Contemporary practitioners such as Orlan, Franko B, Robert Wilson and Tim Etchells are creating work that flies in the face of traditional thinking about what performance might mean. This book offers contextualization and guidance for those wishing to exp

Book by Roose-Evans, James

The book charts the development of collaboratively-created performances from the 1950s to the present day. Companies discussed include the Living Theatre, Open Theatre, Australian Performing Group, People Show, Teatro Campesino, Théâtre de Complicité, Legs on the Wall, Forced Entertainment and Third Angel. Against this background of enormous variety, fundamental questions are posed: "What is devised theatre?"; "Why have theatre-makers chosen to devise performances since the 1950s?" and "How has devised performance changed over the last fifty years?"

Product Description: This fiction title is paired to the nonfiction title "Carpenters Use Wood" for connecting across texts and comprehension through connection strategies.

As the first examination of women's foremost contributions to Jerzy Grotowski's cross-cultural investigation of performance, this book complements and broadens existing literature by offering a more diverse and inclusive re-assessment of Grotowski's legacy, thereby probing its significance for contemporary performance practice and research. Although the particularly strenuous physical training emblematic of Grotowski's approach is not gender specific, it has historically been associated with a masculine conception of the performer incarnated by Ryszard Cieslak in The Constant Prince, thus overlooking the work of Rena Mirecka, Maja Komorowska, and Elizabeth Albahaca, to name only the leading women performers identified with the period of theatre productions. This book therefore redresses this imbalance by focusing on key women from different cultures and generations who share a direct connection to Grotowski's legacy while clearly asserting their artistic independence. These women actively participated in all phases of the Polish director’s practical research, and continue to play a vital role in today's transnational community of artists whose work reflects Grotowski's enduring influence. Grounding her inquiry in her embodied research and on-going collaboration with these artists, Magnat explores the interrelation of creativity, embodiment, agency, and spirituality within their performing and teaching. Building on current debates in performance studies, experimental ethnography, Indigenous research, global gender studies, and ecocriticism, the author maps out interconnections between these women's distinct artistic practices across the boundaries that once delineated Grotowski's theatrical and post-theatrical experiments.

This textbook introduces the reader to modernist avant-garde theatre. It clearly explains the key terms as well as the major movements, including Expressionism, Dadaism, Futurism, Workers' theatres, Constructivism and the Living Newspaper, and Mass Performance, using a case study approach. It introduces the important innovations of the modernist avant-garde, reassesses theatrical techniques, and provides examples of plays and performances from across Europe and America. There are also chapters on The Modernist Body and on Interdisciplinary Performance. The book approaches the modernist avant-garde both as an area of academic study and as potential raw material for contemporary performance.

This book articulates the first theoretical context for a 'cyborg theatre,' metaphorically integrating on-stage bodies with the technologized, digitized, or mediatized, to re-imagine subjectivity for a post-human age. It covers a variety of examples, to propose new theoretical tools for understanding performance in our changing world.

Using new interview material with actors, directors and writers, this book explores the challenges of performance in documentary theatre. Through a series of high profile case studies, Cantrell uses acting theory to examine the actors' complex processes, and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of stage performance.

"Reading this book is certainly a vigorous experience. Kalb's sense of nuance, unpredictability, and the complexity of perception brings these productions to life. He is our surrogate, our scapegoat even, enduring the length of these productions so that he can convey the essence of their power."---Stanton B. Garner, Jr., University of Tennessee "Jonathan Kalb takes us on a tour of monumental theater events, which flaunt the rules of economy, Aristotelian and otherwise. Kalb captures these unwieldy marathon productions by skillfully mixing personal experience and scholarly analysis. I read this engaging book in a single sitting---and came away ready to join the first theater marathon I could find."---Martin Puchner, Harvard University "Jonathan Kalb's Great Lengths leaps to the head of any class in theatre history. Rich with critical perspective of 'marathon' works by Peter Brook, Tony Kushner, Robert Wilson, and others, and written with panache and lucidity, Kalb's book is filled with suspense as he describes and demystifies more than the post-modern and post-dramatic haunting recent theatre. This is history as present event, embracing the Greeks, Shakespeare, and even Charles Dickens."---Gordon Rogoff, Yale University We know that size matters in many areas of human endeavor, but what about works of the imagination? Why do some dramatic creations extend to five hours or more, and how does their extreme length help them accomplish extraordinarily ambitious aims? In Great Lengths, theater critic and scholar Jonathan Kalb addresses these and other questions through a close look at seven internationally prominent theater productions, including Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, and the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby, and the “durational works” of the British experimental company Forced Entertainment. This is a book about extreme length, monumental scope, and intensive immersion in the theater in general, written by a passionate spectator reflecting on selected pinnacles of his theatergoing over thirty years. The book's examples, deliberately chosen for their diversity, range from adapted novels and epics, to dramatic chronicles with macrohistorical and macropolitical implications, to stagings of super-size classic plays, to "postdramatic" works that negotiate the border between life and art. Kalb reconstructs each of the works, re-creating the experience of seeing it while at the same time explaining how it maintained attention and interest over so many hours, and then expanding the scope to embrace a wider view and ask broader questions. The discussion of Nicholas Nickleby, for example, considers melodrama as a basic tool of theatrical communication, and the section on Peter Brook's The Mahabharata explores the ethical problems surrounding theatrical exoticism. The chapter on Einstein on the Beach grows into a reflection on the media-age status of the much-debated Gesamtkunstwerk (or "total artwork") and a reassessment of the long avant-gardist tradition of challenging the primacy of rational language in theater. The essay on Peter Stein's Faust I + II becomes a reflection on the interpretive role of theater directors and the theatrical viability of antitheatrical closet drama. Great Lengths thus offers a remarkable panorama of the surprisingly broad field of contemporary marathon theater---an art form that diverse audiences of savvy, screen-weaned spectators continue to seek out, for the increasingly rare experiences of awe, transcendence, and sustained immersion that it provides. Great Lengths will appeal to general readers as well as theater specialists. It situates the chosen productions in various historical and critical contexts and engages with the many lively scholarly debates that have swirled around them. At the same time, it uses the productions as springboards for wide-ranging reflections on the basic purpose and enduring power of theater in an attention-challenged, media-saturated era.

The general theme of the thesis is performer-object interaction, as enacted and perceived in the theatre - its overarching research question, how varieties of "meaning" may already be enacted and perceived, thereby. In theorizing this, the work generally subscribes to the cognitive turn of the humanities, but also aspires to nudge it toward an ecological ontology, more congenial to the theme: of mind or cognition "beyond the brain," "out of our heads," inseparable from action and perception. The key concepts of the study (metaphor, image schemas, affordances) originate from cognitive linguistics and ecological psychology; the central case studies concern three specific productions directed by Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Chapter 1 isolates the key notions of agent and object, to theorize general processes of perception, action, and cognition: progressively blurring such traditional terms for stage objects as set, props, or costume, it proceeds from "domain-specific" abstractions through "basic-level" categories and "ecological" affordances, to the "domain-general" work of conceptual blending and metaphor. In its more philosophical framing, the chapter addresses metaphors of "the Great Chain of Being" - instrumental to the artificial division of mind over matter and subjects over objects - and instead, makes a theoretical case for the ecological grounding of all cognition, modified by the four influential e's: mind as embodied, embedded, extended, enacted. In Chapter 2, this theoretical framework is further elaborated in a detailed analysis of Meyerhold's 1922 staging of The Magnanimous Cuckold - from the affordances of its "constructivist" setting to an extended discussion of its "biomechanical" acting (the then metaphors of reflexology and Taylorism, contrasted with distributed and enactive notions of cognition and skill) and from the "cultural ecology" of early Soviet Russia to the variety of interpretations the interplay of all these have historically afforded. Toward the end, the general theory is developed into something of a tentative method, as concerns how the notions of image schemas and affordances may intertwine to serve the "ecological validity" of performance analysis. With Chapter 3, the conceptual focus shifts to Kantor's and Grotowski's notions of "poor theatre," reflecting as they seem, a cultural ecology very different from that of Meyerhold's Russia - that of "real socialism" in Communist Poland. Key metaphors of the general mindset thus identified, Chapters 4 and 5 present detailed analyses of Akropolis, as staged by Grotowski and Józef Szajna first in 1962, and of Kantor's 1985 production of Let the Artists Die! - the former, ranging from "plot points" of performer-object interaction to the ecological and enactive emphases of Grotowski's later work; the latter, from some of Kantor's overarching objects and metaphors, throughout his career, to "distributed" notions of memory and selfhood. To conclude, a brief Epilogue will address not only the metonymical and metaphorical "afterlives" of Grotowski and Kantor, respectively, but some of the tensions and continuities that go with "performing humanity" in the ever more mediatized ecologies of new technology that we currently inhabit. While only emerging with these new ecologies, on the notions of extended and distributed cognition such ostensibly contemporary metaphors as the "cyborg" or the "posthuman" only go to define what we've always been already - if by the "human post" we mean a self-contained Cartesian individual, somehow disentangled from its ecological embedding.

What does it mean to "fail" in performance? How might staging failure reveal theatre’s potential to expand our understanding of social, political and everyday reality? What can we learn from performances that expose and then celebrate their ability to fail? In Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, Sara Jane Bailes begins with Samuel Beckett and considers failure in performance as a hopeful strategy. She examines the work of internationally acclaimed UK and US experimental theatre companies Forced Entertainment, Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service, addressing accepted narratives about artistic and cultural value in contemporary theatre-making. Her discussion draws on examples where misfire, the accidental and the intentionally amateur challenge our perception of skill and virtuosity in such diverse modes of performance as slapstick and punk. Detailed rehearsal and performance analysis are used to engage theory and contextualise practice, extending the dialogue between theatre arts, live art and postmodern dance. The result is a critical account of performance theatre that offers essential reading for practitioners, scholars and students of Performance, Theatre and Dance Studies.

"A thoughtful and engaging contribution to the field that will have a sustained and lasting impact on the way feminist performance is defined and understood, as well as on how feminist histories and historiographies continue to challenge and transform the larger field of performance."---Charlotte Canning, The University of Texas at Austin"Harding forcefully challenges and destabilizes the male-centered Eurocentric genealogy of the avant-garde, which he claims is an uncontested, linear, positivistic history, unproblematized by theory. Then he argues that this gendered biased version of the European avant-garde is carried over into American historiography . . . A forceful case for a revisionist history."---Daniel Gerould, The City University of New York Graduate CenterCutting Performances challenges four decades' worth of scholarship on the American avant-garde by offering a provocative reconceptualization of the history of avant-garde performance along feminist lines. Focusing on five women artists (Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gertrude Stein, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, and Valerie Solanas) whose performance aesthetics made prominent use of collage techniques, James M. Harding sheds light on the cultural history of the avant-garde and the role that experimental women artists played in that history. He investigates the prominent position that collage technique occupied within the artists' performance aesthetic, and the decisively feminist inflection that their work gives to collage as a mode of avant-garde expression. The radical juxtapositions in their works produce the powerful effects of making the familiar strange and establishing contexts from which new understandings may emerge.Harding examines the performative dimensions of collage in experimental, feminist redefinitions of the literary, graphic, and theatrical arts, filling a void in a scholarly discourse that, while ostensibly about the vanguard, has lagged well behind other significant theoretical and historiographical currents. Cutting Performances not only challenges assumptions that have governed scholarship on the American avant-garde but also establishes a context to rethink the history of American avant-garde performance along feminist lines. It will appeal to audiences interested in theater history and performance studies as well as those interested in the cultural history of the avant-garde and the role that feminist experimental artists have played in it.James M. Harding is Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington. His other books include Not the Other Avant-Garde: Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (with John Rouse); Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and Their Legacies (with Cindy Rosenthal); and Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality.Illustration: Carolee Schneemann in Eye Body-36 Transformative Actions (1963) Action for camera (Photograph by Erró). Reproduced by permission of Carolee Schneemann.

Surveys Julie Taymor's innovative work in design, production, and direction, and discusses her use of puppetry, masks, and dance movement

How did the concept of the avant-garde come into existence? How did it impact on the performing arts? How did the avant-garde challenge the artistic establishment and avoid the pull of commercial theatre, gallery and concert-hall circuits? How did performance artists respond to new technological developments? Placing key figures and performances in their historical, social and aesthetic context, Günter Berghaus offers an accessible introduction to post-war avant-garde performance. Written in a clear, engaging style, and supported by text boxes and illustrations throughout, this volume explains the complex ideas behind avant-garde art and evocatively brings to life the work of some of its most influential performance artists.Covering hot topics such as multi-media and body art performances, this text is essential reading for students of theatre studies and performance.

The first full-length book of its kind to offer an investigation of the interface between theatre, performance and digital arts, Virtual Theatres presents the theatre of the twenty-first century in which everything - even the viewer - can be simulated. In this fascinating volume, Gabriella Giannachi analyzes the aesthetic concerns of current computer-arts practices through discussion of a variety of artists and performers including: * blast Theory* Merce Cunningham* Eduardo Kac* forced entertainment* Lynn Hershman* Jodi Orlan* Guillermo Gómez-Peña* Marcel-lí Antúnez Roca* Jeffrey Shaw* Stelarc. Virtual Theatres not only allows for a reinterpretation of what is possible in the world of performance practice, but also demonstrates how 'virtuality' has come to represent a major parameter for our understanding and experience of contemporary art and life.

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