Download or read book The Theatre of Death The Uncanny in Mimesis written by Mischa Twitchin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned with such questions as the following: What is the life of the past in the present? How might “the theatre of death” and “the uncanny in mimesis” allow us to conceive of the afterlife of a supposedly ephemeral art practice? How might a theatrical iconology engage with such fundamental social relations as those between the living and the dead? Distinct from the dominant expectation that actors should appear life-like onstage, why is it that some theatre artists – from Craig to Castellucci – have conceived of the actor in the image of the dead? Furthermore, how might an iconology of the actor allow us to imagine the afterlife of an apparently ephemeral art practice? This book explores such questions through the implications of the twofold analogy proposed in its very title: as theatre is to the uncanny, so death is to mimesis; and as theatre is to mimesis, so death is to the uncanny. Walter Benjamin once observed that: “The point at issue in the theatre today can be more accurately defined in relation to the stage than to the play. It concerns the filling-in of the orchestra pit. The abyss which separates the actors from the audience like the dead from the living...” If the relation between the living and the dead can be thought of in terms of an analogy with ancient theatre, how might avant-garde theatre be thought of in terms of this same relation “today”?
Download or read book The Theatre of Death written by Jennifer Woodward and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 1997 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English royal funeral ceremony from Mary, Queen of Scots to James I gives fascinating insight into the relationship between power and ritual at the renaissance court.
Download or read book Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance written by Karoline Gritzner and published by Univ of Hertfordshire Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays brought together in this collection offer new perspectives on the eros/death relation in a wide selection of dramatic texts, theatrical practices and cultural performances.
Download or read book The Theatre of Death written by P J Klemp and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-19 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses some rituals of justice—such as public executions, printed responses to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s execution speech, and King Charles I’s treason trial—in early modern England. Focusing on the ways in which genres shape these events’ multiple voices, I analyze the rituals’ genres and the diverse perspectives from which we must understand them. The execution ritual, like such cultural forms as plays and films, is a collaborative production that can be understood only, and only incompletely, by being alert to the presence of its many participants and their contributions. Each of these participants brings a voice to the execution ritual, whether it is the judge and jury or the victim, executioner, sheriff and other authorities, spiritual counselors, printer, or spectators and readers. And each has at least one role to play. No matter how powerful some institutions and individuals may appear, none has a monopoly over authority and how the events take shape on and beyond the scaffold. The centerpiece of the mid-seventeenth-century’s theatre of death was the condemned man’s last dying utterance. This study focuses on the words and contexts of many of those final speeches, including King Charles I’s (1649), Archbishop William Laud’s (1645), and the Earl of Strafford’s (1641), as well as those of less well known royalists and regicides. Where we situate ourselves to view, hear, and comprehend a public execution—through specific participants’ eyes, ears, and minds or accounts—shapes our interpretation of the ritual. It is impossible to achieve a singular, carefully indoctrinated meaning of an event as complex as a state-sponsored public execution. Along with the variety of voices and meanings, the nature and purpose of the rituals of justice maintain a significant amount of consistency in a number of eras and cultural contexts. Whether the focus is on the trial and execution of the Marian martyrs, English royalists in the 1640s and 1650s, or the Restoration’s regicides, the events draw on a set of cultural expectations or conventions. Because rituals of justice are shaped by diverse voices and agendas, with the participants’ scripts and counterscripts converging and colliding, they are dramatic moments conveying profound meanings. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Download or read book Death in Modern Theatre written by Adrian Curtin and published by Theatre: Theory - Practice - Performance. This book was released on 2019-02-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death in modern theatre offers a unique account of modern Western theatre, focusing on the ways in which dramatists and theatre-makers have explored historically informed ideas about death and dying in their work. It investigates the opportunities theatre affords to reflect on the end of life in a compelling and socially meaningful fashion. In a series of interrelated, mostly chronological, micronarratives beginning in the late nineteenth century and ending in the early twenty-first century, this book considers how and why death and dying are represented at certain historical moments using dramaturgy and aesthetics that challenge audiences' conceptions, sensibilities, and sense-making faculties. It includes a mix of well-known and lesser-known plays from an international range of dramatists and theatre-makers, and offers original interpretations through close reading and performance analysis.
Download or read book Death the One and the Art of Theatre written by Howard Barker and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest collection of Barker's philosophical musings on theatre, this volume includes speculations, deductions, prose poems & poetic apercus, which cast a unique light on the nature of tragedy, eroticism, love & theatre.
Download or read book Theater of the Dead written by Jeehee Hong and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In eleventh-century China, both the living and the dead were treated to theatrical spectacles. Chambers designed for the deceased were ornamented with actors and theaters sculpted in stone, molded in clay, rendered in paint. Notably, the tombs were not commissioned for the scholars and officials who dominate the historical record of China but affluent farmers, merchants, clerics—people whose lives and deaths largely went unrecorded. Why did these elites furnish their burial chambers with vivid representations of actors and theatrical performances? Why did they pursue such distinctive tomb-making? In Theater of the Dead, Jeehee Hong maintains that the production and placement of these tomb images shed light on complex intersections of the visual, mortuary, and everyday worlds of China at the dawn of the second millennium. Assembling recent archaeological evidence and previously overlooked historical sources, Hong explores new elements in the cultural and religious lives of middle-period Chinese. Rather than treat theatrical tomb images as visual documents of early theater, she calls attention to two largely ignored and interlinked aspects: their complex visual forms and their symbolic roles in the mortuary context in which they were created and used. She introduces carefully selected examples that show visual and conceptual novelty in engendering and engaging dimensions of space within and beyond the tomb in specifically theatrical terms. These reveal surprising insights into the intricate relationship between the living and the dead. The overarching sense of theatricality conveys a densely socialized vision of death. Unlike earlier modes of representation in funerary art, which favored cosmological or ritual motifs and maintained a clear dichotomy between the two worlds, these visual practices show a growing interest in conceptualizing the sphere of the dead within the existing social framework. By materializing a “social turn,” this remarkable phenomenon constitutes a tangible symptom of middle-period Chinese attempting to socialize the sacred realm. Theater of the Dead is an original work that will contribute to bridging core issues in visual culture, history, religion, and drama and theater studies.
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 The Theater of War written by Bryan Doerries and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years theater director Bryan Doerries has been producing ancient Greek tragedies for a wide range of at-risk people in society. His is the personal and deeply passionate story of a life devoted to reclaiming the timeless power of an ancient artistic tradition to comfort the afflicted. Doerries leads an innovative public health project—Theater of War—that produces ancient dramas for current and returned soldiers, people in recovery from alcohol and substance abuse, tornado and hurricane survivors, and more. Tracing a path that links the personal to the artistic to the social and back again, Doerries shows us how suffering and healing are part of a timeless process in which dialogue and empathy are inextricably linked. The originality and generosity of Doerries’s work is startling, and The Theater of War—wholly unsentimental, but intensely felt and emotionally engaging—is a humane, knowledgeable, and accessible book that will both inspire and enlighten.
Download or read book Theatre and Death written by Mark Robson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-25 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new title in the Theatre And series confronts the complex relationship between theatre and death. Taking the position that all humans need to 'live' with the reality of death, Mark Robson draws on a range of examples, from Greek theatre to contemporary practitioners, in order to testify to the potency of both theatre and death in contemporary culture. Striking and thought-provoking, this book is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students of theatre and performance, or English literature students with an interest in tragedy.
Download or read book Stories I Forgot to Tell You written by Dorothy Gallagher and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A delicate and darkly witty reflection on loss, marriage, writing, and life in New York from an acclaimed biographer and memoirist. Dorothy Gallagher’s husband, Ben Sonnenberg, died in 2010. He had suffered from multiple sclerosis for many years and was almost completely paralyzed, but his wonderful, playful mind remained quite undimmed. In the ten sections of Stories I Forgot to Tell You, Gallagher moves freely and intuitively between the present and the past to evoke the life they made together and her life after his death, alone and yet at the same time never without thoughts of him, in a present that is haunted but also comforted by the recollection of their common past. She talks—the whole book is written conversationally, confidingly, unpretentiously—about small things, such as moving into a new apartment and setting it up, growing tomatoes on a new deck, and as she does she recalls her missing husband’s elegant clothes and British affectations, what she knew about him and didn’t know, the devastating toll of his disease and the ways they found to deal with it. She talks about their two dogs and their cat, Bones, and the role that a photograph she never took had in bringing her together with her husband. Her mother, eventually succumbing to dementia, is also here, along with friends, an old typewriter, episodes from a writing life, and her husband’s last days. The stories Gallagher has to tell, as quirky as they are profound, could not be more ordinary, and yet her glancing, wry approach to memory and life gives them an extraordinary resonance that makes the reader feel both the logic and the mystery of a couple’s common existence. Her prose is perfectly pitched and her eye for detail unerring. This slim book about irremediable loss and unending love distills the essence of a lifetime.
Download or read book Here We Are written by Benjamin Taylor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award A deeply felt, beautifully crafted meditation on friendship and loss in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, and a touching portrait of Philip Roth from his closest friend. I had a baseball question on the tip of my tongue: What was the name of "the natural," the player shot by a stalker in a Chicago hotel room? He gave me an amused look that darkened in-to puzzlement, then fear. Then he pitched forward into the soup, unconscious. When I entered the examining room twenty minutes after our arrival at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, Philip said, "No more books." Thus he announced his retirement. So begins Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America's greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor's beautifully constructed memoir, we see him as a mortal man, experiencing the joys and sorrows of aging, reflecting on his own writing, and doing something we all love to do: passing the time in the company of his closest friend. Here We Are is an ode to friendship and its wondrous ability to brighten our lives in unexpected ways. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today, and this new memoir pays tribute to his friend, in the way that only a writer can. Roth encouraged him to write this book, giving Taylor explicit instructions not to sugarcoat anything and not to publish it until after his death. Unvarnished and affectionately true to life, Taylor's memoir will be the definitive account of Philip Roth as he lived for years to come.
Download or read book The Theatre of the Body written by Kate Cregan and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is a threefold investigation of understandings of embodiment - as displayed in the playhouses, courthouses, and anatomy theatres of London between 1540 and 1696. These dates mark the waxing and waning of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons' domination of the practice of dissection in London. In 1540 Henry VIII gave them his approval and encouragement but by 1696 Edward Ravenscroft's The Anatomist: Or the Sham Doctor staged their loss of power. This loss of power, the book contends, is symptomatic of a major shift in the concept of embodiment. The book explains the changing understanding of the human body throughout this period by analysis of the interplay between the texts used in and the material practices of three specific public sites: the public playhouses, the Sessions House, and the Anatomy Theatre of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons of London. Using an approach that combines the socially textured understandings of fields of practice found in Bourdieu with the interpretations of progression across time found in Elias and Foucault, The Theatre of the Body demonstrates how the three fields of drama, law, and medicine are intimately inter-connected in that process. In presenting this analysis, the author argues that the quality of embodiment begins to shift during this period from the mid-sixteenth century and throughout the course of the seventeenth century. In this shift one can observe how the earlier, 'traditional' interpretation of embodiment is intensified and resolidified into the beginnings of the medicalized 'modern' body.
Download or read book Chicago Death Trap written by Nat Brandt and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2006-08-03 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A blow-by-blow account of the deadliest fire in American history retraces the final days of the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago, a supposedly indestructible building that burned killing more than six hundred people.
Download or read book The Theatre of Naturalism written by Philip Beitchman and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2011 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impact of naturalism, a literary approach invented by Zola and especially significant in the field of the novel through his American «disciples» Crane, Norris, and Dreiser, is well acknowledged and recognized. Not so well recognized, but equally important, is naturalistic theatre; this was a style that also originated with Zola, but its progeny was more international and its significance more radical and insurrectionary than in the less «spectacular» genre of fiction. The Theatre of Naturalism: Disappearing Act establishes the incipiently revolutionary context (between the Paris Communist Commune, crushed in 1871, and the successful Bolshevik insurrection of October 1917) - more or less foregrounded or in the background of works by Zola, Strindberg, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Synge, Shaw, and Tolstoy, focused especially on issues of class struggle and class war, as well as the prospects and possibilities of challenging the hegemony of the ruling orders. Especially in regard to later theatre, for instance the «hypernaturalism» of The Brig (Living Theatre) of Kenneth Brown, and of plays by Arnold Wesker and David Storey - Philip Beitchman frequently invokes themes culled from recent French theory, particularly Derrida's deconstruction and Baudrillard's ideas about simulation. The Theatre of Naturalism will open up new perspectives for anyone interested in theory or theatre, whether scholars or the wider theatre-loving or performing public.
Download or read book The Theatre of Tennessee Williams written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1971 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume III of the series includes Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958). The first, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Award, has proved every bit as successful as William's earlier A Streetcar Named Desire. The other two plays, though different in kind, both have something of the quality of Greek tragedy in 20th-century settings, bringing about catharsis through ritual death.
Download or read book Christian Death Only Theatre of Pain written by Edward Colver and published by . This book was released on 2022-02-07 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian Death is an American deathrock band formed in Los Angeles County, California, in 1979 by Rozz Williams. Williams was eventually joined by guitarist Rikk Agnew of the band Adolescents, with James McGearty on bass guitar and George Belanger on drums. This lineup was responsible for producing the band's best-known work, their 1982 debut album Only Theatre of Pain, which was highly influential in the development of the style of music known as death rock as well as the American gothic scene. During this time legendary L.A. punk rock photographer Edward Colver befriended the band and shot Christian Death at a dozen of the band's concerts in the Los Angeles area during a six-month period in 1981 and 1982, as well as photographing Rozz at his family home with the band which was later used for the back cover of Only Theatre of Pain, and a session of iconic images at a cemetery in Pomona. Cult Epics founder and friend of Rozz Williams, Nico B edited an oversized (12x12") hardcover book of Ed's photos capturing those rare and never-before-seen moments, as well as the story of early Christian Death as told by Edward Colver, surviving band members and others through new, exclusive interviews.
