The profound political, economic, and social changes in China in the second half of the twentieth century have produced a wealth of scholarship; less studied however is how cultural events, and theater reforms in particular, contributed to the dynamic landscape of contemporary Chinese society. Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform fills this gap by investigating the theories and practice of socialist theater and their effects on a diverse range of genres, including Western-style spoken drama, Chinese folk opera, dance drama, Shanghai opera, Beijing opera, and rural theater. Focusing on the 1950s and ’60s, when theater art occupied a prominent political and cultural role in Maoist China, this book examines the efforts to remake theater in a socialist image. It explores the unique dynamics between official discourse, local politics, performance practice, and audience reception that emerged under the pressures of highly politicized cultural reform as well as the off-stage, lived impact of rapid policy change on individuals and troupes obscured by the public record. This multidisciplinary collection by leading scholars covers a wide range of perspectives, geographical locations, specific research methods, genres of performance, and individual knowledge and experience. The richly diverse approach leads readers through a nuanced and complex cultural landscape as it contributes significantly to our understanding of a crucial period in the development of modern Chinese theater and performance.

In Returning the Gaze Anna Everett revises American film history by recuperating the extensive and all-but-forgotten participation of black film critics during the early twentieth century. While much of the existing scholarship on blacks and the cinema focuses on image studies and stereotypical representations, this work excavates a wealth of early critical writing on the cinema by black cultural critics, academics, journalists, poets, writers, and film fans.
Culling black newspapers, magazines, scholarly and political journals, and monographs, Everett has produced an unparalleled investigation of black critical writing on the early cinema during the era of racial segregation in America. Correcting the notion that black critical interest in the cinema began and ended with the well-documented press campaign against D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, she discovers that as early as 1909 black newspapers produced celebratory discourses about the cinema as a much-needed corrective to the predominance of theatrical blackface minstrelsy. She shows how, even before the Birth of a Nation controversy, the black press succeeded in drawing attention to both the callous commercial exploitation of lynching footage and the varied work of black film entrepreneurs. The book also reveals a feast of film commentaries that were produced during the “roaring twenties” and the jazz age by such writers as W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as additional pieces that were written throughout the Depression and the pre– and post–war periods. Situating this wide-ranging and ideologically complex material in its myriad social, political, economic, and cultural contexts, Everett aims to resuscitate a historical tradition for contemporary black film literature and criticism.
Returning the Gaze will appeal to scholars and students of film, black and ethnic studies, American studies, cultural studies, literature, and journalism.

In contemporary culture, existing audiovisual recordings are constantly reused and repurposed for various ends, raising questions regarding the ethics of such appropriations, particularly when the recording  depicts actual people and events. Every reuse of a preexisting recording is, on some level, a misuse in that it was not intended or at least anticipated by the original maker, but not all misuses are necessarily unethical. In fact, there are many instances of productive misuse that seem justified. At the same time, there are other instances in which the misuse shades into abuse. Documentary scholars have long engaged with the question of the ethical responsibility of documentary makers in relation to their subjects. But what happens when this responsibility is set at a remove, when the recording already exists for the taking and repurposing? Reuse, Misuse and Abuse surveys a range of contemporary films and videos that appropriate preexisting footage and attempts to theorize their ethical implications.

Between 1960 and 2010, a new generation of British avant-garde theater companies, directors, designers, and performers emerged. Some of these companies and individuals have endured to become part of theater history while others have disappeared from the scene, mutated into new forms, or become part of the establishment. Reverberations across Small-Scale British Theatre at long last puts these small-scale British theater companies and personalities in the scholarly spotlight. By questioning what “Britishness” meant in relation to the small-scale work of these practitioners, contributors articulate how it is reflected in the goals, manifestos, and aesthetics of these companies. 

The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism traces intimate encounters between activists and local people of the civil rights movement through an archive of Black and Brown avant-gardism. In the 1960s, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists engaged with people of color working in poor communities to experiment with creative approaches to liberation through theater, media, storytelling, and craftmaking. With a dearth of resources and an abundance of urgency, SNCC activists improvised new methods of engaging with communities that created possibilities for unexpected encounters through programs such as The Free Southern Theater, El Teatro Campesino, and the Poor People’s Corporation. 

Reading the output of these programs, Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder argues that intimacy-making became an extension of participatory democracy. In doing so, Fielder supplants the success-failure binary for understanding social movements, focusing instead on how care work aligns with creative production. The Revolution Will Be Improvised returns to improvisation’s roots in economic and social necessity and locates it as a core tenet of the aesthetics of obligation, where a commitment to others drives the production and result of creative work thus, this book puts forward a methodology to explore further the improvised, often ephemeral, works of art activism.

Revolutionary Stagecraft draws on a rich corpus of literary, historical, and technical materials to reveal a deep entanglement among technological modernization, political agendas, and the performing arts in modern China. This unique approach to Chinese theater history combines a close look at plays themselves, performance practices, technical theater details, and behind-the-scenes debates over “how to” make theater amid the political upheavals of China’s 20th century. The book begins at a pivotal moment in the 1920s—when Chinese theater artists began to import, use, and write about modern stage equipment—and ends in the 1980s when China's scientific and technological boom began. By examining iconic plays and performances from the perspective of the stage technologies involved, Tarryn Li-Min Chun provides a fresh perspective on their composition and staging. The chapters include stories on the challenges of creating imitation neon, rigging up a makeshift revolving stage, and representing a nuclear bomb detonating onstage. 

In thinking about theater through technicity, the author mines well-studied materials such as dramatic texts and performance reviews for hidden technical details and brings to light a number of previously untapped sources such as technical journals and manuals; set design renderings, lighting plots, and prop schematics; and stage technology how-to guides for amateur thespians. This approach focuses on material stage technologies, situating these objects equally in relation to their technical potential, their human use, and the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that influence them. In each of its case studies, Revolutionary Stagecraft reveals the complex and at times surprising ways in which Chinese theater artists and technicians of the 20th  century envisioned and enacted their own revolutions through the materiality of the theater apparatus.

Rewriting Television suggests that it is time for a radical overhaul of television studies. If we don’t want to merely recycle the same old methods, approaches and tropes for another twenty years, we need to consider major changes in why and how we do our work. I am talking here about method: this book offers a new model for doing television (or film, or media) studies that can be taken up around the world. It synthesizes ideas from production studies, screenwriting studies and the idea of “writing otherwise,” to create a new way of studying television. It presents an entirely original approach to working with practitioner interviews that has never been seen before in film, television or media studies. It then offers a series of original reflections on form, story and voice, and considers how these reflections could shape future writing in our discipline(s). Ultimately, this is a book of ideas. This book asks “what if?” This book is an opportunity to imagine differently.
 

Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert were three of America’s most revered and widely read film critics, more famous than many of the movies they wrote about. But their remarkable contributions to the burgeoning American film criticism of the 1960s and beyond were deeply influenced by four earlier critics: Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler scrutinized what was on the screen with an intensity not previously seen in popular reviewing. Although largely ignored by the arts media of the day, they honed the sort of serious discussion of films that would be made popular decades later by Kael, Sarris, Ebert and their contemporaries.
           
With The Rhapsodes, renowned film scholar and critic David Bordwell—an heir to both those legacies—restores to a wider audience the work of Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler, critics he calls the “Rhapsodes” for the passionate and deliberately offbeat nature of their vernacular prose. Each broke with prevailing currents in criticism in order to find new ways to talk about the popular films that contemporaries often saw at best as trivial, at worst as a betrayal of art. Ferguson saw in Hollywood an engaging, adroit mode of popular storytelling. Agee sought in cinema the lyrical epiphanies found in romantic poetry. Farber, trained as a painter, brought a pictorial intelligence to bear on film. A surrealist, Tyler treated classic Hollywood as a collective hallucination that invited both audience and critic to find moments of subversive pleasure. With his customary clarity and brio, Bordwell takes readers through the relevant cultural and critical landscape and considers the critics’ writing styles, their conceptions of films, and their quarrels. He concludes by examining the profound impact of Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler on later generations of film writers.

The Rhapsodes allows readers to rediscover these remarkable critics who broke with convention to capture what they found moving, artful, or disappointing in classic Hollywood cinema and explores their robust—and continuing—influence.

A rigorous and imaginative inquiry into rhythm’s vital importance for film and the moving image

Focusing attention on a concept much neglected in the study of film, The Rhythm of Images opens new possibilities for thinking about expanded perception and idiosyncratic modes of being. Author Domietta Torlasco engages with both philosophy and cinema to elaborate a notion of rhythm in its pre-Socratic sense as a “manner of flowing”—a fugitive mode that privileges contingency and calls up the forgotten fluidity of forms. In asking what it would mean to take this rhythm as an ontological force in its own right, she creatively draws on thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and Luce Irigaray. Rhythm emerges here as a form that eludes measure, a key to redefining the relation between the aesthetic and the political, and thus a pivotal means of resistance to power.

Working with constellations of films and videos by international artists—from Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and David Lynch to Harun Farocki and Victor Burgin, among others—Torlasco brings to bear on them her distinctive concept of rhythm with respect to four interrelated domains: life, labor, memory, and medium. With innovative readings of artworks and critical texts alike, The Rhythm of Images fashions a vibrant, provocative theory of rhythm as the excess or potential of perception. 

Ultimately, the book reconceives the relation between rhythm and the world-making power of images. The result is a vision of cinema as a hybrid medium endowed with the capacity not only to reinvent corporeal boundaries but also to find new ways of living together.

"Collecting essays by fourteen expert contributors into a trans-oceanic celebration and critique, Mamadou Diouf and Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo show how music, dance, and popular culture turn ways of remembering Africa into African ways of remembering.  With a mix of Nuyorican, Cuban, Haitian, Kenyan, Senegalese, Trinidagonian, and Brazilian beats, Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World proves that the pleasures of poly-rhythm belong to the realm of the discursive as well as the sonic and the kinesthetic."
---Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater, Yale University

"As necessary as it is brilliant, Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World dances across, beyond, and within the Black Atlantic Diaspora with the aplomb and skill befitting its editors and contributors."
---Mark Anthony Neal, author of Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic

Along with linked modes of religiosity, music and dance have long occupied a central position in the ways in which Atlantic peoples have enacted, made sense of, and responded to their encounters with each other. This unique collection of essays connects nations from across the Atlantic---Senegal, Kenya, Trinidad, Cuba, Brazil, and the United States, among others---highlighting contemporary popular, folkloric, and religious music and dance. By tracking the continuous reframing, revision, and erasure of aural, oral, and corporeal traces, the contributors to Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World collectively argue that music and dance are the living evidence of a constant (re)composition and (re)mixing of local sounds and gestures.

Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World distinguishes itself as a collection focusing on the circulation of cultural forms across the Atlantic world, tracing the paths trod by a range of music and dance forms within, across, or beyond the variety of locales that constitute the Atlantic world. The editors and contributors do so, however, without assuming that these paths have been either always in line with national, regional, or continental boundaries or always transnational, transgressive, and perfectly hybrid/syncretic. This collection seeks to reorient the discourse on cultural forms moving in the Atlantic world by being attentive to the specifics of the forms---their specific geneses, the specific uses to which they are put by their creators and consumers, and the specific ways in which they travel or churn in place.

Mamadou Diouf is Leitner Family Professor of African Studies, Director of the Institute of African Studies, and Professor of History at Columbia University.

Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo is Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

Jacket photograph by Elias Irizarry

Based on eighteen months of intensive participant-observation, Ring of Liberation offers both an in-depth description of capoeira—a complex Afro-Brazilian martial art that combines feats of great strength and athleticism with music and poetry—and a pioneering synthetic approach to the analysis of complex cultural performance.

Capoeira originated in early slave culture and is practiced widely today by urban Brazilians and others. At once game, sport, mock combat, and ritualized performance, it involves two players who dance and "battle" within a ring of musicians and singers. Stunning physical performances combine with music and poetry in a form as expressive in movement as it is in word.

J. Lowell Lewis explores the convergence of form and content in capoeira. The many components and characteristics of this elaborate black art form—for example, competing genre frameworks and the necessary fusion of multiple modes of expression—demand, Lewis feels, to be given "body" as well as "voice." In response, he uses Peircean semiotics and recent work in discourse and performance theory to map the connections between physical, musical, and linguistic play in capoeira and to reflect on the general relations between semiotic systems and the creation and recording of cultural meaning.

In this ambitious project, historian Katrina Thompson examines the conceptualization and staging of race through the performance, sometimes coerced, of black dance from the slave ship to the minstrel stage. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, Thompson explicates how black musical performance was used by white Europeans and Americans to justify enslavement, perpetuate the existing racial hierarchy, and mask the brutality of the domestic slave trade. Whether on slave ships, at the auction block, or on plantations, whites often used coerced performances to oppress and demean the enslaved.

As Thompson shows, however, blacks' "backstage" use of musical performance often served quite a different purpose. Through creolization and other means, enslaved people preserved some native musical and dance traditions and invented or adopted new traditions that built community and even aided rebellion.

Thompson shows how these traditions evolved into nineteenth-century minstrelsy and, ultimately, raises the question of whether today's mass media performances and depictions of African Americans are so very far removed from their troublesome roots.

Rites of Realism shifts the discussion of cinematic realism away from the usual focus on verisimilitude and faithfulness of record toward a notion of "performative realism," a realism that does not simply represent a given reality but enacts actual social tensions. These essays by a range of film scholars propose stimulating new approaches to the critical evaluation of modern realist films and such referential genres as reenactment, historical film, adaptation, portrait film, and documentary.
By providing close readings of classic and contemporary works, Rites of Realism signals the need to return to a focus on films as the main innovators of realist representation. The collection is inspired by André Bazin's theories on film's inherent heterogeneity and unique ability to register contingency (the singular, one-time event). This volume features two new translations: of Bazin's seminal essay "Death Every Afternoon" and Serge Daney's essay reinterpreting Bazin's defense of the long shot as a way to set the stage for a clash or risky confrontation between man and animal. These pieces evince key concerns—particularly the link between cinematic realism and contingency—that the other essays explore further.
Among the topics addressed are the provocative mimesis of Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread; the adaptation of trial documents in Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc; the use of the tableaux vivant by Wim Wenders and Peter Greenaway; and Pier Paolo Pasolini's strategies of analogy in his transposition of The Gospel According to St. Matthew from Palestine to southern Italy. Essays consider the work of filmmakers including Michelangelo Antonioni, Maya Deren, Mike Leigh, Cesare Zavattini, Zhang Yuan, and Abbas Kiarostami.

Contributors: Paul Arthur, André Bazin, Mark A. Cohen, Serge Daney, Mary Ann Doane, James F. Lastra, Ivone Margulies, Abé Mark Normes, Brigitte Peucker, Richard Porton, Philip Rosen, Catherine Russell, James Schamus, Noa Steimatsky, Xiaobing Tang

The most complete and compelling analysis available of Altman’s films

With his complex and unconventional films, Robert Altman often draws an impassioned response from critics but bafflement and indifference from the general public. Some audiences have dismissed his movies as insignificant, unsatisfying, and unreadable. Ironically, Altman might agree: he makes films in order to challenge filmgoers’s expectations of straightforward narratives and easily understood endings.

In Robert Altman’s Subliminal Reality, Robert T. Self sheds light on Altman’s work and provides the most comprehensive analysis of his films to date. With close readings of classics like MASH, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Nashville, as well as more recent films like The Player, Short Cuts, and Cookie’s Fortune, Self asserts the value of Altman’s work not only to film theory and the entertainment industry but to American culture itself. In his analysis, Self identifies Altman’s films particularly as they address issues of form, identity, and industry. He explains how Altman critiques moviemaking forms by using an open, fragmented mode of storytelling and by turning conventional Hollywood genres inside out. He examines Altman’s characterization of social and individual identity as fragile and fragmentary and his depiction of antiheroic characters debilitated by their socially constructed gender roles. Finally, Self shows how Altman challenges the entertainment industry itself, questioning its methods and motives and critiquing its role in our cultural alienation. Self frames his study of Altman’s work with a discussion of the director’s efforts to create a "subliminal reality" in his narratives—to touch audiences on an unconscious level and to recognize the unspoken, and unspeakable, dimensions in human interactions. According to Self, this striving for "subliminal reality" makes Altman’s films not only exemplary of the potential of art cinema narration but instrumental in keeping such narrative alive.

The early years of film were dominated by competition between inventors in America and France, especially Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers . But while these have generally been considered the foremost pioneers of film, they were not the only crucial figures in its inception. Telling the story of the white-hot years of filmmaking in the 1890s, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema seeks to restore Robert Paul, Britain’s most important early innovator in film, to his rightful place.
           
From improving upon Edison’s Kinetoscope to cocreating the first movie camera in Britain to building England’s first film studio and launching the country’s motion-picture industry, Paul played a key part in the history of cinema worldwide. It’s not only Paul’s story, however, that historian Ian Christie tells here. Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema also details the race among inventors to develop lucrative technologies and the jumbled culture of patent-snatching, showmanship, and music halls that prevailed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Both an in-depth biography and a magnificent look at early cinema and fin-de-siècle Britain, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema is a first-rate cultural history of a fascinating era of global invention, and the revelation of one of its undervalued contributors.
 

Any and all songs are capable of being remixed. But not all remixes are treated equally. Rock This Way examines transformative musical works—cover songs, remixes, mash-ups, parodies, and soundalike songs—to discover what contemporary American culture sees as legitimate when it comes to making music that builds upon other songs. Through examples of how popular discussion talked about such songs between 2009 and 2018, Mel Stanfill uses a combination of discourse analysis and digital humanities methods to interrogate our broader understanding of transformative works and where they converge at the legal, economic, and cultural ownership levels. 

Rock This Way provides a new way of thinking about what it means to re-create and borrow music, how the racial identity of both the reusing artist and the reused artist matters, and the ways in which the law polices artists and their works. Ultimately, Stanfill demonstrates that the extent to which a work is seen as having new expression or meaning is contingent upon notions of creativity, legitimacy, and law, all of which are shaped by white supremacy.

Rodeo people call their sport "more a way of life than a way to make a living." Rodeo is, in fact, a rite that not only expresses a way of life but perpetuates it, reaffirming in a ritual contest between man and animal the values of American ranching society. Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence uses an interpretive approach to analyze rodeo as a symbolic pageant that reenacts the "winning of the West" and as a stylized expression of frontier attitudes toward man and nature. Rodeo constestants are the modern counterparts of the rugged and individualistic cowboys, and the ethos they inherited is marked by ambivalence: they admire the wild and the free yet desire to tame and conquer.

Based on extensive field work and drawing on comparative materials from other stock-tending societies, Rodeo is a major contribution to an understanding of the role of performance in society, the culturally constructed view of man's place in nature, and the structure and meaning of social relationships and their representations.

A new take on an eclectic and controversial director

James Morrison's critical study offers a comprehensive and critically engaged treatment on Roman Polanski's immense body of work. Tracing the filmmaker's remarkably diverse career from its beginnings to 2007, the book provides commentary on all of Polanski's major films in their historical, cultural, social, and artistic contexts. Morrison locates Polanski's work within the genres of comedy and melodrama, arguing that he is not merely obsessed with the theme of repression, but that his true interest is in the concrete—what is out in the open—and why we so rarely see it. 

The range of Polanski's filmmaking challenges traditional divisions between high and low culture. For example, The Ninth Gate is a brash pastiche of the horror genre, while The Pianist is an Academy Award-winner about the Holocaust. Dubbing Polanski a relentless critic of modernity, Morrison concludes that his career is representative of the fissures, victories, and rehabilitations of the last fifty years of international cinema.

A volume in the series Contemporary Film Directors, edited by James Naremore

At the end of World War II, Germany was a broken nation. Split in two and occupied by the victorious Allies, it would have to be rebuilt, literally, from the rubble of its own defeat. Volumes of books have been published chronicling its structural and economic rebirth; this unique study reveals how Germany rebuilt itself culturally.

Rubble Films is a close look at German cinema in the immediate postwar era, and a careful examination of its relationship to Allied occupation. Shandley reveals how German film borrowed -- both literally and figuratively -- from its Nazi past, and how the occupied powers (specifically the US) used its position as victor to open Europe to Hollywood movie products and aesthetics.

Incorporating a careful reading  of several important postwar films, Shandley also discusses how the German studio system operated immediately after the war, in the east and the west, giving special focus on DEFA, the east German studio that rose during Soviet occupation.

Pathbreaking in its research, Rubble Films sheds new light on a significant moment of German cultural rebirth, and  adds a new dimension to the study of the history of film.

Historian Sara Eskridge examines television’s rural comedy boom in the 1960s and the political, social, and economic factors that made these shows a perfect fit for CBS. The network, nicknamed the Communist Broadcasting System during the Red Scare of the 1940s, saw its image hurt again in the 1950s with the quiz show scandals and a campaign against violence in westerns. When a rival network introduced rural-themed programs to cater to the growing southern market, CBS latched onto the trend and soon reestablished itself as the Country Broadcasting System. Its rural comedies dominated the ratings throughout the decade, attracting viewers from all parts of the country. With fascinating discussions of The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and other shows, Eskridge reveals how the southern image was used to both entertain and reassure Americans in the turbulent 1960s.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, America imagined itself young and in love in Europe. And Hollywood films of the era reflected this romantic allure. From a young and naïve Audrey Hepburn falling in love with Gregory Peck inRoman Holiday to David Lean’s Summertime, featuring Katherine Hepburn’s sexual adventure in Venice, these glossy travelogue romances were shot on location, and established an exciting new genre for Hollywood.

As Robert Shandley shows in Runaway Romances, these films were not only indicative of the ideology of the American-dominated postwar world order, but they also represented a shift in Hollywood production values. Eager to capture new audiences during a period of economic crisis, Hollywood’s European output utilized the widescreen process to enhance cinematic experience. The films—To Catch a Thief, Three Coins in the Fountain, and Funny Face among them—enticed viewers to visit faraway places for romantic escapades. In the process, these runaway romances captured American fantasies for a brief, but intense, period that ended as audiences grew tired of old World splendors, and entered into a new era of sexual awakening.

Throughout its modern history, Russia has seen a succession of highly performative social acts that play out prominently in the public sphere. This innovative volume brings the fields of performance studies and Russian studies into dialog for the first time and shows that performance is a vital means for understanding Russia's culture from the reign of Peter the Great to the era of Putin. These twenty-seven essays encompass a diverse range of topics, from dance and classical music to live poetry and from viral video to public jubilees and political protest. As a whole they comprise an integrated, compelling intervention in Russian studies.

Challenging the primacy of the written word in this field, the volume fosters a larger intellectual community informed by theories and practices of performance from anthropology, art history, dance studies, film studies, cultural and social history, literary studies, musicology, political science, theater studies, and sociology.

For the first time since the fall of state communism, Russia is experiencing a profoundly creative revival of playwriting and directing. A new generation of directors has arrived on the country’s major stages, bringing fresh political perspectives, breaking the normative use of formal language for slang and hybridizations of English and Russian, and introducing theatrical innovations such as live mixing of electronic music in performance. Featuring essays by Russian and American critics and scholars, Russian Theater presents major developments in the new Russian theater from 2000 to the present.

In the first English-language collection to examine twenty-first-century Russian theater, this special issue of Theater also includes the complete texts of two new Russian plays, published for the first time in English. Ivan Vyrypaev’s Oxygen is a poetic panorama of new Russian identity set to techno music, and Danila Privalov’s 5-25 explores traditional Dostoyevskian existential themes in the language of a new generation. One contributor chronicles the sweeping cultural and institutional changes in the Russian theater since 2000, while another provides an overview of the regional theater system in the world’s most geographically vast country. Another essay explores the development of the new playwriting movement, identifying its key writers and producers. This special issue also includes interviews with the movement’s directors and producers. Additionally, it contains letters, previously unpublished in English, from the Moscow Art Theater’s Olga Bokshanskaya to the Russian theatrical titan Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, reporting on the Moscow Art Theater’s legendary U.S. tour in 1920–22, which was recorded in theater history as a turning point for American acting.

Contributors. AKHE, Dmitri Chernikov, Nina Chusova, Marina Dmitrievskaya, Sasha Dugdale, John Freedman, Elena Gremina, Nina Karpova, Mindaugus Korbauskis, Ryan McKittrick, Arkady Ostrovsky, Danila Privalov, Victor Rizhakov, Yana Ross, Tom Sellar, Kirill Serebrennikov, Anatoly Smeliansky, Julia Smeliansky, Ivan Vyrypaev

The performance art of burlesque, once a faded form, has made a comeback in the twenty-first century, and it has shimmied back to life with a vengeance in Cleveland. Thanks to fans and entrepreneurs, neo-burlesque has taken the stage—and it’s more inclusive, less seedy, and emphatically fun.

Rust Belt Burlesque traces the history of burlesque in Cleveland from the mid-1800s to the present day, while also telling the story of Bella Sin, a Mexican immigrant who largely drove Northeast Ohio’s neo-burlesque comeback. The historical center of Cleveland burlesque was the iconic Roxy Theater on East Ninth Street. Here, in its twentieth-century heyday, famed dancers like Blaze Starr and comics like Red Skelton and Abbott and Costello entertained both regulars and celebrity guests.

Erin O’Brien’s lively storytelling and Bob Perkoski’s color photos give readers a peek into the raucous Ohio Burlesque Festival that packs the house at the Beachland Ballroom every year. Today’s burlies come in all shapes, ethnicities, and orientations, drawing a legion of adoring fans. This is a show you won’t want to miss.