European Theatre Performance Practice, 1400-1580


Book Description

This volume brings together important records of medieval theatre practice between 1400 and 1580. The records are drawn from a wide range of spheres including civic, ecclesiastical, trade and guild records and consist of payments for materials, techniques and services; also included are some eye witness accounts. Alongside these records is a selection of the best contemporary research conducted into medieval performance practice, which features ground-breaking analysis and challenges current understanding, knowledge and authority in this field. These contributions of rigorous scholarship complement and support the work of the well-known Records of Early English Drama project and help to further illuminate contemporary fifteenth and early sixteenth-century theatre performance practice.




European Theatre Performance Practice, 1400-1580


Book Description

This volume brings together important records of medieval theatre practice between 1400 and 1580. The records are drawn from a wide range of spheres including civic, ecclesiastical, trade and guild records and consist of payments for materials, techniques and services; also included are some eye witness accounts. Alongside these records is a selection of the best contemporary research conducted into medieval performance practice, which features ground-breaking analysis and challenges current understanding, knowledge and authority in this field. These contributions of rigorous scholarship complement and support the work of the well-known Records of Early English Drama project and help to further illuminate contemporary fifteenth and early sixteenth-century theatre performance practice.




European Theatre Performance Practice, 1580-1750


Book Description

This volume presents foundational and representative essays of the last half century on theatre performance practice during the period 1580 to 1750. The particular focus is on the nature of playing spaces, staging, acting and audience response in professional theatre and the selection of previously published research articles and book chapters includes significant works on topics such as Shakespearean staging, French and Spanish theatre audiences, the challenging aspects of the evolution of Italian renaissance acting practice, and the ’hidden’ dimensions of performance. The essays provide coherent transnational coverage as well as detailed treatments of their individual topics. Considerations of theatre practice in Italy, Spain and France, as well as England, place Shakespeare’s theatre in its European context to reveal surprising commonalities and salient differences in the performance practice of early modern Europe’s major professional theatres. This volume is an indispensable reference work for university libraries, lecturers, researchers and practitioners and offers a coherent overview of early modern comparative performance practice, and a deeper understanding of the field’s major topics and developments.




European Theatre Performance Practice, 1750–1900


Book Description

This volume contains key articles and chapters which represent both seminal and innovative scholarship on European theatre performance practice from 1750 to 1900. The selected topics focus on acting and performance, staging (including set design and lighting), and audiences, and are approached with a broad perspective as well as with in-depth, focussed analysis. The volume captures the rich, dynamic and variegated nature of European theatre throughout the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and provides a carefully selected body of significant texts on this important period of theatre history.




European Theatre Performance Practice, 1900 to the Present


Book Description

This volume captures the rich diversity of European performance practice evident in the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first century. Written by leading directors, actors, dancers, scenographers and academics from across Europe, the collection spans a broad range of subject areas including dance, theatre, live art, multimedia performance and street protest. The essays are divided into three sections on: performers and performing; staging performance; representation and reception, and document innovations in acting, performance and stagecraft by key practitioners. Articles also explore the ways that performance has been used to stage debates around major preoccupations of the age such as war, the human condition, globalization, the impact of new technologies and identity politics. This volume, which features previously published performance manifestoes, articles, and book chapters on the most frequently discussed and debated topics in the field, is an indispensable reference work for both academics and students.




Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre


Book Description

In this selection of research articles Butterworth focuses on investigation of the practical and technical means by which early English theatre, from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, was performed. Matters of staging for both 'pageant vehicle' and 'theatre-in-the-round' are described and analysed to consider their impact on playing by players, expositors, narrators and prompters. All these operators also functioned to promote the closely aligned disciplines of pyrotechnics and magic (legerdemain or sleight of hand) which also influence the nature of the presented theatre. The sixteen chapters form four clearly identified parts—staging, playing, pyrotechnics and magic—and drawing on a wealth of primary source material, Butterworth encourages the reader to rediscover and reappreciate the actors, magicians, wainwrights and wheelwrights, pyrotechnists, and (in modern terms) the special effects people and event managers who brought these early texts to theatrical life on busy city streets and across open arenas. The chapters variously explore and analyse the important backwaters of material culture that enabled, facilitated and shaped performance yet have received scant scholarly attention. It is here, among the itemised payments to carpenters and chemists, the noted requirements of mechanics and wheelwrights, or tucked away among the marginalia of suppliers of staging and ingenious devices that Butterworth has made his stamping ground. This is a fascinating introduction to the very ‘nuts and bolts’ of early theatre. Staging, Playing, Pyrotechnics and Magic: Conventions of Performance in Early English Theatre is a closely argued celebration of stagecraft that will appeal to academics and students of performance, theatre history and medieval studies as well as history and literature more broadly. It constitutes the eighth volume in the Routledge series Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies and continues the valuable work of that series (of which Butterworth is a general editor) in bringing significant and expert research articles to a wider audience. (CS 1105).




Research Methods in Theatre and Performance


Book Description

How have theatre and performance research methods and methodologies engaged the expanding diversity of performing arts practices? How can students best combine performance/theatre research approaches in their projects? This book's 29 contributors provide




Medieval Theatre Performance


Book Description

The nature, conditions and place of medieval theatre performance remain somewhat mysterious, with scholarship in the field tending to be devoted to its context, and to the texts themselves. The essays in this volume seek to address this omission. They consider such matters as the nature of performance in theatre/dance/puppetry/automata; the performed qualities of such events; the conventions of performed work; what took place in the act of performing; and the relationships between performers and witnesses, and what conditioned these relationships.




Early Performance: Courts and Audiences


Book Description

These essays of Sarah Carpenter have been selected to reflect her career’s close focus on the relationship of performance and audience. They are drawn from the last 25 years of her writing, and this has enabled the editors to organise them not chronologically but rather to develop her central theme through a range of genres, including morality plays, the interlude, court entertainments, international political spectacle, and the public ‘performances’ of natural and maintained fools. As a scholar who also has experience of acting and of production, Carpenter is particularly sensitive to the implications of location for creating meaning and generating audience reaction. The essays are focused on a relatively short time-span of 120 years, from the late fifteenth to the turn of the seventeenth century, and thus nuance a period traditionally divided between the late medieval and the early-modern, and between Catholicism and Protestantism. Carpenter shows how the dynamics of theatrical engagement in which the roles of audience and performer are frequently mixed or even reversed offer a more creative route to understanding how the individual and society respond to change. (CS1090)




Functions of Medieval English Stage Directions


Book Description

When we speak of theatre, we think we know what a stage direction is: we tend to think of it as an authorial requirement, devised to be complementary to the spoken text and directed at those who put on a play as to what, when, where, how or why a moment, action or its staging should be completed. This is the general understanding to condition a theatrical convention known as the 'stage direction'. As such, we recognise that the stage direction is directed towards actors, directors, designers, and any others who have a part to play in the practical realisation of the play. And perhaps we think that this has always been the case. However, the term 'stage direction' is not a medieval one, nor does an English medieval equivalent term exist to codify the functions contained in extraneous manuscript notes, requirements, directions or records. The medieval English stage direction does not generally function in this way: it mainly exists as an observed record of earlier performance. There are examples of other functions, but even they are not directed at players or those involved in creating performance. More than 2000 stage directions from 40 or so plays and cycles have been included in the catalogue of the volume, and over 400 of those have been selected for analysis throughout the work. The purpose of this research is to examine the theatrical functions of medieval English stage directions as records of earlier performance. Examples of such functions are largely taken from outdoor scriptural plays. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, medieval history and literature.