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Of all Russian writers, Chekhov is one of the best liked and most easily appreciated. Yet he is also one of the most elusive. Here Donald Rayfield reveals the layers of meaning on which the great dramatist's stories and plays are built. He examines his brief twenty-year creative life, from medical student supplementing his income by writing comic stories to his rapid rise as the father of twentieth-century drama and narrative prose. Understanding Chekhov is enriched by revelations from previously unexplored archival material, which deepen our understanding of Chekhov's sources, preoccupations, philosophy, and his relations with theater, with fellow writers, and with contemporary ideas.

Over the past three decades, theater studies has undergone a radical worldwide development and renewal. This happened through two different yet complementary paths: the first (North American in origin) led to the birth of the discipline of performance studies; the second (European continental) is what Marco de Marinis calls “new theatrology.” New theatrology arises from the dialogue between theatre history and the humanities and social sciences, yet de Marinis also characterizes it by a strong experimental imprint resulting from a close and participatory relationship with theatrical practice and its players.
 
The first part of Understanding Theatre retraces the main steps that brought theater studies to make the transition from performance to the audience to their receptive act, giving proper attention to the documentary element. In the second part, de Marinis tests the new perspective of investigation on some fundamental innovative theatrical experiences of the twentieth century. In this way, the volume collects de Marinis’s essays—written for magazines, conference programs, and edited collections—from a span of almost thirty years and documents key post-semiological developments in how we understand theater today.
 

Analyzing contemporary theater and performance works about Korean transnational adoption, Jieun Lee’s Unsettling Acts: Performing Transnational Adoption challenges longstanding ideas about adoption. Lee contends that in staging adoptees’ birth family searches and reunions, theater and performance artists unsettle dominant discourses that have essentialized adoptees through ethnonationalist, gendered, and postwar humanitarian narratives in both birth and adoptive cultures. In doing so, Lee reveals how these performances engage in acts of disavowal of and resistance to mythologies of adoption and adoptee experience.

Lee examines twelve works—from South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Denmark—including plays, musicals, solo performances, community-based theater, and performance art. Through her analysis, theater and performance become a means for reimagining adoptees’ identity, kinship, and sense of belonging. Further, these pieces encourage critical exploration of the history, politics, and social impacts of Korean transnational adoption. These works thus nurture a countermemory to engender redressive accountability and transpacific justice, pointing a way forward for remaking the transnational adoptee experience in the twenty-first century.

Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching explores various multidisciplinary visual and performing art forms, including creative writing, as ways to provide a rich contribution and understanding to research, learning, and teaching. Key figures in the field share their art-based research, arts practice, and philosophy, bringing the arts to life within their taught and learned contexts across a variety of art forms and levels of post-compulsory education. Featuring a foreword by internationally-renowned proponent of art-based research Professor Shaun McNiff, this book will be informative and useful to arts researchers and educators, addressing key challenges and possibilities in a rapidly changing higher education environment.

"Jill Dolan is the theatre's most astute critic, and this new book is perhaps her most important. Utopia in Performance argues with eloquence and insight how theatre makes a difference, and in the process demonstrates that scholarship matters, too. It is a book that readers will cherish and hold close as a personal favorite, and that scholars will cite for years to come."
---David Román, University of Southern California


What is it about performance that draws people to sit and listen attentively in a theater, hoping to be moved and provoked, challenged and comforted? In Utopia in Performance, Jill Dolan traces the sense of visceral, emotional, and social connection that we experience at such times, connections that allow us to feel for a moment not what a better world might look like, but what it might feel like, and how that hopeful utopic sentiment might become motivation for social change.

She traces these "utopian performatives" in a range of performances, including the solo performances of feminist artists Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, and Peggy Shaw; multicharacter solo performances by Lily Tomlin, Danny Hoch, and Anna Deavere Smith; the slam poetry event Def Poetry Jam; The Laramie Project; Blanket, a performance by postmodern choreographer Ann Carlson; Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman; and Deborah Warner's production of Medea starring Fiona Shaw. While the book richly captures moments of "feeling utopia" found within specific performances, it also celebrates the broad potential that performance has to provide a forum for being human together; for feeling love, hope, and commonality in particular and historical (rather than universal and transcendent) ways.

A cofounder of the United Kingdom’s legendary 1980s performance company Impact Theatre Co-op, Claire MacDonald composed Utopia, a sequence of commissioned playtexts, between 1987 and 2008. This book brings together both the plays and the story of how they came to be written and produced. With a compelling introduction by the author and including additional material by Tim Etchells, Dee Heddon, and Lenora Champagne, it provides a range of historical and critical materials that put the plays in the context of MacDonald’s career as writer and collaborator and show how visual practices and poetics, theories of real and imagined space, and new approaches to language itself have profoundly shaped the development of performance writing in the United Kingdom.