History of Performing Arts Books

How do theatre and performance transmit and dispute ideologies of neoliberalism? The essays in this anthology examine the mechanisms and rhetorics of contemporary multinational and transnational organizations, artists, and communities that produce...

An examination of the development of local radio broadcasting and the trend for locally-owned, locally-originated and locally-accountable commercial radio stations to fall into the hands of national and international media groups. Starkey traces the...

This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of Media Memory and brings Media and Mediation to the forefront of Collective Memory research. The essays explore a diversity of media technologies (television, radio, film and new media), genres (news,...

A collection of essays on the ways the senses 'speak' on Shakespeare's stage. Drawing on historical phenomenology, science studies, gender studies and natural philosophy, the essays provide critical tools for understanding Shakespeare's investment in...

At an unparalleled time of the construction of reality across the fields of the science and humanities on a variety of platforms, theatre and performance participates in the current obsession with the problems and possibilities of the epistemologies of...

This book explores the significance of the physicality of manuscripts and printed early modern texts. Focusing on the material aspects and social practices of texts as a new way of reading meaning, it reassesses the developing relationships between...

This book considers crime fighting from the perspective of the civilian city-goer, from the mid-Victorian garotting panics to 1914. It charts the shift from the use of 'body armour' to the adoption of exotic martial arts through the works of popular...

Now available in paperback for the first time, this book brings together leading scholars in the field to analyze Shakespeare's plays, showing how their dramatic content shapes issues debated in conflicts arising from the creation and application of law...

Based on original and previously unseen written and sound archives and interviews with former and current radio producers and presenters, Public Issue Radio addresses the controversial question of the political leanings of current affairs programmes, and...

Irish culture is obsessed with the past, and this book asks why and how. In an innovative reading of Irish culture since 1980, Emilie Pine provides a new analysis of theatre, film, television, memoir and art, and interrogates the anti-nostalgia that...

What does it mean to say Indian movies are melodramatic? How do film audiences engage with socio-political issues? What role has cinema played in the emergence of new economic forms, consumer cultures, and digital technologies in a globalizing India? The...

Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent argues that women managed their own wealth to a far greater extent than previously recognized. Women bought, sold, sued, lent money, and contracted debts with little legal or financial oversight of...

Using examples of refugee arts and theatrical activity since the 1990s, this book examines how the 'refugee crisis' has conditioned all arts and cultural activity with refugees in a world where globalization and migration go hand in hand.

Elephants, lions, tigers and leopards evoke fascination and awe, fear and excitement.This bookanalyzes trained acts in twentieth-century live circus and cinema,reveals how humans anthropomorphize animals with their emotions, and interrogates the notion...

This book, now available in paperback, unravels politics from theatre in order to propose a new means to politicize performance. Performance analyses ranging from child actors, animals and objects to reflections on the theatre work of Societas Raffaello...

Using leadership to generate greater innovation, connectivity, and organizational transformation is crucial for success in this challenging era. The authors present here a new approach to leadership based on findings from complexity science. Integrating...

The automaton, known today as the robot, can be seen as a metaphor for the historical period in which it is explored. Chapters include examinations of Iconoclasm's fear that art might surpass nature, the Cartesian mind/body divide, automata as objects of...

A timely intervention into debates on the representation of feminist and feminine identities in contemporary visual culture. The essays in this collection interrogate how and why certain formulations of feminism and femininity are currently prevalent in...

This exploration of the territory between theory and practice in contemporary theatre features essays by academics from theatre and translation studies, and delineates a new space for the discussion of translation in the theatre that is international,...

A far-reaching examination of exoticism, cultural internationalism and modernism's encounters with Indonesian tradition, Performing Otherness examines how Indonesia entered world stages through imperialism as an antimodern phantasm and through...

Opening up contemporary debates about emotion in social and historical contexts, Women and Ireland as Beckett's Lost Others investigates the relationship between emotion, memory, exile and language. Using a psychoanalytic framework, this monograph traces...

Although the sciences have long understood the value of practice-based research, the arts and humanities have tended to structure a gap between practice and analysis. This book examines differences and similarities between Performance as Research...

Drawing on original archival research, Racial Geometries... examines popular forms of performance -- from musical theatre and minstrelsy to non-theatrical forms like Chinatown tourism -- to expose how American racial formation between the two world wars...

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction; A.Forsyth &  C.Megson The Promise of Documentary;  J.Reinelt Mediating the 1930s: Documentary and Politics in Theatre Union's Last Edition (1940); B.Harker History in the Driving...

PART I: ESSAYS The Dramaturgy of the Real; C.Martin Towards a Poetics of Theatre and Public Events; J.Reinelt Staging Terror; W.Hesford Post-1990s Verbatim Theatre in South Africa: Exploring an African Concept of Truth; Y.Hutchison Reality from the...

This new edition of Anthony Roche's pioneering survey of twentieth-century Irish drama brings the story up to date with new material on the contemporary Irish theatre scene.

One of the most neglected areas of study in nineteenth-century theater is pantomime: this book provides a comprehensive overview of pantomime in the Victorian period, ranging from the ideological positions perpetrated by pantomime to discussions of...

This book is an exploration of the extent to which young people in the UK are disaffected with traditional politics, and particularly the role played by televisual representations of the political process. The authors look at how television represents...

This book is an exploration of the extent to which young people in the UK are disaffected with traditional politics, and particularly the role played by televisual representations of the political process. The authors look at how television represents...

Hijikata Tatsumi's explosive 1959 debut Forbidden Colors sparked a new genre of performance in Japan - butoh: an art form of contrasts, by turns shocking and serene. Since then, though interest has grown exponentially, and people all over the world are...

There is a complex relationship between performance, youth, and the shifting material circumstances under which theatre for children and youth-birth through twenties-is generated and perceived. Offering multiple, intersecting narratives, this book...

In this unique study, Michael Y. Bennett re-reads four influential modern plays alongside their contemporary debates between rationalism and empiricism to show how these monumental achievements were thoroughly a product of their time, but also universal...

Provides a comparative approach to the internationally wide-spread phenomenon of the contemporary director-auteur in the theatre, urging a historical and theoretical exploration of the visions, methods, and stage idioms in the work of established artists...

Between 1780 and 1830, the growing London population divided into immigrant neighborhoods with two dozen unlicensed theatres tailoring productions to attract and serve this new audience. Playing to the Crowd is the first study of the productions of the...

Medieval drama based on the Bible commonly directs its audiences toward a Christian interpretation, but equally interesting, and less frequently investigated by scholars, are the plays' modes of resistance to Christian authority. Through a reading...

This lively, lucid book undertakes a detailed study of Shakespeare's fascination with clowns, fools, and fooling. From the knockabout clowns of the early comedies, through the wise fools of the mature plays, to disturbing tragic figures who play the...

A forgotten yet award-winning playwright, Cal Yeomans was one of the founders of gay theatre whose work was fueled by gay liberation and extinguished by the AIDS epidemic. Exploring both sex and sexuality so candidly, he burst the boundaries of what was...

No play in the history of the American stage has been as ubiquitous and as widely viewed as Uncle Tom's Cabin. This book traces the major dramatizations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic from its inception in 1852 through "modern" versions on film. Frick

The theatrical works of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos, which have largely been marginalized in discussions of theater history and literary scholarship, offer a hybrid theater that integrates the popular with the formal, the mainstream with the...

Contemporary Irish drama communicates not only through words but also through the non-verbal use of space -- both the geographical places in which plays are set and the ways stage space is used. The work of cultural and physical geographers, brought to...

***Listed in THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION's Weekly Book List, July 11, 2011*** Identifying an apprehension about the nature and constitution of urbanism in North American plays, Urban Drama examines how cities like New York City and Los Angeles...

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, advancements in communication and travel encouraged widespread international cultural exchange, and Americans increasingly came into contact with Russian culture and theatrical performance. A number of factors, including...

Chronicling over forty years of critical changes in African-American expressive and popular culture, covering diverse forms of music, dance, and comedy, the Regal Theater (1928-1968) was the largest and most architecturally splendid movie-stage-show...

This is the first book-length study, in any language, of the influence of Mei Lanfang - the internationally known Chinese actor who specialized in female roles - on the twentieth-century international stage. Focusing on Mei Lanfang's tours of Japan, the...

Frontier dramas were among the most popular and successful of early-twentieth-century Broadway type plays. The long runs of dramas such as Augustus Thomas's Arizona (1900), Owen Wister and Kirke La Shelle's The Virginian (1904), Edwin Milton Royle's The...

Over the last hundred years, musical theatre artists - from Berlin to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim - have developed a form that corresponds directly to the Americanization of the increasingly Jewish New York audience; and that audience's...

Shakespeare's company coped with an enormous mnemonic load, performing up to six different plays a week. How did they do it? Cognition in the Globe addresses this question through the lens of Distributed Cognition. This is a dynamic model that attends to...