Results by title
967 books match the query 'Theater' and 260 start with t
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 17
Outdoor PerformanceEdited by Jay Malarcher
University of Alabama Press, 2009
Among other subjects, these essays explore the rise of "airdomes" as performance spaces in the American Midwest in the first half of the 20th century; the civic-religious pageants staged by certain Mormon congregations; Wheels-A-Rolling, and other railroad themed pageants; first-hand accounts of the innovative Hunter Hills theatre program in Tennessee; the role of traditional outdoor historical drama, particularly the long-running performances of Paul Green's The Lost Colony; and the rise of the part dance, part sport, part performance phenomenon "parkour"-- the improvised traversal of obstacles found in both urban and rural landscapes.
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 18
The Prop's The Thing: Stage Properties ReconsideredEdited by J. K. Curry
University of Alabama Press, 2010
The contributors illuminate many aspects of this largely ignored yet crucial part of the theatre. Kyna Hamill looks at props as a means to mark social status. Christine Woodworth addresses the challenges presented by using blood onstage, while Andrew Sofer discusses the use of prop corpses on the Shakespearean stage. Andrew Kimbrough moves from an examination of actors’ use of props to a consideration of audience response to performance. Other essays investigate specific objects or productions, and introduce provocative and original perspectives to the growing discussion about stage properties.
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 19
Theatre and FilmJ K Curry
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Exploring the evolving dialogue between stage performance and cinematic expression.Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4
Despite a shared history and many common present practices, the relationship between theatre and film often remains uncertain. Does a close study of film enrich an understanding of drama on the stage? What ongoing connections do theatre and film maintain, and what elements do they borrow from each other? Does the relative popularity and accessibility of film lead to an increased scholarly defensiveness about qualities exclusive to theatrical performances? Do theatre and film demand two different kinds of attention from spectators, or do audiences tend to experience both in the same ways? The essays in Theatre Symposium: Volume 19 present this dynamic coexistence of theatre and film, and examine the nature of their mutual influence on each other.
Bruce McConachie, in his contribution to the collection, “Theatre and Film in Evolutionary Perspective,” argues that the cognitive functions used to interpret either media arise from the same evolutionary foundation, and that therefore the viewing experiences of theatre and film are closely linked to each other. In “Robert Edmond Jones: Theatre and Motion Pictures, Bridging Reality and Dreams,” Anthony Hostetter and Elisabeth Hostetter consider Jones’ influential vision of a “theater of the future,” in which traditional stage performances incorporate mediated video material into stage productions. Becky Becker’s “Nollywood: Film and Home Video, of the Death of Nigerian Theatre,” by focusing on the current conversation in Nigeria, discusses the anxiety generated by a film and video industry burgeoning into and displacing theatre culture
These and the six other essays in Theatre Symposium: Volume 19 shed light on the current state of affairs—the collaborations and the tensions—between two distinctly individual yet inextricably related artistic media.
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 21
Ritual, Religion, and TheatreEdited by E. Bert Wallace
University of Alabama Press, 2013
Whether or not theatre arose from ritual and/or religion, from prehistory to the present there have been clear and vital connections among the three. Ritual, Religion, and Theatre, volume 21 of the annual journal Theatre Symposium, presents a series of essays that explore the intricate and vital relationships that exist, historically and today, between these various modes of expression and performance.
The essays in this volume discuss the stage presence of the spiritual meme; ritual performance and spirituality in The Living Theatre; theatricality, themes, and theology in James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones; Jordan Harrison’s Act a Lady and the ritual of queerness; Gerpla and national identity in Iceland; confession in Hamlet and Measure for Measure; Christian liturgical drama; Muslim theatre and performance; cave rituals and the Brain’s Theatre; and other, more general issues.
Edited by E. Bert Wallace, this latest publication by the largest regional theatre organization in the United States collects the most current scholarship on theatre history and theory.
CONTRIBUTORS
Cohen Ambrose / David Callaghan / Gregory S. Carr
Matt DiCintio / William Doan / Tom F. Driver / Steve Earnest
Jennifer Flaherty / Charles A. Gillespie / Thomas L. King
Justin Kosec / Mark Pizzato / Kate Stratton
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 22
Broadway and Beyond: Commercial Theatre ConsideredDavid S. Thompson
University of Alabama Press, 2014
The eleven contributors to this fascinating collection illuminate many aspects of commercial theatre and how best to examine it. George Pate analyzes the high-stakes implication of a melodramatic legal battle. Christine Woodworth recounts the difficulties encountered by British actresses near the turn of the twentieth century, while Boone J. Hopkins considers newly found images of Margo Jones along with the commercial appeal they represent.
The volume continues with articles that follow developments with ties to commercial theatre, such as the interplay between Broadway companies and regional theatres, musical productions in communist Poland, and the influence of Korean popular culture on theatre and the unique production arrangements that have resulted. Other essays investigate alternative concepts related to commercial themes with regard to audience interaction and the burgeoning world of geek theatre.
Edited by David S. Thompson, this latest publication by the largest regional theatre organization in the United States collects the most current scholarship on theatre history and theory.
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 23
Theatre and YouthDavid S. Thompson
University of Alabama Press, 2015
The first set of essays draws from robustly diverse sources: the work of Frank Wedekind in nineteenth-century Germany, Peter Pan’s several stage incarnations, Evgeny Shvarts’s antitotalitarian plays in Soviet Russia, and Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, whose depictions of childhood comment on both the classical period as well as Marlowe’s own Elizabethan age.
The second part of the collection explores and illustrates how youth participate in theatre, the cognitive benefits youth reap from theatre practice, and the ameliorating power of theatre to help at-risk youth. These essays show fascinating and valuable case studies of, for example, theatre employed in geography curricula to strengthen spatial thinking, theatre as an antidote to youth delinquency, and theatre teaching Latinos in the south strategies for coping in a multilingual world.
Rounding out this exemplary collection are a pair of essays that survey the state of the art, the significance of theatre-for-youth programming choices, and the shifting attitudes young Americans are bringing to the discipline. Eclectic and vital, this expertly curated collection will be of interest to educators and theatre professionals alike.
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 24
Theatre and SpaceEdited by Becky K. Becker
University of Alabama Press, 2016
Exploring the dynamic intersections of performance and place.
At a time when so many options exist for access to theatrical entertainments, it is no surprise that theatre practitioners and scholars are often preoccupied with the role of the audience. While space undoubtedly impacts the rehearsal and production processes, its greater significance seems to rest in the impact a specific location has on the audience.
This volume provides diverse viewpoints on theatre and space, as well as its relationship to the audience. Sebastian Trainor and Samuel T. Shanks offer contemporary perspectives on two ancient theatre spaces, while Lisa Marie Bowler describes the Globe Theatre, a replica of the original, as embodying a kind of absence despite its rich link to the past. Focusing on distinctly different periods and settings, both Andrew Gibb and Christine Woodworth describe a politics of space in which specific players gain prestige and power. Chase Bringardner identifies the audience as playing an important role in creating a space for parody in a historic Nashville venue, while Arnab Banerji describes an exhausting process for members of the Bengali group theatre who must continually move from space to space. Finally, Alicia Corts discusses virtual performance spaces and the degree to which participants are able to control their online identities within virtual performances. Bookending these eight essays are Marvin Carlson’s keynote presentation “Whose Space Is It Anyway?” and his closing remarks for the symposium, both of which allude to, and richly explicate, the ultimate arbiters of theatrical space: the audience.
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 25
Cross-Cultural Dialogue on the Global StageEdited by Becky K. Becker
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Globalization may strike many as a phenomenon of our own historical moment, but it is truly as old as civilization: we need only look to the ancient Silk Road linking the Far East to the Mediterranean in order to find some of the earliest recorded impacts of people and goods crossing borders. Yet, in the current cultural moment, tensions are high due to increased migration, economic unpredictability, complicated acts of local and global terror, and heightened political divisions all over the world.
Thus globalization seems new and a threat to our ways of life, to our nations, and to our cultures. In what ways have theatre practitioners, educators, and scholars worked to support cross-cultural dialogue historically? And in what ways might theatre embrace the complexities and contradictions inherent in any meaningful exchange? The essays in Theatre Symposium, Volume 25 reflect on these questions.
Featured in Theatre Symposium, Volume 25
- “Theatre as Cultural Exchange: Stages and Studios of Learning” by Anita Gonzalez
- “Certain Kinds of Dances Used among Them: An Initial Inquiry into Colonial Spanish Encounters with the Areytos of the Taíno in Puerto Rico” by E. Bert Wallace
- “Gertrude Hoffmann’s Lawful Piracy: ‘A Vision of Salome’ and the Russian Season as Transatlantic Production Impersonations” by Sunny Stalter-Pace
- “Greasing the Global: Princess Lotus Blossom and the Fabrication of the ‘Orient’ to Pitch Products in the American Medicine Show” by Chase Bringardner
- “Dismembering Tennessee Williams: The Global Context of Lee Breuer’s A Streetcar Named Desire” by Daniel Ciba
- “Transformative Cross-Cultural Dialogue in Prague: Americans Creating Czech History Plays” by Karen Berman
- “Finding Common Ground: Lessac Training across Cultures” by Erica Tobolski and Deborah A. Kinghorn
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 26
In Other Habits: Theatrical CostumeSarah McCarroll
University of Alabama Press, 2018
Stage costumes reveal character. They tell audiences who the character is or how a character functions within the world of the play, among other things. Theatrical costuming, however, along with other forms of theatre design, has often been considered merely a craft, rather than part of the deeply systemic creation of meaning onstage. In what ways do our clothes shape and reveal our habits of behavior? How do stage costumes work to reveal one kind of habit via the manipulation of another? How might theatre practitioners learn to most effectively exploit this dynamic? Theatre Symposium, Volume 26 analyzes the ways in which meaning is conveyed through costuming for the stage and explores the underlying assumptions embedded in theatrical practice and costume production.
THEATRE SYMPOSIUM, VOLUME 26
MICHELE MAJER
Plus que Reine: The Napoleonic Revival in Belle Epoque Theatre and Fashion
CAITLIN QUINN
Creating a Realistic Rendering Pedagogy: The Fashion Illustration Problem
ALY RENEE AMIDEI
Where'd I Put My Character?: The Costume Character Body and Essential Costuming for the Ensemble Actor
KYLA KAZUSCHYK
Embracing the Chaos: Creating Costumes for Devised Work
DAVID S. THOMPSON
Dressing the Image: Costumes in Printed Theatrical Advertising
LEAH LOWE
Costuming the Audience: Gentility, Consumption, and the Lady’s Theatre Hat in Gilded Age America
JORGE SANDOVAL
The RuPaul Effect: The Exploration of the Costuming Rituals of Drag Culture in Social Media and the Theatrical Performativity of the Male Body in the Ambit of the Everyday
GREGORY S. CARR
A Brand New Day on Broadway: The Genius of Geoffrey Holder’s Artistry and His Intentional Evocation of the African Diaspora
ANDREW GIBB
On the [Historical] Sublime: J. R. Planché’s King John and the Romantic Ideal of the Past
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 27
Theatre and EmbodimentEdited by Sarah McCarroll
University of Alabama Press, 2019
Theatre is inescapably about bodies. By definition, theatre requires the live bodies of performers in the same space and at the same time as the live bodies of an audience. And, yet, it’s hard to talk about bodies. We talk about characters; we talk about actors; we talk about costume and movement. But we often approach these as identities or processes layered onto bodies, rather than as inescapably entwined with them. Bodies on the theatrical stage hold the power of transformation. Theatre practitioners, scholars, and educators must think about what bodies go where onstage and what stories which bodies to tell.
The essays in Theatre Symposium, Volume 27 explore a broad range of issues related to embodiment. The volume begins with Rhonda Blair’s keynote essay, in which she provides an overview of the current cognitive science underpinning our understanding of what it means to be “embodied” and to talk about “embodiment.” She also provides a set of goals and cautions for theatre artists engaging with the available science on embodiment, while issuing a call for the absolute necessity for that engagement, given the primacy of the body to the theatrical act.
The following three essays provide examinations of historical bodies in performance. Timothy Pyles works to shift the common textual focus of Racinian scholarship to a more embodied understanding through his examination of the performances of the young female students of the Saint-Cyr academy in two of Racine’s Biblical plays. Shifting forward in time by three centuries, Travis Stern’s exploration of the auratic celebrity of baseball player Mike Kelly uncovers the ways in which bodies may retain the ghosts of their former selves long after physical ability and wealth are gone. Laurence D. Smith’s investigation of actress Manda Björling’s performances in Miss Julie provides a model for how cognitive science, in this case theories of cognitive blending, can be integrated with archival theatrical research and scholarship.
From scholarship grounded in analysis of historical bodies and embodiment, the volume shifts to pedagogical concerns. Kaja Amado Dunn’s essay on the ways in which careless selection of working texts can inflict embodied harm on students of color issues an imperative call for careful and intentional classroom practice in theatre training programs. Cohen Ambrose’s theorization of pedagogical cognitive ecologies, in which subjects usually taught disparately (acting, theatre history, costume design, for example) could be approached collaboratively and through embodiment, speaks to ways in which this call might be answered.
Tessa Carr’s essay on "The Integration of Tuskegee High School" brings together ideas of historical bodies and embodiment in the academic theatrical context through an examination of the process of creating a documentary theatre production. The final piece in the volume, Bridget Sundin’s exchange with the ghost of Marlene Dietrich, is an imaginative exploration of how it is possible to open the archive, to create new spaces for performance scholarship, via an interaction with the body.
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 28
Theatre and CitizenshipEdited by Andrew Gibb
University of Alabama Press, 2020
A collection of essays whose authors reach beyond simple definitions of citizenship as determined by documents and legal rights
The scholarly conference from which this publication emerged was circulated in the waning months of 2018, following a summer of urgent and emotional debate surrounding new US immigration policies regarding immigrant family separations, arguments fueled on one side by fears about the loss of social cohesion, and on the other by photographs of incarcerated children. Given the then-prevailing political atmosphere, editor Andrew Gibb anticipated that a good number of submissions might draw connections between the patterns, policies, and histories of immigration on the one hand, and theatrical or otherwise performance-centered expressions of citizenship, whether inclusive or exclusionary, on the other. In retrospect, what could have been foreseen is that theatre scholars, educators, and professionals would interpret recent events against a wider and more complex backdrop. The ultimate result of that initial call is this volume, a collection of essays whose authors reach beyond simple definitions of citizenship as determined by documents and legal rights, and who engage in larger conversations about what citizenship can mean, and how such meanings are expressed through theatre and performance.
Interestingly, while none of the authors published herein take up immigration as a central issue, they all make use of some combination of three particular analytical frameworks, all of which happen to be pertinent to the current immigrant experience and attempts to regulate it: bodies, institutions, and technologies.
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 29
Theatre and RaceEdited by Andrew Gibb
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Essays whose composition and editing were undertaken almost entirely within the transformed cultural and professional landscape of 2020
A few weeks prior to the submission deadline for this volume of Theatre Symposium, the murder of George Floyd by officers of the Minneapolis Police Department sparked a movement for racial justice that reverberated at every level of US society. At predominantly and historically white academic institutions (including Theatre Symposium and its parent organization, the Southeastern Theatre Conference) leaders were compelled, as perhaps never before, to account for the role of systematic racism in the foundation and perpetuation of their organizations. While the present volume’s theme of “Theatre and Race” was announced in the waning days of 2019, the composition and editing of the issue’s essays were undertaken almost entirely within the transformed cultural and professional landscape of 2020. Throughout its twenty-nine years of publication, Theatre Symposium’s pages have included many excellent essays whose authors have deployed theories of race as an analytical framework, and (less often) treated BIPOC-centered art and artists as subject. The intent of the current editors in conceiving this issue was to center such subjects and theorizations, a goal that has since taken on a more widely recognized urgency.
Taken together, these twelve essays represent a wide range of scholarly responses to the theme of “theatre and race.” The fact that there is so much to say on the topic, from so many different perspectives, is a sign of how profoundly theatre practices have been—and continue to be—shaped by racial discourses and their material manifestations.
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 30
Theatre and Politicsedited by Chase Bringardner
University of Alabama Press, 2023
Illustrates how theatre’s engagement with politics changes over time
For the thirtieth volume of Theatre Symposium, the editors return to a topic first proposed over twenty years ago in volume 9 (theatre and politics in the twentieth century), reimaged for a broader, more comprehensive time frame. In this volume on theater and politics, scholars explore what constitutes the political, how the political is performed, and how theatre engages with politics over time, drawing on the following framing questions: What is the historical and ongoing role of theatre in framing our ideas and conversations about politics? How do politics and theatre engage one another in an increasingly mediated landscape? From theatrical analysis of the political arena to political analysis of the theatrical stage, discussions of theatre and politics can challenge ethical, theoretical, and artistic considerations of our world.
The current moment presents a compelling opportunity to revisit, revise, and reengage. Certainly, in the twenty-one volumes since volume 9, the political landscape both nationally and internationally has shifted dramatically. The past two years specifically have seen an increase in the already prevalent presence of the political in our daily discourse. The COVID-19 global pandemic and ongoing racial reckonings have further unmoored many systems and structures, requiring action and change. Rather than a moment of pause or passivity, pandemic times have seen an increase in political activity and political discourse on the local, national, and global levels. Within the theatre and performance communities, these calls to action have resulted in movements like #weseeyouWAT and other calls to break down old systems and create new ones, to privilege access for those of the global majority, and to explicitly demand advocacy and activism. Organizations like the Southeastern Theatre Conference (SETC) itself crafted new ethos statements and engaged in the necessary work of boldly foregrounding equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility at the center of all its efforts.
The editors and contributors to this volume respond to the immediacy of this moment and the clarion call for change. From Shakespeare to new productions like Alabama Love Stories, presented at Auburn University, contributors grapple with a range of examples, contemporary and historical, and argue with renewed urgency for the importance of intentionally interrogating the interplay of performance and politics. The essays in this volume demonstrate that theatre and performance cannot rise to this moment or even begin to address it without doing that substantial work to clean its own house and create accessible new spaces.
Contributors
Chase Bringardner / Tessa Carr / Lily Climenhaga / Abena Foreman-Trice / Emma Givens / TK Manwill / Boomie Pederson / Royal Shirée / Teresa Simone / Tony Tambasco / Jonathon W. Taylor / Justice von Maur / Patricia Ybarra
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 31
Theatre and the PopularEdited by Chase Bringardner
University of Alabama Press, 2024
A new issue of the longstanding theatre journal, documenting conversations that traverse disciplinary boundaries
The essays in the thirty-first volume of Theatre Symposium traverse disciplinary boundaries to explore what constitutes the “popular” in theater and performance in an increasingly frenetic and mediated landscape. Amid the current resurgence of populist discourse and the enduring impact of popular culture, this volume explores what is considered popular, how that determination gets made, and who makes it. The answers to these questions shape the structures and systems of performance in an interaction that is reciprocal, intricate, and multifaceted. Productions often succeed or fail based on their ability to align with what is popular—sometimes productively, sometimes clumsily, sometimes brazenly, and sometimes tragically.
In our current moment, what constitutes the popular profoundly affects the real world politically, economically, and socially. Controversies about the electoral college system hinge on the primacy of the “popular” vote. Streaming services daily update lists of their most popular content and base future decisions on opaque measures of popularity. Social media platforms broadcast popular content across the globe, triggering new products, social activism, and political revolutions.
The contributors to this volume engage with a range of contemporary and historical examples and argue with clarity and acuity the interplay of performance and the popular. Theatre and performance deeply engage with the popular at every level—from audience response to box office revenue. The variety of methodologies and sites of inquiry showcased in this volume demonstrates the breadth and depth of the popular and the importance of such work to understanding our present moment onstage and off.
CONTRIBUTORS
Mysia Anderson / Chase Bringardner / Elizabeth M. Cizmar / Chelsea Curto / Janet M. Davis / Tom Fish / Kyla Kazuschyk / Sarah McCarroll / Eleanor Owicki / Sunny Stalter-Pace / Chelsea Taylor / Chris Woodworth
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 32
Material Performance and Performing ObjectsKeith Byron Kirk
University of Alabama Press, 2025
A new volume of the longstanding theatre journal, documenting conversations that traverse disciplinary boundaries
Theater Symposium, Volume 32 delves into the collaborative dynamics and ritualistic exchanges within performance during the collective resurgence into a hopeful post-COVID world. This volume’s contributors embark on a journey through the vibrant realm of material performance, with puppetry at the forefront, guiding readers into an expansive landscape of object performance styles and structures. As they navigate this terrain, they pose critical questions that unravel the complexities of object performance analysis and its impact on audiences. Bringing together perspectives from designers, creators, and performers, this volume explores how object performances serve as a medium to engage with the world, fostering synchrony and positive outcomes across a diverse array of artistic practices. Theater Symposium, Volume 32 invites readers to expand their understanding of collaborative practices and the object world, whether it be through the lens of labor or entertainment.
Contributors
Ashley Bellet / Francesca Marie Chilcote / Elisabeth Hostetter / Rebecca Johnson / Kyla Kazuschyk / Keith Byron Kirk / Jesse Njus / Claudia Orenstein / Paulette Richards / Dory Sibley / Echo Sunyata Sibley / Skye Strauss
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 3
Voice of the DramaturgPaul Castagno
University of Alabama Press, 1995
Exploring the many voices of the dramaturg—and the evolving artistry of shaping theatre from within.
As both a verb and a noun, the word voice has many meanings and functions on multiple levels, a phenomenon that is remarkably analogous to the practice of dramaturgy. Thus, the topic title Voice of the Dramaturg allows for the requisite flexibility and provides a unifying theme for the third volume of Theatre Symposium. This volume of the proceedings from the June 1994 joint meeting of the Southeastern Theatre Conference and the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs in Atlanta, Georgia, addresses the question, What is Dramaturgy? Part I includes the contributions of the six symposium participants and concludes with the roundtable discussion by panelists. Part II is composed of refereed papers. These papers range from the highly theoretical to the practical and pedagogical. They reflect the diversity of what dramaturgy means in contemporary theatre.
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 7
Theatre and ViolenceJohn W. Frick
University of Alabama Press, 1999
Theatre Symposium, Vol. 9
Theatre and Politics in the Twentieth CenturyJohn C. Countryman
University of Alabama Press, 2001
This collection of essays explores how drama can teach political principles and entertain at the same time.
Political commentary is possible through "variety" theatre, this volume contends. Compiled from the April 2000 Theatre Symposium held on the campus of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, this collection of essays presents a compelling mix of theoretical and practical viewpoints from a broad diversity of scholars from around the country.
What remains to be learned about the political objectives of Brecht's Lehrstriucke? What political power is resident in the satirical humor of Dario Fo's drama? What can we learn from Mordecai Gorelik's political/artistic philosophy that might inform contemporary practice? What was the impact of political theatre on Broadway between the wars? Is Thornton Wilder's Our Town the play we've always imagined it to be, or does it challenge the politics of its time? What is the role of theatre activism in raising consciousness about gender politics? These are only some of the questions addressed by this lively, informative discussion.
Theatre Theory Reader
Prague School WritingsEdited by David Drozd
Karolinum Press, 2017
Theatre Things
Material Theories and HistoriesEdited by Andrew Friedman and Eero Laine
University of Michigan Press, 2026
Theatre Things: Material Theories and Histories considers key theatrical objects through a comparative approach, examining the uses and histories of different parts of the theatre throughout time and across culture and geography. The ten “theatre things” at the heart of the book are: entrances, tickets, programs, concessions, seats, lights, curtains, stages, trapdoors, and exits. For every object, three different scholars offer short chapters that examine it from different angles across eras, places, and performance traditions to result in a set of diverse and provocative accounts of the many ways objects have functioned throughout theatre history. Written in an accessible style, the book draws on real examples from theatre history around the world to reveal that even the smallest details—where you sit, how the lights shift, what the program says—carry meaning. Whether you’re a regular theatregoer or a curious fan, Theatre Things offers a fresh way to look at the spaces and objects that shape every night at the theatre—and makes them feel newly interesting long after the curtain call.
Theatre and Cartographies of Power
Repositioning the Latina/o AmericasEdited by Jimmy A. Noriega and Analola Santana
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Building on hemispheric and transnational models, this book demonstrates the capacity of theatre studies to challenge the up-down/North-South approach that dominates scholarship in the United States and presents a strong case for a repositioning of the Latina/o Americas in theatrical histories and practices.
Theatre and Consciousness
Explanatory Scope and Future PotentialDaniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
Intellect Books, 1995
• What inspires the dramatist to write a play? This question addresses the nature of the creative process.
• How do different plays reflect human consciousness?
• What kinds of new ideas did major directors or theatre makers, such as Artaud, Grotowski, Barba, and Brook introduce?
• Should actors be personally involved with the emotions they have to portray?
• Are puppets or marionettes superior to actors?
• How to account for the designer’s combination of creativity and practical skill? What part does mental imagination play in the design process? How do designers get their own spatial awareness across to their spectators?
• How does theatre affect the spectator? Why do spectators react as they do? How do distance and suspension of disbelief ‘work’?
An improved and expanded understanding of theatre, resulting from answering the questions above in the context of consciousness studies, should inspire new developments in theatre practice.
Theatre and Identity in Imperial Russia
Catherine A. Schuler
University of Iowa Press, 2009
Schuler draws upon contemporary journals written and published by the educated nobility and the intelligentsia—who represented the intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural groups of the day—as well as upon the laws of the Russian empire and upon theatrical memoirs. With fascinating detail, she spotlights the ideologically charged binaries ascribed to prominent actors—authentic/performed, primitive/civilized, Russian/Western—that mirrored the volatility of national identity from the Napoleonic Wars through the reign of Alexander II.
If the path traveled by Russian artists and audiences from the turn of the nineteenth century to the era of the Great Reforms reveals anything about Russian culture and society, it may be that there is nothing more difficult than being Russian in Russia. By exploring the ways in which theatrical administrators, playwrights, and actors responded to three tsars, two wars, and a major revolt, this carefully crafted book demonstrates the battle for the hearts and minds of the Russian people.
Theatre and Performance in Small Nations
Edited by Steve Blandford
Intellect Books, 2013
Theatre for Lifelong Learning
A Handbook for Instructors, Older Adults, Communities, and ArtistsLinda Lau and Rae Mansfield
Intellect Books, 2024
Theatre for Lifelong Learning is a step-by-step guide for anyone interested in teaching theatre courses and creating theatre with older adults. This book provides instructors with syllabi, discussion questions, classroom management strategies, resource lists, and activities to teach courses from beginning to end. Special topics include playwriting, play development, storytelling, theatre appreciation, theatre criticism, theatre history, and theatre theory.
Older adult theatre courses support emotional well-being and the development of artistic communities and anyone can contribute to lifelong learning as an instructor. If you are new to theatre and theatre education, Theatre for Lifelong Learning offers tips throughout to assist you in creating accessible environments and making courses your own. If you have a background in performing arts, this book enriches your experience with interdisciplinary approaches to share your expertise. If you are an educator, it provides useful strategies to adapt your current skill set for the theatre classroom.
Regardless of your experience, you can help older adults connect, engage, and create. You may find yourself learning, exploring, and experimenting alongside your students. Teaching older adults theatre will contribute to your own enjoyment. In theatre, everyone gets to have fun!
Theatre in Passing 2
Searching for New Amsterdam(E)lena K. Siemens
Intellect Books, 2015
Theatre in Passing
A Moscow Photo-Diary(E)lena K. Siemens
Intellect Books, 2011
Theatre in Passing explores spaces of performance in contemporary Moscow. Inspired by French philosopher Michel de Certeau’s model of a "second, poetic geography" in which the walker—the everyday practitioner—invents the space observed by the voyeur, this book takes the reader on a tour of spaces of performance in contemporary Moscow. Through text and photography, the city’s "theatrical geography" is uncovered, from the Bolshoi Theater in Theater Square to hidden gems like the recently restored Kuskovo estate. With additional sections on street theater and other public gatherings, Theatre in Passing is a must-read book for anyone curious about the theatrical architecture and geography of Russia’s capital.
Theatre in Prison
Theory and PracticeEdited by Michael Balfour
Intellect Books, 1995
Theatre in Prison is a collection of thirteen international essays exploring the rich diversity of innovative drama works in prisons. The book includes an introduction that will present a contextualisation of the prison theatre field. Thereafter, leading practitioners and academics will explore key aspects of practice &endash; problemitising, theorising and describing specific approaches to working with offenders. The book also includes extracts from prison plays, poetry and prisoners writings that offer illustrations and insights into the experience of prison life.
Theatre of Iraq Under Occupation, 2003-2011
Lamentation, Homeland, IdentityJames Al-Shamma
University of Iowa Press, 2025
However, in 2003, the United States invasion of Iraq propelled Iraqi theatre in an altogether different direction. Global media published photographs documenting the torture of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers and sectarian violence broke out, as Shiʿa and Sunni militias struggled for power. Theatre of Iraq Under Occupation examines the occupation’s impact on Iraqi theatre as eliciting lamentation over loss of homeland and identity, and as an assault on the Iraqi character itself. The first volume in English dedicated solely to theatre in Iraq, James Al-Shamma and Amir Al-Azraki’s insights don’t just offer a significant contribution to cultural studies, they bridge foreign policy and art in real time.
Theatre of the Real
Yeats, Beckett, and SondheimGina Masucci MacKenzie
The Ohio State University Press, 2008
Theatre, Community, and Civic Engagement in Jacobean London
Mark Bayer
University of Iowa Press, 2011
Taking to heart Thomas Heywood’s claim that plays “persuade men to humanity and good life, instruct them in civility and good manners, showing them the fruits of honesty, and the end of villainy,” Mark Bayer’s captivating new study argues that the early modern London theatre was an important community institution whose influence extended far beyond its economic, religious, educational, and entertainment contributions. Bayer concentrates not on the theatres where Shakespeare’s plays were performed but on two important amphitheatres, the Fortune and the Red Bull, that offer a more nuanced picture of the Jacobean playgoing industry. By looking at these playhouses, the plays they staged, their audiences, and the communities they served, he explores the local dimensions of playgoing.
Theatre, Globalization and the Heteroglobal Method
Glenn Odom
Intellect Books, 2026
Theatre, Globalization and the Heteroglobal Method offers a groundbreaking framework for rethinking global theatre studies. Drawing on philosophy and scholarship from major theatre traditions—South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Japan, and Nigeria—the volume reimagines how performance circulates and transforms in a global context.
Challenging the dominance of Eurocentric models in postcolonial studies, comparative literature, and world theatre, the book introduces the “heteroglobal” method: an adaptable, equitable approach that begins with local theoretical and philosophical frameworks before bringing them into dialogue. These imagined centers, each with its own rich discursive heritage, become sites of knowledge exchange where fresh understandings of art and globalization emerge.
Through a theoretically pluralistic matrix of comparison and interculturalism, Theatre, Globalization and the Heteroglobal Method documents contemporary scholarly and artistic practices across diverse cultural landscapes, offering a new model for teaching, research, and performance in an interconnected world.
Theatre, Time and Temporality
Melting Clocks and Snapped ElasticsDavid Ian Rabey
Intellect Books, 2016
Theatres of Independence
Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker
University of Iowa Press, 2005
The first part of Dharwadker’s study deals with the new dramatic canon that emerged after 1950 and the variety of ways in which plays are written, produced, translated, circulated, and received in a multilingual national culture. The second part traces the formation of significant postcolonial dramatic genres from their origins in myth, history, folk narrative, sociopolitical experience, and the intertextual connections between Indian, European, British, and American drama. The book’s ten appendixes collect extensive documentation of the work of leading playwrights and directors, as well as a record of the contemporary multilingual performance histories of major Indian, Western, and non-Western plays from all periods and genres. Treating drama and theatre as strategically interrelated activities, the study makes post-independence Indian theatre visible as a multifaceted critical subject to scholars of modern drama, comparative theatre, theatre history, and the new national and postcolonial literatures.
Theatres of the Body
Dance and Discourse in Antebellum PhiladelphiaLynn Matluck Brooks
Temple University Press, 2025
Reviewing print culture in the 1840s, Brooks shows how newspapers, magazines, and popular fiction provided documentation of dancing in Philadelphia as well as the responses of dance commentators, practitioners, and moralists. Theatres of the Body also considers the interplay of science with dance in the 1850s, which impacted both dance practices and reception.
Providing an expansive historiography of these significant contributions to dance in the United States, Brooks deepens our understanding of antebellum culture and history.
Theatrical Consciousness
The Actor’s Mind in Russian ModernismAlisa Ballard Lin
Northwestern University Press, 2025
Investigating late imperial Russian and early Soviet modernism’s reinvention of the actor
In this wide-ranging study, Alisa Ballard Lin argues that Russian theatrical theory and practice contributed to a broad pre- and postrevolutionary discourse about the mind, profoundly reshaping concepts of consciousness, perception, identity, and the constitution of the subject. Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism examines efforts in Russian theater—from around the turn of the century through the mid-1930s—to stimulate, train, imagine, and ultimately understand the actor’s, as well as the spectator’s, mind. Discussing key figures of the period, including Nikolai Evreinov, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Alexander Tairov, Lin identifies an underappreciated dimension of humanism within Russian modernism: a humanism that resisted the pressures of an increasingly technologized, industrialized, and politicized modernity that challenged the place of the human within it.
Theatrical Gamut
Notes for a Post-Beckettian StageEnoch Brater, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1995
Theatrical Reality
Space, Embodiment and Empathy in PerformanceCampbell Edinborough
Intellect Books, 2016
Theatrical Scene Painting
A Lesson GuideWilliam H. Pinnell
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008
Theatrical Scene Painting: A Lesson Guide, second edition, is a practical guide to scene painting for students and novices, as well as a reference for intermediate scene painters who wish to refresh or supplement their basic skills. Drawing on his extensive teaching and scene-painting experience, William H. Pinnell clarifies and expands on the lessons of the first edition, providing a detailed overview of the fundamentals of traditional scene painting.
The guide not only covers the basic tools of the trade and various methods of creating texture on scenery but also includes more advanced techniques for scene making, beginning with stonework, woodwork, and wallpaper before moving on to the more intricate techniques of moldings, paneling, drapery, foliage, shiny metal, perspective illusions, scale transfers, scenic drops, and scrims. Pinnell also includes refinements and embellishments that can lead to the development of personal style without sacrificing the goal of realism and more advanced work. Alternative methods to achieve different effects are also featured.
Theatrical Scene Painting: A Lesson Guide was the first book of its kind to provide clear step-by-step instructions in how to paint a wide variety of basic and advanced effects commonly needed for the theater. This new edition clarifies the origins of painting techniques and is supplemented with clearer step-by-step descriptions, new instructional photographs, and drawings that illustrate each major step. This edition also includes additional painting projects and their possible variations, a gallery of nineteen examples of professional scenic works, and an expanded glossary to eliminate confusion in terms.
Useful to both self-taught artists and students, each lesson in the guide can be a stand-alone topic or can form the foundation for a student to build skills for increasingly complex techniques.
The second edition of Theatrical Scene Painting provides many new essential scene painting projects in a clearer format, broadens the scope of the painting examples, and includes updated methods as well as new lessons. This clear and easily accessible guide gives students the ability to put together recognizable illusions.
Theatrical Scene Painting
A Lesson GuideWilliam H. Pinnell
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987
This handbook explains the techniques of traditional scene painting. A “how to” book for the novice, it shows the methods used in creating the illusion of three dimensions where only two exist. It provides a step-by-step explanation of each aspect of scene painting, using both color and black-and-white photographs for illustration.
Among the many illusions made possible through the magic of paint are stonework, wallpaper, woodwork, as well as mouldings, draperies, and foliage. To teach the beginner how to re-create reality through painted illusion, Pinnell emphasizes traditional scene painting, including basic tools, primary painting techniques, and methods for creating texture on scenery. He also illustrates refinements and embellishments that lead to more advanced work.
Theatricality of the Closet
Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji JapanMichelle Liu Carriger
Northwestern University Press, 2023
Clothing matters. This basic axiom is both common sense and, in another way, radical. It is from this starting point that Michelle Liu Carriger elucidates the interconnected ways in which gender, sexuality, class, and race are created by the everyday act of getting dressed. Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan examines fashion and clothing controversies of the nineteenth century, drawing on performance theory to reveal how the apparently superficial or frivolous deeply affects the creation of identity.
By interrogating a set of seemingly disparate examples from the same period but widely distant settings—Victorian Britain and Meiji-era Japan—Carriger disentangles how small, local, ordinary practices became enmeshed in a global fabric of cultural and material surfaces following the opening of trade between these nations in 1850. This richly illustrated book presents an array of media, from conservative newspapers and tabloids to ukiyo-e and early photography, that locate dress as a site where the individual and the social are interwoven, whether in the 1860s and 1870s or the twenty-first century.
Theory and Craft of the Scenographic Model, Revised Edition
Darwin Reid Payne
Southern Illinois University Press, 1985
Through diagrams, sketches, and models, along with explications of the essential tools and materials required, Payne defines and delineates the precise step-by-step procedures of scenographic modelmaking: the basic preparations of construction, the process of making the model, and the experimental aspects of modelmaking. This new edition with 50 additional illustrations and other new information offers teachers, students, and beginning professionals alike a complete and comprehensive approach to creating and constructing the scenographic model.
Thieving Three-Fingered Jack
Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780-2015Botkin, Frances R.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
The fugitive slave known as “Three-Fingered Jack” terrorized colonial Jamaica from 1780 until vanquished by Maroons, self-emancipated Afro-Jamaicans bound by treaty to police the island for runaways and rebels. A thief and a killer, Jack was also a freedom fighter who sabotaged the colonial machine until his grisly death at its behest. Narratives about his exploits shed light on the problems of black rebellion and solutions administered by the colonial state, creating an occasion to consider counter-narratives about its methods of divide and conquer. For more than two centuries, writers, performers, and storytellers in England, Jamaica, and the United States have “thieved" Three Fingered Jack's riveting tale, defining black agency through and against representations of his resistance.
Frances R. Botkin offers a literary and cultural history that explores the persistence of stories about this black rebel, his contributions to constructions of black masculinity in the Atlantic world, and his legacies in Jamaican and United States popular culture.
Thinking about the Playwright
Comments from Four DecadesEric Bentley
Northwestern University Press, 1987
Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama
Reception and AfterlivesAmy Garnai
Bucknell University Press, 2023
Thunder on the Stage
The Dramatic Vision of Richard WrightBruce Allen Dick
University of Illinois Press, 2024
Drawing on decades of research and interviews with Wright’s family and Wright scholars, Bruce Allen Dick uncovers the theatrical influence on Wright’s oeuvre--from his 1930s boxing journalism to his unpublished one-acts on returning Black GIs in WWII to his unproduced pageant honoring Vladimir Lenin. Wright maintained rewarding associations with playwrights, writers, and actors such as Langston Hughes, Theodore Ward, Paul Robeson, and Lillian Hellman, and took particular inspiration from French literary figures like Jean-Paul Sartre. Dick’s analysis also illuminates Wright’s direct involvement with theater and film, including the performative aspects of his travel writings; the Orson Welles-directed Native Son on Broadway; his acting debut in Native Son’s first film version; and his play “Daddy Goodness,” a satire of religious charlatans like Father Divine, in the 1930s.
Bold and original, Thunder on the Stage offers a groundbreaking reinterpretation of a major American writer.
Time Slips
Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of HistoryJaclyn I. Pryor
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Masterfully synthesizing a wealth of research and experiences, Time Slips will interest scholars and readers in the fields of theater and performance studies, queer studies, and American studies.
Tormented Minds
Christine Roberts
Intellect Books, 1995
The plays are very different in style and include the use of physical theatre, naturalistic explorations of human rights abuses, and symbolic structures, puppets and poetry. The plays are supported by an analysis of their processes and themes. All have reached production and the text is supplemented by photographs of these performances.
Touched Bodies
The Performative Turn in Latin American ArtMara Polgovsky Ezcurra
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Winner of the 2019 Art Journal Prize from the College Art Association
What is the role of pleasure and pain in the politics of art? In Touched Bodies, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra approaches this question as she examines the flourishing of live and intermedial performance in Latin America during times of authoritarianism and its significance during transitions to democracy. Based on original documents and innovative readings, her book brings politics and ethics to the discussion of artistic developments during the “long 1980s”. She describes the rise of performance art in the context of feminism, HIV-activism, and human right movements, taking a close look at the work of Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita from Chile, León Ferrari and Liliana Maresca from Argentina, and Marcos Kurtycz, the No Grupo art collective, and Proceso Pentágono from Mexico. The comparative study of the work of these artists attests to a performative turn in Latin American art during the 1980s that, like photography and film before, recast the artistic field as a whole, changing the ways in which we perceive art and understand its role in society.
Toward a Feminist Theater
Selected PlaysKate Hamill and Kristin Leahey
Northwestern University Press, 2025
Bringing together seven critically acclaimed feminist adaptations of literary classics and one delightfully original new work, this collection demonstrates why Kate Hamill is one of the most electrifying and widely produced playwrights working today. Whether probing the power of toxic leaders (The Piper), revitalizing Jane Austen for the stage (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma), “cheerfully desecrating” Arthur Conan Doyle through a post-pandemic lens (Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson—Apt. 2B), reexamining an American classic’s gender roles (Little Women), or dramatizing the nineteenth-century classic of puritanical New England through the lens of an ostracized mother and daughter (The Scarlet Letter), Hamill’s work has transformed the theatrical landscape over the past decade.
An introduction from editor Kristin Leahey and an interview with Hamill frame this landmark anthology, with reflections on the current state of American drama, Hamill’s unique dramaturgical practice, and how the art form may move further and faster toward a feminist theater.