Download or read book The Legacy of Stylistic Theatre in the Creation of a Modern Sinhala Drama in Sri Lanka written by Lakshmi D. Bulathsinghala and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the development of Sinhala stylistic drama from its earliest manifestations to the post-independence era. Bulathsinghala examines the impact of indigenous and imported folk theatrical forms on the work of the most significant postcolonial stylistic dramatists and on key plays that they produced. In the process, the book explores a number of myths and misunderstandings regarding Sri Lanka’s folk heritage and seeks to establish more reliable information on the principal indigenous Sri Lankan folk dramatic forms and their characteristics. At the same time, by drawing connections between folk drama and the post-independence stylistic theatrical movement, the author demonstrates the essential role of the former in Sinhala culture prior to the advent of Western and other influences and shows how both continue to inflect Sri Lankan drama today. This book will help to open the field of South Asian drama studies to an audience consisting not only of scholars and students but also of general readers who are interested in the fields of drama and theatre and Asian studies.
Download or read book 1964 A Year in African American Performance History written by David Krasner and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-26 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of a single year, 1964. The book analyses specific events that occurred in 1964 as benchmarks of the Civil Right Movement, making the case that 1964 was a watershed year. Each chapter considers individually politics, rhetoric, sports, dramatic literature, film, art, and music, breaking down the events and illustrating their importance to the social and political life in the United States in 1964. This study emphasizes 1964 as a nodal point in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, arguing that it was within this single year that the tide against racism and injustice turned markedly. This book will be of great interest to the scholars and students of civil rights, theatre and performance, art history, and drama literature.
Download or read book The Art and Occupation of Stage Design in Finnish Theatres written by Laura Gröndahl and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the formation, establishment, expansion, and disintegration of stage design as a modern profession and a recognized artform in Finnish theatres. Drawing on oral or written recollections and thoughts of stage designers from different decades, the author asks how their artistic agencies, occupational identities, and theoretical self-understanding have been constituted. She analyses Finnish theatre history from new perspectives by shifting the focus from finished performances to largely unknown practices behind the scenes. This book examines the cultural institutions that have constituted the stage designers’ role and position, like the professional city theatre system, the craft union, and education. This research shows how modern and postmodern scenographic innovations have been assimilated to local contexts, and how material and cultural circumstances have reshaped the artistic practices. Without bypassing canonical trendsetters or hegemonic cultural mindsets, the focus is directed on the everyday grassroot level of stage design practices. Personal interviews with over 20 designers make visible an ample repertoire of unwritten knowledge stored in habitual ways of working and dealing creatively with the complex system of theatre making. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies with a focus on scenography.
Download or read book Messy Connections written by Cathy Sloan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-25 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines performance practices that involve people in recovery from addiction, theorising such practices as recovery-engaged. Focusing on examples of practice from a growing movement of UK-based recovery arts practitioners and performers, it highlights a unique approach to performance that infuses an understanding of lived experiences of addiction and recovery with creative practice. It offers a philosophy of being in recovery that understands lived experience, and performance practice, as a dynamic system of interrelations with the human and nonhuman elements that make up the societal settings in which recovery communities struggle to exist. It thereby frames the process of recovery, and recovery-engaged performance, as an affective ecology – a system of messy connections. Building upon ideas from posthumanist research on addiction, cultural theory on identity and new materialist interpretations of performance practice, it considers how such contemporary theory might offer additional ways of thinking and doing arts practice with people affected by addiction. The discussion highlights the distinct aesthetics, ethics and politics of this area of performance practice. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in Applied Theatre and Critical Arts and Mental Health studies.
Download or read book Dramaturgy to Make Visible written by Peter Eckersall and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-14 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that dramaturgy makes things visible and does so in two distinct and interrelating ways: creative processes and formal elements of performance are rendered visible and readable; and performance dramaturgy becomes an expanded practice in which performance is a locus for creating wide-ranging events and activities. This exploration defines dramaturgy as a perceptibly transforming agency in the construction, presentation and reception of contemporary performance; and it shows how contemporary performance has an intrinsic dramaturgical aspect whose proliferation of dramaturgical practices has led to a far-reaching reinvention of what contemporary theatre is. In doing so, this book deals with a careful selection of performance practices, including theatrical adaptations, new media dramaturgy, contemporary dance, installation-performance, postdramatic theatre, visionary works by auteurs, and revivals of well-known stage shows. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater studies, performance studies, cultural studies, curating, and dance scholarship.
Download or read book Theatre and Human Rights written by Gary M. English and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-09 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops theoretical intersections between theatre and human rights and provides methodologies to investigate human rights questions from within the perspective of theatre as a complex set of disciplines. While human rights research and programming often employ the arts as representations of human rights-related violations and abuses, this study focuses on dramatic form and structure, in addition to content, as uniquely positioned to interrogate important questions in human rights theory and practice. This project positions theatre as a method of examination in addition to the important purposes the arts serve to raise consciousness that accompany other, often considered more primary modes of analysis. A main feature of this approach includes emphasis on dialectical structures in drama and human rights and integration of applied theatre and critical ethnography with more traditional theatre. This integration will demonstrate how theatre and human rights operates beyond the arts as representation model, offering a primary means of analysis, activism, and political discourse. This book will be of great interest to theatre and human rights practitioners and activists, scholars, and students.
Download or read book Becomings written by Johanna Kirk and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores postmodern choreographic engagements of pregnant bodies in the US over the last 70 years. Johanna Kirk discusses how choreographers negotiate identification with the look of their pregnant bodies to maintain a sense of integrity as artists and to control representations of their gender and physical abilities while pregnant. Across chapters, the artists discussed include Anna Halprin, Trisha Brown, Twyla Tharp, Sandy Jamrog, Jane Comfort, Jody Oberfelder, Jawole Willa, Miguel Gutiérrez, Yanira Castro, Noémie LaFrance, and Meg Foley. By presenting their bodies in performance, these artists demonstrate how their experiences surrounding pregnancy intersect not only with their artform and its history but also with their personal experiences of race, gender, and sexual identification. In these pages, Johanna Kirk argues that choreography offers them tools that are alternative to medicine (or other forms of social representation) for understanding what/how pregnant bodies do and feel and what they can mean for individuals and their communities. The works within these chapters invite readers to see dancing bodies and pregnant bodies in new ways and for their potential to manifest new possibilities. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars exploring dance, theatre and performance, race, and gender.
Download or read book Transfiguring Tragedy written by Ryder Thornton and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-19 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates Eugene O’Neill’s use of philosophy in the early period of his work and provides analyses of selected works from that era, concluding with The Hairy Ape, completed in 1921, as an illustration of the mastery he had achieved in dramatizing key concepts of philosophy. Analyses of one-act and full-length plays from 1913 to 1921 reveal the influence of the three philosophers and establish that O’Neill was fundamentally a philosophic playwright, even from his earliest dramatic sketches. Specific concepts from Schopenhauer, Stirner, and Nietzsche went into O’Neill’s shaping of character arcs, dramatic circumstances, symbology, and theme. Among them are Schopenhauer’s concept of will and representation, Stirner’s notion of possession, and Nietzsche’s principle of the Apollonian–Dionysian duality. These ideas were foundational to O’Neill’s construction of tragic irony apparent in his early period plays. The critical concepts of these three philosophers are the major pathways in this study. However, such an approach inevitably reveals other layers of spiritual influence, such as Catholicism and Eastern philosophy, which are touched on in these analyses. This book is a much-needed introduction to philosophic concepts in Eugene O’Neill’s early work and would be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre studies and philosophy.
Download or read book Dancing with Georges Perec written by Leslie Satin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-14 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the relationship of the life and work of the remarkable Parisian-Jewish writer Georges Perec (1936–1983) to dance. "Dancing" addresses art-making parallels and their personal and sociocultural contexts, including Perec’s childhood loss of his parents in the Holocaust and its repercussions in the significance of the body, everydayness, space, and attention permeating his work. This book, emerging from the author Leslie Satin’s perspective as a dancer and scholar, links Perec’s concerns with those of dance and demonstrates that Perec’s work has implications for dance and how we think about it. Moreover, it is framed as a performative autobiographical enactment of the author's relationship to Perec, periodically linking their written, danced, and imagined lives. This exploration will be of great interest to dancers, dance scholars, and dance students interested in contemporary experimental dance and contemporary dance.
Download or read book Passion and Elegance written by Barbara File Marangon and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-28 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book commences with the history of Indian, Egyptian, Arab, and flamenco dance, then compares and contrasts the history of both classical ballet and flamenco. The book outlines the early roots of flamenco in India, and the journey of the Romani through the Middle East and Europe up to their final destination in Spain. Alongside this, the history of classical ballet is detailed from its beginning in Italy to its later development in France. The book spans the period from the temples of India to Massine’s Spanish ballet, The Three-cornered Hat, for the Ballets Russes. The chronicle of flamenco's journey from India to Spain is important to understanding the development of classical ballet as it relates to The Three-cornered Hat, which is the culmination of the story. The evolution of costumes, space, scenery, and props is examined along with the historical parallels. This exploration is set to inspire and encourage choreographers to partner other dance forms with ballet as Leonide Massine did with flamenco in The Three-cornered Hat while also challenging the anthropological idea of the language of dance movement tracing the migration of people.
Download or read book Creative Production and Management in the Performing Arts written by Vânia Rodrigues and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-24 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume takes stock of the ways in which the regimes of artistic creation and production intersect, lending special attention to emergent discourses and work models of producing and managing theatre, dance, and performance – through the lenses of creative producers. This book suggests that social protection failures, longstanding institutional shortcomings, and the dilemmas of social and environmental sustainability are pushing arts management and production modi operandi towards a review of its expansionist assumptions and managerial hyper-productivist processes. By documenting singular ‘counter-management’ experiences in Portugal, Belgium, France, and Brazil, this study makes a strong claim for a reassessment of the role of producers and art managers as reflective practitioners and as pivotal elements towards more sustainable artistic practices. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies, policymakers, and cultural professionals.
Download or read book Sophia Robot written by Thomas Riccio and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers David Hanson’s robots as a performative expression of our cultural moment, serving as a paradigm for the evolution of humanoid social robots. Mechanical beings have occupied the human imagination since antiquity. Now, they inhabit the pop-cultural imagination, embodying the apotheosis of humanity’s technological aspirations and dread. Sophia, Hanson’s most advanced robot, anticipates the future as she articulates the mythic pattern, narrative, anxieties, and hopes as old as humanity. Gendered as an attractive female with a face inspired by Queen Nefertiti and Audrey Hepburn, Sophia is a cipher, avatar, and turning point that brings humanity and technology a step closer to the emergence of a post-human species. The author is a transdisciplinary artist/scholar/educator working internationally in experimental performance, indigenous performance (ritual, shamanism), and social robotics. Hanson’s robots and Sophia are examined as performance media and events, as characters evolving as post-human narratives of technological beings. The emergent, complex, and collaborative relationships social robots have with technology, AI, performance, anthropology, mythology, psychology, sociology, popular culture, social media, politics, and economics are considered.
Download or read book Performance in a Time of Terror written by and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection of five Sinhala plays, translated into English, which were written and performed during the most violent phase of modern Sri Lankan history. Ranjini Obeyesekere’s translation of these five well-known and celebrated plays by K. B. Herath, Prasannajith Abeysuriya, Dhananjaya Karunarathne, Prasanna Jayakody and Rajitha Dissanayake highlights and explores the dynamic period of Sri Lankan theater and performance arts in the 1980s and 1990s. The plays in this collection offered a political space for criticism, introspection, discussion and protest during a time of suppression of voices, political violence and terror. Audiences flocked to the theater to watch plays produced by talented dramatists and artists who were experimenting with forms and themes under extremely challenging circumstances, shoe-string budgets and strict censorship. Kanchuka Dharmasiri’s introduction to the volume further details the history and socio-political contexts of the theater of this period, discussing themes such as dissent, identity and the brutal power of the state. She also looks at the unique formal elements employed in these plays as well as their influence and reach. This volume is a significant addition to the growing corpus of Sinhala literature in translation. It will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of literature, performance studies, cultural studies, and the politics and history of Sri Lanka.
Download or read book Theatre in Sri Lanka written by A. J. Gunawardana and published by [Colombo] : Department of Cultural Affairs, Sri Lanka. This book was released on 1976 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Modernizing Composition written by Garrett Field and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-03-22 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The study of South Asian music falls under the purview of ethnomusicology, whereas that of South Asian literature falls under South Asian studies. As a consequence of this academic separation, scholars rarely take notice of connections between South Asian song and poetry. Modernizing Composition overcomes this disciplinary fragmentation by examining the history of Sinhala-language song and poetry in twentieth-century Sri Lanka. Garrett Field describes how songwriters and poets modernized song and poetry in response to colonial and postcolonial formations. The story of this modernization is significant in that it shifts focus from India’s relationship to the West to little-studied connections between Sri Lanka and North India.
Download or read book Living Folklore written by Martha Sims and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2005-07-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living Folklore is a comprehensive, straightforward introduction to folklore as it is lived, shared and practiced in contemporary settings. Drawing on examples from diverse American groups and experiences, this text gives the student a strong foundation—from the field’s history and major terms to theories, interpretive approaches, and fieldwork. Many teachers of undergraduates find the available folklore textbooks too complex or unwieldy for an introductory level course. It is precisely this criticism that Living Folklore addresses; while comprehensive and rigorous, the book is specifically intended to meet the needs of those students who are just beginning their study of the discipline. Its real strength lies in how it combines carefully articulated foundational concepts with relevant examples and a student-oriented teaching philosophy.
