Staging 21st Century Tragedies

Staging 21st Century Tragedies
Author: Avra Sidiropoulou
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2022-06-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000598918

Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis is an international collection of essays by leading academics, artists, writers, and curators examining ways in which the global tragedies of our century are being negotiated in current theatre practice. In exploring the tragic in the fields of history and theory of theatre, the book approaches crisis through an understanding of the existential and political aspect of the tragic condition. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, it showcases theatre texts and productions that enter the public sphere, manifesting notably participatory, immersive, and documentary modes of expression to form a theatre of modern tragedy. The coexistence of scholarly essays with manifesto-like provocations, interviews, original plays, and diaries by theatre artists provides a rich and multifocal lens that allows readers to approach twenty-first-century theatre through historical and critical study, text and performance analysis, and creative processes. Of special value is the global scope of the collection, embracing forms of crisis theatre in many geographically diverse regions of both the East and the West. Staging 21st Century Tragedies: Theatre, Politics, and Global Crisis will be of use and interest to academics and students of political theatre, applied theatre, theatre history, and theatre theory.

The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy

The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy
Author: Edwin Wong
Publisher: FriesenPress
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2019
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1525537555

WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT IT, BIRNAM WOOD COMES TO DUNSINANE HILL The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy presents a profoundly original theory of drama that speaks to modern audiences living in an increasingly volatile world driven by artificial intelligence, gene editing, globalization, and mutual assured destruction ideologies. Tragedy, according to risk theatre, puts us face to face with the unexpected implications of our actions by simulating the profound impact of highly improbable events. In this book, classicist Edwin Wong shows how tragedy imitates reality: heroes, by taking inordinate risks, trigger devastating low-probability, high-consequence outcomes. Such a theatre forces audiences to ask themselves a most timely question---what happens when the perfect bet goes wrong? Not only does Wong reinterpret classic tragedies from Aeschylus to O’Neill through the risk theatre lens, he also invites dramatists to create tomorrow’s theatre. As the world becomes increasingly unpredictable, the most compelling dramas will be high-stakes tragedies that dramatize the unintended consequences of today's risk takers who are taking us past the point of no return.

The Theatre of Paula Vogel

The Theatre of Paula Vogel
Author: Lee Brewer Jones
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2023-06-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350251720

In this volume, Lee Brewer Jones examines Paula Vogel as both a playwright and renowned teacher, analyzing texts and early reviews of Vogel's major plays-including Indecent, Desdemona, How I Learned to Drive, and The Baltimore Waltz-before turning attention to her influence upon other major American playwrights, including Sarah Ruhl, Lynn Nottage, and Quiara Alegría Hudes. Chapters explore Vogel's plays in chronological order, consider her early influences and offer detailed accounts of her work in performance. Enriched by an interview with Lynn Nottage and essays from scholars Ana Fernández-Caparrós and Amy Muse, this is a vibrant exploration of Paula Vogel as a major American playwright. By the time Paula Vogel made her Broadway debut with her 2017 Rebecca Taichman collaboration Indecent, she was already an accomplished playwright, with a Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned to Drive (1998) and two Obie Awards. She had also enjoyed a brilliant career as a professor at Brown and Yale with students such as Sarah Ruhl, a MacArthur “Genius” Grant winner, Pulitzer Prize winners Nilo Cruz, Quiara Alegría Hudes, and the only woman to win two Pulitzers for Drama, Lynn Nottage. Vogel's theatre draws upon Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky and uses devices such as “defamiliarization” and “negative empathy” to challenge conventional definitions of protagonists and antagonists.

Performing Arousal

Performing Arousal
Author: Julia Listengarten
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021-12-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350155640

This book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual arts, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection draws on the complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability to address what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, scientific, cultural, and artistic experimentation, and discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Probing “what arouses” in relation to the ethics of representation, the book investigates the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism, underscores the political impact of aroused bodies, and explores how arousal can turn the body into a mediated object.

The Routledge Companion to Contemporary European Theatre and Performance

The Routledge Companion to Contemporary European Theatre and Performance
Author: Ralf Remshardt
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 978
Release: 2023-08-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000913643

This is a comprehensive overview of contemporary European theatre and performance as it enters the third decade of the twenty-first century. It combines critical discussions of key concepts, practitioners, and trends within theatre-making, both in particular countries and across borders, that are shaping European stage practice. With the geography, geopolitics, and cultural politics of Europe more unsettled than at any point in recent memory, this book’s combination of national and thematic coverage offers a balanced understanding of the continent’s theatre and performance cultures. Employing a range of methodologies and critical approaches across its three parts and ninety-four chapters, this book’s first part contains a comprehensive listing of European nations, the second part charts responses to thematic complexes that define current European performance, and the third section gathers a series of case studies that explore the contribution of some of Europe’s foremost theatre makers. Rather than rehearsing rote knowledge, this is a collection of carefully curated, interpretive accounts from an international roster of scholars and practitioners. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary European Theatre and Performance gives undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers and practitioners an indispensable reference resource that can be used broadly across curricula.

Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy

Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy
Author: Michael Meere
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2022-01-13
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 019284413X

Studies the representation of violence in tragedies written for the French stage during the sixteenth century, and explores its connection with issues such as politics, religion, gender, and militantism to place the plays within their historical, cultural, and theatrical contexts.

Staging the Renaissance

Staging the Renaissance
Author: David Scott Kastan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2017-01-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136758240

The essays in Staging the Renaissance show the theatre to be the site of a rich confluence of cultural forces, the place where social meanings are both formed and transformed. The volume unites some of the most challenging issues in contemporary Renaissance studies and some of our best-known critics, including Stephen Orgel, Margaret Ferguson, Cath

The Theatre de la Monnaie and Theatre Life in the 18th Century Austrian Netherlands

The Theatre de la Monnaie and Theatre Life in the 18th Century Austrian Netherlands
Author: Bram Van Oostveldt
Publisher: Academia Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2000
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9789076645032

In the Austrian Netherlands, city culture determined social life: the cities' feeling of independence stimulated the realization of a personal interdependence within them and consolidated a new conception of society and its focal point. The court attempted to unite and appease at the same time. Theater supplied the symbols and the rituals which shaped and contributed to the building of a new identity. This book describes this social progress from the point of view of the theater and in doing so offers the first extensive study of the influence of the Brussels' Monnaie Theatre on theatrical life in the Dutch speaking part of the Southern Netherlands.

Portraits of Medea in Portugal during the 20th and 21st Centuries

Portraits of Medea in Portugal during the 20th and 21st Centuries
Author: Andrés Pociña Pérez
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004383395

The theme of Medea in Portuguese literature has mainly given rise to the writing of new plays on the subject. The central episode in the Portuguese rewritings in the last two centuries is the one that takes place in Corinth, i.e., the break between Medea and Jason, on the one hand, and Medea’s killing of their children in retaliation, on the other. Besides the complex play of feelings that provides this episode with very real human emotions, gender was a key issue in determining the interest that this story elicited in a society in search of social renovation, after profound political transformations – during the transition between dictatorship and democracy which happened in 1974 – that generated instability and established a requirement to find alternative rules of social intercourse in the path towards a new Portugal.