Download or read book The Birth of Modern Theatre written by Norman S. Poser and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Birth of Modern Theatre: Rivalry, Riots, and Romance in the Age of Garrick is a vivid description of the eighteenth-century London theatre scene—a time when the theatre took on many of the features of our modern stage. A natural and psychologically based acting style replaced the declamatory style of an earlier age. The theatres were mainly supported by paying audiences, no longer by royal or noble patrons. The press determined the success or failure of a play or a performance. Actors were no longer shunned by polite society, some becoming celebrities in the modern sense. The dominant figure for thirty years was David Garrick, actor, theatre manager and playwright, who, off the stage, charmed London with his energy, playfulness, and social graces. No less important in defining eighteenth-century theatre were its audiences, who considered themselves full-scale participants in theatrical performances; if they did not care for a play, an actor, or ticket prices, they would loudly make their wishes known, sometimes starting a riot. This book recounts the lives—and occasionally the scandals—of the actors and theatre managers and weaves them into the larger story of the theatre in this exuberant age, setting the London stage and its leading personalities against the background of the important social, cultural, and economic changes that shaped eighteenth-century Britain. The Birth of Modern Theatre brings all of this together to describe a moment in history that sowed the seeds of today’s stage.
Download or read book The Birth of Theater from the Spirit of Philosophy written by David Kornhaber and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nietzsche's love affair with the theater was among the most profound and prolonged intellectual engagements of his life, but his transformational role in the history of the modern stage has yet to be explored. In this pathbreaking account, David Kornhaber vividly shows how Nietzsche reimagined the theatrical event as a site of philosophical invention that is at once ancestor, antagonist, and handmaiden to the discipline of philosophy itself. August Strindberg, George Bernard Shaw, and Eugene O'Neill— seminal figures in the modern drama's evolution and avowed Nietzscheans all—came away from their encounters with Nietzsche's writings with an impassioned belief in the philosophical potential of the live theatrical event, coupled with a reestimation of the dramatist's power to shape that event in collaboration with the actor. In these playwrights' reactions to and adaptations of Nietzsche's radical rethinking of the stage lay the beginnings of a new direction in modern theater and dramatic literature.
Download or read book Theatre of the Book 1480 1880 written by Julie Stone Peters and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the impact of printing on the European theatre in the period 1480-1880 and shows that the printing press played a major part in the birth of modern theatre.
Download or read book Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism written by Toril Moi and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-02-14 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is the founder of modern theater, and his plays are performed all over the world. Yet in spite of his unquestioned status as a classic of the stage, Ibsen is often dismissed as a fuddy-duddy old realist, whose plays are of interest only because they remain the gateway to modern theater. In Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism , Toril Moi makes a powerful case not just for Ibsen's modernity, but for his modernism. Situating Ibsen in his cultural context, she shows how unexpected his rise to world fame was, and the extent of his influence on writers such Shaw, Wilde, and Joyce who were seeking to escape the shackles of Victorianism. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism also rewrites nineteenth-century literary history; positioning Ibsen between visual art and philosophy, the book offers a critique of traditional theories of the opposition between realism and modernism. Modernism, Moi argues, arose from the ruins of idealism, the dominant aesthetic paradigm of the nineteenth century. She also shows why Ibsen still matters to us today, by focusing on two major themes-his explorations of women, men, and marriage and his clear-eyed chronicling of the tension between skepticism and the everyday. This radical new account places Ibsen in his rightful place alongside Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Manet as a founder of European modernism.
Download or read book A History of Japanese Theatre written by Jonah Salz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 1066 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan boasts one of the world's oldest, most vibrant and most influential performance traditions. This accessible and complete history provides a comprehensive overview of Japanese theatre and its continuing global influence. Written by eminent international scholars, it spans the full range of dance-theatre genres over the past fifteen hundred years, including noh theatre, bunraku puppet theatre, kabuki theatre, shingeki modern theatre, rakugo storytelling, vanguard butoh dance and media experimentation. The first part addresses traditional genres, their historical trajectories and performance conventions. Part II covers the spectrum of new genres since Meiji (1868–), and Parts III to VI provide discussions of playwriting, architecture, Shakespeare, and interculturalism, situating Japanese elements within their global theatrical context. Beautifully illustrated with photographs and prints, this history features interviews with key modern directors, an overview of historical scholarship in English and Japanese, and a timeline. A further reading list covers a range of multimedia resources to encourage further explorations.
Download or read book The Nervous Stage written by Matthew Wilson Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nervous Stage examines the relations between theatrical practices and the scientific study of the nervous system.
Download or read book David Garrick and the Birth of Modern Theatre written by Jean Benedetti and published by Methuen Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Actor, director, impresario, author, David Garrick (1717-1779) is the most legendary man of the theatre of modern times. He reformed English theatre practice, established a 'natural' style of acting, and made the profession socially acceptable. As his great friend Dr. Johnson remarked, no actor before Garrick had made so much money nor achieved such an eminent position in society. Not for nothing is the most exclusive club in London named after him: Garrick was the first international 'megastar'." "Garrick's circle of friends was enormous and covered the social spectrum, from lawyers and wine merchants to the most famous men of letters and statesmen of his time: Pope, Boswell, Edmund Burke, Lord Burlington, Lord Chesterfield, the Prime Minister Pitt the Elder, the Lord Chancellor: the Duke of Devonshire, Lord Spencer. In France he counted Diderot, d'Alembert, Baron d'Holbach and the philosophes among his acquaintance. Though never honoured, he was at the very centre of his world." "Drawing on the large amount of source material available - from the accounts of Johnson's friendship with Garrick by James Boswell, through descriptions of his acting by English, French and German critics, to his own diaries and letters - Jean Benedetti has written a lively and fascinating account of Garrick's style and reforms, clearly establishing his pivotal role in the development of acting and directing."--Book Jacket.
Download or read book Theatre and Knowledge written by David Kornhaber and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-04 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Plato onwards, philosophers the world over have pondered the fraught relationship between the illusory practices of the stage and the rational pursuit of knowledge. In this engaging and accessible volume, David Kornhaber sheds new light on this ancient quarrel. Drawing on a global array of theatrical traditions and spanning millennia-from the Sanskrit dramas of classical India to Shakespeare and Greek tragedy, from the Noh drama of Japan to West End comedies and avant-grade performances.Theatre & Knowledge vividly demonstrates how questions of knowledge have long animated the theatre and continue to motivate some of its most innovative practices. As much as philosophy itself, the theatre has always been instrumental in probing the boundaries of what we can possibly know. Concise yet thought-provoking, this is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Theatre and Philosophy.
Download or read book If you know not me you know nobody written by and published by . This book was released on 1935 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Strategies of Political Theatre written by Michael Patterson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-22 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a theoretical framework for some of the most important play-writing in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. Examining representative plays by Arnold Wesker, John Arden, Trevor Griffith, Howard Barker, Howard Brenton, Edward Bond, David Hare, John McGrath and Caryl Churchill, the author analyses their respective strategies for persuading audiences of the need for a radical restructuring of society. The book begins with a discussion of the way that theatre has been used to convey a political message. Each chapter is then devoted to an exploration of the engagement of individual playwrights with left-wing political theatre, including a detailed analysis of one of their major plays. Despite political change since the 1980s, political play-writing continues to be a significant element in contemporary play-writing, but in a very changed form.
Download or read book John Gay and the London Theatre written by Calhoun Winton and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Beggar's Opera, often referred to today as the first musical comedy, was the most popular dramatic piece of the eighteenth century—and is the work that John Gay (1685-1732) is best remembered for having written. That association of popular music and satiric lyrics has proved to be continuingly attractive, and variations on the Opera have flourished in this century: by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, by Duke Ellington, and most recently by Vaclav Havel. The original opera itself is played all over the world in amateur and professional productions. But John Gay's place in all this has not been well defined. His Opera is often regarded as some sort of chance event. In John Gay and the London Theatre, the first book-length study of John Gay as dramatic author, Calhoun Winton recognized the Opera as part of an entirely self-conscious career in the theatre, a career that Gay pursued from his earliest days as a writer in London and continued to follow to his death. Winton emphasizes Gay's knowledge of and affection for music, acquired, he argues, by way of his association with Handel. Although concentrating on Gay and his theatrical career, Winton also limns a vivid portrait of London itself and of the London stage of Gay's time, a period of considerable turbulence both within and outside the theatre. Gay's plays reflect in varying ways and degrees that social, political, and cultural turmoil. Winton's study sheds new light not only on Gay and the theatre, but also on the politics and culture of his era.
Download or read book The O Neill written by Jeffrey Sweet and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At the O'Neill, we were all engaged with full-hearted passion in sometimes the silliest of exercises, and all in service of finding that wiggly, elusive creature, a new play."—Meryl Streep "I would not be who or where I am today without the O'Neill."—Michael Douglas As the old ways of the commercial theater were dying and American playwriting was in crisis, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center arose as a midwife to new plays and musicals, introducing some of the most exciting talents of our time (including August Wilson, Wendy Wasserstein, and Christopher Durang) and developing works that went on to win Pulitzer Prizes and Tony Awards. Along the way, it collaborated with then-unknown performers (like Meryl Streep, Michael Douglas, Courtney Vance, and Angela Bassett) and inspired Robert Redford in his creation of the Sundance Institute. This is the story of a theatrical laboratory, a place that transformed American theater, film, and television.
Download or read book The Language of Theatre written by Martin Harrison and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theatre has provided many words and meanings which we use - ignorant of their origins - in everyday writing and speech. This is the first book to explore 2,000 theatre terms in depth, in some cases tracing their history over two and a half millenia, in others exploring expressions less than a decade old. Terms are defined, shown in use and cross-referenced in ways which will fascinate theatre-goers, help theatre students and encourage those engaged in the theatre to examine the familiar from new angles.
Download or read book Theatre written by Marvin Carlson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theatre is one of the longest-standing art forms of modern civilization. Taking a global look at how various forms of theatre - including puppetry, dance, and mime - have been interpreted and enjoyed, this book explores all aspects of the theatre, including its relationship with religion, literature, and its value worldwide.
Download or read book Theatre and Cartographies of Power written by Analola Santana and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the colonial period to independence and into the twenty-first century, Latin American culture has been mapped as a subordinate “other” to Europe and the United States. This collection reconsiders geographical space and power and the ways in which theatrical and performance histories have been constructed throughout the Americas. Essays bridge political, racial, gender, class, and national divides that have traditionally restricted and distorted our understanding of Latin American theatre and performance. Contributors—scholars and artists from throughout the Americas, including well-known playwrights, directors, and performers—imagine how to reposition the Latina/o Americas in ways that offer agency to its multiple peoples, cultures, and histories. In addition, they explore the ways artists can create new maps and methods for their creative visions. Building on hemispheric and transnational models, this book demonstrates the capacity of theatre studies to challenge the up-down/North-South approach that dominates scholarship in the United States and presents a strong case for a repositioning of the Latina/o Americas in theatrical histories and practices.
Download or read book Ibsen and the Theatre written by Henrik Ibsen and published by Springer. This book was released on 1980-06-18 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Theatrical Baroque written by Larry F. Norman and published by University of Chicago David & Alfred. This book was released on 2001-01 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are frequently labeled the age of theater. Throughout western Europe, the dramatic arts attained new heights of cultural prestige, political importance, and commercial success. This series of essays investigates the dialogue between the newly invigorated theater and the plastic arts. Discussed are the interactions between spectator and spectacle, social performance and the staging of the individual, the shaping of space and time, and the debates over the relationship that visual and theatrical representations have to the objects they portray.
