Download or read book Disability Theatre and Modern Drama written by Kirsty Johnston and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-04-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bertolt Brecht's silent Kattrin in Mother Courage, or the disability performance lessons of his Peachum in The Threepenny Opera; Tennessee Williams' limping Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and hard-of-hearing Bodey in A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur; Samuel Beckett's blind Hamm and his physically disabled parents Nagg and Nell in Endgame – these and many further examples attest to disability's critical place in modern drama. This Companion explores how disability performance studies and theatre practice provoke new debate about the place of disability in these works. The book traces the local and international processes and tensions at play in disability theatre, and offers a critical investigation of the challenges its aesthetics pose to mainstream and traditional practice. The book's first part surveys disability theatre's primary principles, critical terms, internal debates and key challenges to theatre practice. Examining specific disability theatre productions of modern drama, it also suggests how disability has been re-envisaged and embodied on stage. In the book's second part, leading disability studies scholars and disability theatre practitioners analyse and creatively re-imagine modern drama, demonstrating how disability aesthetics press practitioners and scholars to rethink these works in generative, valuable and timely ways.
Download or read book Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama written by Lindsey Row-Heyveld and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do able-bodied characters fake disability in 40 early modern English plays? This book uncovers a previously unexamined theatrical tradition and explores the way counterfeit disability captivated the Renaissance stage. Through detailed case studies of both lesser-known and canonical plays (by Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, and others), Lindsey Row-Heyveld demonstrates why counterfeit disability proved so useful to early modern playwrights. Changing approaches to almsgiving in the English Reformation led to increasing concerns about feigned disability. The theater capitalized on those concerns, using the counterfeit-disability tradition to explore issues of charity, epistemology, and spectatorship. By illuminating this neglected tradition, this book fills an important gap in both disability history and literary studies, and explores how fears of counterfeit disability created a feedback loop of performance and suspicion. The result is the still-pervasive insistence that even genuinely disabled people must perform in order to, paradoxically, prove the authenticity of their impairments.
Download or read book Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability written by Genevieve Love and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What work did physically disabled characters do for the early modern theatre? Through a consideration of a range of plays, including Doctor Faustus and Richard III, Genevieve Love argues that the figure of the physically disabled prosthetic body in early modern English theatre mediates a set of related 'likeness problems' that structure the theatrical, textual, and critical lives of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The figure of disability stands for the relationship between actor and character: prosthetic disabled characters with names such as Cripple and Stump capture the simultaneous presence of thefictional and the material, embodied world of the theatre. When the figure of the disabled body exits the stage, it also mediates a second problem of likeness, between plays in their performed and textual forms. While supposedly imperfect textual versions of plays have been characterized as 'lame', the dynamic movement of prosthetic disabled characters in the theatre expands the figural role which disability performs in the relationship between plays on the stage and on the page. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability reveals how attention to physical disability enriches our understanding of early modern ideas about how theatre works, while illuminating in turn how theatre offers a reframing of disability as metaphor.
Download or read book Disability Theatre and Modern Drama written by Kirsty Johnston and published by . This book was released on with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores how disability performance studies and disability theatre practice provoke debate about the place of disability in these works. The author traces the local and international processes and tensions at play in disability theatre, and offers a critical investigation of the challenges disability theatre aesthetics pose to mainstream and traditional practice and critique.
Download or read book Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama written by Leslie C. Dunn and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-04 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability. Proffering an expansive view of early modern disability in performance, the contributors suggest methodologies for finding and interpreting it in unexpected contexts. The volume also includes essays on disabled actors whose performances are changing the meanings of disability in Shakespeare for present-day audiences. By combining these two areas of scholarship, this text makes a unique intervention in early modern studies and disability studies alike. Ultimately, the volume generates a conversation that locates and theorizes the staging of particular disabilities within their historical and literary contexts while considering continuity and change in the performance of disability between the early modern period and our own.
Download or read book Unfixable Forms written by Katherine Schaap Williams and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unfixable Forms explores how theatrical form remakes—and is in turn remade by—early modern disability. Figures described as "deformed," "lame," "crippled," "ugly," "sick," and "monstrous" crowd the stage in English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In each case, such a description distills cultural expectations about how a body should look and what a body should do—yet, crucially, demands the actor's embodied performance. In the early modern theater, concepts of disability collide with the deforming, vulnerable body of the actor. Reading dramatic texts alongside a diverse array of sources, ranging from physic manuals to philosophical essays to monster pamphlets, Katherine Schaap Williams excavates an archive of formal innovation to argue that disability is at the heart of the early modern theater's exploration of what it means to put the body of an actor on the stage. Offering new interpretations of canonical works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, and close readings of little-known plays such as The Fair Maid of the Exchange and A Larum For London, Williams demonstrates how disability cuts across foundational distinctions between nature and art, form and matter, and being and seeming. Situated at the intersections of early modern drama, disability studies, and performance theory, Unfixable Forms locates disability on the early modern stage as both a product of cultural constraints and a spark for performance's unsettling demands and electrifying eventfulness.
Download or read book Peering Behind the Curtain written by Kimball King and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses disability in theater, and features all new work, including critical essays, interviews, personal essays, and an original play. It fills a gap in scholarship while promoting the profile of disability in theater. Peering Behind the Curtain examines the issues surrounding disability in many well-known plays, including Children of a Lesser God, The Elephant Man, 'night Mother, and Wit, as well as an original play by James McDonald.
Download or read book Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability written by Genevieve Love and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What work did physically disabled characters do for the early modern theatre? Through a consideration of a range of plays, including Doctor Faustus and Richard III, Genevieve Love argues that the figure of the physically disabled prosthetic body in early modern English theatre mediates a set of related 'likeness problems' that structure the theatrical, textual, and critical lives of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The figure of disability stands for the relationship between actor and character: prosthetic disabled characters with names such as Cripple and Stump capture the simultaneous presence of thefictional and the material, embodied world of the theatre. When the figure of the disabled body exits the stage, it also mediates a second problem of likeness, between plays in their performed and textual forms. While supposedly imperfect textual versions of plays have been characterized as 'lame', the dynamic movement of prosthetic disabled characters in the theatre expands the figural role which disability performs in the relationship between plays on the stage and on the page. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability reveals how attention to physical disability enriches our understanding of early modern ideas about how theatre works, while illuminating in turn how theatre offers a reframing of disability as metaphor.
Download or read book Theatre and Disability written by Petra Kuppers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This succinct and engaging text examines the complex relationship between theatre and disability, bringing together a wide variety of performance examples in order to explore theatrical disability through the conceptual frameworks of disability as spectacle, narrative, and experience. Accessible and affordable, this is an ideal resource for theatre students and lovers everywhere.
Download or read book Disability Public Space Performance and Spectatorship written by B. Hadley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers, Bree Hadley examines the performance practices of disabled artists in the US, UK, Europe and Australasia who re-engage, re-enact and re-envisage the stereotyping they are subject to in the very public spaces and places where this stereotyping typically plays out.
Download or read book Theatre and Disability written by Petra Kuppers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This succinct and engaging text examines the complex relationship between theatre and disability, bringing together a wide variety of performance examples in order to explore theatrical disability through the conceptual frameworks of disability as spectacle, narrative, and experience. Accessible and affordable, this is an ideal resource for theatre students and lovers everywhere.
Download or read book Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre written by Julia A. Walker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-30 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although often dismissed as a minor offshoot of the better-known German movement, expressionism on the American stage represents a critical phase in the development of American dramatic modernism. Situating expressionism within the context of early twentieth-century American culture, Walker demonstrates how playwrights who wrote in this mode were responding both to new communications technologies and to the perceived threat they posed to the embodied act of meaning. At a time when mute bodies gesticulated on the silver screen, ghostly voices emanated from tin horns, and inked words stamped out the personality of the hand that composed them, expressionist playwrights began to represent these new cultural experiences by disarticulating the theatrical languages of bodies, voices and words. In doing so, they not only innovated a new dramatic form, but redefined playwriting from a theatrical craft to a literary art form, heralding the birth of American dramatic modernism.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Disability Studies written by Sonya Freeman Loftis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare and Disability Studies argues that an understanding of disability theory is essential for scholars, teachers, and directors who wish to create more inclusive and accessible theatrical and pedagogical encounters with Shakespeare's plays. Previous work in the field of early modern disability studies has focused largely on Renaissance characters that a modern audience might view as disabled. This volume argues that the conception of disability as residing within individual literary characters limits understandings of disability in Shakespeare: by theorizing disability vis-a-vis characters, previous studies have largely overlooked readers, performers, and audience members who self-identify as disabled. Focusing on issues such as accessible performances, inclusive casting, and Shakespeare-based therapy, Shakespeare and Disability Studies reinvigorates textual approaches to disability in Shakespeare by reading accessibility as an art form and exploring both the powers and potential limits of universal design in theatrical performance. The book examines the complex interdependence among the concepts of theory, access, and inclusion—demonstrating the crucial role of disability theory in building access and examining the ways that access may both open and foreclose inclusive dramatic practice. Shakespeare and Disability Studies challenges Shakespearians, from students to audience members, from classroom teachers to theatre practitioners, to consider how Shakespeare, as industry, as high art, and as cultural symbol, impacts the lived reality of those with disabled bodies and/or minds.
Download or read book Theatre and Empowerment written by Richard Boon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-08-19 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theatre and Empowerment examines the ability of drama, theatre, dance and performance to empower communities of very different kinds, and it does so from a multi-cultural perspective. The communities involved include poverty-stricken children in Ethiopia and the Indian sub-continent, disenfranchised Native Americans in the USA and young black men in Britain, victims of violence in South Africa and Northern Ireland, and a threatened agricultural town in Italy. The book asserts the value of performance as a vital agent of necessary social change, and makes its arguments through the close examination, from 'inside' practice, of the success - not always complete - of specific projects in their practical and cultural contexts. Practitioners and commentators ask how performance in its widest sense can play a part in community activism on a scale larger than the individual, 'one-off' project by helping communities find their own liberating and creative voices.
Download or read book Capitalism and Disability written by Marta Russell and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spread out over many years and many different publications, the late author and activist Marta Russell wrote a number of groundbreaking and insightful essays on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. In this volume, Russell’s various essays are brought together in one place in order to provide a useful and expansive resource to those interested in better understanding the ways in which the modern phenomenon of disability is shaped by capitalist economic and social relations. The essays range in analysis from the theoretical to the topical, including but not limited to: the emergence of disability as a “human category” rooted in the rise of industrial capitalism and the transformation of the conditions of work, family, and society corresponding thereto; a critique of the shortcomings of a purely “civil rights approach” to addressing the persistence of disability oppression in the economic sphere, with a particular focus on the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; an examination of the changing position of disabled people within the overall system of capitalist production utilizing the Marxist economic concepts of the reserve army of the unemployed, the labor theory of value, and the exploitation of wage-labor; the effects of neoliberal capitalist policies on the living conditions and social position of disabled people as it pertains to welfare, income assistance, health care, and other social security programs; imperialism and war as a factor in the further oppression and immiseration of disabled people within the United States and globally; and the need to build unity against the divisive tendencies which hide the common economic interest shared between disabled people and the often highly-exploited direct care workers who provide services to the former.
Download or read book Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater written by W. B. Worthen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.
Download or read book Cruelty and Desire in the Modern Theater written by Laurens De Vos and published by Fairleigh Dickinson. This book was released on 2011-04-18 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Departing from a refreshing look at the ideas of Antonin Artaud, this book provides a thorough analysis of how both Sarah Kane and Samuel Beckett are indebted to his legacy. In juxtaposing these playwrights, De Vos minutely points out how both in their own way struggle with coming to terms with Artaud. A key concept in Lacanian psychoanalytic theories, desire lies at the root of the Theatre of Cruelty; Kane and Beckett prove that desire and cruelty are inextricably linked to one another, but that they appear in radically different disguises. Relying on Kane and Beckett, this book not only sheds a light on the precise intentions behind Artaud's project, it also maps out the structural parallels and dichotomies between the Theatre of Cruelty and the literary genre of tragedy.
