Ecology and Environment in European Drama

Ecology and Environment in European Drama

Author: Downing Cless

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-05-11

Total Pages: 526

ISBN-13: 1136972056

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Looking at European drama through an ecological lens, this book chronicles nature and the environment as primary topics in major plays from ancient to recent times. Cless focuses on the few, yet well-known plays in which nature is at stake in the action or the environment is a dramatic force. Though theater predominantly explores human and cultural themes, these plays fully display the power of the other-than-human world and its endangerment during the history of Europe. While offering a broad overview, the book features extensive case studies of several playwrights, plays, and eco-theater productions: Aristophanes’ The Birds, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, and Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot. In each case, Cless connects nature in the play to nature in the life of the playwright based on biographical research into the understanding of natural philosophy and awareness of the immediate environment that influenced the specific play. The book is one of the first of its kind in a growing field of ecocriticism and emerging eco-studies of theater.


Theatre Ecology

Theatre Ecology

Author: Baz Kershaw

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-12-13

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0521877164

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A study into the relationships between performance, theatre and environmental ecology.


Ecodramaturgies

Ecodramaturgies

Author: Lisa Woynarski

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-11-25

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 3030558533

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This book addresses theatre’s contribution to the way we think about ecology, our relationship to the environment, and what it means to be human in the context of climate change. It offers a detailed study of the ways in which contemporary performance has critiqued and re-imagined everyday ecological relationships, in more just and equitable ways. The broad spectrum of ecologically-oriented theatre and performance included here, largely from the UK, US, Canada, Europe, and Mexico, have problematised, reframed, and upended the pervasive and reductive images of climate change that tend to dominate the ecological imagination. Taking an inclusive approach this book foregrounds marginalised perspectives and the multiple social and political forces that shape climate change and related ecological crises, framing understandings of the earth as home. Recent works by Fevered Sleep, Rimini Protokoll, Violeta Luna, Deke Weaver, Metis Arts, Lucy + Jorge Orta, as well as Indigenous activist movements such as NoDAPL and Idle No More, are described in detail.


Earth Matters on Stage

Earth Matters on Stage

Author: Theresa J. May

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-09

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1000069982

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Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater tells the story of how American theater has shaped popular understandings of the environment throughout the twentieth century as it argues for theater’s potential power in the age of climate change. Using cultural and environmental history, seven chapters interrogate key moments in American theater and American environmentalism over the course of the twentieth century in the United States. It focuses, in particular, on how drama has represented environmental injustice and how inequality has become part of the American environmental landscape. As the first book-length ecocritical study of American theater, Earth Matters examines both familiar dramas and lesser-known grassroots plays in an effort to show that theater can be a powerful force for social change from frontier drama of the late nineteenth century to the eco-theater movement. This book argues that theater has always and already been part of the history of environmental ideas and action in the United States. Earth Matters also maps the rise of an ecocritical thought and eco-theater practice – what the author calls ecodramaturgy – showing how theater has informed environmental perceptions and policies. Through key plays and productions, it identifies strategies for artists who want their work to contribute to cultural transformation in the face of climate change.


Readings in Performance and Ecology

Readings in Performance and Ecology

Author: Wendy Arons

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-30

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1137011696

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This ground-breaking collection focuses on how theatre, dance, and other forms of performance are helping to transform our ecological values. Top scholars explore how familiar and new works of performance can help us recognize our reciprocal relationship with the natural world and how it helps us understand the way we are connected to the land.


New International Voices in Ecocriticism

New International Voices in Ecocriticism

Author: Serpil Oppermann

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2014-12-18

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1498501486

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With twelve original essays that characterize truly international ecocriticisms, New International Voices in Ecocriticism presents a compendium of ecocritical approaches, including ecocritical theory, ecopoetics, ecocritical analyses of literary, cultural, and musical texts (especially those not commonly studied in mainstream ecocriticism), and new critical vistas on human-nonhuman relations, postcolonial subjects, material selves, gender, and queer ecologies. It develops new perspectives on literature, culture, and the environment. The essays, written by contributors from the United States, Canada, Germany, Turkey, Spain, China, India, and South Africa, cover novels, drama, autobiography, music, and poetry, mixing traditional and popular forms. Popular culture and the production and circulation of cultural imaginaries feature prominently in this volume—how people view their world and the manner in which they share their perspectives, including the way these perspectives challenge each other globally and locally. In this sense the book also probes borders, border transgression, and border permeability. By offering diverse ecocritical approaches, the essays affirm the significance and necessity of international perspectives in environmental humanities, and thus offer unique responses to environmental problems and that, in some sense, affect many beginning and established scholars.


Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory

Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory

Author: Gabriel Egan

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-10-22

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1441142525

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Combining the latest scientific and philosophical understanding of humankind's place in the world with interpretative methods derived from other politically inflected literary criticism, ecocriticism is providing new insights into literary works both ancient and modern. With case-study analyses of the tragedies, comedies, histories and late romances, this book is a wide-ranging introduction to reading Shakespeare in the light of contemporary ecocritical theory.


Theatre and Environment

Theatre and Environment

Author: Vicky Angelaki

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-05-25

Total Pages: 88

ISBN-13: 1350316377

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This exciting new title in the Theatre And series explores how theatre and the environment have informed and continue to inform each other, considering both what theatre can do for the environment and what the environment can do for theatre. Drawing on a diverse range of case studies from writers and theatre-makers, Vicky Angelaki encourages a sense of responsibility towards the environment and examines how it is being handled by artists and performers in our time. Timely and topical, this concise introduction is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students of theatre and performance studies with an interest in the environment, contemporary theatre-making or site-specific performance.


Towards an Ecocritical Theatre

Towards an Ecocritical Theatre

Author: Mohebat Ahmadi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-04-27

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 100058397X

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Towards an Ecocritical Theatre investigates contemporary theatre through the lens of Anthropocene-oriented ecocriticism. It assesses how Anthropocene thinking engages different modes of theatrical representation, as well as how the theatrical apparatus can rise to the representational challenges of changing interactions between humans and the nonhuman world. To explore these problems, the book investigates international Anglophone plays and performances by Caryl Churchill, Stephen Sewell, Andrew Bovell, E.M. Lewis, Chantal Bilodeau, Jordan Hall, and Miwa Matreyek, who have taken significant steps towards re-orienting theatre from its traditional focus on humans to an ecocritical attention to nonhumans and the environment in the Anthropocene. Their theatrical works show how an engagement with the problem of scale disrupts the humanist bias of theatre, provoking new modes of theatrical inquiry that envision a scale beyond the human and realign our ecological culture, art, and intimacy with geological time. Moreover, the plays and performances studied here, through their liveness, immediacy, physicality, and communality, examine such scalar shifts via the problem of agency in order to give expression to the stories of nonhuman actants. These theatrical works provoke reflections on the flourishing of multispecies responsibilities and sensitivities in aesthetic and ethical terms, providing a platform for research in the environmental humanities through imaginative conversations on the world’s iterative performativity in which all bodies, human and nonhuman, are cast horizontally as agential forces on the theatrical world stage. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre studies, environmental humanities, and ecocritical studies.


Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film

Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film

Author: Katja Krebs

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-08-15

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1134114109

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This book provides a pioneering and provocative exploration of the rich synergies between adaptation studies and translation studies and is the first genuine attempt to discuss the rather loose usage of the concepts of translation and adaptation in terms of theatre and film. At the heart of this collection is the proposition that translation studies and adaptation studies have much to offer each other in practical and theoretical terms and can no longer exist independently from one another. As a result, it generates productive ideas within the contact zone between these two fields of study, both through new theoretical paradigms and detailed case studies. Such closely intertwined areas as translation and adaptation need to encounter each other’s methodologies and perspectives in order to develop ever more rigorous approaches to the study of adaptation and translation phenomena, challenging current assumptions and prejudices in terms of both. The book includes contributions as diverse yet interrelated as Bakhtin’s notion of translation and adaptation, Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello, and an analysis of performance practice, itself arguably an adaptive practice, which uses a variety of languages from English and Greek to British and International Sign-Language. As translation and adaptation practices are an integral part of global cultural and political activities and agendas, it is ever more important to study such occurrences of rewriting and reshaping. By exploring and investigating interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives and approaches, this volume investigates the impact such occurrences of rewriting have on the constructions and experiences of cultures while at the same time developing a rigorous methodological framework which will form the basis of future scholarship on performance and film, translation and adaptation.