Download or read book Stage Fright Animals and Other Theatrical Problems written by Nicholas Peter Ridout and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Things nearly always go wrong in the theatre. This study looks at the things that shouldn't happen: stage fright, embarrassment, animals on stage, getting the giggles and bumping into the furniture. All these turn out to be neither anomalies nor accidents, but are instead what makes theatre, theatre.
Download or read book Stage Fright Animals and Other Theatrical Problems written by Nicholas Ridout and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-17 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do actors get stage fright? What is so embarrassing about joining in? Why not work with animals and children, and why is it so hard not to collapse into helpless laughter when things go wrong? In trying to answer these questions - usually ignored by theatre scholarship but of enduring interest to theatre professionals and audiences alike - Nicholas Ridout attempts to explain the relationship between these apparently unwanted and anomalous phenomena and the wider social and political meanings of the modern theatre. This book focuses on the theatrical encounter - those events in which actor and audience come face to face in a strangely compromised and alienated intimacy - arguing that the modern theatre has become a place where we entertain ourselves by experimenting with our feelings about work, social relations and about feelings themselves.
Download or read book Theatre and Ethics written by Nicholas Ridout and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-16 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is ethics and what has it got to do with theatre? Drawing on both theoretical material and practical examples, Ridout makes a clear and compelling critical intervention, raising fundamental questions about what theatre is for and how audiences interact with it.
Download or read book Stage Fright written by Martin Puchner and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-04-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grounded equally in discussions of theater history, literary genre, and theory, Martin Puchner's Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama explores the conflict between avant-garde theater and modernism. While the avant-garde celebrated all things theatrical, a dominant strain of modernism tended to define itself against the theater, valuing lyric poetry and the novel instead. Defenders of the theater dismiss modernism's aversion to the stage and its mimicking actors as one more form of the old "anti-theatrical" prejudice. But Puchner shows that modernism's ambivalence about the theater was shared even by playwrights and directors and thus was a productive force responsible for some of the greatest achievements in dramatic literature and theater. A reaction to the aggressive theatricality of Wagner and his followers, the modernist backlash against the theater led to the peculiar genre of the closet drama—a theatrical piece intended to be read rather than staged—whose long-overlooked significance Puchner traces from the theatrical texts of Mallarmé and Stein to the dramatic "Circe" chapter of Joyce's Ulysses. At times, then, the anti-theatrical impulse leads to a withdrawal from the theater. At other times, however, it returns to the stage, when Yeats blends lyric poetry with Japanese Nôh dancers, when Brecht controls the stage with novelistic techniques, and when Beckett buries his actors in barrels and behind obsessive stage directions. The modernist theater thus owes much to the closet drama whose literary strategies it blends with a new mise en scène. While offering an alternative history of modernist theater and literature, Puchner also provides a new account of the contradictory forces within modernism.
Download or read book Playing Scared written by Sara Solovitch and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-07-02 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stage fright is one of the human psyche's deepest fears. Over half of British adults name public speaking as their greatest fear, even greater than heights and snakes. Laurence Olivier learned to adapt to it, as have actors Salma Hayek and Hugh Grant. Musicians such as Paul McCartney and Adele have battled it and learned to cope. Playing Scared is Sara Solovitch's journey into the myriad causes of stage fright and the equally diverse ways we can overcome it. As a young child, Sara studied piano and fell in love with music. As a teen, she played Bach and Mozart at her hometown's annual music festival, but was overwhelmed by stage fright, which led her to give up aspirations of becoming a professional pianist. In her late fifties, Sara gave herself a one-year deadline to tame performance anxiety and play before an audience. She resumed music lessons, while exploring meditation, exposure therapy, cognitive therapy, biofeedback and beta blockers, among many other remedies. She practiced performing in airports, hospitals and retirement homes. Finally, the day before her sixtieth birthday, she gave a formal recital for an audience of fifty. Using her own journey as inspiration, Sara has written a thoughtful and insightful cultural history of performance anxiety and a tribute to pursuing personal growth at any age.
Download or read book A History of Modern Oman written by Jeremy Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ideal introduction to the history of modern Oman from the eighteenth century to the present, this book combines the most recent scholarship on Omani history with insights drawn from a close analysis of the politics and international relations of contemporary Oman. Jeremy Jones and Nicholas Ridout offer a distinctive new approach to Omani history, building on post-colonial thought and integrating the study of politics and culture. The book addresses key topics including Oman's historical cosmopolitanism, the distinctive role of Omani Islam in the country's social and political life, Oman's role in the global economy of the nineteenth century, insurrection and revolution in the twentieth century, the role of Sultan Qaboos in the era of oil and Oman's unique regional and diplomatic perspective on contemporary issues.
Download or read book Acting Emotions written by Elly Konijn and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Actors and actresses play characters such as the embittered Medea, or the lovelorn Romeo, or the grieving and tearful Hecabe. The theatre audience holds its breath, and then sparks begin to fly. But what about the actor? Has he been affected by the emotions of the character he is playing? What'sgoing on inside his mind? The styling of emotions in the theatre has been the subject of heated debate for centuries. In fact, Diderot in his Paradoxe sur le comedien, insisted that most brilliant actors do not feel anything onstage. This greatly resembles the detached acting style associated with Bertolt Brecht, which, in turn, stands in direct opposition to the notion of the empathy-oriented "emotional reality" of the actor which is most famously associated with the American actingstyle known as method acting. The book's survey of the various dominant acting styles is followed by an analysis of the current state of affairs regarding the psychology of emotions. By uniting the psychology of emotions with contemporary acting theories, the author is able to come to the conclusion that traditional acting theories are no longer valid for today's actor. Acting Emotions throws new light on the age-old issue of double consciousness, the paradox of the actor who must nightly express emotions while creating the illusion of spontaneity. In addition, the book bridges the gap between theory and practice by virtue of the author's large-scale field study of the emotions of professional actors. In Acting Emotions, the responses of Dutch and Flemish actors is further supplemented by the responses of a good number of American actors. The book offers a unique view of how actors act out emotions and how this acting out is intimately linked to the development of contemporary theatre.
Download or read book The Stage Lives of Animals written by Una Chaudhuri and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Stage Lives of Animals examines what it might mean to make theatre beyond the human. In this stunning collection of essays, Una Chaudhuri engages with the alternative modes of thinking, feeling, and making art offered by animals and animality, bringing insights from theatre practice and theory to animal studies as well as exploring what animal studies can bring to the study of theatre and performance. As our planet lives through what scientists call "the sixth extinction," and we become ever more aware of our relationships to other species, Chaudhuri takes a highly original look at the "animal imagination" of well-known plays, performances and creative projects, including works by: Caryl Churchill Rachel Rosenthal Marina Zurkow Edward Albee Tennesee Williams Eugene Ionesco Covering over a decade of explorations, a wide range of writers, and many urgent topics, this volume demonstrates that an interspecies imagination deeply structures modern western drama.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance written by Paul Allain and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is theatre? What is performance? What connects them and how are they different? What events, people, practices and ideas have shaped theatre and performance in the twentieth and twenty-first century? The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance offers some answers to these big questions. It provides an analytical, informative and engaging introduction to important people, companies, events, concepts and practices that have defined the complementary fields of theatre and performance studies. This fully updated second edition contains three easy to use alphabetized sections including over 120 revised entries on topics and people ranging from performance artist Ron Athey, to directors Vsevold Meyerhold and Robert Wilson, megamusicals , postdramatic theatre and documentation. Each entry includes crucial historical and contextual information, extensive cross-referencing, detailed analysis and an annotated bibliography. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance is a perfect reference guide for the keen student.
Download or read book Intermedial Theater written by Bryan Reynolds and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores relationships between intermedial theater, consciousness, memory, objects, subjectivity, and affect through productive engagement with the performance aesthetics, socio-cognitive theory, and critical methodology of transversal poetics alongside other leading philosophical approaches to performance. It offers the first sustained analysis of the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, and Friedrich Nietzsche in relation to the contemporary European theater of Jan Lauwers and Needcompany, Romeo Castellucci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Thomas Ostermeier, Rodrigo García and La Carnicería Teatro, and the Transversal Theater Company. It connects contemporary uses of objects, simulacra, and technologies in both posthumanist discourse and postdramatic theater to the transhistorically and culturally mediating power of Shakespeare as a means by which to discuss the affective impact of intermedial theater on today’s audiences.
Download or read book Sports Plays written by Eero Laine and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sports Plays is a volume about sports in the theatre and what it means to stage sports. The chapters in this volume examine sports plays through a range of critical and theoretical approaches that highlight central concerns and questions both for sports and for theatre. The plays cut across boundaries and genres, from Broadway-style musicals to dramas to experimental and developmental work. The chapters examine and trouble the conventions of staging sports as they open possibilities for considering larger social and cultural issues and debates. This broad range of perspectives make the volume a compelling resource for students and scholars of sport, theatre, and performance studies whose interests span feminism, sexuality, politics, and race.
Download or read book The Theatre of Naomi Wallace written by Scott T. Cummings and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-12-18 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Naomi Wallace, an American playwright based in Britain, is one of the more original and provocative voices in contemporary theatre. Her poetic, erotically-charged, and politically engaged plays have been seen in London's West End, off-Broadway, at the Comédie-Française, in regional and provincial theaters, and on college campuses around the world. Known for their intimate, sensual encounters examining the relationship between identity and power, Wallace's works have attracted a wide range of theatre practitioners, including such important directors as Dominic Dromgoole, Ron Daniels, Jo Bonney, and Kwame Kwei-Armah. Drawing on scholars, activists, historians, and theatre artists in the United States, Canada, Britain, and the Middle East, this anthology of essays presents a comprehensive overview of Wallace's body of work that will be of use to theatre practitioners, students, scholars, and educators alike.
Download or read book A Strange Proximity written by Jon Foley Sherman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens in the relationship between audience and performer? What choices are made in the space of performance about how we attend to others? A Strange Proximity examines stage presence as key to thinking about performance and ethics. It is the first phenomenological account of ethics generated from, rather than applied to, contemporary theatrical productions. The ethical possibilities of the stage, argues Jon Foley Sherman, rest not so much in its objects—the performers and the show itself—as in the “how” of attending to others. A Strange Proximity is a unique perspective on the implications of attention in performance.
Download or read book Performing the Unstageable written by Karen Quigley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the gouging out of eyes in Shakespeare's King Lear or Sarah Kane's Cleansed, to the adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, theatre has long been intrigued by the staging of challenging plays and impossible texts, images or ideas. Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure examines this phenomenon of what the theatre cannot do or has not been able to do at various points in its history. The book explores four principal areas to which unstageability most frequently pertains: stage directions, adaptations, violence and ghosts. Karen Quigley incorporates a wide range of case studies of both historical and contemporary theatrical productions including the Wooster Group's exploration of Hamlet via the structural frame of John Gielgud's 1964 filmed production, Elevator Repair Service's eight-hour staging of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and a selection of impossible stage directions drawn from works by such playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, Philip Glass, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane and Alistair McDowall. Placing theatre history and performance analysis in such a context, Performing the Unstageable values what is not possible, and investigates the tricky underside of theatre's most fundamental function to bring things to the place of showing: the stage.
Download or read book Lothario s Corpse written by Daniel Gustafson and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-12 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: The long-running Restoration -- Corpsing Lothario -- Debating Dorimant -- Stuarts without end -- Libertines and liberalism.
Download or read book Theater of Capital written by Alisa Zhulina and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reads canonical works of modern drama in relation to the economic ideas of their era Emerging amid the turbulent rise of market finance and wider socioeconomic changes, modern drama enacted vital critiques of art and life under capitalism. Alisa Zhulina shows how fin-de-siècle playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, and Gerhart Hauptmann interrogated the meaning of this newly coined economic concept. Acutely aware of their complicity in the system they sought to challenge, these playwrights staged economic questions as moral and political concerns, using their plays to explore the theories of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, and others within the boundaries of bourgeois theater. Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life reveals the prescient and unsettling visions of life in a new financial and societal reality in now-canonical plays such as A Doll’s House, Miss Julie, and The Cherry Orchard, as well as in lesser-known and long-overlooked works. This wide-ranging study prompts us to reevaluate modern drama and its legacy for the urgent economic and political questions that haunt our present moment.
Download or read book Audience Participation in Theatre written by G. White and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book asks that we consider the practices that facilitate audience participation on equal terms with other elements of the theatre maker's art; it offers a theoretical basis for this new approach, illustrated by examples from diverse participatory performances.
