Download or read book Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists written by Laurence P. Senelick and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-09-10 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although younger than most European theatrical traditions, the Russian professional theater has generated an exciting body of criticism and theory which until recently has remained unknown or nearly inaccessible in the West. This anthology presents a selection of important Russian writing on the aesthetics of drama and the theater from 1828 to 1914. The focus of these essays, most published here for the first time in English, is on the so-called Crisis in the Theater of 1904 to 1914, a lively debate between the symbolists and the naturalists that evoked brilliant polemic writing from Meyerhold, Bely, Bryusov, and others. Along with Chekhov's amusing critique of Sarah Bernhardt ("monstrously facile!") and Ivanov's abstruse analysis of the essence of tragedy, the essays form a running commentary on the development of the Russian theater: Pushkin on his predecessors, Gogol on his own work, Belinsky on Gogol, Sleptsov on Ostrovsky and Leskov, Bely on Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard ("enervated people, trying to forget the terror of life"), the symbolists on one another. Each selection is printed in its entirety, with extensive notes, and a lengthy introduction places all the pieces within their historical and cultural contexts to comprise a brief history of Russian dramatic theory before the revolution. This volume is essential reading for all who wish to extend their knowledge of the Russian contribution to theatrical history, theory, and criticism.

Download or read book Uncle Vanya written by Anton Chekhov and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Along with Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya is credited as one of Chekhov's masterpieces and a significant precursor of modern drama. Set on a country estate in late nineteenth century Russia, Uncle Vanya is in part a study of the enervation of Russian middle-class provincial life. The major dynamics between the characters themselves are centred on two obsessive love affairs that lead nowhere and a flirtation that brings disaster. Mixing the tragic and the absurd and dealing with a form that allows for ambiguity and contradiction, Uncle Vanya has been deemed "the first modernist play". (David Lan)

Download or read book The Spectre of Tradition and the Aesthetic Political Movement of Theatre and Performance written by Min Tian and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-25 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book interrogates anew the phenomenon of tradition in a dialogical debate with a host of Western thinkers and critical minds. In contrast to the predominantly Western approaches, which look at traditions (Western and non-Western) from a predominantly (Western) modernist perspective, this book interrogates, from an intercultural perspective, the transnational and transcultural consecration, translation, (re)invention, and displacement of traditions (theatrical and cultural) in the aesthetic-political movement of twentieth-century theatre and performance, as exemplified in the case studies of this book. It looks at the question of traditions and modernities at the centre of this aesthetic-political space, as modernities interculturally evoke and are haunted by traditions, and as traditions are interculturally refracted, reconstituted, refunctioned, and reinvented. It also looks at the applicability of its intercultural perspective on tradition to the historical avant-garde in general, postmodern, postcolonial, and postdramatic theatre and performance and to the twentieth-century "classical" intercultural theatre and the twenty-first-century "new interculturalisms" in theatre and performance. To conclude, it looks at the future of tradition in the ecology of our globalized theatrum mundi and considers two important interrelated concepts, future tradition and intercultural tradition. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance studies.

Download or read book The Modern Russian Theater A Literary and Cultural History written by Nicholas Rzhevsky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive and original survey of Russian theater in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first encompasses the major productions of directors such as Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Tovostonogov, Dodin, and Liubimov that drew from Russian and world literature. It is based on a close analysis of adaptations of literary works by Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Blok, Bulgakov, Sholokhov, Rasputin, Abramov, and many others."The Modern Russian Stage" is the result of more than two decades of research as well as the author's professional experience working with the Russian director Yuri Liubimov in Moscow and London. The book traces the transformation of literary works into the brilliant stagecraft that characterizes Russian theater. It uses the perspective of theater performances to engage all the important movements of modern Russian culture, including modernism, socialist realism, post-moderninsm, and the creative renaissance of the first decades since the Soviet regime's collapse.

Download or read book Performing Emotions written by Peta Tait and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Performing Emotions, Peta Tait's central argument is that performing emotions in realism is also performing gender identity. Emotions are phenomena that are performable by bodies, which have cultural identities. In turn, these create cultural spaces of emotions. This study integrates scholarship on realist drama, theatre and approaches to acting, with interdisciplinary theories of emotion, phenomenology and gender theory. With chapters devoted to masculinity and femininity specifically, as well as to emotions generally, it investigates social beliefs about emotions through Chekhov's four major plays in translation, and English language commentaries on Constantin Stanislavski's direction (of the play's first productions) and his approaches to acting, and Olga Knipper's acting of the central women characters. Emotions exists as social relationships; they are imagined and embodied as gendered. Tait demonstrates how theatrical emotions are predicated on social performances and vice versa. In Chekhov's plays, which came to dominate a twentieth century theatre of emotions, characters interpret their emotions intertextually in relation to other theatrical and fictional narratives of emotions. Tait here interrogates these plays as sustained explorations of the inherent theatricality of characters expressing emotions from their phenomenological awareness. A theatrical language of gendered interiority is produced in the acting of emotions in Stanislavski's early realistic theatre. Alternatively, remapping the performances of emotional bodies can destabilise the culturally constructed boundary separating an inner, private self and an outer, social self in culturally produced geographies of emotions. As Tait shows, emotions can be performed as indivisible spatialities. Performing Emotions integrates theories of theatre, gender identity and emotion to investigate how sexual difference impacts on the representations of emotions. The book develops an accumulative analysis of the meanings of emotions in twentieth century realist drama, theatre and acting.

Download or read book The Writer in Petrograd and the House of Arts written by Martha Weitzel Hickey and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-16 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Founded by Maksim Gorky and Kornei Chukovsky in 1919 and disbanded in 1922, the Petrograd House of Arts occupied a crucial moment in Russia's cultural history. By chronicling the rise and fall of this literary landmark, this book conveys in greater depth and detail than ever before a significant but little studied period in Soviet literature. Poised between Russian culture's past and her Soviet future, between pre- and post-Revolutionary generations, this once lavish private home on the Nevsky Prospekt housed as many as fifty-six poets, novelists, critics, and artists at one time, during a period of great social and political turbulence. And as such, Hickey contends, the House of Arts served as a crucible for a literature in transition. Hickey shows how the House of Arts, though virtually ignored by Soviet-era cultural historians, played a critical role in shaping the lively literature of the next decade, a literature often straddling the border between fiction and non-fiction. Considering prose writers such as Yevgeny Zamyatin, Olga Forsh, the Serapion Brothers group, Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, as well as poets including Alexander Blok, Nikolay Gumilev, Anna Radlova, Osip Mandelstam, and Vladislav Khodasevich, she traces the comings and goings at the House of Arts: the meetings and readings and lectures and, most of all, the powerful influence of these interactions on those who briefly lived and worked there. In her work, the Petrograd House of Arts appears for the first time in all its complexity and importance, as a focal point for the social and cultural ferment of the day, and a turning point in the direction of Russian literature and criticism.

Download or read book Modern Theatre in Russia written by Stefan Aquilina and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did modern theatre in Russia look like and how did it foreground tradition building and transmission processes? The book challenges conventional historiographical approaches by weaving contemporary theories on cultural transmission into its historical narrative. It argues that processes of transmission – training spaces, acting manuals, photographic evidence, newspaper reports, international networking, informal encounters, cultural memories – contribute to the formation and consolidation of theatre traditions. Through English translations of rare Russian sources, the book expounds on: *side-lined material on Stanislavsky, including his relationship with German actor Ludwig Barnay, use of improvisation at the First Studio, and rehearsal practices for Artists and Admirers (1933); *Valentin Smyshlaev's acting manual The Technique to Process Stage Performance and the creation of hybrid practices; *proletarian theatre as an amateur-professional combination and force in the transformation of everyday life, as seen in the Proletkult's volume Art at the Workers' Clubs; *Meyerhold's Borodin Studio as an early example of Practice as Research, his European tour of 1930, and international persona as depicted in newspapers published in the West; and *Asja Lacis's work with children, which contributes to current efforts to address the gender imbalance that is often characteristic of modernism. This historical-theoretical investigation is combined with practical exercises that provide a more experiential understanding of the modern performance realities involved. In this way, the book speaks not only to theatre scholars and historians, but also to students and practitioners engaged in practical work.

Download or read book Rewriting Russia written by Barbara J. Henry and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jacob Gordin was the first major playwright of the "Golden Age" of New York's Yiddish theater, which was not just entertainment but also a public forum, a force for education and acculturation, and a battleground for ideologies and artistic credos. Gordin, like his audience, was a Russian émigré. His most successful and scandalous dramas--The Jewish King Lear, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Khasye the Orphan--were based on works by Lev Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, and reflected a profoundly Jewish means of using literature to salvage a lost land. Gordin's life and his plays held out the tantalizing possibility that by changing the story of one's past, one could write one's own future. Through a detailed examination of Gordin's career in Russia, Barbara Henry dismantles the fictive radical background he invented for himself. In doing so, she illuminates the continuities among his Russian fiction and journalism, his work as a controversial Jewish religious reformer, and his Yiddish plays.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture written by Nicholas Rzhevsky and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fully updated new edition of this overview of contemporary Russia and the influence of its Soviet past.

Download or read book Tragedy Modernity and Mourning written by Olga Taxidou and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-28 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This powerful reinterpretation of Greek tragedy focuses on the performative - the physical and civic - dimension of tragedy. It challenges the idealist, humanist, and universalist approaches that have informed our most cherished philosophical, psychoanalytical, and modern interpretations of Greek tragedy and, in doing so, asks us to renew our relation to these works and to our literary and philosophical inheritance.The book reassesses tragic form in relation to Athenian democracy and links it with a performative discourse that both excludes the feminine and relies on civic and private forms of mourning. At the same time, it explores the centrality of tragedy for thinkers of Modernity such as Holderlin, Nietzsche, Hegel, Freud, Brecht and Benjamin. Through a persuasive analysis of both classical theorists - Plato and Aristotle - and modern theorists - Benjamin, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida and Butler - the book significantly shifts the emphasis from a Sophoclean model of tragedy to a Euripidean one. Close readings of the performance aspects of Greek play-texts help illuminate these ideas.Features* Compelling new interpretation of Greek tragedy * Performance based * Attentive to issues of gender

Download or read book The Stony Dance written by Timothy Langen and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-22 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely considered the greatest Russian modernist novel, Andrei Bely's Petersburg has until now eluded the critical attention that a book of its caliber merits. In The Stony Dance, Timothy Langen offers readers a study of Bely's masterpiece unparalleled in its comprehensiveness, clarity, and inclusion of detail--a critical study that is at the same time a meditation on the nature of literary art. Thoroughly versed in Russian and European modernism, in Bely's biography and writings, and in twentieth-century literary theory, Langen constructs an original analytic scheme for reading Petersburg. Guided by Bely's fertile but challenging notions of art and philosophy, he analyzes the novel first as an object embodying intentions and essences, then as a pattern of signification and events, and finally as a dance of gestures that coordinate body and meaning, regularity and surprise, self and other, and author, novel, and reader. The terms are derived from Bely's own writings, but they are nuanced with reference to Russian and European contexts and clarified with reference to philosophy and literary theory. Langen shows how Bely invariably challenges his own concepts and patterns, thereby creating an unusually demanding and dynamic text. In finding an approach to these enriching difficulties, this book at long last shows readers a welcoming way into Bely's thought, and his masterwork, and their place in the complex world of early twentieth-century literature.

Download or read book Modern Theories of Performance written by Jane Milling and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern era in the theatre is remarkable for the extraordinary role and influence of theoretical practitioners, whose writings have shaped our sense of the possibilities and objectives of performance. This study offers a critical exploration of the theoretical writings of key modern practitioners from Stanlislavski to Boal. Designed to be read alongside primary source material, each chapter offers not only a summary and exposition of these theories, but a critical commentary on their composition as discourses. Close scrutiny of the cultural context and figurative language of these important, and sometimes difficult, texts yields fresh insight into the ideas of these practitioners.

Download or read book Melodramatic Voices Understanding Music Drama written by Sarah Hibberd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The genre of mélodrame à grand spectacle that emerged in the boulevard theatres of Paris in the 1790s - and which was quickly exported abroad - expressed the moral struggle between good and evil through a drama of heightened emotions. Physical gesture, mise en scène and music were as important in communicating meaning and passion as spoken dialogue. The premise of this volume is the idea that the melodramatic aesthetic is central to our understanding of nineteenth-century music drama, broadly defined as spoken plays with music, operas and other hybrid genres that combine music with text and/or image. This relationship is examined closely, and its evolution in the twentieth century in selected operas, musicals and films is understood as an extension of this nineteenth-century aesthetic. The book therefore develops our understanding of opera in the context of melodrama's broader influence on musical culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book will appeal to those interested in film studies, drama, theatre and modern languages as well as music and opera.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre written by Laurence Senelick and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-08-13 with total page 693 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A latecomer continually hampered by government control and interference, the Russian theatre seems an unlikely source of innovation and creativity. Yet, by the middle of the nineteenth century, it had given rise to a number of outstanding playwrights and actors, and by the start of the twentieth century, it was in the vanguard of progressive thinking in the realms of directing and design. Its influence throughout the world was pervasive: Nikolai Gogol', Anton Chekhov and Maksim Gor'kii remain staples of repertories in every language, the ideas of Konstantin Stanislavskii, Vsevolod Meierkhol'd and Mikhail Chekhov continue to inspire actors and directors, while designers still draw on the graphics of the World of Art group and the Constructivists. What distinguishes Russian theater from almost any other is the way in which these achievements evolved and survived in ongoing conflict or cooperation with the State. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre covers the history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on individual actors, directors, designers, entrepreneurs, plays, playhouses and institutions, Censorship, Children’s Theater, Émigré Theater, and Shakespeare in Russia. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Russian Theatre.

Download or read book Romantic Drama written by Gerald Ernest Paul Gillespie and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1994 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It does not treat Romanticism as a limited "period" dominated by some construed singular master-ethos or dialectic; rather, it follows the literary patterns and dynamics of Romanticism as a flow of interactive currents across geocultural frontiers

Download or read book R EVOLUTIONS written by Jennifer Craig and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can art change the world? Or can art produce new knowledge that facilitates radical change in our slowly-evolving communities? If so, then we must ask: How does cultural transformation, whether super or slight, affect our understanding of culture and the world? Operating under the rubric of resistance and reform, R|EVOLUTIONS: Mapping Culture, Community and Change is a unique scholarly collection that seeks to illuminate current understandings of art, aesthetics, and the revolutionary impulse. The resulting work interrogates intersections between culture and community, revolution and evolution. At the same time, it examines how enduring social issues intertwine with current concerns, such as representations of the body or the book. Multidisciplinary in approach, topics run from subversive uses of the body in Renaissance drama to the effect of the atom bomb on postmodern culture. From Mark Wallinger’s Turner Prize-winning performance in a bear suit, to Angela Carter’s concept of sexual multiplicity in The Passion of New Eve. Cutting-edge and politically engaging, R|Evolutions will appeal to general readers as well as the specialist, and it is designed for scholars not only interested in issues of cultural production, but also in the evolution of politics and perception over time.

Download or read book Interpreting Chekhov written by Geoffrey Borny and published by ANU E Press. This book was released on 2006-08-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author's contention is that Chekhov's plays have often been misinterpreted by scholars and directors, particularly through their failure to adequately balance the comic and tragic elements inherent in these works. Through a close examination of the form and content of Chekhov's dramas, the author shows how deeply pessimistic or overly optimistic interpretations fail to sufficiently account for the rich complexity and ambiguity of these plays. The author suggests that, by accepting that Chekhov's plays are synthetic tragi-comedies which juxtapose potentially tragic sub-texts with essentially comic texts, critics and directors are more likely to produce richer and more deeply satisfying interpretations of these works. Besides being of general interest to any reader interested in understanding Chekhov's work, the book is intended to be of particular interest to students of Drama and Theatre Studies and to potential directors of these subtle plays.