History of Performing Arts Books

The first anthology dedicated to critically assess the role of the human sensorium in performance - from ritual to theatre, from dance to architecture. The anthology gathers original essays by leading international scholars and artists.

This book gives a new view on the legacy of Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999), one of the central, and yet misunderstood, figures who shaped 20th-century theatre, focusing on his least known last phase of work on ancient songs and the craft of the performer...

What does it mean to "fail" in performance? How might staging failure reveal theatre's potential to expand our understanding of social, political and everyday reality? What can we learn from performances that expose and then celebrate their ability to...

This is the first in-depth examination of contemporary intercultural performance by women around the world. Contemporary feminist performance is explored in the contexts of current intercultural practices, theories and debates. Holledge and Tompkins...

This acclaimed volume is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of Jerzy Grotowski's long and multi-faceted career. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Grotowski's life and work.Edited by the two leading experts on Grotowski, the...

Text and Performance in Contemporary British Theatre interrogates the paradoxical nature of theatre texts, which have been understood both as separate literary objects in their own right and as material for performance. Drawing on analysis of...

From the late forties through the sixties, Elia Kazan was the most important and influential director in America, and the only one who managed simultaneously to dominate both theater and film. In that role he manifestly shaped the conception and writing,...

Drawing from newly available archives, Jeffrey Veidlinger uses the dramatic story of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, the premiere secular Jewish cultural institution of the Soviet era, to demonstrate how Jewish writers and artists were able to promote...

In France, both political culture and theatrical performances have drawn upon melodrama. This "melodramatic thread" helped weave the country's political life as it moved from monarchy to democracy. By examining the relationship between public ceremonies...

Published in France in 1987, this is the book in which Lecoq first set out his philosophy of human movement, and the way it takes expressive form in a wide range of different performance traditions. He traces the history of pantomime, sets out his...

This book explores the origins of Butoh in post-war Japan through orality and transmission, in conjunction with an embodied research approach.The book is a gathering of seminal artistic voices - Yoshito Ohno, Natsu Nakajima, Yukio Waguri, Moe Yamamoto,...

Drawing on the author's two decades of watching, writing, and teaching about puppetry from a critical perspective, this is a collection of insights into how we watch, understand, and appreciate puppetry.

Innovative and engaging, A Good Night Out for the Girls looks beyond the confines of the political theatre paradigm that has been the mainstay of feminist theatre interests and theorising. In a departure from the many feminist theorists and philosophers...

This study explores the relationship between performances of Shakespeare's plays and the ways in which they engage with traumatic events and histories. It investigates the ethical and political implications of attempts to represent trauma in performance,...

Using our favourite Springfield family as a case study, Watching with The Simpsons examines the textual and social role of parody in offering critical commentary on other television programs and genres.

Examining photographs, illustrations, films and live performances, Peta Tait presents an extraordinary survey of 140 years of trapeze acts and the cultural identities that are presented by bodies in fast, physical aerial movement.

This book considers and discuss aspects of the management of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the twentieth century since the death of its founder Richard D'Oyly Carte and concentrate on key events which contributed to its demise in 1982.

Michael Chekhov and Sanford Meisner: Collisions and Convergence in Actor Training offers a comprehensive analysis of the Sanford Meisner Acting Technique in comparison to the Michael Chekhov Acting Technique. This compilation reveals the connections as...

The Dark Theatre is an indispensable text for activist communities wondering what theatre might have to do with their futures, students and scholars across Theatre and Performance Studies, Urban Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Economy and Social...

In Staging and Re- cycling , John Keefe and Knut Ove Arntzen re-visit and reappraise a selection of their work to explore how the retrieval, re-approaching and re-framing of material can offer pathways for new work and new thinking.The book includes a...

This book investigates audience experience through the lens of sensory engagement in immersive, one-to-one performance.

This book explores how unique factors about the dance profession impact mothers working in it.

In recent years, a growth in dance and wellbeing scholarship has resulted in new ways of thinking that place the body, movement, and dance in a central place with renewed significance for wellbeing. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing examines...

Growing up in a gold mining camp outside 19th century San Francisco makes life seem hard until Lotta Crabtree arrives to sing and dance on a makeshift stage. Her greatest fan, Walter Cain, the young son of an alcoholic miner, not only finds himself...

Ritual today can be encountered in the midst of catastrophic and transforming events. This collection reassesses and revises traditionally understood relationships between ritual and politics, ritual and everyday life, ritual and art...

Mama Dada is the first book to examine Gertrude Stein's drama within the history of the theatrical and cinematic avant-gardes. Since the publication of Stein's major writings by the Library of America in 1998, interest in her dramatic writing has...

Focusing on examples of live performance in drama, dance, opera and light entertainment, Jane Goodall explores a characteristic as compelling and enigmatic as the performers who demonstrate it.The mysterious quality of 'presence' in a performer has...

This is the first book to investigate the social, political, cultural, artistic and economic forces which created conditions for the rise, success and decline of mime and physical theatre in the United Kingdom, from the 1970s to 2000.

This book presents a lucid, comprehensive, and entertaining narrative of culture and society in late 19th- and early 20th-century Maharashtra through a perceptive study of its theatre and cinema. An intellectual tour de force, it will be invaluable to...

In recent decades, dance has become a vehicle for querying assumptions about what it means to be embodied, in turn illuminating intersections among the political, the social, the aesthetical, and the phenomenological. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and...

The representation and experience of embodiment is a central preoccupation of Samuel Beckett's drama, one that he explored through diverse media. McMullan investigates the full range of Beckett's dramatic canon for stage, radio, television and film,...

This book focuses on the influence of classical authors on Ben Jonson's dramaturgy, with particular emphasis on the Greek and Roman playwrights and satirists.

Seismic shifts in the theatrical meanings of The Merry Wives of Windsor have taken place across the centuries as Shakespeare's frequently performed play has relocated to Windsor's across the world, journeying along the production/ adaptation/...

Amidst the growing forums of kinky Jews, orthodox drag queens, and Jewish geisha girls, we find today's sexy Jewess in a host of reflexive plays with sexed-up self-display. A social phantasm with real legs, she moves boldly between neo-burlesque...

A surprisingly large number of women writers, directors, and performers have created works that talk back to Shakespeare, or to most earlier and more traditional interpretations of his plays, in the late 20th century. For example, Jane Smiley's A...

When it was first published in 1962, Anger and After was the first comprehensive study of the dramatic movement which began in 1956 with the staging of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and has since brought forward such dramatists as Brendan Behan,...

First Published in 1989, this work is based around a monthly TV column which Raymond Williams wrote for The Listener between 1968 and 1972. Those were the years of the Prague Spring, of anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, of fighting in Cambodia and...