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.

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.

Ecological Imperialism
Ecological Imperialism

Author: Alfred W. Crosby

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 1107569877

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A fascinating study of the important role of biology in European expansion, from 900 to 1900.

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.

Performing Nature
Performing Nature

Author: Gabriella Giannachi

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 9783039105571

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The essays in this volume explore the borderland between ecology and the arts. Nature is here read by a number of contributors as 'cultural', by others as an 'independent domain', or even as a powerful process of exchange 'between the human and the other-than-human'. The four parts of the volume reflect these different understandings of nature and performance. Informed by psychoanalysis and cultural materialism, contributors to the first part, 'Spectacle: Landscape and Subjectivity', look at ways in which particular social and scientific experiments, theatre and film productions and photography either reinforce or contest our ideas about nature and human-human or human-animal relations and identities. The second part, 'World: Hermeneutic Language and Social Ecology', investigates political protest, social practice art, acoustic ecology, dance theatre, family therapy and ritual in terms of social philosophy. Contributors to the third part, 'Environment: Immersiveness and Interactivity', explore architecture and sculpture, site-specific and mediatised dance and paratheatre through radical theories of urban and virtual space and time, or else phenomenological philosophy. The final part, 'Void: Death, Life and the Sublime', indicates the possibilities in dance, architecture and animal behaviour of a shift to an existential ontology in which nature has 'the capacity to perform itself'.

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.

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.

Sustainable Theatre: Theory, Context, Practice
Sustainable Theatre: Theory, Context, Practice

Author: Iphigenia Taxopoulou

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-04-20

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1350215724

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How does the world of theatre and the performing arts intersect with the climate and environmental crisis? This timely book is the first comprehensive account of the sector's response to the defining issue of our time. The book documents a sector in transition and presents theatre professionals, practitioners and organizations with a synthesis of information, knowledge and expertise to guide them to their own endorsement of sustainable thinking and practice. It is illustrated with inspiring case studies and interviews, from London's National Theatre, to Sydney Theatre Company, to the Göteborg Opera and the American Repertory Theatre. These foreground the work of pioneering institutions and individual practitioners whose artistic ingenuity, creative activism and sense of public mission have given shape, content and purpose to what we can now call 'sustainable theatre'. Spanning almost three decades, the book approaches the topic from multiple angles and through an international perspective, recording how climate and environmental concerns have been expressed in cultural policy, arts leadership and organizational ethics; in the greening of infrastructure and daily operations; in the individual and institutional practice of sustainable theatre-making; in performing arts education; and in touring practices and international collaboration. It investigates, too, how the climate crisis influences theatre as a story-teller – on stage and beyond. Written by a leading expert in the field of culture and environmental sustainability and distilling many years of research and hands-on experience, Sustainable Theatre: Theory, Context, Practice is intended to be relevant and useful to professionals involved in the theatre and performing arts sector in many different capacities: from policy-makers, arts leaders and managers to administrators, technicians, artists, scholars and educators.

Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd
Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd

Author: Carl Lavery

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-11-05

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 147250576X

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Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd is an innovative collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of theatre, performance and eco-criticism, which reconfigures absurdist theatre through the optics of ecology and environment. As well as offering strikingly new interpretations of the work of canonical playwrights such as Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Adamov, Albee, Kafka, Pinter, Shepard and Churchill, the book playfully mimics the structure of Martin Esslin's classic text The Theatre of the Absurd, which is commonly recognised as one of the most important scholarly publications of the 20th century. By reading absurdist drama, for the first time, as an emergent form of ecological theatre, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd interrogates afresh the very meaning of absurdism for 21st-century audiences, while at the same time making a significant contribution to the development of theatre and performance studies as a whole. The collection's interdisciplinary approach, accessibility, and ecological focus will appeal to students and academics in a number of different fields, including theatre, performance, English, French, geography and philosophy. It will also have a major impact on the new cross disciplinary paradigm of eco-criticism.