and performance studies.




Staging 21st Century Tragedies


Book Description

Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis is an international collection of essays by leading academics, artists, writers, and curators examining ways in which the global tragedies of our century are being negotiated in current theatre practice. In exploring the tragic in the fields of history and theory of theatre, the book approaches crisis through an understanding of the existential and political aspect of the tragic condition. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, it showcases theatre texts and productions that enter the public sphere, manifesting notably participatory, immersive, and documentary modes of expression to form a theatre of modern tragedy. The coexistence of scholarly essays with manifesto-like provocations, interviews, original plays, and diaries by theatre artists provides a rich and multifocal lens that allows readers to approach 21st century theatre through historical and critical study, text and performance analysis, and creative processes. Of special value is the global scope of the collection, embracing forms of crisis theatre in many geographically diverse regions of both the East and the West. Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis will be of use and interest to academics and students of political theatre, applied theatre, theatre history, and theatre theory.







The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy


Book Description

WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT IT, BIRNAM WOOD COMES TO DUNSINANE HILL The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy presents a profoundly original theory of drama that speaks to modern audiences living in an increasingly volatile world driven by artificial intelligence, gene editing, globalization, and mutual assured destruction ideologies. Tragedy, according to risk theatre, puts us face to face with the unexpected implications of our actions by simulating the profound impact of highly improbable events. In this book, classicist Edwin Wong shows how tragedy imitates reality: heroes, by taking inordinate risks, trigger devastating low-probability, high-consequence outcomes. Such a theatre forces audiences to ask themselves a most timely question---what happens when the perfect bet goes wrong? Not only does Wong reinterpret classic tragedies from Aeschylus to O’Neill through the risk theatre lens, he also invites dramatists to create tomorrow’s theatre. As the world becomes increasingly unpredictable, the most compelling dramas will be high-stakes tragedies that dramatize the unintended consequences of today's risk takers who are taking us past the point of no return.