Theatre studies Books

Physical Theatres: A Critical Reader is an invaluable resource for students of physically orientated theatre and performance. This book aims to trace the roots and development of physicality in theatre by combining practical experience of the field with...

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.

The 'Sound of Shakespeare' reveals the surprising extent to which Shakespeare's art is informed by the various attitudes, beliefs, practices and discourses that pertained to sound and hearing in his culture. In this engaging study, Wes Folkerth develops...

Interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco is one of North America's leading interpreters of intercultural theory and practice. This volume gathers together her finest writings since 1995 and includes critical essays by Jean Fisher and Caroline...

Masquerade, both literal and metaphorical, is now a central concept on many disciplines. This timely volume explores and revisits the role of disguise in constructing, expressing and representing marginalised identities, and in undermining easy...

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.

Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre offers unique insight into the question of 'voice' in learning disabled theatre and what is gained and lost in making performance. It is grounded in the author's 18 years of making theatre with...

This book investigates transnational processes through the analytic lens of cultural performance. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of American Studies, Performance Studies, and Transnational Studies.

Callan Davies presents "strangeness" as a fresh critical paradigm for understanding the construction and performance of Jacobean drama-one that would have been deeply familiar to its playwrights and early audiences. This study brings together cultural...

The 20th century was a dynamic period for the theatrical arts in China. Booming urban theatres, the interaction between commercial practice and theatre, dramas staged during the War of Resistance against Japan and a healthy dialogue between Western and...

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...

Shakespeare Company: When Action is Eloquence is the first comprehensive insight into this internationally acclaimed company founded in 1978 in Lenox, Massachusetts, by actor-director Tina Packer and voice pioneer Kristin Linklater, with the...

Collaborative Stage Directing: A Guide to Creating and Managing a Positive Theatre Environment focuses on the director's collaboration with actors and the creative team, and the importance of communication and leadership skills to create and manage a...

"A theatre which is able to speak to each spectator in a different and penetrating language is not a fantastic idea, nor a utopia. This is the theatre for which many of us, directors and leaders of groups, trained for a long time....." - from the...

Erika Fischer-Lichte's introduction to the discipline of Theatre Studies is a strikingly authoritative and wide-ranging guide to the study of theatre in all of its forms. Its three-part structure moves from the first steps in starting to...

This book, from Europe's leading Mask director and co-founder of the Trestle Theatre Company, provides a fascinating demystification of the process of using masks.Full of simple explanations, and collating over twenty-five years' experience of writing...

A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre provides a fascinating overview of naturalist theatre. Innes has selected three writers, Ibsen, Chekhov and Bernard Shaw to exemplify the movement. A must for all students studying naturalist theatre.

A spectacular and timely contribution to dance history, recasting canonical dance since the early nineteenth century in terms of a feminist perspective.

Focusing on eighteenth-century cultural productions, Wendy Sutherland examines how representations of race in philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, drama, and court painting influenced the construction of a white bourgeois German self. Sutherland...

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.

The Beginner's Guide to Opera Stage Management is the first book to cover theatrical stage management practices specifically for opera productions, providing an invaluable step-by-step guide.Beginning with a brief history of opera and detailing its...

The Business of American Theatre is a research guide to the history of producing theatre in the United States. Covering a wide range of subjects, the book explores how traditions of investment, marketing, labor union contracts, advertising, leasing...

The Audition Playbook is a two-part guide and workbook designed to help musicians of all instruments and levels efficiently and effectively plan and prepare for orchestra, band, or other ensemble auditions. No matter the goal, the Audition Playbook...

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...

Speaking of Dance: Twelve Contemporary Choreographers on Their Craft delves into the choreographic processes of some of America's most engaging and revolutionary dancemakers. Based on personal interviews, the book's narratives reveal the methods and...

Dance Masters is a lively ensemble of conversations with seven celebrated dancers and choreographers. In these intimate interviews, dance critic Janet Lynn Roseman probes the heart of dance: * The creative process * The role of dream and rituals * The...

Mae West, wise-cracking vaudeville performer, was one of the most controversial figures of her era. Rarely, however, do people think of Mae West as a writer. In Three Plays By Mae West, Lillian Schlissel brings this underexplored part of West's career to...

Anne Bogart is an award-winning theatre maker, and a best-selling writer of books about theatre, art, and cultural politics. In this her latest collection of essays she explores the story-telling impulse, and asks how she, as a 'product of...

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...

Live Art in the UK addresses the historical and cultural specificity of contemporary experimental performance, and explores the diversity of practices that are carried out, programmed, read or taught as Live Art.This book was originally published as a...

'As an actress I sit, speak, run, sweat and, simultaneously, I represent someone who sits, speaks, runs and sweats. As an actress, I am both myself and the character I am playing. I exist in the concreteness of the performance and, at the same time, I...

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the contemporary theatre field in Singapore. Based on extensive original research it provides a wealth of information on theatre in Singapore overall, not just theatre-state relations.

This comprehensive collection provides theoretical accounts of the grounds and phenomenon of film acting. Each section proposes novel ways of considering the recurring motifs in academic enquiries into film acting.

'A focus on the body, its actions, and its cognitive mechanisms identifies ... foundational principles of activity that link the three elements of theatre; Story, Space, and Time. The three meet in, are defined by, and expressed through the actor's body...

This is the first English translation of Michael Chekhov's two-volume autobiography, combining The Path of the Actor (1927) and extensive extracts from his later volume Life and Encounters. Full of illuminating anecdotes and insightful observations...