Disability Theatre and Modern Drama

Disability Theatre and Modern Drama
Author: Kirsty Johnston
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2016-04-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1472510356

Bertolt Brecht's silent Kattrin in Mother Courage, or the disability performance lessons of his Peachum in The Threepenny Opera; Tennessee Williams' limping Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and hard-of-hearing Bodey in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur; Samuel Beckett's blind Hamm and his physically disabled parents Nagg and Nell in Endgame – these and many further examples attest to disability's critical place in modern drama. This Companion explores how disability performance studies and theatre practice provoke new debate about the place of disability in these works. The book traces the local and international processes and tensions at play in disability theatre, and offers a critical investigation of the challenges its aesthetics pose to mainstream and traditional practice. The book's first part surveys disability theatre's primary principles, critical terms, internal debates and key challenges to theatre practice. Examining specific disability theatre productions of modern drama, it also suggests how disability has been re-envisaged and embodied on stage. In the book's second part, leading disability studies scholars and disability theatre practitioners analyse and creatively re-imagine modern drama, demonstrating how disability aesthetics press practitioners and scholars to rethink these works in generative, valuable and timely ways.

Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability

Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability
Author: Genevieve Love
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2018-10-18
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1350017213

What work did physically disabled characters do for the early modern theatre? Through a consideration of a range of plays, including Doctor Faustus and Richard III, Genevieve Love argues that the figure of the physically disabled prosthetic body in early modern English theatre mediates a set of related 'likeness problems' that structure the theatrical, textual, and critical lives of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The figure of disability stands for the relationship between actor and character: prosthetic disabled characters with names such as Cripple and Stump capture the simultaneous presence of thefictional and the material, embodied world of the theatre. When the figure of the disabled body exits the stage, it also mediates a second problem of likeness, between plays in their performed and textual forms. While supposedly imperfect textual versions of plays have been characterized as 'lame', the dynamic movement of prosthetic disabled characters in the theatre expands the figural role which disability performs in the relationship between plays on the stage and on the page. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability reveals how attention to physical disability enriches our understanding of early modern ideas about how theatre works, while illuminating in turn how theatre offers a reframing of disability as metaphor.

Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama

Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama
Author: Lindsey Row-Heyveld
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2018-08-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319921355

Why do able-bodied characters fake disability in 40 early modern English plays? This book uncovers a previously unexamined theatrical tradition and explores the way counterfeit disability captivated the Renaissance stage. Through detailed case studies of both lesser-known and canonical plays (by Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, and others), Lindsey Row-Heyveld demonstrates why counterfeit disability proved so useful to early modern playwrights. Changing approaches to almsgiving in the English Reformation led to increasing concerns about feigned disability. The theater capitalized on those concerns, using the counterfeit-disability tradition to explore issues of charity, epistemology, and spectatorship. By illuminating this neglected tradition, this book fills an important gap in both disability history and literary studies, and explores how fears of counterfeit disability created a feedback loop of performance and suspicion. The result is the still-pervasive insistence that even genuinely disabled people must perform in order to, paradoxically, prove the authenticity of their impairments.

Unfixable Forms

Unfixable Forms
Author: Katherine Schaap Williams
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501753517

Unfixable Forms explores how theatrical form remakes—and is in turn remade by—early modern disability. Figures described as "deformed," "lame," "crippled," "ugly," "sick," and "monstrous" crowd the stage in English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In each case, such a description distills cultural expectations about how a body should look and what a body should do—yet, crucially, demands the actor's embodied performance. In the early modern theater, concepts of disability collide with the deforming, vulnerable body of the actor. Reading dramatic texts alongside a diverse array of sources, ranging from physic manuals to philosophical essays to monster pamphlets, Katherine Schaap Williams excavates an archive of formal innovation to argue that disability is at the heart of the early modern theater's exploration of what it means to put the body of an actor on the stage. Offering new interpretations of canonical works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, and close readings of little-known plays such as The Fair Maid of the Exchange and A Larum For London, Williams demonstrates how disability cuts across foundational distinctions between nature and art, form and matter, and being and seeming. Situated at the intersections of early modern drama, disability studies, and performance theory, Unfixable Forms locates disability on the early modern stage as both a product of cultural constraints and a spark for performance's unsettling demands and electrifying eventfulness.

Peering Behind the Curtain

Peering Behind the Curtain
Author: Thomas Richard Fahy
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2002
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780415929974

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama
Author: Leslie C. Dunn
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2021-01-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030572080

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability. Proffering an expansive view of early modern disability in performance, the contributors suggest methodologies for finding and interpreting it in unexpected contexts. The volume also includes essays on disabled actors whose performances are changing the meanings of disability in Shakespeare for present-day audiences. By combining these two areas of scholarship, this text makes a unique intervention in early modern studies and disability studies alike. Ultimately, the volume generates a conversation that locates and theorizes the staging of particular disabilities within their historical and literary contexts while considering continuity and change in the performance of disability between the early modern period and our own.

Beyond Victims and Villains

Beyond Victims and Villains
Author: Victoria Lewis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2006
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

First major anthology of dramatic work dealing with disabilities.

Theatres of Learning Disability

Theatres of Learning Disability
Author: Matt Hargrave
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2015-06-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137504390

Winner of the TaPRA New Career Research in Theatre/Performance Prize 2016 This is the first scholarly book to focus exclusively on theatre and learning disability as theatre, rather than advocacy or therapy. Hargrave provocatively realigns the - hitherto unvoiced - assumptions that underpin such practice and proposes that learning disabled artists have earned the right to full critical review.

Theatre and Disability

Theatre and Disability
Author: Petra Kuppers
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 102
Release: 2017-11-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350315966

This succinct and engaging text examines the complex relationship between theatre and disability, bringing together a wide variety of performance examples in order to explore theatrical disability through the conceptual frameworks of disability as spectacle, narrative, and experience. Accessible and affordable, this is an ideal resource for theatre students and lovers everywhere.