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DAI (enough)
A Play
Iris Bahr
Northwestern University Press, 2009

Set in a Tel Aviv café in the moments before a suicide bomber enters, Iris Bahr’s 2008 Lucille Lortel Award–winning DAI (enough) courageously speaks to tragic current events. Bahr plays eleven different characters who span the ideological and class spectrum of Israeli society, including a Zionist kibbutznik, an evangelical from America funding an Armageddon fantasy, a West Bank settler, a snooty expat living in Long Island, and a Palestinian professor trying to keep her son from taking the path of extremism. Thanks to the emotional depth and honesty with which Bahr endows these characters and their individual stories, a complex portrait of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict emerges. Alternately very funny and tragic, DAI (enough) is a brave attempt to humanize the headlines.

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Dance, Disability and Law
InVisible Difference
Edited by Sarah Whatley, Charlotte Waelde, Shawn Harmon, Abbe Brown, Karen Wood, and Hetty Blades
Intellect Books, 2018
This collection is the first book to focus on the intersection of dance, disability, and the law. Bringing together a range of writers from different disciplines, it considers the question of how we value, validate, and speak about diversity in performance practice, with a specific focus on the experience of differently-abled dance artists within the changing world of the arts in the United Kingdom.  Contributors address the legal frameworks that support or inhibit the work of disabled dancers and explore factors that affect their full participation, including those related to policy, arts funding, dance criticism, and audience reception.
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Dancing across the Page
Narrative and Embodied Ways of Knowing
Karen Barbour
Intellect Books, 2011

An innovative exploration of understanding through dance, Dancing across the Page draws on the frameworks of phenomenology, feminism, and postmodernism to offer readers an understanding of performance studies that is grounded in personal narrative and lived experience. Through accounts of contemporary dance making, improvisation, and dance education, Karen Barbour explores a diversity of themes, including power; activism; and cultural, gendered, and personal identity. An intimate yet rigorous investigation of creativity in dance, Dancing across the Page emphasizes embodied knowledge and imagination as a basis for creative action in the world.

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Dancing Odissi
Paratopic Performances of Gender and State
Anurima Banerji
Seagull Books, 2018
Odissi holds iconic status as one of the eight classical dance forms recognized and promoted by the Indian government. This book traces the dance’s transformation from its historical role as a regional artistic practice to its modern incarnation as transnational spectacle, with a focus on the state’s regulation of the dance form and the performances of gender embedded within it. Using an interdisciplinary approach that brings together social history, political theory, and dance and performance studies, the book explores three original themes: the idea of the state as a choreographic agent; the performance of “extraordinary genders,” or those identities and acts that lie outside everyday norms; and the original concept of the “paratopia”—a space of alterity produced by performance. Through an investigation of these themes, the author explores how Odissi has shown the potential to challenge dominant cultural imperatives in India.
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The Danton Case and Thermidor
Two Plays
Stanislawa Przybyszewska
Northwestern University Press, 1989
Stanislawa Przybyszewski is recognized as a major twentieth-century playwright on the basis of her trilogy about the French Revolution, of which The Danton Case and Thermidor are the principal parts. The Danton Case depicts the battle for power between two exceptional individuals: the corrupt sentimental idealist, Danton, and the incorruptible genius of the Revolution, Robespierre. Thermidor shows the final playing out of this drama, as Robespierre, left alone with the heroic absolutist Saint-Just, foresees the ruin of himself and his cause, and in his despair predicts that hatred, war, and capitalism will steal the Revolution and corrupt nineteenth-century man.
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Dark Matter
Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance
Andrew Sofer
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Dark Matter maps the invisible dimension of theater whose effects are felt everywhere in performance. Examining phenomena such as hallucination, offstage character, offstage action, sexuality, masking, technology, and trauma, Andrew Sofer engagingly illuminates the invisible in different periods of postclassical western theater and drama. He reveals how the invisible continually structures and focuses an audience’s theatrical experience, whether it’s black magic in Doctor Faustus, offstage sex in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, masked women in The Rover, self-consuming bodies in Suddenly Last Summer, or surveillance technology in The Archbishop’s Ceiling. Each discussion pinpoints new and striking facets of drama and performance that escape sight. Taken together, Sofer’s lively case studies illuminate how dark matter is woven into the very fabric of theatrical representation. Written in an accessible style and grounded in theater studies but interdisciplinary by design, Dark Matter will appeal to theater and performance scholars, literary critics, students, and theater practitioners, particularly playwrights and directors.

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Darkness We Carry
Robert Skloot
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988

Offering an informed critical approach, Skloot discusses more than two dozen plays and one film that confront the issues and stories of the Holocaust.

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Darwin Meets Einstein
On the Meaning of Science
Frans W. Saris
Amsterdam University Press, 2009

Why do humans engage in scientific research? For some, it’s simply a career. Others are drawn to science for its potential financial rewards. And still others do it out of competitiveness—to be the first in their field. But in Darwin Meets Einstein Frans W. Saris argues that in our postmodern times we have lost the meaning of science—that science is not about competition, nor about creating wealth, nor about the joy of discovery. Science is for survival—the survival of humans, the survival of life.

In this accessible collection of essays and columns, Saris brings together in conversation a number of great minds—Charles Darwin, Baruch Spinoza, Niko Tinbergen, Francis Bacon, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Franz Kafka, and Albert Einstein—to answer the question: why science? With selections like “Diary of a Physicist,” “The Scientific Life,” “The Mother of All Knowledge,” and “Science Through the Looking Glass of Literature,” Darwin Meets Einstein will entertain its readers and ultimately encourage them to reconsider the meaning—and the purpose—of science.

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The Death and Life of Drama
Reflections on Writing and Human Nature
By Lance Lee
University of Texas Press, 2005

What makes a film "work," so that audiences come away from the viewing experience refreshed and even transformed in the way they understand themselves and the world around them? In The Death and Life of Drama, veteran screenwriter and screenwriting teacher Lance Lee tackles this question in a series of personal essays that thoroughly analyze drama's role in our society, as well as the elements that structure all drama, from the plays of ancient Athens to today's most popular movies.

Using examples from well-known classical era and recent films, Lee investigates how writers handle dramatic elements such as time, emotion, morality, and character growth to demonstrate why some films work while others do not. He seeks to define precisely what "action" is and how the writer and the viewer understand dramatic reality. He looks at various kinds of time in drama, explores dramatic context from Athens to the present, and examines the concept of comedy. Lee also proposes a novel "five act" structure for drama that takes account of the characters' past and future outside the "beginning, middle, and end" of the story. Deftly balancing philosophical issues and practical concerns, The Death and Life of Drama offers a rich understanding of the principles of successful dramatic writing for screenwriters and indeed everyone who enjoys movies and wants to know why some films have such enduring appeal for so many people.

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The Death of Comedy
Erich Segal
Harvard University Press, 2001

In a grand tour of comic theater over the centuries, Erich Segal traces the evolution of the classical form from its early origins in a misogynistic quip by the sixth-century B.C. Susarion, through countless weddings and happy endings, to the exasperated monosyllables of Samuel Beckett. With fitting wit, profound erudition lightly worn, and instructive examples from the mildly amusing to the uproarious, his book fully illustrates comedy's glorious life cycle from its first breath to its death in the Theater of the Absurd.

An exploration of various landmarks in the history of a genre that flourished almost unchanged for two millennia, The Death of Comedy revisits the obscenities and raucous twists of Aristophanes, the neighborly pleasantries of Menander, the tomfoolery and farce of Plautus. Segal shows how the ribaldry of foiled adultery, a staple of Roman comedy, reappears in force on the stages of Restoration England. And he gives us a closer look at the schadenfreude--delight in someone else's misfortune--that marks Machiavelli's and Marlowe's works.

At every turn in Segal's analysis--from Shakespeare to Molière to Shaw--another facet of the comic art emerges, until finally, he argues, "the head conquers and the heart dies": Letting the intellect take the lead, Cocteau, Ionesco, and Beckett smother comedy as we know it. The book is a tour de force, a sweeping panorama of the art and history of comedy, as insightful as it is delightful to read.

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Democratic Swarms
Ancient Comedy and the Politics of the People
Page duBois
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Considers how ancient Greek comedy offers a model for present-day politics.
 
With Democratic Swarms, Page duBois revisits the role of Greek comedy in ancient politics, considering how it has been overlooked as a political medium by modern theorists and critics. Moving beyond the popular readings of ancient Greece through the lens of tragedy, she calls for a revitalized look at Greek comedy. Rather than revisiting the sufferings of Oedipus and his family or tragedy’s relationship to questions of sovereignty, this book calls for comedy—its laughter, its free speech, its wild swarming animal choruses, and its rebellious women—to inform another model of democracy.
 
Ancient comedy has been underplayed in the study of Greek drama. Yet, with the irrepressible energy of the comic swarm, it provides a unique perspective on everyday life, gender and sexuality, and the utopian politics of the classical period of Athenian democracy. Using the concepts of swarm intelligence and nomadic theory, duBois augments tragic thought with the resistant, utopian, libidinous, and often joyous communal legacy of comedy, and she connects the lively anti-authoritarianism of the ancient comic chorus with the social justice movements of today.
 
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Demons and Dancers
Performance in Late Antiquity
Ruth Webb
Harvard University Press, 2008

Compared to the wealth of information available to us about classical tragedy and comedy, not much is known about the culture of pantomime, mime, and dance in late antiquity. Charges of obscenity and polemical anti-theater discourse have, at times, erased these popular performance traditions from the modern imagination. Demons and Dancers returns us to the times and places where those great ancient theaters were more than picturesque ruins dotting the Mediterranean landscape.

Ruth Webb fills this gap in our knowledge of the ancient world and provides us with a richly detailed look at social life in the late antique period through an investigation of its performance culture. The book focuses on the eastern empire, from Greece proper to modern-day Turkey and Egypt, between the second and sixth centuries CE. Using some of the tools provided by modern performance theory, this book explains how audiences interpreted the actions on stage, how the status of male and female performers shifted across time and place, how skilled the actors actually were (it was commonplace to dismiss these performers for their lack of skill), and what role spectacles involving spoken and sung words, as well as stylized gestures, had in Greco-Roman civic life.

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Directing Shakespeare
A Scholar Onstage
Sidney Homan
Ohio University Press, 2004

An impossible question from a Chinese actor—“Why is Shakespeare eternal?”—drove Sidney Homan after fifty years in the theater to ponder just what makes Shakespeare…well, Shakespeare. The result, Directing Shakespeare, reflects the two worlds in which Homan operates—as a scholar and teacher on campus, and as a director and actor in professional and university theaters. His concern is the entire process, beginning in the lonely period when the director develops a concept, and moving into increasingly larger realms: interaction with stage designers; rehearsals; and performances in which the audience’s response further shapes the play.

Homan recounts the experience of staging King Lear accompanied by a musical score for piano, violin, and cello played live onstage. He discusses the challenge of making and trying to justify cuts in Hamlet. A casual remark from an actress leads to a feminist production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He describes the delicate collaboration between director and performer as he works with actors preparing for The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Hamlet. Other chapters treat a set designer’s bold red drapes that influenced the director’s concept for Julius Caesar, and the cross-influence of back-to-back runs of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstsern Are Dead and Hamlet.

In a highly personal concluding chapter, Homan tells of joyously working with a spontaneous young actor playing Puck and with an audience of unruly teenagers who wept at a performance of Lear.

Delightfully written, and filled with practical insights, Directing Shakespeare draws together scholars, critics, and those who work in the theater to bring the written word to life.

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Disability Arts and Culture
Methods and Approaches
Edited by Petra Kuppers
Intellect Books, 2019
A practical, accessible introduction to the study of disability art and culture around the world.

What does it mean to approach disability-focused cultural production and consumption as generative sites of meaning-making? Disability Arts and Culture seeks the answer to this question and more in an exploration of disability studies within the arts and beyond. In this collection, international scholars and practitioners use ethnographic and participatory action research approaches alongside textual and discourse analysis to discover how disability figures into our contemporary world. Chapters explore deaf theater productions, representations of disability on screen, community engagement projects, disabled bodies in dance, and more, in a comprehensive overview of disability studies that will benefit both practitioner and scholar.
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Dollhouse
A Play
Rebecca Gilman
Northwestern University Press, 2010

Nora seems to have it all: a successful husband, three adorable children, and a beautiful home in the tony Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. But what looks like the perfect life is woefully incomplete, propped up by dark secrets and bitter betrayals. While her husband, Terry, singlemindedly climbs the career ladder, Nora’s compulsive shopping and scheming pushes her ever further from freedom and self-fulfillment. As the lies on which their life is built gradually emerge, Nora comes to realize the true cost of what she thinks she has always wanted. From Ibsen’s masterpiece A Doll’s House, award-winning playwright Rebecca Gilman crafts a bold and insightful update. This contemporary adaptation brings Ibsen’s classic into our century with a sharp eye for social satire and moments of dark comedy coupled with powerful human drama.

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Don Álvaro, or, The Force of Fate
Ángel de Saavedra
Catholic University of America Press, 2005
In this English edition designed for either classroom use or performance, Robert Fedorchek presents a readable translation faithful to the tone and spirit of the original.
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Drama as Text and Performance
Strindberg's and Bergman's Miss Julie
Egil Törnqvist
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
This book is a study of August Strindberg’s famous drama Miss Julie, presented in both Swedish and English. Since it was first performed in 1888, Miss Julie has became one of the most successful plays written by Strindberg, widely considered one of the pioneers of modern drama. The book provides a penetrating analysis of the author’s text, followed by a close investigation of Ingmar Bergman’s much lauded 1985 production at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Drama as Text and Performance is intended as a paradigmatic illustration of similarities and differences between the two media—textand performance and their recipients, readers and spectators.

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Drama in English From the Middle Ages to the Early Twentieth Century
Christopher J. Wheatley
Catholic University of America Press, 2016
At a time when good editions of drama in English are prohibitively expensive and online texts are unedited and lack the apparatus necessary for students to understand and contextualize the plays, this anthology affordably illustrates every significant genre of drama in the English language from the late fourteenth century to the early twentieth century, with plays from England, Ireland, and the United States of America. The mystery and morality plays of the Middle Ages, Renaissance comedy, tragedy and meta-theater, Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy, tragedy, and ballad opera, nineteenth-century melodrama, and early twentieth century realism and naturalism are all presented with the introductions glossaries and notes suitable for a college level reader by an editor with a quarter of a century of experience teaching courses on the history of drama in English. The plays both reflect their times and critique them, while remaining stageable today. The Wakefield Master, The York Realist, Marlowe, Jonson, Dryden, Wycherley, Gay, Boucicault, Synge, and Shaw are some of the playwrights in this representative collection of plays that reveal both the popular appeal of the English-language theater and the dazzling dramatic artistry it embodied over a period of six centuries. Further the collection is in "old spelling" and is thus a useful sourcebook for those interested in the history of the English language.
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Drama in the Language Classroom
What Every ESL Teacher Needs to Know
Carmela Romano Gillette and Deric McNish
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Drama in the Language Classroom weaves together cutting-edge research and practices from the fields of theater and TESOL. After providing an overview of how drama can be used in the language classroom, Carmela Romano Gillette (a TESOL expert) and Deric McNish (an expert in actor training) present a collection of resources teachers need to begin using drama, including practical classroom-tested and evidence-based techniques. They show how theater, performance, and improvisation can help students build confidence, develop a deeper context for speaking, and create authentic opportunities for language use. In addition, they outline the para- and extra-linguistic techniques that can improve expression and meaningful communication. Each section includes sample activities, such as script analysis for improving fluency, and assessment suggestions. Readers do not need to have experience with performance or drama to learn how to incorporate these practices into the ESL classroom. 
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The Drama of Everyday Life
Karl Scheibe
Harvard University Press, 2000

Psychologists, says the old joke, know everything there is to know about the college sophomore and the white rat. But what about the rest of us, older than the former, bigger than the latter, with lives more labyrinthine than either? In this ambitious book, Karl E. Scheibe aims to take psychology out of its rut and bring it into contact with the complex lives that most people quietly live.

Drama, Scheibe reminds us, is no more confined to the theater than religion is to the church or education to the schoolroom. Accordingly, he brings to his reflection on psychology the drama of literature, poetry, philosophy, history, music, and theater. The essence of drama is transformation: the transformation of the quotidian world into something that commands interest and stimulates conversation. It is this dramatic transformation that Scheibe seeks in psychology as he pursues a series of suggestive questions, such as: Why is boredom the central motivational issue of our time? Why are eating and sex the biological foundations of all human dramas? Why is indifference a natural condition, caring a dramatic achievement? Why is schizophrenia disappearing? Why does gambling have cosmic significance?

Writing with elegance and passion, Scheibe asks us to take note of the self-representation, performance, and scripts of the drama that is our everyday life. In doing so, he challenges our dispirited senses and awakens psychology to a new realm of dramatic possibility.

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The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers, 1939-1985 (CW33)
Eric Voegelin, Edited & Intro by William Petropulos & Gilbert Weiss
University of Missouri Press, 2004
This second volume of Eric Voegelin’s miscellaneous papers contains unpublished writings from the time of his forced emigration from Austria in 1938 until his death in 1985. The volume’s focus is on dialogue and discussion, presenting Voegelin in the role of lecturer, discussant, and respondent. “The Drama of Humanity” presents the Walter Turner Candler Lectures delivered in four parts at Emory University in 1967. This text, a small book in itself, addresses the themes of “The Contemporary Situation,” “Man in the Cosmos,” “The Epiphany of Man,” and “Man in Revolt,” providing the reader with a good introduction to Voegelin’s later work.
Another extensive text included in this volume is “Conversations with Eric Voegelin at the Thomas More Institute” in Montreal. These exchanges include lectures and discussions given by Voegelin between 1967 and 1976. A number of other sections offer insight into Voegelin’s intellectual development over a period of forty years. These include the complete “Foreword” to the second edition of The Political Religions, which is published here for the first time; “Notes on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets;” the “Cycle Theory and Disintegrations;” “What Is Political Theory?;” “The Spiritual and Political Future of the Western World;” “Notes on ‘Civilization and Foreign Affairs;’” “Structures of Consciousness;” “The Beyond and Its Parousia;” and the 1983 “Responses at the Panel Discussion of ‘The Beginning of the Beginning.’”
Several lengthy excerpts from conference dialogues with other scholars are also included: “The West and the Meaning of Industrial Society,” “Natural Law in Political Theory,” and “Man in Political Institutions.” Volume 33 concludes with Voegelin’s “Autobiographical Statement at the Age of Eighty-Two,” his last public utterance on the course of his life and his life’s work. By choosing dialogue as the focus of this volume, Petropulos and Weiss are able to show not only the extent to which Voegelin engaged in an exchange of ideas but also his abiding concern for the practical and theoretical conditions necessary in order for this exchange to take place.
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The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800-1865
Michael J. Collins
University of Michigan Press, 2016
The Drama of the American Short Story, 18001865 argues that to truly understand the short story form, one must look at how it was shaped by the lively, chaotic, and deeply politicized world of 19th-century transatlantic theater and performance culture. By resurrecting long-neglected theatrical influences on representative works of short fiction, Michael J. Collins demonstrates that it was the unruly culture of the stage that first energized this most significant of American art forms. Whether it was Washington Irving’s first job as theater critic, Melville’s politically controversial love of British drama, Alcott’s thwarted dreams of stage stardom, Poe and Lippard’s dramatizations of peculiarly bloodthirsty fraternity hazings, or Hawthorne’s fascination with automata, theater was a key imaginative site for the major pioneers of the American short story.

The book shows how perspectives from theater studies, anthropology, and performance studies can enrich readings of the short-story form. Moving beyond arbitrary distinctions between performance and text, it suggests that this literature had a social life and was engaged with questions of circumatlantic and transnational culture. It suggests that the short story itself was never conceived as a nationalist literary form, but worked by mobilizing cosmopolitan connections and meanings. In so doing, the book resurrects a neglected history of American Federalism and its connections to British literary forms.
 


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Drama, Play, and Game
English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period
Lawrence M. Clopper
University of Chicago Press, 2001
How was it possible for drama, especially biblical representations, to appear in the Christian West given the church's condemnation of the theatrum of the ancient world?In a book with radical implications for the study of medieval literature, Lawrence Clopper resolves this perplexing question.

Drama, Play, and Game demonstrates that the theatrum repudiated by medieval clerics was not "theater" as we understand the term today. Clopper contends that critics have misrepresented Western stage history because they have assumed that theatrum designates a place where drama is performed. While theatrum was thought of as a site of spectacle during the Middle Ages, the term was more closely connected with immodest behavior and lurid forms of festive culture. Clerics were not opposed to liturgical representations in churches, but they strove ardently to suppress May games, ludi, festivals, and liturgical parodies. Medieval drama, then, stemmed from a more vernacular tradition than previously acknowledged-one developed by England's laity outside the boundaries of clerical rule.

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Drama, Poetry and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy
The Life and Works of Leonora Bernardi
Virginia Cox and Lisa Sampson
University College London, 2023
The first-ever study of Leonora Bernardi’s life along with a modern edition of her recently discovered literary corpus.

Leonora Bernardi (1559–1616), a gentlewoman of Lucca, was a highly regarded poet, dramatist, and singer. She was active in the brilliant courts of Ferrara and Florence at a time when creative women enjoyed exceptional visibility in Italy. Like many such figures, she has since suffered historical neglect. Drama, Poetry and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy presents the first-ever study of Bernardi’s life along with a modern edition of her recently discovered literary corpus, which mostly exists in manuscripts. Her writings are presented in the original Italian with new English translations, scholarly notes, and critical essays. Based on new archival research, the substantial opening section reconstructs Bernardi’s unusually colorful life. The second major section presents her pastoral tragicomedy Clorilli, one of the earliest secular dramatic works by a woman. The third section presents Bernardi’s secular and religious verse, which engaged with new trends in lyric and poetry for music, and was set by various key composers across Italy. The volume thus firmly positions Leonora Bernardi as a distinctive voice and dynamic player in the extraordinarily rich social, cultural, and geo-political networks of late-Renaissance Italy.  
 
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The Drama Therapy Decision Tree
Connecting Drama Therapy Interventions to Treatment
Edited by Paige Dickinson and Sally Bailey
Intellect Books, 2020

The Drama Therapy Decision Tree provides an integrated model for therapeutic decision-making by deconstructing the processes of choosing drama therapy interventions. The authors strive to provide a common language for communicating what drama therapists do in terms of diagnoses and interventions, especially for students and early career professionals in the field.

The book provides a systematic method for drama therapists and drama therapy students to use to determine the most appropriate therapy technique for clients. Paige Dickinson and Sally Bailey have identified and analyzed their own experiences with the task, and here they explain how to put learned theory into practice. In doing so, they provide early career drama therapy professionals a reliable and effective tool for making clinical decisions and offer practitioners a point of reference in addressing the socio-emotional needs of their clients.

The authors explain the basic tools drama therapists use in therapy situations, identify the core healing concepts of the practice, discuss the basic treatment planning process, and explain how these components are used together to identify an  appropriate type of intervention for the client. They also offer examples of how this system can be applied to a variety of common diagnoses, and the appendices provide resources to connect drama therapy interventions to global treatment outcomes.

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Drama-based Pedagogy
Activating Learning Across the Curriculum
Kathryn Dawson and Bridget Kiger Lee
Intellect Books, 1995
Drama-based Pedagogy examines the mutually beneficial relationship between drama and education, championing the versatility of drama-based teaching and learning designed in conjunction with classroom curricula. Written by seasoned educators and based upon their own extensive experience in diverse learning contexts, this book bridges the gap between theories of drama in education and classroom practice.

Kathryn Dawson and Bridget Kiger Lee provide an extensive range of tried and tested strategies, planning processes, and learning experiences, in order to create a uniquely accessible manual for those who work, think, train, and learn in educational and/or artistic settings. It is the perfect companion for professional development and university courses, as well as for already established educators who wish to increase student engagement and ownership of learning.
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The Dramatic Writer's Companion, Second Edition
Tools to Develop Characters, Cause Scenes, and Build Stories
Will Dunne
University of Chicago Press, 2017
In just eight years, The Dramatic Writer’s Companion has become a classic among playwrights and screenwriters. Thousands have used its self-contained character, scene, and story exercises to spark creativity, hone their writing, and improve their scripts.
Having spent decades working with dramatists to refine and expand their existing plays and screenplays, Dunne effortlessly blends condensed dramatic theory with specific action steps—over sixty workshop-tested exercises that can be adapted to virtually any individual writing process and dramatic script. Dunne’s in-depth method is both instinctual and intellectual, allowing writers to discover new actions for their characters and new directions for their stories. The exercises can be used by those just starting the writing process and by those who have scripts already in development.  With each exercise rooted in real-life issues from Dunne’s workshops, readers of this companion will find the combined experiences of more than fifteen hundred workshops in a single guide.
This second edition is fully aligned with a brand-new companion book, Character, Scene, and Story, which offers forty-two additional activities to help writers more fully develop their scripts. The two books include cross-references between related exercises, though each volume can also stand alone.
No ordinary guide to plotting, this handbook centers on the principle that character is key. “The character is not something added to the scene or to the story,” writes Dunne. “Rather, the character is the scene. The character is the story.” With this new edition, Dunne’s remarkable creative method will continue to be the go-to source for anyone hoping to take their story to the stage.
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The Dramatic Writer's Companion
Tools to Develop Characters, Cause Scenes, and Build Stories
Will Dunne
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Moss Hart once said that you never really learn how to write a play; you only learn how to write this play. Crafted with that adage in mind, The Dramatic Writer’s Companion is designed to help writers explore their own ideas in order to develop the script in front of them. No ordinary guide to plotting, this handbook starts with the principle that character is key. “The character is not something added to the scene or to the story,” writes author Will Dunne. “Rather, the character is the scene. The character is the story.”

Having spent decades working with dramatists to refine and expand their existing plays and screenplays, Dunne effortlessly blends condensed dramatic theory with specific action steps—over sixty workshop-tested exercises that can be adapted to virtually any individual writing process and dramatic script. Dunne’s in-depth method is both instinctual and intellectual, allowing writers to discover new actions for their characters and new directions for their stories.

Dunne’s own experience is a crucial element of this guide. His plays have been selected by the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center for three U.S. National Playwrights Conferences and have earned numerous honors, including a Charles MacArthur Fellowship, four Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards, and two Drama-Logue Playwriting Awards. Thousands of individuals have already benefited from his workshops, and The Dramatic Writer’s Companion promises to bring his remarkable creative method to an even wider audience.

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Dramatizing Dementia
Madness In The Plays Of Tennessee Williams
Jacqueline O'Connor
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
Jacqueline O’Connor examines how Tennessee Williams portrayed society’s treatment of the mentally ill. The critical approach is eclectic and the author draws on a variety of psychological, literary, and biographical sources.
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Dramaturging Personal Narratives
Who Am I and Where Is Here?
Judith Rudakoff
Intellect Books, 2015
How do people identify, locate, or express home? Displaced, exiled, colonized, and disenfranchised people the world over grapple with this question. Dramaturging Personal Narratives explores the relationship between personal and cultural identity by investigating how people perceive and creatively express self, home, and homeland through showcasing a variety of innovative artistic processes and resulting projects. Written in clear and accessible language, this book will appeal to professional and community-based artists who work in a wide variety of genres, scholars from creative fields, and both students and teachers at all levels of education who are interested in learning more about generating, developing, and disseminating artistic work inspired by personal narratives.
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Dubious Spectacle
Extremities of Theater, 1976-2000
Herbert Blau
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

Spanning a quarter of a century, the essays in this book rehearse, in the movement of memory and cross-reflection, an extensive career in theater. The work of Herbert Blau-his directing, writing, and criticism-has been a determining force during this period as theater encounters theory.

Blau’s struggle to bring a critical intelligence to the American stage goes back half a century, to the quiescent postwar years (which he has eloquently described in The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto). His innovations in performance began with early productions of now-canonical plays that were hardly known at that time (works by Brecht, Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Duerrenmatt, and others). His experience is as distinctive as his versatile habits of mind and conceptual urgency of style.

If the impossible takes a little time (as the title of one essay states), Blau’s struggle now continues in a theoretical vein. Performance-and his own compelling writing- has moved across other genres and disciplines into fashion, politics, sexuality, and theory. His diversity of thought is demonstrated here in commentaries about the newer modes of performance (including conceptual and body art), various American playwrights, Renaissance drama, new music and theater, voice, the senses and the baroque, and the photographic image. As the essays reflect upon each other, a kind of cultural history, with inflections of autobiography, develops-which is what readers of Blau’s previous books have come to expect.


 
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front cover of The Duchess of Suffolk
The Duchess of Suffolk
Richard Dutton and Steven Galbraith
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
With the inaugural edition of the Early Modern Drama Texts series, Richard Dutton and Steven K. Galbraith illuminate the only surviving work of playwright and actor Thomas Drue. First performed by the Palsgrave’s Men at the Fortune Theater in 1624, The Duchess of Suffolk dramatizes the exile of Protestant noblewoman Katherine Willoughby (1519–80) during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary I (1516–58). Drawing from popular accounts in works by John Foxe and Thomas Deloney, Drue created a narrative of exaggerated peril, as the Duchess and her companions are chased across the continent. The embellished history evokes many iconic figures of the Reformation, from the celebrated Oxford Martyrs Hugh Latimer, Thomas Cranmer, and Nicholas Ridley to Bishop Edmund Bonner, whose infamous reputation had earned him the soubriqet “bloody Bonner.” A tragicomic history, The Duchess of Suffolk still resonated when it was written and performed in early seventeenth-century England some seventy years later.
 
With this volume, Dutton and Galbraith provide a critical apparatus that situates The Duchess of Suffolk in historical context and suggests an explanation for its continued resonance. They account for the play’s censorship in 1624 by detailing how it evoked contemporary parallels to the controversial foreign policy of King James I. More specifically, the editors offer an introduction that includes a historical overview of the author, staging, printing, and reception. Facing facsimiles of the original are pages with the updated text, complete with annotations to clarify language and staging details. This edition of The Duchess of Suffolk will have something to offer to early modern drama scholars as well as scholars of book history.
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