Product Description: This book investigates trans-historical and international instances of performance that arise directly out of situations of crisis and extremity to ask what performance is for in such contexts. It explores how people living in oppressive, dangerous or deprived conditions use performance to survive, to express dissent or a desire for change...read more

Product Description: In liberal democracies across the globe, where the right to vote is framed as both civil right and civic duty, disillusioned creative activists run for public office on satiric, ironic and iconoclastic platforms...read more

Product Description: As the twenty-first century moves towards its third decade, applied theatre is being shaped by contemporary economic and environmental concerns and is contributing to new conceptual paradigms that influence the ways in which socially engaged art is produced and understood...read more

Product Description: "This text offers a cohesive framework for exploring social justice through drama and drama from a social justice perspective. Research based examples of practice from a range of international contexts link theory and practice. Connecting chapters raise key critical questions in an engaging dialogue format...read more

Product Description: What role can provocation play in the process of renewal, both of individuals and of societies? Provocation in Popular Culture is an investigation into the practice of specific provocateurs and the wider nature of cultural provocation, examining, among others: Banksy Sacha Baron Cohen Leo Bassi Pussy Riot Philippe Petit Archaos...read more

Product Description: This book proposes a new way to consider theatre and performance that claims a special relationship to reality, truth and authenticity. It documents innovations in devising and staging theatre and performance that takes reality as its subject, cultural shifts that have generated theatre of the real, some of its problems and some possibilities...read more

Passionate Amateurs tells a new story about modern theater: the story of a romantic attachment to theater’s potential to produce surprising experiences of human community. It begins with one of the first great plays of modern European theater—Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in Moscow—and then crosses the 20th and 21st centuries to look at how its story plays out in Weimar Republic Berlin, in the Paris of the 1960s, and in a spectrum of contemporary performance in Europe and the United States. This is a work of historical materialist theater scholarship, which combines a materialism grounded in a socialist tradition of cultural studies with some of the insights developed in recent years by theorists of affect, and addresses some fundamental questions about the social function and political potential of theater within modern capitalism. Passionate Amateurs argues that theater in modern capitalism can help us think afresh about notions of work, time, and freedom. Its title concept is a theoretical and historical figure, someone whose work in theater is undertaken within capitalism, but motivated by a love that desires something different. In addition to its theoretical originality, it offers a significant new reading of a major Chekhov play, the most sustained scholarly engagement to date with Benjamin’s “Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre,” the first major consideration of Godard’s La chinoise as a “theatrical” work, and the first chapter-length discussion of the work of The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, an American company rapidly gaining a profile in the European theater scene. Passionate Amateurs contributes to the development of theater and performance studies in a way that moves beyond debates over the differences between theater and performance in order to tell a powerful, historically grounded story about what theater and performance are for in the modern world.

Product Description: Winner of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Excellence in Editing Award 2016 Following the ground-breaking Performance and the City, this new volume explores what it means to create and experience urban performance – as both an aesthetic and a political practice – in the burgeoning world where cities are built by globalization and neoliberal capital...read more

Product Description: Jérôme Bel’s Disabled Theater, a dance piece featuring eleven actors with cognitive disabilities from Zurich’s Theater Hora, has polarized audiences worldwide. Some have celebrated the performance as an outstanding exploration of presence and representation; others have criticized it as a contemporary freak show...read more

Product Description: This book draws upon cognitive and affect theory to examine applications of contemporary performance practices in educational, social and community contexts. The writing is situated in the spaces between making and performance, exploring the processes of creating work defined variously as collaborative, participatory and socially engaged...read more

Product Description: How do theatre and performance transmit and dispute ideologies of neoliberalism? The essays in this anthology examine the mechanisms and rhetorics of contemporary multinational and transnational organizations, artists, and communities that produce theatre and performance for global audiences...read more

Product Description: Replay: Classic Modern Drama Reimagined spans over a century of great theatre to explore how iconic plays have been adapted and versioned by later writers to reflect or dissect the contemporary zeitgeist. Starting with A Doll's House, Ibsen's much-reprised masterpiece of marital relations from 1879, Toby Zinman explores what made the play so controversial and shocking in its day before tracing how later reimaginings have reworked Ibsen's original...read more

Product Description: History, Memory, Performance is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring performances of the past in a wide range of trans-national and historical contexts. At its core are contributions from theatre scholars and public historians discussing how historical meaning is shaped through performance...read more

Product Description: Winter Passages is Robert Brustein’s nineteenth book of criticism. It includes his considerations of culture and politics over the past four years of American life, demonstrating how the imperfections of the government and economy have plunged the country into an artistic winter in which there is a troubling lack of support for, and understanding of, America’s arts and artists...read more

Product Description: The concept of the public sphere, as first outlined by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, refers to the right of all citizens to engage in debate on public issues on equal terms. In this book, Christopher B. Balme explores theatre's role in this crucial political and social function...read more

Applied Drama offers an insight into theatre-making that takes place in communities across the world. It considers the role of artists who work in challenging settings, including prisons, schools, hostels for the homeless, care homes for the elderly and on the street. In this updated second edition, Helen Nicholson provides vivid new examples of practice, and addresses twenty-first century concerns about the environments in which applied theatre takes place. Ideal for students and practitioners, this lively study poses critical questions about the aesthetics and ethics of applied theatre. It invites debate about the social role of theatre, and explores how interventionist theatre might maintain its radicalism in an increasingly globalized world.

Product Description: Nationalism and Youth in Theatre and Performance explores how children and young people fit into national political theatre and, moreover, how youth enact interrogative, patriotic, and/or antagonistic performances as they develop their own relationship with nationhood...read more

Product Description: This book provides a timely intervention in the fields of performance studies and theatre history, and to larger issues of global cultural exchange. The authors offer a provocative argument for rethinking the scholarly assessment of how diverse performative cultures interact, how they are interwoven, and how they are dependent upon each other...read more

Product Description: Theatre of Good Intentions examines limitations of theatre in the creation of social and political change. This book looks at some of the reasons why achieving such goals is hard; examining what theatre can and can't do. It examines a range of applied and political theatre case studies, focusing on theatre's impact on participants and spectators...read more

Product Description: The study of consciousness has developed considerably over the past ten years, with an emphasis on seeking to explain subjective experience. Our understanding of key questions relating to the performing arts, in theory and practice, benefits from the insights of consciousness studies...read more