Search results for ""Author Prof. Enoch Brater""

Beckett is acknowledged as one of the greatest playwrights and most innovative fiction writers of the twentieth century with an international appeal that bridges both general and more specialist readers. This collection of essays by renowned Beckett scholar Enoch Brater offers a delightfully original, playful and intriguing series of approaches to Beckett's drama, fiction and poetry. Beginning with a chapter entitled ‘Things to Ponder While Waiting for Godot', each essay deftly illuminates aspects of Beckett's thinking and craft, making astute and often surprising discoveries along the way. In a series of beguiling discussions such as 'From Dada to Didi: Beckett and the Art of His Century', 'Beckett's Devious Interventions, or Fun with Cube Roots' and 'The Seated Figure on Beckett's Stage', Brater proves the perfect companion and commentator on Beckett's work, helping readers to approach it with fresh eyes and a renewed sense of the author's unique aesthetic. ‘An eloquent, witty and erudite collection of essays that illuminates Beckett's drama and prose fiction from a number of complementary perspectives. Brater's precise explication of the interwoven tropes of language and mise-en-scène is combined with a fine grasp of the overarching structure of work ... to create a rich and suggestive series of reflections on Beckett's aesthetics.' - Robert Gordon, Professor of Drama, Goldsmiths, University of London

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Talk-show confessions, online rants, stand-up routines, inspirational speeches, banal reflections and calls to arms: we live in an age of solo voices demanding to be heard. In The Contemporary American Monologue Eddie Paterson looks at the pioneering work of US artists Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, Anna Deavere Smith and Karen Finley, and the development of solo performance in the US as a method of cultural and political critique. Ironic confession, post-punk poetry, investigations of race and violence, and subversive polemic, this book reveals the link between the rise of radical monologue in the late 20th century and history of speechmaking, politics, civil rights, individual freedom and the American Dream in the United States. It shows how US artists are speaking back to the cultural, political and economic forces that shape the world. Eddie Paterson traces the importance of the monologue in Shakespeare, Brecht, Beckett, Chekov, Pinter, O'Neill and Williams, before offering a comprehensive analysis of several of the most influential and innovative American practitioners of monologue performance. The Contemporary American Monologue constitutes the first book-length account of US monologists that links the tradition of oratory and speechmaking in the colony to the appearance of solo performance as a distinctly American phenomenon.

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Constituting the first comprehensive look at Ruth Maleczech’s work, Jessica Brater’s companion is a landmark study in innovative theatre practice, bringing together biography, critical analysis, and original interviews to establish a portrait of this Obie-award winning theatre artist. Tracing Maleczech’s background, training, and influences, the volume contextualizes her work and the founding of Mabou Mines within the wider landscape of American avant-garde theatre. It considers her performances and productions, revealing both her interest in making ordinary women important onstage, and her predilection for resurrecting extraordinary women from history and finding their resonances within a contemporary theatrical context. Brater considers Maleczech’s investment in redrawing the boundaries of what women are allowed to say, both on stage and off, and shows how her commitment to radical artistic and production risks has reshaped the contours of a contemporary theatrical experience. Highlights of the volume include discussion of productions such as Mabou Mines’ Lear, Dead End Kids, Hajj, Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, Red Beads, and La Divina Caricatura, as well as a close look at Maleczech’s final work-in-progress, Imagining the Imaginary Invalid.

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Drawing on rich interdisciplinary research that has laced the emerging subject of drag studies as an academic discipline, this book examines how drag performance is a political, socio-cultural practice with a widespread lineage throughout the history of performance. This volume maps the multi-threaded contexts of contemporary practices while rooting them in their fabulous historical past and memory. The book examines drag histories and what drag does with history, how it enacts or tells stories about remembering and the past. Featuring work about the USA, UK and Ireland, Japan, Australia, Brazil and Barbados, this book allows the reader to engage with a range of archival research including camp and history; ethnicity and drag; queering ballet through drag; the connections between drag king and queen history; queering pantomime performance; drag and military veterans; Puerto Rican drag performers and historical film.

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What do we mean when we describe theatre as political today? How might theatre-makers’ provocations for change need to be differently designed when addressing the precarious spectator-subject of twenty- first century neoliberalism? In this important study Liz Tomlin interrogates the influential theories of Jacques Rancière to propose a new framework of analysis through which contemporary political dramaturgies can be investigated. Drawing, in particular, on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Lilie Chouliaraki and Judith Butler, Tomlin argues that the capacities of the contemporary and future spectator to be ‘effected’ or ‘affected’ by politically-engaged theatre need to be urgently re-evaluated. Central to this study is Tomlin’s theorized figuration of the neoliberal spectator-subject as precarious, individualized and ironic, with a reduced capacity for empathy, agency and the ability to imagine better futures. This, in turn, leads to a predilection for a response to injustice that is driven by a concern for the feelings of the subject-self, rather than concern for the suffering other. These characteristics are argued to shape even those spectator-subjects towards the left of the political spectrum, thus necessitating a careful reconsideration of new and long-standing dramaturgies of political provocation. Dramaturgies examined include the ironic invitations of Made in China and Martin Crimp, the exploration of affect in Kieran Hurley’s Heads Up, the new sincerity that characterizes the work of Andy Smith, the turn to the staging of the spectators’ ‘other’ in Developing Artists’ Queens of Syria and Chris Thorpe and Rachel Chavkin’s Confirmation, and the community activism of Common Wealth’s The Deal Versus the People.

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Howard Barker and The Wrestling School have been seen as marginal to the major concerns of British theatre, problematic in their staging and challenging in the ideas they explore. Yet Barker's writing career spans six decades, he is the only living writer to have been accorded an entire season with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and The Wrestling School produces theatre of such a striking quality that it earned continuous Arts Council funding for nearly 20 years. Wrestling with Catastrophe challenges existing ways of reading Barker’s theatre practice and plays and provides new ways into his work. It brings together conversations with theatre makers from in and outside The Wrestling School, with first-hand accounts of the company’s practice, and a selection of critical readings. The book’s combining of testimony from key Wrestling School practitioners with alternative practical perspectives, and with analysis by both established and emerging scholars, ensures that a spectrum of understanding emerges that is rich in both breadth and depth. In its consideration of the full range of Barker's aesthetic concerns - including text, direction, design, acting, narrative form, poetry, appropriation, painting, photography, electronic media, technology, puppetry, and theatre space - the volume makes a radical re-evaluation of Barker's theatre possible.

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