Download or read book Shakespeare and Audience in Practice written by Stephen Purcell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do audiences do as they watch a Shakespearean play? What makes them respond in the ways that they do? This book examines a wide range of theatrical productions to explore the practice of being a modern Shakespearean audience. It surveys some of the most influential ideas about spectatorship in contemporary performance studies, and analyses the strategies employed both in the texts themselves and by modern theatre practitioners to position audiences in particular ways.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Costume in Practice written by Bridget Escolme and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2021-12-24 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role of costume in Shakespeare production? Shakespeare and Costume in Practice argues that costume design choices are central not only to the creation of period setting and the actor’s work on character, but to the cultural, political, and psychological meanings that the theatre makes of Shakespeare. The book explores questions about what the first Hamlet looked like in his mourning cloak; how costumes for a Shakespeare comedy can reflect or critique the collective nostalgias a culture has for its past; how costume and casting work together to ask new questions about Shakespeare and race. Using production case studies of Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest, the book demonstrates that costume design can be a site of experimentation, playfulness, and transgression in the theatre – and that it can provoke audiences to think again about what power, race, and gender look like on the Shakespearean stage.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Audiences written by Matteo Pangallo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-28 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare wrote for a theater in which the audience was understood to be, and at times invited to be, active and participatory. How have Shakespeare’s audiences, from the sixteenth century to the present, responded to that invitation? In what ways have consumers across different cultural contexts, periods, and platforms engaged with the performance of Shakespeare’s plays? What are some of the different approaches taken by scholars today in thinking about the role of Shakespeare's audiences and their relationship to performance? The chapters in this collection use a variety of methods and approaches to explore the global history of audience experience of Shakespearean performance in theater, film, radio, and digital media. The approaches that these contributors take look at Shakespeare’s audiences through a variety of lenses, including theater history, dramaturgy, film studies, fan studies, popular culture, and performance. Together, they provide both close studies of particular moments in the history of Shakespeare’s audiences and a broader understanding of the various, often complex, connections between and among those audiences across the long history of Shakespearean performance.
Download or read book Talking to the Audience written by Bridget Escolme and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique study investigates the ways in which the staging convention of direct address - talking to the audience - can construct dramatic subjectivity, or selfhood, in Shakespeare plays.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Costume in Practice written by Bridget Escolme and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-12-23 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role of costume in Shakespeare production? Shakespeare and Costume in Practice argues that costume design choices are central not only to the creation of period setting and the actor’s work on character, but to the cultural, political, and psychological meanings that the theatre makes of Shakespeare. The book explores questions about what the first Hamlet looked like in his mourning cloak; how costumes for a Shakespeare comedy can reflect or critique the collective nostalgias a culture has for its past; how costume and casting work together to ask new questions about Shakespeare and race. Using production case studies of Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest, the book demonstrates that costume design can be a site of experimentation, playfulness, and transgression in the theatre – and that it can provoke audiences to think again about what power, race, and gender look like on the Shakespearean stage.
Download or read book Shakespeare Actors and Audiences written by Fiona Banks and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences brings together the voices of those who make productions of Shakespeare come to life. It shines a spotlight on the relationship between actors and audiences and explores the interplay that makes each performance unique. We know much about theatre in Shakespeare's time but very little about the audiences who attended his plays. Even today the audience's voice remains largely ignored. This volume places the role of the audience at the centre of how we understand Shakespeare in performance. Part One offers an overview of the best current audience research and provides a critical framework for the interviews and testimony of leading actors, theatre makers and audience members that follow in Part Two, including Juliet Stevenson and Emma Rice. Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences offers a fascinating insight into the world of theatre production and of the relationship between actor and audience that lies at the heart of theatre-making.
Download or read book Talking to the Audience written by Bridget Escolme and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique study investigates the ways in which the staging convention of direct address - talking to the audience - can construct selfhood, for Shakespeare's characters. By focusing specifically on the relationship between performer and audience, Talking to the Audience examines what happens when the audience are in the presence of a dramatic figure who knows they are there. It is a book concerned with theatrical illusion; with the pleasures and disturbances of seeing 'characters' produced in the moment of performance. Through analysis of contemporary productions Talking to the Audience serves to demonstrate how the study of recent performance helps us to understand both Shakespeare's cultural moment and our own. Its exploration of how theory and practice can inform each other make this essential reading for all those studying Shakespeare in either a literary or theatrical context.
Download or read book Shakespeare on Theatre written by Robert Cohen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-07 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shakespeare on Theatre, master acting teacher Robert Cohen brilliantly scrutinises Shakespeare's implicit theories of acting, paying close attention to the plays themselves and providing a wealth of fascinating historical evidence. What he finds will surprise scholars and actors alike – that Shakespeare's drama and his practice as an actor were founded on realism, though one clearly distinct from the realism later found in Stanislavski. Shakespeare on Acting is an extraordinary introduction to the way the plays articulate a profound understanding of performance and reflect the life and times of a uniquely talented theatre-maker.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Political Theatre in Practice written by Andrew James Hartley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes a Shakespeare production political? Can Shakespeare's plays ever be truly radical? Revealing the unspoken politics of Shakespeare's plays on stage, Andrew Hartley examines their nature, agenda, limits and potential. In considering key theoretical issues, analysing a wide range of productions, and engaging in a collaborative debate with Professor Ayanna Thompson, Hartley highlights a more consciously political approach to making theatre out of Shakespeare's scripts – and to experiencing it as an audience. Dynamic and provocative, this book is a crucial text for students and theatre practitioners alike.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Gesture in Practice written by Darren Tunstall and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-19 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When actors perform Shakespeare, what do they do with their bodies? How do they display to the spectator what is hidden in the imagination? This is a history of Shakespearean performance as seen through the actor's body. Tunstall draws upon social, cognitive and moral psychology to reveal how performers from Sarah Siddons to Ian McKellen have used the language of gesture to reflect the minds of their characters and shape the reactions of their audiences. This book is rich in examples, including detailed analysis of recent performances and interviews with key figures from the worlds of both acting and gesture studies. Truly interdisciplinary, this provocative and original contribution will appeal to anyone interested in Shakespeare, theatre history, psychology or body language.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance written by James C. Bulman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespearean performance criticism has undergone a sea change in recent years, and strong tides of discovery are continuing to shift the contours of the discipline. The essays in this volume, written by scholars from around the world, reveal how these critical cross-currents are influencing the ways we now view Shakespeare in performance. The volume is organised in four Parts. Part I interrogates how Shakespeare continues to achieve contemporaneity for Western audiences by exploring modes of performance, acting styles, and aesthetic choices regarded as experimental. Part II tackles the burgeoning field of reception: how and why audiences respond to performances as they do, or actors to the conditions in which they perform; how immersive productions turn spectators into actors; how memory and cognition shape and reshape the performances we think we saw. Part III addresses the ways in which revolutions in technology have altered our views of Shakespeare, both through the mediums of film and sound recording, and through digitalizing processes that have generated a profound reconsideration of what performance is and how it is accessed. The final Part grapples with intercultural Shakespeare, considering not only matters of cultural hegemony and appropriation in a 'global' importation of non-Western productions to Europe and North America, but also how Shakespeare has been made 'local' in performances staged or filmed in African, Asian, and Latin American countries. Together, these ground-breaking essays attest to the richness and diversity of Shakespearean performance criticism as it is practiced today, and they point the way to critical continents not yet explored.
Download or read book New Sites For Shakespeare written by John Russell Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the course of exploring the theatrical cultures of South and East Asia, eminent Shakespeareanist John Russell Brown developed some remarkable theories about the nature of performance, the state of Western 'Theatre' today, and the future potential of Shakespeare's plays. In New Sites for Shakespeare he outlines his passionate belief in the power of theatre to reach mass audiences, based on his experiences of popular Asian performances. It is a personal polemic, but it is also a carefully argued and brilliantly persuasive study of the kind of theatrical experience Shakespeare's own contemporaries enjoyed. This is a book which cannot be ignored by anyone who cares about the live performing arts today. Separate chapters consider staging, acting, improvisation, ceremonies and ritual, and an analysis of the experience of the audience is paramount throughout.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production and Reception written by John Tulloch and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a focus on the canonical institutions of Shakespeare and Chekhov, John Tulloch brings together for the first time new concepts of “the theatrical event” with live audience analysis. Using mainstream theatre productions from across the globe that were highly successful according to both critics and audiences, this book of case studies—ethnographies of production and reception—offers a combined cultural and media studies approach to analyzing theatre history, production, and audience. Tulloch positions these concepts and methodologies within a broader current theatrical debate between postmodernity and risk modernity. He also describes the continuing history of Shakespeare and Chekhov as a series of stories “currently and locally told” in the context of a blurring of academic genres that frames the two writers. Drawn from research conducted over nearly a decade in Australia, Britain, and the U.S., Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production and Reception will be of interest to students and scholars of theatre studies, media studies, and audience research.
Download or read book The Practical Shakespeare written by Colin Butler and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare's plays in clear prose, The Practical Shakespeare: The Plays in Practice and on the Page illuminates for a general audience how and why the plays work so well.Noting in detail the practical and physical limitations the Bard faced as he worked out the logistics of his plays, Colin Butler demonstrates how Shakespeare incorporated and exploited those limitations to his advantage: his management of entrances and exits; his characterization technique; his handling of scenes off stage; his control of audience responses; his organization of major scenes; and his use of prologues and choruses. A different aspect of the plays is covered in each chapter?and all chapters are free-standing, for separate consultation. For easy access, chapters also are subdivided, and each part has its own heading. Butler draws most of his examples from mainstream plays, such as Macbeth, Othello, and Much Ado About Nothing. He brings special focus to A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is treated as one of Shakespeare's most important plays. Butler supports his major points with quotations, so readers can understand an issue even if they are unfamiliar with the particular play being discussed. The author also cross-references dramatic devices among plays, increasing enjoyment and understanding of Shakespeare's achievements. Clear, jargon-free, easy-to-use, and comprehensive, The Practical Shakespeare looks to the elements of stagecraft and playwriting as a conduit for students, teachers, and general audiences to engage with, understand, and appreciate the genius of Shakespeare. Colin Butler, previously the head of an English department at a British grammar school, lives in Canterbury, England, where he writes on literary subjects.
Download or read book The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare written by Bruce R. Smith and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This transhistorical, international and interdisciplinary work will be of interest to students, theater professionals and Shakespeare scholars.
Download or read book Shakespeare in the Theatre Mark Rylance at the Globe written by Stephen Purcell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare in the Theatre: Mark Rylance at the Globe Each volume in the Shakespeare in the Theatre series focuses on a director or theatre company who has made a significant contribution to Shakespeare production, identifying the artistic and political/social contexts of their work. The series introduces readers to the work of significant theatre directors and companies whose Shakespeare productions have been transformative in our understanding of his plays in performance. Each volume examines a single figure or company, considering their key productions, rehearsal approaches and their work with other artists. Since its opening in the late 1990s, the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe Theatre has made an indelible impression on the contemporary British theatre scene. This book explores the theatre's first decade of productions under the pioneering leadership of Sir Mark Rylance. Drawing upon an extensive range of material from the theatre's archive, interviews with Globe practitioners, and Rylance's own personal archive, this book argues that the Rylance era was a ground-breaking and important period of recent theatre history. It concludes with an in-depth interview with Rylance himself. The book gives a unique insight into Rylance's practice and impact, and will be of interest to anyone studying Shakespeare in performance. Stephen Purcell is Associate Professor of English at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on the performance of the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries on the modern stage and screen, and his publications include the books Popular Shakespeare and Shakespeare and Audience in Practice. He also directs for the open-air theatre company The Pantaloons. Series Editors: Bridget Escolme, Queen Mary University of London, UK, Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, USA and Farah Karim-Cooper, Shakespeare's Globe, London ,UK.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Gender in Practice written by Terri Power and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cross-gender performance was an integral part of Shakespearean theatre: from boys portraying his female characters, to those characters disguising themselves as men within the story. This book examines contemporary trends in staging cross-gender performances of Shakespeare in the UK and USA. Terri Power surveys the field of gender in performance through an intersectional feminist and queer theoretical lens. In depth discussions of key productions reveal processes adapted by companies for their performances. The book also looks at how contemporary performance responds to new cultural politics of gender and creates a critical language for understanding that within Shakespeare. This book features: - First-hand interviews with professional artists - Case studies of individual performances - A practical workshop section with innovative exercises
