The Impossible Theater PDF Download

Author: Herbert Blau
Publisher: New York : Macmillan
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The author critiques contemporary American theater.

Author: Edwin Wong
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 1525537555
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT IT, BIRNAM WOOD COMES TO DUNSINANE HILL The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy presents a profoundly original theory of drama that speaks to modern audiences living in an increasingly volatile world driven by artificial intelligence, gene editing, globalization, and mutual assured destruction ideologies. Tragedy, according to risk theatre, puts us face to face with the unexpected implications of our actions by simulating the profound impact of highly improbable events. In this book, classicist Edwin Wong shows how tragedy imitates reality: heroes, by taking inordinate risks, trigger devastating low-probability, high-consequence outcomes. Such a theatre forces audiences to ask themselves a most timely question---what happens when the perfect bet goes wrong? Not only does Wong reinterpret classic tragedies from Aeschylus to O’Neill through the risk theatre lens, he also invites dramatists to create tomorrow’s theatre. As the world becomes increasingly unpredictable, the most compelling dramas will be high-stakes tragedies that dramatize the unintended consequences of today's risk takers who are taking us past the point of no return.

Author: Herbert Blau
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816638123
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Spanning a quarter of a century, the essays in this book rehearse, in the movement of memory and cross-reflection, an extensive career in theater. The work of Herbert Blau-his directing, writing, and criticism-has been a determining force during this period as theater encounters theory. Blau's struggle to bring a critical intelligence to the American stage goes back half a century, to the quiescent postwar years (which he has eloquently described in The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto). His innovations in performance began with early productions of now-canonical plays that were hardly known at that time (works by Brecht, Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Duerrenmatt, and others). His experience is as distinctive as his versatile habits of mind and conceptual urgency of style. If the impossible takes a little time (as the title of one essay states), Blau's struggle now continues in a theoretical vein. Performance-and his own compelling writing- has moved across other genres and disciplines into fashion, politics, sexuality, and theory. His diversity of thought is demonstrated here in commentaries about the newer modes of performance (including conceptual and body art), various American playwrights, Renaissance drama, new music and theater, voice, the senses and the baroque, and the photographic image. As the essays reflect upon each other, a kind of cultural history, with inflections of autobiography, develops-which is what readers of Blau's previous books have come to expect.

Author: Maria M. Delgado
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719062919
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century is a wide-ranging look at the state of contemporary theater practice, economics, and issues related to identity, politics, and technology. The volume offers a snapshot dissection of where theater is, where it has been and where it might be going through the voices of established and emerging theater artists and scholars from the UK, US, and elsewhere. Contributors: Maria M. Delgado & Caridad Svich • Oliver Mayer, Jorge Cortiñas, Neena Beber, & Craig Lucas • Jim Carmody • Roberta Levitow • Peter Lichtenfels & Lynette Hunter • Michael Billington • Claire H. Macdonald • Anna Furse • Phyllis Nagy • Max Stafford-Clark • Len Berkman • DD Kugler • Tori Haring-Smith • John London • Kia Corthron • Alice Tuan • Ricardo Szwarcer • Peter Sellars • Dragan Klaic • Lisa D’Amour • Paul Heritage • Matthew Causey • Andy Lavender • Jon Fosse • Erik Ehn • Matthew Maguire • Shelley Berc • Ruth Margraff • Martin Epstein • Mac Wellman • Goat Island

Author: Mike Vanden Heuvel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135005156X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Across two volumes, Mike Vanden Heuvel and a strong roster of contributors present the history, processes, and achievements of American theatre companies renowned for their use of collective and/or ensemble-based techniques to generate new work. This first study considers theatre companies that were working between 1970 and 1995: it traces the rise and eventual diversification of activist-based companies that emerged to serve particular constituencies from the countercultural politics of the 1960s, and examines the shift in the 1980s that gave rise to the next generation of company-based work, rooted in a new interest in form and the more mediated and dispersed forms of politics. Ensembles examined are Mabou Mines, Theatre X, Goat Island, Lookingglass, Elevator Repair Service, and SITI Company. Preliminary chapters provide a sweeping overview of ensemble-based creation within the general historical and cultural contexts of the period, followed by a detailed study of the evolution of ensemble-based work. The case studies consider factors such as influence, funding, production, and legacies, as well as the forms of collective devising and creation, while surveying the continuing work of significant long-running companies. Contributors provide detailed case studies of the 6 companies from the period and cover: * A chronicle of development and methods * Key productions and projects * Critical reception and legacy * A chronological overview of significant productions From the long history of collective theatre creation, with its sources in social crises, urgent aesthetic experimentation and utopian dreaming, American ensemble-based theatre has emerged at several key points in history to challenge the primacy of author-based and director-produced theatre. As the volume demonstrates, US ensemble companies have collectively revolutionized the form and content of contemporary performance, influencing experimental, as well as mainstream practice.

Author: Herbert Blau
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472051512
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
DIVA panoramic view of how we think about life and the imitation of life on stage/div

Author: Virginia Cooke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100037839X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
This book, first published in 1985, assembles essential facts on Samuel Beckett and makes vital but elusive information available. It contains a comprehensive checklist of all the writer’s plays, with a detailed performance history, excerpted reviews, and most importantly, a selection of Beckett’s own comments on their work drawn from essays, interviews, letters and diaries. Other features include a chronology of life and work, a checklist of non-dramatic writings and an annotated bibliography.

Author: S. E. Gontarski
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501337653
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Revisioning Beckett reassesses Beckett's career and literary output, particularly his engagement with what might be called decadent modernism. Gontarski approaches Beckett from multiple viewpoints: from his running afoul of the Irish Censorship of Publications Acts in the 1930s through the 1950s, his preoccupations to “find literature in the pornography, or beneath the pornography,” his battles with the Lord Chamberlain in the mid-1950s over London stagings of his first two plays, and his close professional and personal associations with publishers who celebrated the work of the demimonde. Much of that term encompasses an opening to the fullness of human experience denied in previous centuries, and much of that has been sexual or decadent. As Gontarski shows, the aesthetics that emerges from such early career encounters and associations continues to inform Beckett's work and develops into experimental modes that upend literary models and middle-class values, an aesthetics that, furthermore, has inspired any number of visual artists to re-vision Beckett.

Author: A. Ackerman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230289088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Against Theatre shows that the most prominent writers of modern drama shared a radical rejection of the theatre as they knew it. Together with designers, composers and film makers, they plotted to destroy all existing theatres. But from their destruction emerged the most astonishing innovations of modernist theatre.

Author: Brill Academic Pub
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789051834659
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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