Download or read book Witness onstage written by Molly Flynn and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-07 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witness Onstage is a detailed study of the remarkable growth of documentary theatre forms in Russian since the early 2000s. It draws on the author’s work as a performer, producer, and researcher of documentary theatre both in Russia and internationally to provide new perspective on the mechanics of theatre as a venue for civic engagement.
Download or read book Seeing Witness written by Jane Blocker and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The act of bearing witness can reveal much, but what about the figure of the witness itself? As contemporary culture is increasingly dominated by surveillance, the witness--whether artist, historian, scientist, government official, or ordinary citizen--has become empowered in realms from art to politics. In Seeing Witness, Jane Blocker challenges the implicit authority of witnessing through the examination of a series of contemporary artworks, all of which make the act of witnessing visible, open to inspection and critique.
Download or read book The Wound and the Witness written by Jennifer R. Ballengee and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2009-01-21 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wound and the Witness offers a historically grounded approach to an urgent contemporary problem: the persistence of torture in Western culture. Drawing upon ancient Greek and Roman texts, as well as contemporary media events, Jennifer R. Ballengee explores the spectacle of torture as a persuasive device. She suggests that both torture and the witnessing of torture are forms of polemical writing, carried out on the body. The analysis combines close reading and philological study with a materialist cultural approach to ancient Greek theater, early Christian accounts of martyrdom, and recent political controversies over the interrogation tactics in the U.S. government-run Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib prisons. By incorporating key classical texts by Sophocles, Achilles Tatius, and Prudentius, the author demonstrates how deeply the ancient literature resonates with contemporary issues of the body, rhetoric, and the spectacle of pain.
Download or read book A Shared Truth written by Julie Ann Ward and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2019-04-18 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol (Lizards Lounging in the Sun) is a Mexican theater company that performs what is known as theater of the real.By taking reality as its subject, this genre claims a special relationship to reality, truth, and authenticity. In A Shared Truth, Julie Ann Ward traces the development of this contemporary and cutting-edge collective’s unique aesthetic. Based on performances, play texts, videos, and interviews, this in-depth look at a single theatrical troupe argues that the company’s work represents a larger trend in which Latin American theater positions itself as a source of and repository for truth in the face of unreliable official narratives. A Shared Truth critically examines the work of an influential company whose collaborative methods and engagement with the real challenge the bounds of theater.
Download or read book The Memory Marketplace written by Emilie Pine and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when cultural memory becomes a commodity? Who owns the memory? In The Memory Marketplace, Emilie Pine explores how memory is performed both in Ireland and abroad by considering the significant body of contemporary Irish theatre that contends with its own culture and history. Analyzing examples from this realm of theatre, Pine focuses on the idea of witnesses, both as performers on stage and as members of the audience. Whose memories are observed in these transactions, and how and why do performances prioritize some memories over others? What does it mean to create, rehearse, perform, and purchase the theatricalization of memory? The Memory Marketplace shows this transaction to be particularly fraught in the theatricalization of traumatic moments of cultural upheaval, such as the child sexual abuse scandal in Ireland. In these performances, the role of empathy becomes key within the marketplace dynamic, and Pine argues that this empathy shapes the kinds of witnesses created. The complexities and nuances of this exchange—subject and witness, spectator and performer, consumer and commodified—provide a deeper understanding of the crucial role theatre plays in shaping public understanding of trauma, memory, and history.
Download or read book A Scream Goes Through the House written by Arnold Weinstein and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “For too long we have been encouraged to see culture as an affair of intellect, and reading as a solitary exercise. But the truth is different: literature and art are pathways of feeling, and our encounter with them is social, inscribing us in a larger community.... Through art we discover that we are not alone.” So writes the esteemed Brown University professor Arnold Weinstein in this brilliant, radical exploration of Western literature. In the tradition of Harold Bloom and Jacques Barzun, Weinstein guides us through great works of art, to reveal how literature constitutes nothing less than a feast for the heart. Our encounter with literature and art can be a unique form of human connection, an entry into the storehouse of feeling. Writing about works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Munch, Proust, O’Neill, Burroughs, DeLillo, Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison, and others, Weinstein explores how writers and artists give us a vision of what human life is really all about. Reading is an affair of the heart as well as of the mind, deepening our sense of the fundamental forces and emotions that govern our lives, including fear, pain, illness, loss, depression, death, and love. Provocative, beautifully written, essential, A Scream Goes Through the House traces the human cry that echoes in literature through the ages, demonstrating how intense feelings are heard and shared. With intellectual insight and emotional acumen, Weinstein reveals how the scream that resounds through the house of literature, history, the body, and the family shows us who we really are and joins us together in a vast and timeless community.
Download or read book Honest Creativity written by Craig Detweiler and published by Church Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential guide for not only fostering genuine personal expression, but also the courage to share our most meaningful work with others—all without pretense or artifice. Author, filmmaker, educator, cultural commentator, and Variety Mentor of the Year recipient Craig Detweiler has taught thousands how to launch creative projects with intention, awareness, and confidence. As a result, his students have founded festivals, started companies and schools, written acclaimed graphic novels, and directed movies for Marvel. Now, at a time when generative AI can aggregate text and images in seconds, Detweiler shows why “honest creativity” is one of the core tenets that separates humans from machines. Readers will learn, not only how to prioritize ideas, but also how to develop their own method for producing cohesive, whole, and enduring works; escaping comfort zones; and cultivating a like-minded community that both motivates and challenges. This groundbreaking approach promises to help creators turn problems into possibilities by first honing their ability to innovate and then preparing them to handle the feedback—both positive and negative—that is inevitable when private work is displayed in the public sphere. For Detweiler, creating honestly is a way of honoring the gift of life, and his transcendent guide shows us how we can excel in an act that is, fundamentally, both uniquely human and magnificently divine.
Download or read book Transatlantic Malague as and Zapateados in Music Song and Dance written by Walter Aaron Clark and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-06-20 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados is an exploration of two fandango dances, recording the circulations of people, imagery, music, and dance across what were once the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Although these dance-musics seem to be mirror images, the unbreachable space between them reflects the political fault-lines along which nineteenth-century musical populism and folkloric nationalism extend into present-day debates about globalization, immigration, neoliberalism, and neofascism. If malagueñas are a fantastic incarnation of Spanishness, caught like a fly in amber by their anachronistic references to a fraught imperial past, noisy and raucous zapateado dances cut toward the future. Inherently marked by European conventions of zapatos (shoes), zapateados are nonetheless shaped by Africanist and Native American footwork traditions. In these Afro-Indigenous mestizajes, not only are European aesthetic values reordered and resignified, but the Catholic catechism which indoctrinated the New World yields to alternate spiritual systems springing out of a culture of resistance to European domination.
Download or read book Aristophanes Frogs written by C. W. Marshall and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comedy about tragedy and a play about playmaking, Aristophanes' Frogs (405 BCE) is perhaps the most popular of ancient comedies. This new introduction guides students through the play, its themes and contemporary contexts, and its reception history. Frogs offers sustained engagement with the Athenian literary scene, with the politics of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War, and with the religious understanding of the fifth-century city. It presents the earliest direct criticism of theatre and a detailed description of the Underworld, and also dramatizes the place of Mystery cults in the religious life of Athens and shows the political concerns that galvanized the citizens. It is also genuinely funny, showcasing a range of comic techniques, including literary and musical parody, political invective, grotesque distortion, wordplay, prop comedy, and funny costumes. Frogs has inspired literary works by Henry Fielding, George Bernard Shaw, and Tom Stoppard. This book explores all of these features in a series of short chapters designed to be accessible to a new reader of ancient comedy. It proceeds linearly through the play, addressing a range of issues, but paying particular attention to stagecraft and performance. It also offers a bold new interpretation of the play, suggesting that the action of Frogs was not the first time Euripides and Aeschylus had competed against each other.
Download or read book Beyond Reason written by Karol Berger and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-10-29 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Reason relates Wagner's works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal. Karol Berger seeks to penetrate the "secret" of large-scale form in Wagner's music dramas and to answer those critics, most prominently Nietzsche, who condemned Wagner for his putative inability to weld small expressive gestures into larger wholes. Organized by individual opera, this is essential reading for both musicologists and Wagner experts.
Download or read book Shakespeare s histories and counter histories written by Dermot Cavanagh and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-30 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's history plays have always been pivotal to our understanding of his works. This collection renews attention to these crucial plays by exploring official and unofficial versions of the past, histories and counter-histories in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By exploring the diversity of Shakespeare’s engagement with history in all its forms, these contributors open up a range of new interpretive possibilities for understanding the way history ‘plays’ with the past. The book is divided into three sections: Memory and mourning, Counter-histories, Identity and performance. In each section, leading theorists, historicists and performance critics offer fresh perspectives on the key issues that are transforming our understanding of Shakespeare. These include: gender and violence, the mapping of Britain, cultural memory and religion. This collection will appeal to all critically engaged readers of Shakespeare. In particular it will command wide-ranging interest from undergraduates, postgraduates, academic researchers and students of early modern theatre, history and culture.
Download or read book Passing Judgement written by Helene E. Bilis and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The royal judge was an archetypal character in French tragedy during the 17th century. This figure impersonated the king by asserting his judicial authority and bringing order to an otherwise chaotic world. In Passing Judgement, Hélène Bilis examines how an overlooked character-type—the royal judge—remained a constant of the tragic genre throughout the 17th century, although the specifics of his role and position fluctuated as playwrights experimented with changing models of sovereignty onstage. Her readings analyze how this royal decision-maker stood at the intersection of political and theatrical debates, and evolved through a process of trial and error in which certain portrayals of kingship were deemed obsolete and were discarded, while others were promoted as culturally allowable and resonant. In tracing the royal judge’s persistent presence and transformation, Bilis argues that we can better grasp the weighty political stakes of theatrical representations under the ancien régime.
Download or read book New Drama in Russian written by J.A.E. Curtis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and why does the stage, and those who perform upon it, play such a significant role in the social makeup of modern Russia, Ukraine and Belarus? In New Drama in Russian, Julie Curtis brings together an international team of leading scholars and practitioners to tackle this complex question. New Drama, which draws heavily on techniques of documentary and verbatim writing, is a key means of protest in the Russian-speaking world; since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, theatres, dramatists, and critics have collaborated in using the genre as a lens through which to explore a wide range of topics from human rights and state oppression to sexuality and racism. Yet surprisingly little has been written on this important theatrical movement. New Drama in Russian rectifies this. Through providing analytical surveys of this outspoken transnational genre alongside case-studies of plays and interviews with playwrights, this volume sheds much-needed light on the key issues of performance, politics, and protest in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Meticulously researched and elegantly argued, this book will be of immense value to scholars of Russian cultural history and post-Soviet literary studies.
Download or read book Richard III written by William Shakespeare and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2005-04-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bitter, deformed brother of the King is secretly plotting to seize the throne of England. Charming and duplicitous, powerfully eloquent and viciously cruel, he is prepared to go to any lengths to achieve his goal - and, in his skilful manipulation of events and people, Richard is a chilling incarnation of the lure of evil and the temptation of power.
Download or read book Voicing Trauma and Truth Narratives of Disruption and Transformation written by Oliver Bray and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jesus on Stage written by Philip Oakeshott and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2015-01-07 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jesus on Stage argues that the Gospel of John is, in its present form, an ancient historical novel, but that the evangelists first version was his own draft for a Greek play. The development of Greek drama at Athens is briefly described, with new suggestions on some details, and the continuing influence of the great Greek tragedians in the 1st Century AD is shown. Then the internal evidence in the gospel which points to an earlier draft play is marshalled: not merely dramatic scenes, some of which echo Sophocles, but speeches only appropriate to the stage, puzzling features which make sense if they were devised with theatrical presentation in mind, others which suggest the chorus of a play; and a drastic reshaping of the Synoptic storyline to centre the whole work on Jerusalem, with a Jesus who resembles the hero of a play. All this has later been expanded to form a novel, including incidents in the mystery and suspense tradition beloved by ancient novelists. But the book is not only for scholars; anyone re-examining Johns gospel from this standpoint will find new depths in the evangelists seldom historical but deeply spiritual creation.
Download or read book Images in Mind written by Deborah Tarn Steiner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In archaic and classical Greece, statues played a constant role in people's religious, political, economic, aesthetic, and mental lives. Evidence of many kinds demonstrates that ancient Greeks thought about--and interacted with--statues in ways very different from our own. This book recovers ancient thinking about statues by approaching them through contemporary literary sources. It not only shows that ancient viewers conceived of images as more operative than aesthetic, but additionally reveals how poets and philosophers found in sculpture a practice ''good to think with.'' Deborah Tarn Steiner considers how Greek authors used images to ponder the relation of a copy to an original and of external appearance to inner reality. For these writers, a sculpture could straddle life and death, encode desire, or occasion reflection on their own act of producing a text. Many of the same sources also reveal how thinking about statues was reflected in the objects' everyday treatment. Viewing representations of gods and heroes as vessels hosting a living force, worshippers ritually washed, clothed, and fed them in order to elicit the numinous presence within. By reading the plastic and verbal sources together, this book offers new insights into classical texts while illuminating the practices surrounding the design, manufacture, and deployment of ancient images. Its argument that images are properly objects of cultural and social--rather than purely aesthetic--study will attract art historians, cultural historians, and anthropologists, as well as classicists.
