Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century
Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century

Author: Akihiro Odanaka

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-16

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0429620004

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Bunraku has fascinated theatre practitioners through its particular forms of staging, such as highly elaborated manipulation of puppets and exquisite coordination of chanters and shamisen players. However, Bunraku lacks scholarship dedicated to translating not only the language but also cultural barriers of this work. In this book, Odanaka and Iwai tackle the wealth of bunraku plays underrepresented in English through rexamining their siginifcance on a global scale. Little is written on the fact that bunraku theatre, despites its elegant figures of puppets and exotic stories, was often made as a place to manifest the political concerns of playwrights in the 18th century, hence a reflection of the audience's expectation that could not have materialized outside the theatre. Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century aims to make bunraku texts readable for those who are interested in the political and cultural implications of this revered theatre tradition.

The Sinosphere and Beyond
The Sinosphere and Beyond

Author: Joan Judge

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-07-22

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 3111383652

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The history of East Asia can be most productively studied through a transnational, translingual, and transcultural approach to the region. In The Sinosphere and Beyond, twenty-six leading and emerging scholars use such approaches in rich clusters of essays on Historiography, Sino-Japanese Encounters, Law and Justice, Politics, Art, Literature, and Translation. Each essay builds on the legacy of Joshua Fogel, whose scholarship defined the contours of the Sinosphere in the Western world and beyond. The collection will be of interest to scholars and students with specific research concerns within these broader rubrics: from the towering progenitors of Japanese Sinology to gendered, diplomatic, and cultural dimensions of Sino-Japanese encounters; from Sinitic poetry to legal culture and revolutionary life; from art commerce and levels of literary expression to the quandaries of translation. In addition to offering a broad range of case studies, the volume is testimony to the methodological importance of a dynamic intra- and transregional approach for an understanding of the layered history of East Asia.

Aotearoa New Zealand in the Global Theatre Marketplace
Aotearoa New Zealand in the Global Theatre Marketplace

Author: James Wenley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-18

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0429575130

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Aotearoa New Zealand in the Global Theatre Marketplace offers a case study of how the theatre of Aotearoa has toured, represented and marketed itself on the global stage. How has New Zealand work attempted to stand out, differentiate itself, and get seen by audiences internationally? This book examines the journeys of a dynamic range of culturally and theatrically innovative works created by Aotearoa New Zealand theatre makers that have toured and been performed across time, place and theatrical space: from Moana Oceania to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, from a Māori Shakespeare adaptation to an immersive zombie theatre experience. Drawing on postcolonialism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and globality to understand how Aotearoa New Zealand has imagined and conceived of itself through drama, the author investigates how these representations might be read and received by audiences around the world, variously reinforcing and complicating conceptions of New Zealand national identity. Developing concepts of theatrical mobility, portability and the market, this study engages with the whole theatrical enterprise as a play travels from concept and scripting through to funding, marketing, performance and the critical response by reviewers and commentators. This book will be of global interest to academics, producers and theatre artists as a significant resource for the theory and practice of theatre touring and cross-cultural performance and reception.

Situated Knowing
Situated Knowing

Author: Ewa Bal

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-11

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 1000082148

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Situated Knowing aims to critically examine performance studies’ ideological and socio-political underpinnings while also challenging the Anglo-centrism of the discipline. This book reworks the concept of situated knowledges put forward over thirty years ago by American biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway in order to challenge the Enlightenment paradigm of objectivity in sciences by emphasising the role of the embodied and partial socio-cultural perspective of the scholar in the production of knowledge. Through carefully selected case studies of contemporary natural, cultural and technological performances, contributors to this volume show that the proposed approach requires new genealogies of traditional concepts, emerges from encounters with contemporary performative arts or contact zones and may potentially go beyond the human in order to include non-human ways of being in the world. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, cultural studies, media studies and theatre studies.

The Scenography of Howard Barker
The Scenography of Howard Barker

Author: Lara Maleen Kipp

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-18

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0429668236

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Influential contemporary British playwright and director Howard Barker has been engaging with the scenography of the Wrestling School’s productions since 1998. Despite this active involvement in the design of set, costume, lighting, and sound, no in-depth published study on this aspect of his work exists to date. This monograph therefore offers the first comprehensive and detailed analysis of Barker’s scenographic practice. Combining aesthetic analysis of play texts and production records with original interview materials, this book presents the first full-length foray into Barker’s scenography. It features extracts from conversations with designers working with Barker, and with Barker himself. In addition, it presents the first printed versions of select set and costume designs by Barker. With the first fully detailed analysis of Barker’s scenographic work, this book will be a vital read for scholars and postgraduates of Barker Studies, contemporary British and European drama, theatre, and scenography.

Skateboarding and Femininity
Skateboarding and Femininity

Author: Dani Abulhawa

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-08-27

Total Pages: 90

ISBN-13: 1000076946

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Skateboarding and Femininity explores and highlights the value of femininity both within skateboarding and wider culture. This book examines skateboarding’s relationship to gender politics through a consideration of the personal politics connected to individual skateboarders, the social-spatial arenas in which skateboarding takes place, and by understanding the performance of tricks and symbolic movements as part of gender-based power dynamics. Dani Abulhawa anaylses the discursive frameworks connected to skateboarding philanthropic projects and how these operate through gendered tropes. Through the author’s work with skateboarding charity SkatePal, this book offers an alternative way of recognising the value of skateboarding philanthropy projects, proposing a move toward a more open and explorative somatic practice perspective.

Practices of Relations in Task-Dance and the Event-Score
Practices of Relations in Task-Dance and the Event-Score

Author: Josefine Wikström

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-29

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1000215679

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In this study, Josefine Wikström challenges a concept of performance that makes no difference between art and non-art and argues for a new concept. This book confronts and criticises the way in which the dominating concept of performance has been used in art theory and performance and dance studies. Through an analysis of 1960s performance practices, Wikström focuses specifically on task-dance and event-score practices and provides an examination of the key philosophical concepts that are inseparable from such a concept of art and are necessary for the reconstruction of a critical concept of performance, such as "practice", "experience", "object", "abstraction" and "structure". This book will be of great interest to scholars, students and practitioners across dance, performance art, aesthetics and art theory.

The Teaching of Kathakali in Australia
The Teaching of Kathakali in Australia

Author: Arjun Raina

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-29

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 1000213668

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This book tells the story of teaching Kathakali, a seventeenth century Indian dance-drama, to contemporary performers in Australia. A rigorous analysis and detailed documentation of the teaching of multiple learners in Melbourne, both in the group workshop mode and one-on-one, combined with the author’s ethnographic research in India, leads to a unique insight into what the author argues persuasively is at the heart of the art’s aesthetic- a practical realisation of the theory of rasa as first articulated in the ancient Sanskrit treatise on drama The Natyashastra. The research references the latest discoveries in neuroscience on ‘mirror neurons’ and argues for a reconceptualization of Kathakali’s imitative methodology, advancing it from the reductive category of ‘mimicry’ to a more contemporary and complex mirroring which is where its value lies in Australian actor performer training. The Teaching of Kathakali in Australia will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and dance, intercultural actor training, practice-led research, and interdisciplinary studies of neuroscience and performance.

Modernizing Costume Design, 1820–1920
Modernizing Costume Design, 1820–1920

Author: Annie Holt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-14

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 0429619987

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Annie Holt identifies the roots of contemporary Euro-American practices of costume design, in which costumes are an integrated part of the dramaturgy rather than a reflection of an individual performer’s taste or status. She argues that in the period 1820–1920, as part of the larger project of modernism across the artistic and cultural field, the functions of "clothing" and "costume" diverged. Onstage apparel took on a more specific semiotic task, acting as a fresh channel for the flow of information between the performer, the literary text, and the spectator. Modernizing Costume Design traces how five kinds of artists – directors, performers, writers, couturiers, and painters – made key contributions to this new model of costume design. Holt shows that by 1920, costume design shifted in status from craft to art.

Dynamic Cartography
Dynamic Cartography

Author: María José Martínez Sánchez

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-28

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1000077322

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Dynamic Cartography analyses the works of Rudolf Laban, Lawrence Halprin, Anne Bogart, Adolphe Appia, Cedric Price, Joan Littlewood, and Hélio Oiticica. They are practitioners who have worked on different areas of enquiry from the existing relations between body and space through movement, events, or actions but whose work has never been presented from this perspective or in this context. The work and methodologies set up by these practitioners enable us to develop a practice-based exploration. Some of the experiments in the book – Micro-actions I and II – explore the presence of the body in the space. In Kinetography I and II, Laban’s dance notation system – kinetography – is used to create these dynamic cartographies. Kinetography III proposes the analysis of an urban public space through the transcription of the body movement contained on it. The series Dynamic Cartographies I, II, and III analyses movement in geometrically controlled spaces through the Viewpoints techniques by Anne Bogart. Finally, Wooosh! and Trellick Tales present two projects in which performance is applied in order to analyse and understand urban and architectural space.