Festivalising!

Festivalising!

Author: Temple Hauptfleisch

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 9042022213

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Throughout the world festivals are growing - in numbers, in size, in significance - and serve as spaces where aesthetic encounters, religious and political celebrations, economic investments and public entertainment can take place. In this sense, festivals are theatrical events. Exploration of the theoretical frames of reference for the discussion about the present festival culture. Survey of 14 festival events throughout the world.


Participatory Theatre and the Urban Everyday in South Africa

Participatory Theatre and the Urban Everyday in South Africa

Author: Alexandra Halligey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-06

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1000769739

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This book explores theatre and performance as participatory research practices for exploring the everyday of the city. Taking an inner-city suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa as its central case study, the book considers how theatre and performance might be both useful practical tools in considering the everyday city, as well as conceptual lenses for understanding it. The author establishes an understanding of space as ever evolving and formed through the ongoing relationship between things, human and non-human, and considers how theatre and performance offer useful paradigms for learning about and working with city spaces. As ephemeral, embodied, material artistic practices, theatre and performance mirror the nature of everyday life. The book discusses theatre and performance games and placemaking processes as offering valuable ways of discovering daily acts of place-making and providing insights that more conventional research methods may not allow. Yet the book also considers how seeing daily city life as a kind of performance, a kind of theatre in its own right, helps to further understandings of city spaces as ever evolving through complex webs of relationships. This book will be of interest to academics, academic practitioners and post-graduate students in the fields of theatre and performance studies, urban studies and cultural geography.


Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre 3

Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre 3

Author: Kene Igweonu

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-01-02

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1443855103

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This book is part of a three-volume book-set published under the general title of Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre. Each of the three books in the set has a unique subtitle that works to better focus its content, and differentiates it from the other two volumes. The contributors’ backgrounds and global spread adequately reflect the international focus of the three books that make up the collection. The contributions, in their various ways, demonstrate the many advances and ingenious solutions adopted by African theatre practitioners in tackling some of the challenges arising from the adverse colonial experience, as well as the “one-sided” advance of globalisation. The contributions attest to the thriving nature of African theatre and performance, which in the face of these challenges, has managed to retain its distinctiveness, while at the same time acknowledging, contesting, and appropriating influences from elsewhere into an aesthetic that is identifiably African. Consequently, the three books are presented as a comprehensive exploration of the current state of African theatre and performance, both on the continent and diaspora. Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre 3: Making Space, Rethinking Drama and Theatre in Africa offers essays that seek to re-conceptualise notions of drama and theatre in Africa, and therefore redefine our understanding of the practice, role, and place they occupy in a constantly evolving African socio-cultural contexts. Contributions in Making Space, Rethinking Drama and Theatre in Africa range from essays that explore notions of space in performance, to those that challenge the perceived orthodoxy of conventional forms and approaches to theatre.


Trends in Twenty-First-Century African Theatre and Performance

Trends in Twenty-First-Century African Theatre and Performance

Author: Kene Igweonu

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 9401200823

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Trends in Twenty-First Century African Theatre and Performance is a collection of regionally focused articles on African theatre and performance. The volume provides a broad exploration of the current state of African theatre and performance and considers the directions they are taking in the 21st Century. It contains sections on current trends in theatre and performance studies, on applied/community theatre and on playwrights. The chapters have evolved out of a working group process, in which papers were submitted to peer-group scrutiny over a period of four years, at four international conferences. The book will be particularly useful as a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in non-western theatre and performance (where this includes African theatre and performance), and would be a very useful resource for theatre scholars and anyone interested in African performance forms and cultures.


Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-apartheid South Africa

Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-apartheid South Africa

Author: Duane Jethro

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1350059781

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In this innovative book, Duane Jethro creates a framework for understanding the role of the senses in processes of heritage making. He shows how the senses were important for crafting and successfully deploying new, nation-building heritage projects in South Africa during the post-apartheid period. The book highlights how heritage dynamics are entangled in evocative, changing sensory worlds. Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa features five case studies that correlate with the five main Western senses. Examples include touch and the ruination of a series of art memorials; how vision was mobilised to assert the authority of the state sponsored Freedom Park project in Pretoria; how small memories of apartheid era social life in Cape Town informed contemporary struggles for belonging after forced removal; how taste informed debates about the attempted rebranding of Heritage Day as barbecue day; and how the sound of the vuvuzela, popularised during the FIFA 2010 Football World Cup, helped legitimise its unofficial African and South African heritage status. This book makes a valuable contribution to the field of sensory studies and, with its focus on aesthetics and material culture, is in synch with the broader material turn in the humanities. This is important reading for students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, sensory studies, and transnational studies.


Syncretic Arenas

Syncretic Arenas

Author: Isidore Diala

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2014-11-15

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 9401211809

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This collection in part examines the legacy of the consummate Nigerian stage artist and scholar, Esiaba Irobi (1960–2010). Poems, tributes, and studies cele¬brate Irobi’s significance as actor, play¬wright, director, poet, and theatre theorist. Irobi’s life, temper, times, and career are inextricably linked to the history, devel¬opment, concerns, and uses of drama and theatre in Africa. The contributions high¬light the evolution of autochthonous thea¬trical practices: the interaction between Western and indigenous African perfor¬mance traditions; colonial/postcolonial government policies and the mutations of drama and theatre (and critical commen¬tary); the tensions inherent in postcolonial conceptions of history, identity, nation¬hood, and articulations of alternative aes¬thetics, pedagogies, and epistemologies for postcolonial African theatre; staging African plays in the West; and the con-stituencies of the contemporary African playwright and director. The strength of these studies derives primarily from nuanced examinations of the concerns and careers of particular African playwrights; the history, offerings, and fortunes of particular theatrical arenas, and close explorations of specific performances and texts. The foregrounding of correspon¬dences in the dramaturgies and intellec¬tual ferment of the continent critically accentuates equally privileged regional, historical, and other crucial specificities. Situated in time and place while under¬scoring the political and intellectual inter¬sections of a shared history of colonial-ism, the contributions to Syncretic Arenas, individually and collectively, reveal the transformations and growing strengths of postcolonialism as an analytical strategy. Isidore Diala is Professor of African literature in the Department of English and Literary Studies at Abia State University, Uturu, and author of Esiaba Irobi’s Drama and the Postcolony: Theory and Practice of Postcolonial Performance (2013).


Modern Anglophone Drama by Women

Modern Anglophone Drama by Women

Author: Alan P. Barr

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9780820488882

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Alan P. Barr has brought together eleven world-class modern plays by women that show not only their artistry but also their variety and their passion. Drawn from nine different countries (other than the United States and England) that use English as their literary language, the plays reflect the concerns of women across the globe. The imagery and dramatic conventions may shift and the tones vary, but the need to be strong (and its difficulty), the sense of a world that is anything but nurturing or ideal, and the suspect nature of family life and relations are constant themes. The struggle over language, in countries that are very often ex-colonies, conveys the frequent overlap between feminist and postcolonial focuses. The diversity of Englishes on stages from Singapore to South Africa is a lovely curtain call to this theater festival.


Transformative Language Arts in Action

Transformative Language Arts in Action

Author: Ruth Farmer

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-11-26

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 147581061X

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Transformative Language Arts, an emerging field and profession, calls on us to use writing, storytelling, theater, music, expressive and other arts for social change, personal growth, and culture shift. In this landmark anthology, Transformative Language Artists share their stories, scholarship and practices for a more just and peaceful world, from a Hmong storyteller and spoken word artist weaving traditions with contemporary immigrant challenges in Philadelphia, to a playwright raising awareness of AIDS/HIV prevention. Read the stories, consider the questions raised, and find inspiration and tools in using words as a vehicle for transformation through essays on the challenge of dominant stories, public housing women writing for their lives, histories and communities at the margins, singing as political action, the convergence of theology and poetics, women's self-leadership, embodied writing, and healing the self, others, and nature through TLA. The anthology also includes “snapshots,” short features on transformative language artists who make their livings and lives working with people of all ages and backgrounds to speak their truths, and change their communities.