Theatre and Violence

Theatre and Violence
Author: Lucy Nevitt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2013-07-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350316334

If violence is a terrible thing, why do we watch it? Nevitt explores the use of violence in theatre and its effect on spectators. Critically engaging with examples of stage combat, rape, terrorism, wrestling and historical re-enactments, she argues that studying violence through theatre can be part of a desire to create a more peaceful world.

Theatres of Violence

Theatres of Violence
Author: Philip G. Dwyer
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857452991

Massacres and mass killings have always marked if not shaped the history of the world and as such are subjects of increasing interest among historians. The premise underlying this collection is that massacres were an integral, if not accepted part (until quite recently) of warfare, and that they were often fundamental to the colonizing process in the early modern and modern worlds. Making a deliberate distinction between 'massacre' and 'genocide', the editors call for an entirely separate and new subject under the rubric of 'Massacre Studies', dealing with mass killings that are not genocidal in intent. This volume offers a reflection on the nature of mass killings and extreme violence across regions and across centuries, and brings together a wide range of approaches and case studies.

Provocative Eloquence

Provocative Eloquence
Author: Laura L. Mielke
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2019-02-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472131052

In the mid-19th century, rhetoric surrounding slavery was permeated by violence. Slavery’s defenders often used brute force to suppress opponents, and even those abolitionists dedicated to pacifism drew upon visions of widespread destruction. Provocative Eloquence recounts how the theater, long an arena for heightened eloquence and physical contest, proved terribly relevant in the lead up to the Civil War. As antislavery speech and open conflict intertwined, the nation became a stage. The book brings together notions of intertextuality and interperformativity to understand how the confluence of oratorical and theatrical practices in the antebellum period reflected the conflict over slavery and deeply influenced the language that barely contained that conflict. The book draws on a wide range of work in performance studies, theater history, black performance theory, oratorical studies, and literature and law to provide a new narrative of the interaction of oratorical, theatrical, and literary histories of the nineteenth-century U.S.

The Medieval Theater of Cruelty

The Medieval Theater of Cruelty
Author: Jody Enders
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801487835

Why did medieval dramatists weave so many scenes of torture into their plays? Exploring the cultural connections among rhetoric, law, drama, literary creation, and violence, Jody Enders addresses an issue that has long troubled students of the Middle Ages. Theories of rhetoric and law of the time reveal, she points out, that the ideology of torture was a widely accepted means for exploiting such essential elements of the stage and stagecraft as dramatic verisimilitude, pity, fear, and catharsis to fabricate truth. Analyzing the consequences of torture for the history of aesthetics in general and of drama in particular, Enders shows that if the violence embedded in the history of rhetoric is acknowledged, we are better able to understand not only the enduring "theater of cruelty" identified by theorists from Isidore of Seville to Antonin Artaud, but also the continuing modern devotion to the spectacle of pain.

Performing Violence

Performing Violence
Author: Birgit Beumers
Publisher: Intellect (UK)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009
Genre: Russian drama
ISBN: 9781841502694

The so-called "New Russian Drama" emerged at the end of the twentieth century, following a long period of decline in dramatic writing in the late Soviet and post-Soviet era. In Performing Violence, Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky examine the representation of violence in these new dramatic works by young Russian playwrights. Reflecting the disappointment in Yeltsin's democratic reforms and Putin's neoconservative politics, the plays focus on political and social representations of violence, its performances, and its justifications. As the first English-language study of Russian drama and theatre in the twenty-first century, Performing Violence seeks a vantage point for the analysis of brutality in post-Soviet culture. While previous generations had preferred poetry and prose, this new breed of authors--the Presnyakov brothers, Evgeni Grishkovets, and Vasili Sigarev among them--have garnered international recognition for their fierce plays. This book investigates the violent portrayal of the identity crisis of a generation as represented in their theatrical works, and will be a key text for students and scholars of drama, Russian studies, and literature.

History of Violence

History of Violence
Author: Édouard Louis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2018-06-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374170592

"Originally published in French in 2016 by Seuil, France, as Historie de la violence"--Title page verso.

The Theater of Operations

The Theater of Operations
Author: Joseph Masco
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2014-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822375990

How did the most powerful nation on earth come to embrace terror as the organizing principle of its security policy? In The Theater of Operations, Joseph Masco locates the origins of the present-day U.S. counterterrorism apparatus in the Cold War's "balance of terror." He shows how, after the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. global War on Terror mobilized a wide range of affective, conceptual, and institutional resources established during the Cold War to enable a new planetary theater of operations. Tracing how specific aspects of emotional management, existential danger, state secrecy, and threat awareness have evolved as core aspects of the American social contract, Masco draws on archival, media, and ethnographic resources to offer a new portrait of American national security culture. Undemocratic and unrelenting, this counterterror state prioritizes speculative practices over facts, and ignores everyday forms of violence across climate, capital, and health in an unprecedented effort to anticipate and eliminate terror threats—real, imagined, and emergent.

Theater and Violence

Theater and Violence
Author: Tom Sellar
Publisher: A Special Issue of Theater
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2005
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780822366157

As violence escalates around the world, its victims and perpetrators struggle to develop comprehensible narratives to present truthful accounts of history and experience. This special issue of Theater--a collection of theater artists' responses to contemporary events--examines the human psyche and its capacity for violence and explores theater's possibilities for political dissent. In Theater and Violence, through interviews, play excerpts, and full-length plays--including the first American publication of two major German playwrights and directors--theater artists offer their own narratives for humankind's violent psychologies. One full-length play, Falk Richter's Seven Seconds (In God We Trust), probes the mind of an American pilot moments before he releases a bomb on a city below. Another, René Pollesch's 24 Hours Are Not a Day, humorously explores the ironies and pathologies of globalization after September 11. The issue also includes a commentary on the National Endowment for the Arts' Shakespeare presentations for the U.S. military; interviews with Russian theater artists on the first anniversary of the Chechen rebels' siege of a Moscow theater; and Jonathan Kalb's powerful adaptation of Heiner Müller's Mauser, set in Tikrit. Contributors. Josh Fox, Gitta Honegger, Jonathan Kalb, Anna Kohler, James Leverett, Mark Lord, Marlene Norst, René Pollesch, Falk Richter, Yana Ross, Scott Saul, Tom Sellar, Catherine Sheehy, Robert Woodruff

The Theater of War

The Theater of War
Author: Bryan Doerries
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2016-08-23
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0307949729

For years theater director Bryan Doerries has been producing ancient Greek tragedies for a wide range of at-risk people in society. His is the personal and deeply passionate story of a life devoted to reclaiming the timeless power of an ancient artistic tradition to comfort the afflicted. Doerries leads an innovative public health project—Theater of War—that produces ancient dramas for current and returned soldiers, people in recovery from alcohol and substance abuse, tornado and hurricane survivors, and more. Tracing a path that links the personal to the artistic to the social and back again, Doerries shows us how suffering and healing are part of a timeless process in which dialogue and empathy are inextricably linked. The originality and generosity of Doerries’s work is startling, and The Theater of War—wholly unsentimental, but intensely felt and emotionally engaging—is a humane, knowledgeable, and accessible book that will both inspire and enlighten.