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310 books match the query 'Performance' and 10 start with o

cover of Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy

Objects as Actors

Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy

Melissa Mueller

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Objects as Actors charts a new approach to Greek tragedy based on an obvious, yet often overlooked, fact: Greek tragedy was meant to be performed. As plays, the works were incomplete without physical items—theatrical props. In this book, Melissa Mueller ingeniously demonstrates the importance of objects in the staging and reception of Athenian tragedy.

As Mueller shows, props such as weapons, textiles, and even letters were often fully integrated into a play’s action. They could provoke surprising plot turns, elicit bold viewer reactions, and provide some of tragedy’s most thrilling moments. Whether the sword of Sophocles’s Ajax, the tapestry in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, or the tablet of Euripides’s Hippolytus, props demanded attention as a means of uniting—or disrupting—time, space, and genre.

Insightful and original, Objects as Actors offers a fresh perspective on the central tragic texts—and encourages us to rethink ancient theater as a whole.
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cover of Off Book: Devised Performance and Higher Education

Off Book

Devised Performance and Higher Education

Edited by Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, Nicola Hyland, and James McKinnon

Intellect Books, 2022

An edited collection of essays exploring ways that theatrical devising supports and defies higher education’s institutional goals.

In the theater industry, “off book” refers to the date by which performers are to have memorized their lines and will no longer carry their play script—the “book”—on stage. But for the authors of this volume, the question is not when the book needs to be memorized, but why is there a need to be “on” book in the first place? Practitioners of devised performance choose to compose live performances from scratch rather than follow instructions in someone else’s script; educators of devised performance prefer to practice learning, too, as a generative and creative process that can never be confused with mere memorization. In its usual context, “off book” implies that theater is (literally) authorized by the book—the dramatic text—that represents its essential core or contains its meaning. Yet the “book” is not essential, and the chapters here highlight higher education theater practices that throw away the “book” altogether, creating space for actors and learners to do more than memorize. The conventional rules and hierarchies of theater creation, research, training, and education are not always relevant, or desirable, in these contexts. Instead, the questions and practices that go beyond the “book” matter.   

Lively and engaging, Off Book will be a valuable and unique resource for university students, drama educators, theater historians, and practicing devised theater artists.
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cover of On Repetition: Writing, Performance and Art

On Repetition

Writing, Performance and Art

Edited by Eirini Kartsaki

Intellect Books, 2016

On Repetition aims to unpack the different uses and functions of repetition within contemporary performance, dance practices, craft, and writing. The collection, edited by Eirini Kartsaki, explores repetition in relation to intimacy, laughter, technology, familiarity, and fear—proposing a new vocabulary for understanding what is at stake in works that repeat. Drawing on psychoanalysis, philosophy, linguistics, sociology, and performance studies—and employing case studies from a range of practices—the essays presented here combine to form a unique interdisciplinary exploration of the functions of repetition in contemporary culture.
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cover of One Hundred Years of Futurism: Aesthetics, Politics and Performance

One Hundred Years of Futurism

Aesthetics, Politics and Performance

Edited by John London

Intellect Books, 2017

More than one hundred years after Futurism exploded onto the European stage with its unique brand of art and literature, there is a need to reassess the whole movement, from its Italian roots to its international ramifications. In wide-ranging essays based on fresh research, the contributors to this collection examine both the original context and the cultural legacy of Futurism. Chapters touch on topics such as Futurism and fascism, the geopolitics of Futurism, the Futurist woman, and translating Futurist texts. A large portion of the book is devoted to the practical aspects of performing Futurist theatrical ideas in the twenty-first century.
 
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cover of One Hundred Years of Futurism: Aesthetics, Politics and Performance

One Hundred Years of Futurism

Aesthetics, Politics and Performance

Edited by John London

Intellect Books, 2017

More than one hundred years after Futurism exploded onto the European stage with its unique brand of art and literature, there is a need to reassess the whole movement, from its Italian roots to its international ramifications. In wide-ranging essays based on fresh research, the contributors to this collection examine both the original context and the cultural legacy of Futurism. Chapters touch on topics such as Futurism and fascism, the geopolitics of Futurism, the Futurist woman, and translating Futurist texts. A large portion of the book is devoted to the practical aspects of performing Futurist theatrical ideas in the twenty-first century.
 
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cover of Opera—Dead or Alive: Production, Performance and Enjoyment of Musical Theatre

Opera—Dead or Alive

Production, Performance and Enjoyment of Musical Theatre

Ronald E. Mitchell

University of Wisconsin Press, 1972

Playwright, director, and critic Ronald E. Mitchell offers general readers a richer understanding of traditions, terms, styles, and staging techniques of musical theater, including an introduction to seventeen examples of operas and musicals, from baroque and romantic operas to Gilbert & Sullivan, from proletarian dramas to Broadway shows like Oklahoma.
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cover of Oral Patterns of Performance: Story and Song

Oral Patterns of Performance

Story and Song

Barre Toelken

Utah State University Press, 2003

To many Native American cultures, songs and stories are dramatic enactments of reality, and words bring reality into existence. In this chapter from his award-winning book, The Anguish of Snails, Toelken thoughtfully approaches a number of stories from Native American traditions, discussing how narratives can be touchstones of shared values among closely associated traditional people and how songs and stories go far beyond an evening's entertainment or "lessons” about life. A traditional narrative can be a culturally structured way of thinking and of experiencing the patterns that make culture real.

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cover of Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics

Orphan Black

Performance, Gender, Biopolitics

Edited by Andrea Goulet and Robert A. Rushing

Intellect Books, 2018

This book presents a groundbreaking exploration of the hit television series Orphan Black and the questions it raises for performance and technology, gender and reproduction, and biopolitics and community. 

Contributors come from a range of backgrounds and explore the digital innovations and technical interactions between human and machine that allow the show to challenge conventional notions of performance and identity, address family themes, and Orphan Black’s own textual genealogy within the contexts of science, reproductive technology, and the politics of gender, and extend their inquiry to the broader question of community in a "posthuman" world of biopolitical power. Mobilizing philosophy, history of science, and literary theory, scholars analyze the ways in which Orphan Black depicts resistance to the many forms of power that attempt to capture, monitor, and shape life today.
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cover of Out of This World: Afro-German Afrofuturism

Out of This World

Afro-German Afrofuturism

Priscilla Dionne Layne

Northwestern University Press, 2025

Examining Afro-German artists’ use of Afrofuturist tropes to critique German racial history

The term Afrofuturism was first coined in the 1990s to describe African diasporic artists’ use of science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy to reimagine the diaspora’s pasts and to counter not only Eurocentric prejudices but also pessimistic narratives. Out of This World: Afro-German Afrofuturism focuses on contemporary Black German Afrofuturist literature and performance that critiques Eurocentrism and, specifically, German racism and colonial history. This young generation has, Priscilla Layne argues, engaged with Afrofuturism to disrupt linear time and imagine alternative worlds, to introduce non-Western technologies into the German cultural milieu, and to consider the possibilities of posthumanism. Their experiments in futurist and speculative narratives offer new tools for breaking with the binary thinking about race, culture, and gender identity that have been enforced by repressive ideological and state apparatuses, such as educational, cultural, and police institutions. Rather than providing escapism or purely imaginary alternatives, however, they have created a space—outer and artistic—in which their lives matter.

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cover of Over and Over: Performance, Time, and Resonance in Serial Television Drama

Over and Over

Performance, Time, and Resonance in Serial Television Drama

Elliott Logan

Rutgers University Press, 2026

How does serial drama earn, keep, and reward our attention for so long—over episodes, seasons, months, and years? While we know that characters are the focus of story and viewer interest in television fiction, scholars have for decades overlooked the way those characters are performed on-screen and the lure of performance as a key formal and thematic aspect of long-form television storytelling. In Over and Over, Elliott Logan offers close readings of performance in some of the most celebrated television dramas of the century, casting new light on the attractions and significance of the medium’s seriality. The book shows how the patterning and expressive resonance of performers on-screen binds together otherwise unconnected episodes of shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men. In doing so, it highlights the provisionality of identity and meaning as crucial to their interest in the sustenance of human relationships over long periods of time. In accounting for the resonance of performance over time in serial drama, this book shows, we find the terms of our own attachment to its compelling depictions of human life

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