Theatre studies Books
The University of Michigan Press Acts of AuthorityActs of Resistance
Book SynopsisBhatia argues that Indian theatre was a central force in the struggle against oppressive colonial and postcolonial structures, as it sought to undo various scheme of political and cultural power through engagement with subjects derived from mythology, history, and available colonial models such as Shakespeare.
£999.99
The University of Michigan Press Performing Conquest
Book SynopsisBecause of its strategic alliance with the Spanish invaders in Cortez's conquest in the early 16th century, Tlaxcala has played a significant role in Mexican history. This book examines the distinct Tlaxcalan identity that has evolved over the last five centuries and the way that performance has been inextricably linked to its creation.
£64.95
The University of Michigan Press Illusive Utopia
Book SynopsisA rare glimpse into North Korean propagandain parades, posters, murals, theater, and filmsTrade Review"North Korea is not just a security or human rights problem (although it is those things) but a real society. This book gets us closer to understanding North Korea beyond the usual headlines, and does so in a richly detailed, well-researched, and theoretically contextualized way." - Charles K. Armstrong, Center for Korean Research, Columbia University"
£76.08
The University of Michigan Press Artaud and His Doubles
Book SynopsisThe work of director, playwright, essayist, and poet Antonin Artaud has had a lasting influence, particularly among theatre scholars, who consider his 1938 book Le Théâtre et son double a classic text of the avant-garde. This challenges the Artaud legend by reexamining his works in the context of European political, theatrical, and intellectual history of the early 20th century.
£66.11
The University of Michigan Press Ellen Stewart Presents
Book SynopsisFounder of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Ellen Stewart was responsible for a staggering array of productions and for fostering the early work of directors, playwrights, actors, composers, and performance artists. Theatre scholar Cindy Rosenthal relates the history of La MaMa through its performance posters, capturing the irreverence and the aesthetic of La MaMa over five decades.Trade ReviewThrough the physical nature of the poster, its relationship to performance, and the actual poster-making process, Rosenthal found a way to provide a linkage for all the disparate, uncommon, and almost otherworldly theatre that was and is the mainstay of this important theatre institution . . . using the poster as a kind of key in the lock of Stewart’s impenetrably mysterious personal connection with her theatre, its history, and the magic of her artistic entrepreneurship, to provide insight into the nature of how she worked over fifty years to create an artistic home for some of the world’s most important theatrical artists. It is a fascinating and rather gorgeous way into the heart of what has made La MaMa and Ellen Stewart a place of magic in the theatre."" - David Crespy, University of Missouri
£35.10
The University of Michigan Press The Sarah Siddons Audio Files
Book SynopsisTrade Review“The theatre scholar's daunting but irresistible quest to recover some echoes of performance of the past has never been more engagingly presented than in Pascoe's account of tracing the long-silenced voice of Sarah Siddons. Her report is a warm, witty, and highly informative exploration of the methodology and the pleasures of historical research.” - Marvin Carlson, author of The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine
£61.77
The University of Michigan Press As If
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£75.55
The University of Michigan Press Lives in Play
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£66.14
The University of Michigan Press Acts of Gaiety
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£66.34
The University of Michigan Press Spectacles of Reform
Book SynopsisReveals the crucial role that spectacle played in American activism and reform movements in the 1800s
£72.95
The University of Michigan Press Sensational Devotion
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£70.65
The University of Michigan Press Americas Japan and Japans Performing Arts
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£68.95
The University of Michigan Press Preaching to Convert
Book SynopsisOffers an intriguing new perspective on the outreach strategies of U.S. evangelicals. Author John Fletcher frames these activities, from door-to-door proselytising to the spirited sermons of superstar televangelists, as examples of activist performance, broadly defined here as acts performed before an audience in the hopes of changing hearts and minds.
£79.99
The University of Michigan Press Shattering Hamlets Mirror
Book SynopsisExamines recent and contemporary work by such groups as Rimini Protokoll, Societas Raffaelo Sanzio, the Gob Squad, Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, and Foundry Theatre, while revealing the deep antecedents of today’s theater, placing it in useful historical perspective. While many may consider it a post-postmodern phenomenon, the “theater of the real”, as it turns out, has very deep roots.Trade ReviewA pleasure to read… the prose has Carlson’s usual clarity and force. While previous critics have noted the incursion of ‘the real’ into avant-garde performance, to my knowledge Carlson is the first to see this as a key driver of theatrical developments since the eighteenth century. One of the book’s virtues is that it integrates French, German, and Russian theatre history on the one hand, and developments within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the other, to our understanding of the historical avant-garde and more recent European and American experimental theatre.” — Andrew Sofer, Boston College
£56.95
The University of Michigan Press The Drama of the American Short Story 18001865
Book SynopsisTrade Review“A pleasure to read. . . . Collins’ textual analyses are strong andpersuasive and I was impressed by the energy and depth of knowledgeevinced by the book.” - Sarah Chinn, Hunter College
£64.95
The University of Michigan Press The Very Thought of Herbert Blau
Book SynopsisDistinguished artists and scholars offer reflections on what made Herbert Blau's contributions so visionary, transformative, and unforgettable, and why his ideas endure in both seminar rooms and studios. Contributors respond to Blau's fierce and polymorphous intellect, his relentless drive and determination, and his audacity.Trade ReviewHerbert Blau was a High Modernist to the core, a position from which he was able to critique the unruliness of the Postmodern, challenge those whose work failed to dig deeply enough into the understanding of theatre, and most importantly, to open doors into understanding Beckett, Brecht, Artaud, and others . . .These essays elucidate and further challenge Blau's body of work and will be of immense value: new generations of theatre/performance scholars will find avenues for engaging with Blau's work, while those familiar with Blau's ideas will welcome the opportunity to re-engage with them."" - John Lutterbie, Stony Brook University
£70.55
The University of Michigan Press Ghostly Fragments
Book SynopsisGathers the essays of the late Barbara C. Hodgdon, a renowned scholar of Shakespeare and performance studies. The editors have selected essays that represent the wide sweep of Hodgdon's scholarship, including unpublished pieces and those from hard-to-access sources.
£999.99
Random House USA Inc In the Heights
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£27.79
Hal Leonard Corporation Broadway Songs Paperback Songs
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£7.50
Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation First Book of Broadway Solos BaritoneBass Edition
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£23.99
Lutterworth Press Ritual and Drama The Medieval Theatre
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£29.70
Lutterworth Press Curtain Calls
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£33.30
Dover Publications Inc. Vocal Selections from Funny Girl
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£19.54
DK Opera
Book SynopsisExperience the passion and drama of the world’s greatest operas with this sumptuously illustrated visual guide.Immerse yourself in more than 400 years of the world’s most celebrated operas and discover the fascinating stories behind them. Explore the lives of singers such as Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti, and Jonas Kaufmann. Meet composers like Mozart, Wagner, and Britten, and the librettists with whom they collaborated to create the magical blend of words and music that make up opera.From its origins in the 17th-century courts of Italy to live screenings in public spaces today, Opera: The Definitive Illustrated Story follows the history of opera from Monteverdi’s L'Orfeo in 1607, to Cosi fan Tutte, La Bohème, and modern operas such as Brokeback Mountain. It explains musical terminology, traces historical developments, and sets everything in a cultural context.This awe-inspiring opera book further features:
£40.00
Schiffer Publishing Ltd Stars of the New Jersey Shore
Book SynopsisIn the pre-Hollywood era, theatrical stars flocked to the New Jersey coast to escape the eastern cities'' sweltering heat. After performing from September to May, they relished its tranquil beauty and cool breezes in the summer. This unique book spotlights dozens of the stars from the 1860s to the 1920s, including Maggie Mitchell, Lillie Langtry, Nate Salsbury, Lillian Nordica, and Robert B. Mantell, to name just a few. Count Basie and Arthur Pryor were among the musicians, celebrities, and vaudevillains in these seashore communities. Overviews of the Jersey shore theaters, Broadway tryouts, and technologies that changed entertainment are discussed at length. The Foreword is by Monmouth County historian George H. Moss, Jr.
£17.09
Schiffer Publishing Ltd Fraver by Design
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£28.79
Hal Leonard Corporation The Boneheads Guide to Guitars Guitar World
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£9.45
Johns Hopkins University Press Becoming Criminal Transversal Performance and
Book SynopsisHe maps the effects of the public theater's transformative force of transversality, such as through the criminality represented by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Dekker, on both Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the scholarship devoted to it.Trade ReviewA very useful introduction for those interested in the ways in which the Renaissance is frequently introduced to today's students... [Reynolds] is unusually attuned to the ways in which acts of speech depend upon their context and their assumed audience, and his analysis impressively focuses upon the cultural and literary importance of writing outside the canon. His book never fails to be interesting. -- Dennis D. Kezar Tennessean [Bryan Reynolds] frames his cross-disciplinary inquiry with a concept of 'transversal theory,' which offers a spatially organized understanding of how subjects empower themselves through performance (social, criminal, or theatrical) and so not only defy official ideology but also transform the conditions of their own perception and experience... Especially valuable here is Reynolds's analysis of canting language as an 'official' language used by all members of a substantially unified criminal subculture that emerged in the 1520's, continued beyond the Puritan's rise to power in the early 1640's, and was commodified and fetishized by official culture. Studies in English Literature 2003 A valuable contribution both to the study of early modern criminality and to theorizing the period's social and political relations more broadly. -- Tanya Pollard Renaissance Quarterly 2004 Becoming Criminal's transversal theory performs a valuable service in reconceptualizing early modern English criminality and linking it to some of the period's most important institutions and discourses. -- Stephen Cohen Sixteenth Century JournalTable of ContentsContents: Preface Acknowledgments ONE State Power, Cultural Dissidence, Transversal Power TWO Becoming Gypsy, Criminal Culture, Becoming Transversal THREE Communal Departure, Criminal Language, Dissident Consolidation FOUR Social Spatialization, Criminal Praxis, Transversal Movement FIVE Antitheatrical Discourse, Transversal Theater, Criminal Intervention Notes Bibliography Index
£43.00
Johns Hopkins University Press Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance
Book SynopsisAt the turn of the 16th century, Italians rediscovered and reinvented an old art form: the ancient Latin comedy. In this anthology, Giannetti and Ruggiero have translated five of the most representative plays of the period, presenting the modern reader with a view of Italian Renaissance society.Trade ReviewThe translations of these bold and sometimes bawdy Italian imitations of raucous Latin comedy are readable and playable. Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance An intelligently prefaced book which makes available in sensible, accurate English-to scholars and students of drama and of the Renaissance, as well as to general readers-a coherent body of theatre which is culturally and intrinsically valuable. -- Ronnie Ferguson Modern Language Review 2006Table of ContentsLa Calandra (The Comedy of Calandro) / by Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena; La mandragola (The Mandrake Root) / by Niccolao Machiavelli; Il Marescalco (The Master of the Horse) / by Pietro Aretino; Gl'ingannati (The Deceived) / by the Academy of the Intronati of Siena; La Veniexiana (The Venetian Comedy) / Anonymous.
£61.50
Johns Hopkins University Press Staging Governance Theatrical Imperialism in
Book SynopsisThe economics of political and sexual exchange not only became entwined but functioned as mutual supports during a period of social, cultural, and political readjustment.Trade ReviewAn ambitious and compelling book, notable for its command of divergent fields and discourses, its careful readings, and its theoretical reach. -- Betsy Bolton Comparative Drama O'Quinn's focus... is refreshing. -- Diedre Lynch Studies in English Literature A sophisticated exposition... useful and stimulating. -- Cheryl Wanko 1650-1850: Ideas, Esthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era An ambitious and important book. -- Michael Garner Studies in Romanticism The book as a whole is an impressive scholarly achievement and a major contribution to the fields of romantic theatre and imperial studies. Theatre Research International Groundbreaking, informative, and penetrating, and it [ Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800] offers significant new information about the role of the theater in late eighteenth-century debates about the Asian colonies and English government. -- Jeremy W. Webster Eighteenth-Century Life O'Quinn's book is one of great importance and significant innovation. His understanding of the situated nature and ideological function of performance is excellent. -- David Francis Taylor Huntington Library QuarterlyTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Supplementation of Imperial SovereigntyPart I: Ethnographic ActsChapter 1. Empire's Vicious Expenses: Samuel Foote's The Nabob and the Credit Crisis of 1772Chapter 2. "As Much as Science Can Approach Barbarity" Pantomimical Ethnography in Omai; or, A Trip round the WorldPart II: Women and the Trials of Imperial MasculinityChapter 3. Inchbald's Indies: Meditations on Despotism circa 1784Chapter 4. The Raree Show of ImpeachmentChapter 5. Molière's Old Woman: Judging and Being Judged with Frances BurneyPart III: A Theatre of Perpetual WarChapter 6. Starke Reforms: Martial Masculinity and the Perils of IndianizationChapter 7. War and Precinema: Tipu Sultan and the Allure of Mechanical DisplayAfterword: Recreational AlterityNotesIndex
£58.00
Johns Hopkins University Press Tragedy Walks the Streets
Book SynopsisSurveying this expanded field of inquiry, Buckley weaves together a coherent formal genealogy of the drama during this period and offers a new, more continuous generic history of modern drama in its first and most turbulent phase of development.Trade ReviewThe book is both interdisciplinary and highly readable. Choice 2007 Those working on British Romanticism are often monolingual and indeed monocultural and so it is refreshing to see a monograph engaging with France, Britain and Germany in its re-evaluation of the development of modern drama. -- Katherine Astbury French History 2007 Compelling account of the birth of modern drama and its relationship with the French Revolution... Redraws the boundaries of scholarly insight and represents a valuable contribution to the field of Eighteenth-Century Studies. -- Radosveta Getova Modern Language Review 2008 A thought-provoking and intellectually ambitious study. -- Mark Darlow Journal of European Studies 2008 Disciplined and concise with its scope and material, and in this way, it serves as a model for interdisciplinary rigor. -- Wendy C. Nielsen Modern Philology 2010Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Theater of the Revolution2. The Drama of the Revolution3. The Revolution and British Theatrical Politics4. The Fall of Robespierre and the Tragic Imagination5. Reviving the Revolution: Dantons TodConclusionNotesIndex
£46.50
Johns Hopkins University Press The Third Citizen Shakespeares Theater and the
Book SynopsisRepresentationalism and its subject mark the beginning of political modernity; Shakespeare's tragedies greet political representationalism with skepticism, bleakness, and despair.Trade ReviewArnold's dense book explores the fertile ground left mostly unturned by new historicist approaches of early modern politics... Brilliant and well-documented analysis of Shakespeare's 'representational plays'. -- Marie-Dominique Garnier Cercles 2007 A compelling historical refinement... Recommended. Choice 2007 Remarkably scholarly... This seminal redrawing of power and politics in late Tudor and early Stuart England takes its authority from the tight analogies it makes between political events and governmental practice in Shakespeare's time and its detailed examination of key scenes in a half-dozen of his plays. In confronting our common assumptions of the period, it forces us to rethink our own historical beliefs. -- Arthur F. Kinney Renaissance Quarterly 2007 Intelligent and important book... A bracing riposte to revisionist historians. -- Anne McLaren English Historical Review 2008 A superb look at Shakespearean politics. Studies in English Literature 2008 Promises a fresh and original approach. -- Richard McCoy Comparative Drama 2008 Provides some needed and very stimulating ideas and evidence with which to develop scholarly analysis of the ways in which contemporaries thought about parliamentary representation, and about the problems involved in making such a system both meaningful and practicable. -- Jason Peacey H-Net Reviews 2008 A serious book about an important subject and a work that anyone interested in Shakespeare's political thought should read carefully... I admire The Third Citizen. Clio 2008 Arnold quite convincingly documents his major claim. -- Maurice Hunt English Studies 2008Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsNote on References and AbbreviationsIntroductionPart I: Parliament in Shakespeare's England1. "An epitome of the whole realme": Absorption and Representation in the Elizabethan and Jacobean House of Commons2. Cade's Mouth: Swallowing Parliament in the First TetralogyPart II: Political Representation in Shakespeare's Rome3. "Their tribune and their trust": Political Representation, Property, and Rape in Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece4. "Caesar is turn'd to hear": Theater, Popular Dictatorship, and the Conspiracy of Republicanism in Julius Caesar5. "Worshipful mutineers": From Demos to Electorate in CoriolanusEpilogue: Losing Power, Losing Oneself: The Third Citizen and TragedyNotesWorks CitedIndex
£50.00
Johns Hopkins University Press The Birth of Comedy Texts Documents and Art from
Book SynopsisA full index includes not only authors, play titles, and persons mentioned, but themes from the whole Greek comic sphere (including politics, literature and philosophy, celebrities and social scandals, cookery and wine, sex, and wealth).Trade ReviewA unique resource for the serious study of comedy, this book is vast in scope and of incalculable value for those who do not read Greek. Choice This book is a landmark, which has come to stay. Bryn Mawr Classical Review This volume, which is aimed at general readers... and whose generous dimensions rival the size of an Oxford Classical Dictionary, will be an essential resource for anyone who wants to inquire into what is known of Athenian comedy beyond the surviving plays of Aristophanes and Menander... Rusten offers a concise and balanced account. New England Classical Journal The Birth of Comedy is a singularly ambitious and very welcome work. Times Literary Supplement A true reference book, to be dipped into when certain facts or information are required and thoughtfully arranged in an accessible style. Scholarly and academic in both approach and scope, this is a valuable resource for anyone interested in or researching not only Ancient Greek comedy but also the history of comic plays, theatre and drama. After twenty years spent compiling the material it is a resource that will not date and one that should provide for interesting scholarly debate and research outcomes. Reference Reviews A valuable scholarly enterprise. Classical Journal It will certainly be appearing on my reading lists in future. Journal of Hellenic StudiesTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsSymbols and AbbreviationsIntroductionFragments of ComedyPrinciples of This SelectionHow to Use This BookList of Translators and SectionsPlays and Fragments of Special InterestSources of the Comic FragmentsA Short History of Athenian ComedyAttested Dates of Athenian Comedies, 486–280 BCEPart I. Beginnings1. Proto-Comedy2. Epicharmus of SicilyPart II. Athenian Old ComedyIntroduction3. Festivals, Competitions, and Victory Lists4. The First and Second Generations (except Cratinus)5. Cratinus6. Eupolis7. Aristophanes8. Phrynichus and Platon9. Other Authors, ca. 420–390 BCE10. Theater, Audience, Actors, Chorus, and Costume of Old and Middle Comedy11. Scenes from Old or Middle Comedy on Fourth-Century South Italian VasesPart III. Middle ComedyIntroduction12. Anaxandrides, Eubulus, and Ephippus13. Antiphanes14. Timocles and Nicostratus15. Alexis16. Other AuthorsPart IV. Athenian New ComedyIntroduction17. Masks, Actors, Staging, and Scenes from New Comedy18. Philemon19. Menander20. Diphilus of Sinope21. Other AuthorsEpilogue22. Survival of Comedy in Hellenistic Greece and Republican and Imperial Rome23. Ancient Theories of Comedy and Laughter, and Ancient Writers on ComedyKomoidoumenoiBibliographyIllustration CreditsIndex
£97.00
Northwestern University Press Comic Agony Mixed Impressions in the Modern
Book SynopsisA companion volume to Contradictory characters, this book analyzes the juxtaposition of the tragic and the comic in modern drama.Table of ContentsPart 1 Smiling at trouble: virgin sacrifice - The wild duck, Henrik Ibsen; frost in the spring air - Spring's awakening, Frank Wedekind; sireless in Russia - Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov; inward journey - The ghost sonata, August Strindberg; playing the role for real - Enrico IV, Luigi Pirandello; summary 1 - comedy in hiding. Part 2 Taking the joke seriously: jest and superjests - Man and superman, Bernard Shaw; dependence day - Ah, wilderness!, Eugene O'Neill; society as a brother - The balcony, Jean Genet; Dionysus in Sussex - The Norman conquests, Alan Ayckbourn; summary 2 - pain in hiding. Part 3 Howling at farce: male heroine - The breast of Tiresias, Guillaume Apollinaire; timid exhibitionist - Professor Taranne, Arthur Adamov; anything but absurd - Jacques and The chairs, Eugene Ionesco; almighty goad - Acts without words I and II, Samuel Beckett; for sex and empire - Cloud 9, Caryl Churchill; summary 3 - the farcical overlay; conclusion: the playful end.
£18.95
Northwestern University Press A Theater of Our Own A History and a Memoir of
Book SynopsisRichard Christiansen, former chief critic for the Chicago Tribune, draws upon his exclusive interviews, insights, and memories gathered over a period of more than forty years of reviewing the arts. This history and memoir traces the evolution of the Chicago theater.
£26.96
Northwestern University Press Site Unscene The Offstage in English Renaissance
Book SynopsisExplores the key role of dramatic episodes that occur offstage and beyond the knowledge-generating faculty of playgoers' sight. Does Ophelia drown? Is Desdemona unfaithful to Othello? Does Macbeth murder Duncan in his sleep? Site Unscene considers how the drama's non-visible and eccentric elements embellish, alter, and subvert visible action on the stage.
£33.20
Northwestern University Press The Scene of Foreplay Theater Labor and Leisure
Book SynopsisIn a study that spans the fields of theatre history, performance studies, and cultural studies, Giulia Palladini analyses artistic performances, social performances, archival remains, and memoirs of the underground theatre scene in 1960s New York. She employs foreplay as a theoretical term that refers to a form of labor that both anticipates and postpones theatre production proper.Trade ReviewPalladini develops truly fresh""theorizations of the possible relations between labor, value, productivity, and capitalism, while presenting an extraordinarily rich and extensive set of materials on 1960s New York""‘underground’ performance.""This work has the potential for broad impact beyond theater and performance studies;""it is relevant to everyone engaged with cultural studies and critical theory, from queer and gender studies to critical human geography and other theoretically engaged humanistic social sciences.""It will thus be a great resource for scholars within these fields, as well as for historians of New York City."" - Miranda Joseph, author of""Debt to Society: Accounting for Life Under Capitalism""
£33.20
Northwestern University Press Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian
Book SynopsisOffers an innovative examination of how supporters of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez engaged in performance practice to build and negotiate the terms of populism. In Angela Marino's analysis populism is the practice of politics by ordinary people, which may include a variety of behaviours and forms of cultural production in live events, media, and the built environment.Trade ReviewThis is a first-rate work that demonstrates Marino's thorough command of the secondary literature of both theoretical and empirical significance. The author breaks new ground by questioning the validity of alternative views of populism that stress the polarizing, as opposed to the unifying, tendency of populist movements. This book will appeal broadly to scholars across several areas of politics and performance practice, and provide a rich theoretical discussion that is relevant to the fields of philosophy and political science."" - Steven Ellner, editor of Latin America's Radical Left: Challenges and Complexities of Political Power in the Twenty-First Century""I know of no other book that deals specifically with Venezuelan theatre and performance during the Chavez years, which makes this work significant. It will be a good complement to the wealth of scholarship available on Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution, as well as an important addition to Latin American theater and performance scholarship."" - Adam Versenyi, author of Theatre in Latin America: Religion, Politics, and Culture From Cortés to the 1980s
£33.20
Northwestern University Press The Unfinished Art of Theater
Book SynopsisA certain idea of the avant-garde posits the possibility of a total rupture with the past. The Unfinished Art of Theater pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theatre became a key site for artists on the semi-periphery of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934.
£33.20
The University Press of Kentucky Broadway Goes to War
Book Synopsis
£30.40
John Wiley & Sons Moving Performances Divas Iconicity and
Book SynopsisFabulous yet fierce, imperious yet impetuous, boss yet bitchy - divas are figures of paradox. Focusing on four early twentieth-century divas - Aida Overton Walker, Loïe Fuller, Libby Holman, and Josephine Baker - who were icons in their own time, Moving Performances considers what their past and current reception reveals about changing ideas of race and gender.Trade Review"This well-researched and carefully conceptualized study establishes a crucial connection between women artists' cultural production and the political economy in which they worked. Rich and complex, Moving Performances will make a notable and distinct contribution to the existing scholarship." -- Mae Henderson * author of Speaking in Tongues & Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing *"This innovative study rethinks the racialized gendered subjectivities of women who not only remade themselves and forms of performance through modernism but relocated race, colonialism, and sexuality through their very bodies." -- Eileen Boris * author of Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State *"The diva exudes singularity: whether she sings arias or popular songs, dances the ballet or the cakewalk, she always performs herself. This may explain why studies of female performers consider them so often in iconic isolation rather than as part of a broader celebrity culture. Moving Performances: Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage remedies this problem with its analysis of four divas of early twentieth-century popular performance." * Theatre Survey *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Divas, Iconicity, Remembering 1. The Color Line Is Always Moving: Aida Overton Walker 2. Transnational Technologies of Orientalism: Loïe Fuller’s Invented Repertoires 3. “Voices within the Voice”: Aural Passing and Libby Holman’s Deracinated/Reracinated Sound 4. “Much Too Busy to Die”: Josephine Baker’s Diva Iconicity Conclusion: Diva Remains NotesBibliographyIndex
£36.56
Rutgers University Press Black Movements Performance and Cultural Politics
Book SynopsisAnalyses how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy. Through an exploration of the way that black movements create circuits connecting people across space and time, Colbert offers important interventions into performance, literary, diaspora, and American studies.Trade Review"Colbert engages with cultural narratives that cross disciplinary boundaries; Black Movements will influence the field because it offers a unique way to think about processes and products of black artistic thought." -- Anita Gonzalez * University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and co-author of Black Performance Theory *"With rigor and creativity, Soyica Diggs Colbert weaves together debates in performance studies, black studies, and American studies. Black Movements offers a new way to think about race, time, history, and performance in the contemporary moment and will have a lasting influence." -- Shane Vogel * author of The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance *"It is a significant book, one that should be read alongside the scholarship of Saidiya Hartman, Daphne Brooks, Amber Jamilla Musser and other black feminist thinkers. Like Beyoncé reflecting back on Josephine Baker, Black Movements’s looks to the legacies of black performance in order to imagine and build black futures." * Journal of American Drama and Theatre *"Colbert’s 2017 book is especially exigent because it challenges the fixity of black death in a contemporary moment where black life is continuously expected to end abruptly. Whether this anticipation comes from video circulations of encounters with police or the Sate’s neglect of a predominantly black city’s contaminated water system, Colbert challenges this anticipated permanence to black death in Black Movements via analyses of literature, popular culture, and history. In doing so, she presents freedom as a multimodal phenomenon – through performance, film, literature, music, and prophecy." * Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Webs of Affiliation1 Flying Africans in Spaceships2 Entrapping and Ensnaring Entanglements3 Prophesying in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series4 MarchingEpilogue: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”: Locating the Future of Black Studies NotesBibliographyIndex
£36.08
University of Arizona Press Outside Theater
Book Synopsis
£56.05
MJ - Ohio University Press The Practical Shakespeare
Book SynopsisA comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare’s plays, The Practical Shakespeare: The Plays in Practice and on the Page illuminates for a general audience how and why the plays work so well.NotingTrade ReviewA resource for high school teachers and their advanced students, for undergraduate faculty and their students in survey courses that include some of the Bard’s plays, and for the occasional theatergoer. The Practical Shakespeare is highly readable, informative, and thought-provoking. * coeditor of Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-first Century *
£29.37
University of Missouri Press The Collected Works of Langston Hughes v. 6
Book SynopsisAlthough Langston Hughes had a lifelong engagement in theatre and other performance arts, his work in this area is the least known of his contributions to African American expressive culture. This volume focuses on Hughes's plays after 1942, along with all of his other work written for performance.
£66.50
University of Exeter Press British Theatre and the Red Peril The Portrayal
Book SynopsisBritish Theatre and the Red Peril examines how communism was portrayed in plays in the British theatre between 1917 and 1945, and how at a time when the capitalist system seemed on the verge of collapse, the theatre played a significant part in communicating and manipulating political propaganda in order to influence audiences.Trade Review 'This book appears to be that extreme rarity, a genuinely original contribution to our knowledge and understanding of twentieth-century British theatre. I don't know of anybody else besides Steve Nicholson who has delved so deeply or so keenly into the archives of the Lord Chamberlain to uncover a shoal of apparently subversive, politically-motivated play scripts, as well as the extraordinary and devious machinations of the censor and his friends in high places to block and suppress them. The result is a book which is at once refreshingly original and depressingly predictable . . . British Theatre and the Red Peril emerges as a truly significant and courageous work.' (New Theatre Quarterly , 2002) 'Political theatre comes in many shapes and sizes and, more often than not, is assumed to be left-wing in character. Steve Nicholson's fascinating study of the impact the Bolshevik revolution had on the British theatre shows that, whilst this common assumption is frequently correct, there is another and seldom recounted history of political theatre associated with the right.' (Theatre Research International, Vol. 26:2 , 2001) 'An attractively produced volume carefully researched and accessibly written. The book is likely to become (and remain) a standard work on the subject.' (Albion, Vol. 33, Issue 1 , Spring 2001) 'Steve Nicholson offers us a meticulously researched and critically astute study of a fascinating period of theatre in the UK. The main text is supported by a very useful chronological chart of plays and events between 1918 and 1946, a series of mini-biographies of the leading characters involved, a good number of pertinent and informative illustrations and a very helpful bibliography.' (Studies in Theatre and Performance, Vol 20, no 2 , June 2000) 'I know of no other book that investigates the depiction of the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1945. The author charts the response to plays dealing with the 'Red Peril' from the terrified reaction of the early twenties, through the more inquisitive tone of the 'intellectual' thirties to the paradoxical situation of the war years when the 'evil empire' became an essential ally.' (Dominic Shellard, Department of English Literature, The University of Sheffield) ‘After discussing censorship in the first two chapters, Nicholson turns to the plays themselves and the rest of the book is largely a series of plot summaries. But what plots! It is to Nichols’s credit that after reading the book I immediately wanted to run out and read many of the plays he describes. This would be no easy feat, since many of the plays Nicholson examines were never published.’ (Theatre Journal, Dec 2002) Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgements Brief Chronology 1. Not a Political Arena? 2. The Revolution will not be Dramatised 3. No More than a Bad Smell from the North East 4. Wakening the Devil 5. When England goes Communist 6. The Land of the Free Afterword Notes Appendix: Biographies and Production Details Select Bibliography Index
£30.77
University of Exeter Press In Comes I Performance Memory and Landscape
Book SynopsisIn Comes I' explores performance and land, biography and locality, memory and place. The book reflects on performances past and present, taking the form of a series of excursions into the agricultural landscape of eastern England, and drawing from archaeology, geomorphology, folklore, and local and family history.Trade Review ‘In Comes I is a brilliant and timely book, and one that will expand the field of Theatre and Performance Studies by introducing new concepts, functions, forms, and vocabularies.’ ‘…In Comes I is beautifully designed: the images, layout, and font transform the book into a kind of page-bound installation, a landscape to hold and move through. It feels good to look at and to touch.’ New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 23, Issue 3 August 2007 ‘All credit to the author for a book that could have been tedious…but is by contrast heart-warming and inspirational, as Pearson explores history and identity with the help of local historians, museum curators and archaeologists.’ British Archaeology, July/August 2007 ‘Pearson handles an impressive range of scholarly knowledge with clarity and elegance, and his book is easy to read. The apparent simplicity is, however, deceptive – for what he is proposing has radical implications for performance-makers and analysts and, indeed, for theatre studies more generally.’ Theatre Research International, 32.3, 2007 ‘…essential reading for anyone seriously interested in everything good that performance study can do at its best.’ (Contemporary Theatre Review, 18:1, 114-125, 01 February 2008) ‘However, what may distinguish his book is his unique approach, for by drawing on theory and literature of a range of academic disciplines he challenges academic boundaries and conventions. But he also challenges each of us to reflect in our own ways: to remember, to perform, to recreate, and most importantly, to be free again. Performance artists and theorists will find this book particularly exciting but so too should archaeologists, historians, and folklorists. Even materially driven Baby Boomer bankers might find it rewarding in that it may reawaken something long forgotten of benefit to others, such as the value of creative arts to memory, landscape, and personal experience.’ Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology Consciousness and Culture, Volume I, Issue I, March 2008 ‘A compellingly attractive, beautifully produced volume, full of maps, photographs, cartographical coordinates, anecdotes, recollections, analyses and speculations.’ Online: http://www.performanceparadigm.net/journal/issue-4/bookreviews/ ‘In Comes I is not a book about performance so much as a performance in its own right.’ ‘The scholar of English folklore will find much to value here.’ Phil Stafford, Journal of Folklore Research, March 9 2009, www.indiana.edu/%7Ejofr/review ‘You make this work essential reading for anyone seriously interested in everything good that performance study can do at its best. ‘A collector’s piece and that rare work, truly world class, that is always cognisant of class and the world’ Alan Read, Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 18 (1), 2008 Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Preface Map of the book Introduction VILLAGE: Preamble Performance: Bubbling Tom Excursion: Hibaldstow Project: White House Yard NEIGHBOURHOOD: Preamble Performance: Hibaldstow Plough Play Excursion: Hibaldstow, Redbourne and Kirton in Lindsey Project: Gainsthorpe REGION: Preamble Performance: Haxey Hood Excursion: North Lincolnshire Project: Ousefleet Afterword: Performance and landscape Bibliography Index
£999.99
Michigan State University Press Theater Sans Frontieres Essays on the Dramatic
Book SynopsisIn response to the resonance of his work as an actor, stage director and playwright in the theatre worldwide, academics and theatre professionals from across the world have collaborated on this collection of critical essays to analyse Robert Lepage's theatrical idiom.
£23.36
