The term "French theater" evokes most immediately the glories of the classical period and the peculiarities of the Theater of the Absurd. It has given us the works of Corneille, Racine, and Moliere. In the Romantic era there was Alexander Dumas and surrealist works of Alfred Jarry, and then the Theater of the Absurd erupted in rationalistic France with Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The Historical Dictionary of French Theater relates the history of the French theater through a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, trends, genres, concepts, and literary and historical developments that played a central role in the evolution of French theater.
A invaluable survey of French theatre since 1968 Mise en Scène is a book in two parts. The first half is a probing look at French theatre now, providing an historical and critical survey of drama and theatre in France since 1968. It explores playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès and directors of international reputation such as Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Roger Planchon, Antoine Vitez, Patrice Chereau and Ariane Mnouchkine. The second part of Mise en Scène features a comprehensive listings guide to major theatre companies, insitutions, festivals, training schools and invaluable A-Z profiles of contemporary playwrights and directors from France.
This is the first book to explore the relationship between experimental theatre and performance making in France. Reflecting the recent return to aesthetics and politics in French theory, it focuses on how a variety of theatre and performance practitioners use their art work to contest reality as it is currently configured in France.
Occupying the Stage: the Theater of May '68 tells the story of student and worker uprisings in France through the lens of theater history, and the story of French theater through the lens of May '68. Based on detailed archival research and original translations, close readings of plays and historical documents, and a rigorous assessment of avant-garde theater history and theory, Occupying the Stage proposes that the French theater of 1959–71 forms a standalone paradigm called "The Theater of May '68." The book shows how French theater artists during this period used a strategy of occupation-occupying buildings, streets, language, words, traditions, and artistic processes-as their central tactic of protest and transformation. It further proposes that the Theater of May '68 has left imprints on contemporary artists and activists, and that this theater offers a scaffolding on which to build a meaningful analysis of contemporary protest and performance in France, North America, and beyond. At the book's heart is an inquiry into how artists of the period used theater as a way to engage in political work and, concurrently, questioned and overhauled traditional theater practices so their art would better reflect the way they wanted the world to be. Occupying the Stage embraces the utopic vision of May '68 while probing the period's many contradictions. It thus affirms the vital role theater can play in the ongoing work of social change.
"This book offers an introduction to seventeen key figures in French stagecraft. It is not a systematic study of mise en scène. Readers can consult the sections on individual directors who most interest them. But those who take the study as a whole will also ... find a guide to the changing attitudes and assumptions, the new ideas and controversies, that have shaped the French stage during the last hundred years."--Preface.
Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance is the first monograph to provide an in-depth study of the implications of Deleuze's philosophy for theatre and performance. Drawing from Goat Island, Butoh, Artaud and Kaprow, as well from Deleuze, Bergson and Laruelle, the book conceives performance as a way of thinking immanence.
Collaborative Theatre combines critical and historical essays by theatre scholars from around the world with the writings of and interviews with members of le Théâtre du Soleil, past and present.
Greek tragedy is currently being performed more frequently than at any time since classical antiquity. This book is the first to address the fundamental question, why has there been so much Greek tragedy in the theatres, opera houses and cinemas of the last three decades? A detailed chronological appendix of production information and lavish illustrations supplement the fourteen essays by an interdisciplinary team of specialists from the worlds of classics, theatre studies, and the professional theatre. They relate the recent appeal of Greek tragedy to social trends, political developments, aesthetic and performative developments, and the intellectual currents of the last three decades, especially multiculturalism, post-colonialism, feminism, post-structuralism, revisions of psychoanalytical models, and secularization.
This volume offers a compelling account of Jean-Louis Barrault, Ariane Mnouchkine and Peter Stein, who not only won international recognition as directors whose repertoires ranged from classical Greek to Shakespeare to the avant-garde, but also succeeded as leaders of their own companies. The ensembles they nurtured and kept afloat despite setbacks represent the artistic vision of each: the Compagnie Madeleine Renaud–Jean-Louis Barrault, the Théâtre du Soleil and the Schaubühne. Selected landmark productions illuminate the achievements of these 3 directors and their companies.
In 2005 literary and film critic Edward Turk immersed himself in New York City’s ACT FRENCH festival, a bold effort to enhance American contact with the contemporary French stage. This dizzying crash course on numerous aspects of current French theatre paved the way for six months of theatregoing in Paris and a month’s sojourn at the 2006 Avignon Festival. In French Theatre Today he turns his yearlong involvement with this rich topic into an accessible, intelligent, and comprehensive overview of contemporary French theatre. Situating many of the nearly 150 stage pieces he attended within contexts and timeframes that stretch backward and forward over a number of years, he reveals French theatre during the first decade of the twenty-first century to be remarkably vital, inclined toward both innovation and concern for its audience, and as open to international influence as it is respectful of national tradition. French Theatre Today provides a seamless mix of critical analysis with lively description, theoretical considerations with reflexive remarks by the theatremakers themselves, and matters of current French and American cultural politics. In the first part, “New York,” Turk offers close-ups of French theatre works singled out during the ACT FRENCH festival for their presumed attractiveness to American audiences and critics. The second part, “Paris,” depicts a more expansive range of French theatre pieces as they play out on their own soil. In the third part, “Avignon,” Turk captures the subject within a more fluid context that is, most interestingly, both eminently French and resolutely international. The Paris and Avignon chapters contain valuable and well-informed contextual and background information as well as descriptions of the milieus of the Avignon Festival and the various neighborhoods in Paris where he attended performances, information that readers cannot find easily elsewhere. Finally, in the spirit of inclusiveness that characterizes so much new French theatre and to give a representative account of his own experiences as a spectator, Turk rounds out his survey with observations on Paris’s lively opera scene and France’s wealth of circus entertainments, both traditional and newly envisioned. With his shrewd assessments of contemporary French theatre, Turk conveys an excitement and an affection for his topic destined to arouse similar responses in his readers. His book’s freshness and openness will reward theatre enthusiasts who are curious about an aspect of French culture that is inadequately known in this country, veteran scholars and students of contemporary world theatre, and those American theatre professionals who have the ultimate authority and good fortune to determine which new French works will reach audiences on these shores.
