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2 books match the query 'Woolf, Brandon'
Institutional Theatrics
Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall BerlinBrandon Woolf
Northwestern University Press, 2021
2022 Outstanding Book Award Finalist from the Association for Theater in Higher Education (ATHE)
In a city struggling to determine just how neoliberal it can afford to be, what kinds of performing arts practices and institutions are necessary—and why?
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, political and economic agendas in the reunified German capital have worked to dismantle long-standing traditions of state‑subsidized theater even as the city has redefined itself as a global arts epicenter. Institutional Theatrics charts the ways theater artists have responded to these shifts and crises both on- and offstage, offering a method for rethinking the theater as a vital public institution.
What is the future of the German theater, grounded historically in large ensembles, extensive repertoires, and auteur directors? Examining the restructuring of Berlin’s theatrical landscape and most prominent performance venues, Brandon Woolf argues that cultural policy is not simply the delegation and distribution of funds. Instead, policy should be thought of as an artistic practice of institutional imagination. Woolf demonstrates how performance can critique its patron institutions in order to transform the relations between the stage and the state, between the theater and the infrastructures of its support. Bold, nuanced, and rigorously documented, Institutional Theatrics offers new insights about art, its administration, and the forces that influence cultural production.
Problem Solved!
The Music and Theater of The Negro ProblemStew Stewart and Heidi Rodewald, Edited and with an Introduction by Brandon Woolf
University of Michigan Press, 2027
Problem Solved! invites readers into the exhilarating, unpredictable artistic world of The Negro Problem, the genre-defying music and theater collective behind the Tony and Obie Award–winning Passing Strange. Blending previously unpublished song lyrics, playscripts, critical essays, intimate interviews, and performance texts, the collection charts more than three decades of daring experimentation across rock music, musical theater, avant-garde performance, and other interdisciplinary forms of social and artistic critique.
Equal parts archive, mixtape, and critical meditation, the book captures The Negro Problem’s unique ability to move between seriousness and satire, activism and irony, intellectual rigor and irresistible melody. In addition to theatrical texts written and composed by Stew Stewart and Heidi Rodewald, the volume features a contextual essay by historian Scott Kurashige, close readings of The Total Bent by performance studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o, dramaturgical analyses of Passing Strange by volume editor Brandon Woolf, and a long-form interview about the band’s origins from co-leader Heidi Rodewald. The volume explores how the band challenges conventional ideas about race, identity, authenticity, activism, and musical theater through humor, contradiction, experimentation, and joyful disruption. Problem Solved! invites general readers, music enthusiasts, scholars, and theater lovers alike to explore how song can boldly and beautifully rise to meet our fractious cultural moment.