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Presenting a groundbreaking account of an audacious theatrical undertaking

Created by the Norwegian/German duo of Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller, the Ibsen-Saga (2006–present) is a six-hundred-year project to restage Henrik Ibsen’s entire oeuvre. Andrew Friedman presents a groundbreaking historical narrative of this project’s development and dramaturgy, through the theories and practices of modernism’s most influential and controversial artists, including Henrik Ibsen, Richard Wagner, F. T. Marinetti, Erwin Piscator, and Jackson Pollock. Vinge and Müller treat Ibsen’s plays as the urtexts of a mythical struggle between artistic vision and material limits, which they explore through analogous narratives ranging from Hamlet to World Cup soccer matches, all unified by a singular aesthetic that juxtaposes totalizing fiction and extreme reality. As Friedman shows, they mythologize Ibsen’s themes of artistic ambition to resurrect and test modernism’s fantasies of artistic autonomy, totality, creative license, and provocation.

By reading Vinge and Müller’s project through its modernist inspirations, Friedman demonstrates the material and ethical limits of modernist ideals in current theatrical practice, providing new perspectives on the legacy of these pioneering figures. Ibsen Apocalypse is a bold, cross-disciplinary reappraisal of the persistent power of modernity in contemporary performance.
 

"A brilliant and daring book on how art reveals life, how it illuminates childhood beyond what the sciences of development can tell us."
---Jerome Bruner, University Professor, New York University

"Combining the surgical precision of a psychoanalytically informed critic with the oracular eloquence of a brilliant close reader, Ellen Handler Spitz reads our cultural fortunes about childhood and parenting through works of art.  Moving us (in both senses of the term) from the serene plenitude of Piero della Francesca's Madonna of Childbirth to the unsparing horror of Lessing's Fifth Child, she reveals just how powerfully art puts us in touch with the pulsing energies of real life."
---Maria Tatar, John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University 

"Illuminating Childhood is a wonderfully well-written and researched interdisciplinary study of childhood in various media and mediums as well as through ethnicity, race, gender, cultures, and time."
---T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Distinguished Professor of French and Director of African American and Diaspora Studies, Vanderbilt University

While literature and the arts are rarely considered primary sources for knowledge about human motivation and behavior, people read novels, attend movies, watch television, and go to the theater not solely to be entertained but also to learn about one another and about themselves. Illuminating Childhood formalizes this quest for psychological knowledge in the domain of the arts.

Starting with the premise that a gifted writer, artist, or filmmaker has the ability to teach us as much in one scene as a theorist can in a treatise or a therapist in a session, the author shares her intimate experience of eight thematically linked works in film and literature from the second half of the twentieth century, touching on issues central to parent-child relations, including toxic intrafamilial secrets, the disjunction between love and understanding, and the lasting impact of deceased parents on their children. While the canon of literature about children and parent-child relations includes books that identify problems, propose solutions, and present statistical data, Illuminating Childhood offers a living out of experience via the arts, written for a general audience---parents, teachers, mental health professionals, those who engage with their students via the arts of literature and film, and others.

Ellen Handler Spitz holds the Honors College Professorship of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland. She is the author of a number of books on art, psychology, and imagery, including The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood. Her abiding research interests are the cultural lives of young people; the relations between aesthetics and psychology; and the interconnections among literature, music, dance, and the visual arts.

Jacket photo: Courtesy of PhotoFest

A revisionist history of Method acting that connects the popular reception of “methodness” to entrenched understandings of screen performance still dominating American film discourse today.

Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book maps the forces giving shape to methodness and policing its boundaries.

Imagining the Method traces the primordial conditions under which the Method was conceived. It explores John Garfield's tenuous relationship with methodness due to his identity. It considers the links between John Wayne's reliance on "anti-Method" stardom and Marlon Brando and James Dean's ascribed embodiment of Method features. It dissects contemporary emphases on transformation and considers the implications of methodness in the encoding of AI performers. Altogether, Justin Rawlins offers a revisionist history of the Method that shines a light on the cultural politics of methodness and the still-dominant assumptions about race, gender, and screen actors and acting that inform how we talk about performance and performers.

The thoroughly revised third edition of the bible of improvisational theater.

Viola Spolin's improvisational techniques changed the very nature and practice of modern theater. The first two editions of Improvisation for the Theater sold more than 100,000 copies and inspired actors, directors, teachers, and writers in theater, television, film. These techniques have also influenced the fields of education, mental health, social work, and psychology.

The revised edition features:

• 30 new exercises, including introductions (Slow/Fast/Normal; Extended Sound; Mirror Speech; Unrelated Conversation)
• More than 200 updated classic exercises
• new section of traditional theater games for warm-up use 
• “Paul Sills' Sayings of Viola Spolin” 
• New glossary of side-coaching phrases, with definitions of their meaning and value 
• Alphabetical list of all games and exercises

In Force, Drive, Desire, Rudolf Bernet develops a philosophical foundation of psychoanalysis focusing on human drives. Rather than simply drawing up a list of Freud’s borrowings from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, or Lacan’s from Hegel and Sartre, Bernet orchestrates a dialogue between philosophy and psychoanalysis that goes far beyond what these eminent psychoanalysts knew about philosophy. By relating the writings of Freud, Lacan, and other psychoanalysts to those of Aristotle, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and, more tacitly, Bergson and Deleuze, Bernet brings to light how psychoanalysis both prolongs and breaks with the history of Western metaphysics and philosophy of nature.

Rereading the long history of metaphysics (or at least a few of its key moments) in light of psychoanalytic inquiries into the nature and function of drive and desire also allows for a rewriting of the history of philosophy. Specifically, it allows Bernet to bring to light a different history of metaphysics, one centered less on Aristotelian substance (ousia) and more on the concept of dunamis—a power or potentiality for a realization toward which it strives with all its might. Relating human drives to metaphysical forces also bears fruit for a renewed philosophy of life and subjectivity.

The conventional way of understanding what musicians do as performers is to treat them as producers of sound; some even argue that it is unnecessary to see musicians in performance as long as one can hear them.  But musical performance, counters Philip Auslander, is also a social interaction between musicians and their audiences, appealing as much to the eye as to the ear. In Concert: Performing Musical Persona he addresses not only the visual means by which musicians engage their audiences through costume and physical gesture, but also spectacular aspects of performance such as light shows.

Although musicians do not usually enact fictional characters on stage, they nevertheless present themselves to audiences in ways specific to the performance situation.  Auslander’s term to denote the musician’s presence before the audience is musical persona.  While presence of a musical persona may be most obvious within rock and pop music, the book’s analysis extends to classical music, jazz, blues, country, electronic music, laptop performance, and music made with experimental digital interfaces. The eclectic group of performers discussed include the Beatles, Miles Davis, Keith Urban, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Frank Zappa, B. B. King, Jefferson Airplane, Virgil Fox, Keith Jarrett, Glenn Gould, and Laurie Anderson.

Some of theater’s most powerful works in the past thirty years fall into the category of "verbatim theater," socially engaged performances whose texts rely on word-for-word testimony. Performances such as Fires in the Mirror, The Laramie Project, and The Vagina Monologues have at their best demonstrated how to hold hard conversations about explosive subjects in a liberal democracy. But in this moment of what author Ryan Claycomb terms the “rightward lurch” of western democracies, does this idealized space of democratic deliberation remain effective? In the Lurch asks that question in a pointed and self-reflexive way, tracing the history of this branch of documentary theater with particular attention to the political outcomes and stances these performances seem to seek.

But this is not just a disinterested history—Claycomb reflects on his own participation in that political fantasy, including earlier scholarly writing that articulated with breathless hopefulness the potential of verbatim theater, and on his own theatrical attendance, imbued with a belief that witnessing this idealized public sphere was a substitute for actual public participation. In the Lurch also recounts the bumpy path towards its completion, two years marked by presidential impeachments, an insurrection, a national reckoning with racism, and a global pandemic. At the heart of the book is a central question: is verbatim theater any longer an effective cultural response to what can look like the possible end of democracy?

Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment and other psychological experiments as performance and theater

A comprehensive guide to creating inclusive and accessible musical theater at the high school level. 

This book is a comprehensive guide that presents a research-backed curriculum and strategies for creating an inclusive and accessible musical theater rehearsal and performance process for high schoolers. It draws on the author's doctoral research and extensive teaching experience to provide practical tools, assessments, and process modifications to support students of all learning needs and backgrounds.

The book begins by exploring the historical context and legal frameworks surrounding special education in public schools, as well as the intersection of drama education and disability studies. It then delves into an in-depth analysis of traditional actor training methods, highlighting their ableist origins and the need for adaptations to foster radical inclusion.

The core of the text outlines a twenty-nine-week rehearsal and performance curriculum, broken into three distinct phases, that is designed to scaffold skill development, promote ensemble collaboration, and empower diverse learners. Accompanying the unit plans are detailed assignments, assessments, and grading rubrics that align with national and state arts standards. Additionally, the author provides a wealth of supporting documents, such as student contracts, production resources, and a sample warm-up guide. 

By championing inclusive practices rooted in the principles of Universal Design for Learning and culturally responsive pedagogy, this book equips drama educators with the tools to create transformative theatrical experiences for all students.

Infinity (Stage) is a highly original study and poetic meditation on the themes of death, memory, identity, and representation in theater, film, and literature. Inspired in part by the death of his father, Spencer Golub's scholarly entertainment employs imaginative wordplay, subtle humor, and textual layering to talk about the impossibility of being real. Infinity (Stage) is a masterful piece of performative writing, a quasi-memoir of a mind staging and screening its inner life, embodying a theory of the nature of art and existence. This alternative approach to history uses mostly immaterial evidence, accident, and coincidence to subvert the widespread power and authority of the material world and its logical functions. The list of artists, authors, directors and other celebrities who make appearances includes Alfred Hitchcock, Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, Fred Astaire, Harold Pinter, Herbert Blau, Jean Baudrillard, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Auster, Peter Handke, Robert Wilson, Sam Shepard, Stanley Kubrick, Peter Greenaway, Maya Deren, Jocelyn Moorhouse, Tadeusz Kantor, Tom Stoppard, Vladimir Nabokov, and Rene Magritte, among others. The author's interdisciplinary approach, the scope of his sources and concerns, his blending of critical analysis and creative writing, and his attention to different genres and styles (narrative; dramatic; aphoristic; science, detective, and post-modern fictions) will appeal to readers in theatre, film, performance studies, philosophy, and creative writing. The book will also be of interest to readers who have experienced loss and to those who perceive meaning in things un-remembered, mis-remembered, and unseen. "This book will change the way we think about theatre/film studies and their relation not only to ideology, politics, cultural studies, but to something far more demanding than enunciated and passing power relationships--to life." --Michal Kobialka, University of Minnesota

Revelations about the theatrical practice and its evolution.

Insights in Applied Theatre offers an inside look into the advent of applied theater and its development as an area of practice and research. Much more than an archive, the texts in this collection present vivid, pertinent voices and messages from the pioneers of applied theater. The nineteen articles chosen by the editors of Applied Theatre Research represent key themes and elements from the start of the practice. The articles—many of which were influential in their own time—have much to say to the contemporary scene. They have been arranged in sections according to key themes and issues discovered, investigated, and stumbled across by the trailblazing writers in the collection. A vital new contribution to the field, the book raises questions about the contested issues of power, partnerships, and voice in applied theater.

While Hollywood has long been called “The Dream Factory,” and theatrical entertainment more broadly has been called “The Industry,” the significance of these names has rarely been explored. There are in fact striking overlaps between industrial rhetoric and practice and the development of theatrical and cinematic techniques for rehearsal and performance. Interchangeable Parts examines the history of acting pedagogy and performance practice in the United States, and their debts to industrial organization and philosophy. Ranging from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth, the book recontextualizes the history of theatrical technique in light of the embrace of industrialization in US culture and society.
 
Victor Holtcamp explores the invocations of scientific and industrial rhetoric and philosophy in the founding of the first schools of acting, and echoes of that rhetoric in playwriting, production, and the cinema, as Hollywood in particular embraced this industrially infected model of acting.  In their divergent approaches to performance, the major US acting teachers (Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner) demonstrated strong rhetorical affinities for the language of industry, illustrating the pervasive presence of these industrial roots. The book narrates the story of how actors learned to learn to act, and what that process, for both stage and screen, owed to the interchangeable parts and mass production revolutions.

In this study, leading scholar Rosette C. Lamont traces Eugene ionesco’s development as a writer and dramatist from his Surrealist beginnings through to his late “dream plays.” Her careful analysis of Ionesco’s entire oeuvre shows how the archetypal and the historical are intermingled in a synthesis that marks lonesco as a major figure in post-World War Il, post-Holocaust literature.Lamont’s rereading of lonesco’s work reveals the dramatist as profoundly marked by the events occurring in Europe in his time and his personal experiences with war, occupation, and concentration camps. Despite his repeated statements that he was strictly apolitical, later in life lonesco himself admitted that being officially apolitical may well be the most political of attitudes.The author links the modern idea of totalitarianism with the playwright’s critique of language, thereby placing her discussion of his work within the new theoretical approaches to language and power. In moving the analysis of his work beyond the category of absurdist theater, Lamont reveals how the power of his plays resides in his synthesis of the political, psychological, and metaphysical.

Ishtyle follows queer South Asian men across borders into gay neighborhoods, nightclubs, bars, and house parties in Bangalore and Chicago. Bringing the cultural practices they are most familiar with into these spaces, these men accent the aesthetics of nightlife cultures through performance. Kareem Khubchandani develops the notion of “ishtyle” to name this accented style, while also showing how brown bodies inadvertently become accents themselves, ornamental inclusions in the racialized grammar of desire. Ishtyle allows us to reimagine a global class perpetually represented as docile and desexualized workers caught in the web of global capitalism. The book highlights a different kind of labor, the embodied work these men do to feel queer and sexy together. Engaging major themes in queer studies, Khubchandani explains how his interlocutors’ performances stage relationships between: colonial law and public sexuality; film divas and queer fans; and race, caste, and desire. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that the unlikely site of nightlife can be a productive venue for the study of global politics and its institutional hierarchies.