Download or read book The Wooster Group Work Book written by Andrew Quick and published by Taylor & Francis US. This book was released on 2007 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book accesses, often for the first time, the company's rehearsal methods and source materials, as well as the creative thinking and reflections of director Elizabeth LeCompte.
Download or read book Breaking the Rules written by David Savran and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through interviews and descriptions of methodology, Breaking the Rules captures the essence of major works by the internationally acclaimed avant-garde company.
Download or read book Ron Vawter s Life in Performance written by Theresa Smalec and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1974 to 1994, Ron Vawter was a staple of New York's downtown theater scene, first with the Performance Group and later as a founding member of the Wooster Group. Ron Vawter's Life in Performance is the first book focused on this incomparable actor's specific contributions to ensemble theater, while also covering his solo projects. Through a combination of archival research and oral testimony--including interviews with Willem Dafoe, Spalding Gray, Elizabeth LeCompte, Gregory Mehrten, Richard Schechner, and Marianne Weems--Vawter emerges as an unsung innovator whose metamorphosis from soldier to avant-garde star was hardly accidental. Theresa Smalec reconstructs Vawter's years in amateur theater, his time in the National Guard, and his professional body of work. Partly recuperative history, Ron Vawter's Life in Performance explores the complex intersections of individual and group biography. It also offers a unique perspective on an era that spanned from the Vietnam War to the AIDS crisis, putting Vawter's own activism at the forefront. This volume's broad historical and cultural reach, coupled with its careful study of a beloved yet enigmatic performer, will make it a tremendous resource for theater scholars and practitioners.
Download or read book The Mother written by Bertolt Brecht and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1965 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bertolt Brecht's play The Mother is freely adapted from Gorky's world-famous novel of the same name. Brecht tells the story of a working-class mother who is drawn into the struggle for a Bolshevik revolution; in the character of Pelagea Vlassova, the mother of the title, Brecht draws a richly human figure who emerges as the single entirely positive major hero in all of Brecht's dramatic works. This edition has an extensive introduction by the translator, Lee Baxandall, which gives a detailed history of the play and its first production. In addition, there are twenty-five pages of notes by Brecht himself.
Download or read book The Wooster Group and Its Traditions written by Johan Callens and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2004 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first collection of critical essays to appear about the Wooster Group. Since the 1970s this groundbreaking, New York-based performance company has led the way in crystallizing the conditions of contemporary stage practice at the intersection of several cultural and artistic traditions. As demonstrated by the assembled critics, each of them an authority in the field, these traditions extend into the past as well as into the future, through the Wooster Group's impact on the latest generation of performance artists. The company's consequent institutionalization is posited and challenged in the essays constituting Part I of the collection. Part II tackles the work-in-progress, mapping its idiomatic stage vocabulary and providing case studies, ranging from Frank Dell's The Temptation of St. Antony to To You, The Birdie! (Phèdre). Part III presents productions by kindred artists such as Elevator Repair Service, the Builders Association, Cannon Company, and Richard Maxwell. Lavishly illustrated with photographs, this collection should prove invaluable to anyone with an interest in the current theatrical scene and its place in the wider institutional, artistic, and historical contexts.
Download or read book Vieux Carr written by Tennessee Williams and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2000 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born out of the journals the playwright kept at the time, Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carre is not emotion recollected in tranquillity, but emotion re-created with all the pain, compassion, and wry humor of the playwright's own 1938-39 sojourn in the New Orleans French Quarter vividly intact. The drama takes its form from the shifting scenes of memory, and Williams's surrogate self invites us to focus, in turn, on the various inhabitants of his dilapidated rooming house in the Vieux Carre: the comically desperate landlady, Mrs. Wire; Jane, a properly brought-up young woman from New York making a last grab at pleasure with Tye, the vulgar but appealing strip-joint barker; two decayed gentlewomen politely starving in the garret; and the dying painter Nightingale, who tries to teach the young writer something about love -- both of the body and of the heart. This is a play about the education of the artist, an education in loneliness and despair, in giving and not giving, but most of all in seeing, hearing, feeling, and learning that "writers are shameless spies," who pay dearly for their knowledge and who cannot forget.
Download or read book The Wooster Group Work Book written by Andrew Quick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wooster Group has consistently challenged audiences and critics alike with their extraordinary performance works, many of which are now recognised as ?classics' of the contemporary stage. Highly accessible to the student, scholar, theatre-goer and practitioner, and including three contextualizing essays by Andrew Quick, this book offers a series of remarkable insights into the working practices of one of the world's leading performance companies.The Wooster Group Work Book accesses, often for the first time, the company's rehearsal methods and source materials, as well as the creative thinking and reflections of director Elizabeth LeCompte and her main artistic collaborators. Focusing on six performance pieces, Frank Dell's the Temptation of St. Antony (1987), Brace Up! (1990), Fish Story (1994), House/Lights (1999) and To You, the Birdie! (Phed̀re) (2002), this new volume gathers together an astonishing range of archival material to produce a vivid and personal account of how the company makes its work. This book's intricate layering of journal extracts, actors' notes, stage designs, drawings, performance texts, rehearsal transcriptions, stage-managers' logs and stunning photographs traces a unique documentary path across the practice of the Wooster Group, one that will be an indispensable resource for all those with an interest in contemporary performance and its impact on contemporary culture.
Download or read book The Art of Rehearsal written by Barbara Simonsen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the key elements that go into creating a work of art for the stage? Which are the most productive conditions and methods of rehearsal? In this collection of interviews, 18 international artists share their experience and offer practical advice on the creation of performance work. Their answers provide a goldmine of tried and tested approaches as they discuss the common problems and difficulties of creative work, their turning-point experiences, and ways in which they have challenged performers and themselves to go beyond conditioned reflexes to create groundbreaking new work.
Download or read book The Performance of Power written by Sue-Ellen Case and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 1991-05-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently in the field of theatre studies there has been an increasing amount of debate and dissonance regarding the borders of its territory, its methodologies, subject matter, and scholarly perspectives. The nature of this debate could be termed "political" and, in fact, concerns "the performance of power"—the struggle over power relations embedded in texts, methodologies, and the academy itself. This striking new collection of nineteen divergent essays represents this performance of power and the way in which the recent convergence of new critical theories with historical studies has politicized the study of the theatre. Neither play text, performance, nor scholarship and teaching can safely reside any longer in the "free," politically neutral, self-signifying realm of the aesthetic. Politicizing theatrical discourse means that both the hermeneutics and the histories of theatre reveal the role of ideology and power dynamics. New strategies and concepts—and a vital new phase of awareness—appear in these illuminating essays. A variety of historical periods, from the Renaissance through the Victorian and up to the most contemporary work of the Wooster group, illustrate the ways in which contemporary strategies do not require contemporary texts and performances but can combine with historical methods and subjects to produce new theatrical discourse.
Download or read book Art Into Theatre written by Nick Kaye and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art Into Theatre investigates the processes of hybrid forms of performance developed between 1952 and 1994 through a series of interviews with key practitioners and over 80 pieces of documentation, many previously unpublished, of the works under discussion. Ranging from the austerity of Cage's 4'33" through the inter-species communication of Schneeman's Cat Scanand the experimental theatre work of Schechner, Foreman, and Kirby, to the recent performances of Abramovic, Forced Entertainment and the Wooster Group, Art Into Theatre offers a fascinating collection of perspectives on the destabilizing of conventional ideas of the art "object" and the theatrical "text". Nick Kaye's introductory essay to the volume offers a useful context for the reader and each interview is preceded by an informative biographical sketch.
Download or read book Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture written by Matthew Causey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-01-24 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture examines the recent history of advanced technologies, including new media, virtual environments, weapons systems and medical innovation, and considers how theatre, performance and culture at large have evolved within those systems. The book examines the two Iraq wars, 9/11 and the War on Terror through the lens of performance studies, and, drawing on the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Martin Heidegger, alongside the dramas of Beckett, Genet and Shakespeare, and the theatre of the Kantor, Foreman, Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio and the Wooster Group, the book positions theatre and performance in technoculture and articulates the processes of aesthetics, metaphysics and politics. This wide-ranging study reflects on how the theatre and performance have been challenged and extended within these new cultural phenomena.
Download or read book Thank You Jeeves written by P. G. Wodehouse and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "P. G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century." —Sebastian Faulks Bertram Wooster’s interminable banjolele playing has driven Jeeves, his otherwise steadfast gentleman's gentleman, to give notice. The foppish aristocrat cannot survive for long without his Shakespeare-quoting and problem-solving valet, however, and after a narrowly escaped forced marriage, a cottage fire, and a great butter theft, the celebrated literary odd couple are happy to return to the way things were.
Download or read book The Community Performance Reader written by Petra Kuppers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Community Performance: A Reader is the first book to provide comprehensive teaching materials for this significant part of the theatre studies curriculum. It brings together core writings and critical approaches to community performance work, presenting practices in the UK, USA, Australia and beyond. Offering a comprehensive anthology of key writings in the vibrant field of community performance, spanning dance, theatre and visual practices, this Reader uniquely combines classic writings from major theorists and practitioners such as Augusto Boal, Paolo Freire, Dwight Conquergood and Jan Cohen Cruz, with newly commissioned essays that bring the anthology right up to date with current practice. This book can be used as a stand-alone text, or together with its companion volume, Community Performance: An Introduction, to offer an accessible and classroom-friendly introduction to the field of community performance.
Download or read book Certain Fragments written by Tim Etchells and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of what lies at the heart of contemporary theatre. Written by the artistic director of Forced Entertainment, it investigates the process of devising performance, theatre's interdisciplinary role, and the city's influence.
Download or read book The Builders Association written by Shannon Jackson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-10-09 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lavishly illustrated history and critical appraisal of The Builders Association, an award-winning intermedia performance company, with detailed accounts of its major productions. This book begins with the building of a house, and the building of a company while building the house. It expands to look at the ideas found in various rooms, some of which expanded into virtual space while they still were grounded in the lives of the artists in the house. —from the preface by Marianne Weems The Builders Association, an award-winning intermedia performance company founded in 1994, develops its work in extended collaborations with artists and designers, working through performance, video, architecture, sound, and text to integrate live performance with other media. Its work is not only cross-media but cross-genre—fiction and nonfiction, unorthodox retellings of classic tales and multimedia stagings of contemporary events. This book offers a generously illustrated history and critical appraisal of The Builders Association, written by Shannon Jackson, a leading theater scholar, and Marianne Weems, the founder and artistic director of the company. It also includes critical meditations from such artists and scholars as Elizabeth Diller, Pico Iyer, Saskia Sassen, Kate Valk, and many others. Technological wizardry in the theater has a long history, going back to the deus ex machina of ancient Greek drama. The Builders Association makes its technological dependence visible, putting backstage technologies center stage and presenting architectural assemblies of screens and bodies. Jackson and Weems explore a series of major productions—from MASTER BUILDER (Ibsen by way of Gordon Matta-Clark) to SUPERVISION (an exploration of dataveillance) to HOUSE/DIVIDED (the foreclosure crisis juxtaposed with the Joads of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath). Each work is described through a series of steps, including “R&D,” “Operating Systems,” “Storyboard,” and “Rehearsal/Assembly.” The Builders Association not only traces the evolution of an intermedial aesthetic practice but also tells a story about how a group makes the risky decision to make art in the first place.
Download or read book Blooded Thought written by Herbert Blau and published by New York : Performing Arts Journal Publications. This book was released on 1982 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the nature of drama and performance, linking contemporary thinking in theatrical and literary theory, politics and the sciences. Blau's essays illuminate crucial issues in today's theatre: the place of language and the dramatization of thought.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater written by Nadine George-Graves and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 1057 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater collects a critical mass of border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theatre. Taking corporeality as an idea that unites the work of dance and theater scholars and artists, and embodiment as a negotiation of power dynamics with important stakes, these essays focus on the politics and poetics of the moving body in performance both on and off stage. Contemporary stage performances have sparked global interest in new experiments between dance and theater, and this volume situates this interest in its historical context by extensively investigating other such moments: from pagan mimes of late antiquity to early modern archives to Bolshevik Russia to post-Sandinista Nicaragua to Chinese opera on the international stage, to contemporary flash mobs and television dance contests. Ideologically, the essays investigate critical race theory, affect theory, cognitive science, historiography, dance dramaturgy, spatiality, gender, somatics, ritual, and biopolitics among other modes of inquiry. In terms of aesthetics, they examine many genres such as musical theater, contemporary dance, improvisation, experimental theater, television, African total theater, modern dance, new Indian dance theater aesthetics, philanthroproductions, Butoh, carnival, equestrian performance, tanztheater, Korean Talchum, Nazi Movement Choirs, Lindy Hop, Bomba, Caroline Masques, political demonstrations, and Hip Hop. The volume includes innovative essays from both young and seasoned scholars and scholar/practitioners who are working at the cutting edges of their fields. The handbook brings together essays that offer new insight into well-studied areas, challenge current knowledge, attend to neglected practices or moments in time, and that identify emergent themes. The overall result is a better understanding of the roles of dance and theater in the performative production of meaning.
