America in the Round
America in the Round

Author: Donatella Galella

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2019-03-15

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1609386256

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2020 Barnard Hewitt Award, honorable mention Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage was the first professional regional theatre in the nation’s capital to welcome a racially integrated audience; the first to perform behind the Iron Curtain; and the first to win the Tony Award for best regional theatre. This behind-the-scenes look at one of the leading theatres in the United States shows how key financial and artistic decisions were made, using a range of archival materials such as letters and photographs as well as interviews with artists and administrators. Close-ups of major productions from The Great White Hope to Oklahoma! illustrate how Arena Stage navigated cultural trends. More than a chronicle, America in the Round is a critical history that reveals how far the theatre could go with its budget and racially liberal politics, and how Arena both disputed and duplicated systems of power. With an innovative “in the round” approach, the narrative simulates sitting in different parts of the arena space to see the theatre through different lenses—economics, racial dynamics, and American identity.

The National Stage
The National Stage

Author: Loren Kruger

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1992-08

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780226454979

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The idea of staging a nation dates from the Enlightenment, but the full force of the idea emerges only with the rise of mass politics. Comparing English, French, and American attempts to establish national theatres at moments of political crisis—from the challenge of socialism in late nineteenth-century Europe to the struggle to "salvage democracy" in Depression America—Kruger poses a fundamental question: in the formation of nationhood, is the citizen-audience spectator or participant? The National Stage answers this question by tracing the relation between theatre institution and public sphere in the discourses of national identity in Britain, France, and the United States. Exploring the boundaries between history and theory, text and performance, this book speaks to theatre and social historians as well as those interested in the theoretical range of cultural studies.

The Nation's Stage
The Nation's Stage

Author: Michael Dolan

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2011-11-22

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1451629443

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“There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare, and the new frontier for which I campaign in public life can also be a new frontier for American art.” —John F. Kennedy When the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts opened in our nation’s capital on September 8, 1971, its mission was to be the “national center for the performing arts.” Forty years later the Center has succeeded in that mission and continues to celebrate it—countless times over—in every state and country around the world, and in the hearts and minds of millions of audience members, performers, and artists. In The Nation’s Stage, that history comes alive through a stirring historical and pictorial narrative. An incubator and springboard for some of the most memorable and important theater, dance, opera, and musical productions of the past four decades, the Center has hosted plays by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Tom Stoppard, and August Wilson, as well as theater for young people with Debbie Allen; dance by Antony Tudor, Agnes de Mille, Mark Morris, and Jerome Robbins; orchestral scores by Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Dmitri Shostakovich, and John Cage; and breathtaking performances from the world’s most notable actors, musicians, and dancers. Every year, millions of Americans and people from around the globe gather at the Center to enjoy the arts. This book, an introduction to the Center’s accomplishments and abilities and a commemorative artifact for those who have enjoyed those gifts over the years, is a historical narrative with hundreds of colorful archival photos that allow past audiences to relive the most magical moments at the Center. Those who’ve never been inside receive a backstage pass to all the glamour and wonder this national treasure has to offer.

Theatre and National Identity
Theatre and National Identity

Author: Nadine Holdsworth

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-27

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1134102348

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This book explores the ways that pre-existing ‘national’ works or ‘national theatre’ sites can offer a rich source of material for speaking to the contemporary moment because of the resonances or associations they offer of a different time, place, politics, or culture. Featuring a broad international scope, it offers a series of thought-provoking essays that explore how playwrights, directors, theatre-makers, and performance artists have re-staged or re-worked a classic national play, performance, theatrical form, or theatre space in order to engage with conceptions of and questions around the nation, nationalism, and national identity in the contemporary moment, opening up new ways of thinking about or problematizing questions around the nation and national identity. Chapters ask how productions engage with a particular moment in the national psyche in the context of internationalism and globalization, for example, as well as how productions explore the interconnectivity of nations, intercultural agendas, or cosmopolitanism. They also explore questions relating to the presence of migrants, exiles, or refugees, and the legacy of colonial histories and post-colonial subjectivities. The volume highlights how theatre and performance has the ability to contest and unsettle ideas of the nation and national identity through the use of various sites, stagings, and performance strategies, and how contemporary theatres have portrayed national agendas and characters at a time of intense cultural flux and repositioning.

A Nation Under Our Feet
A Nation Under Our Feet

Author: Steven Hahn

Publisher: Belknap Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 610

ISBN-13: 9780674017658

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Emphasizing the role of kinship, labor, and networks in the African American community, the author retraces six generations of black struggles since the end of the Civil War, revealing a "nation" under construction.

A Great and Rising Nation
A Great and Rising Nation

Author: Michael A. Verney

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-07-20

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0226819922

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Jeremiah Reynolds and the empire of knowledge -- The United States exploring expedition as Jacksonian capitalism -- The United States exploring expedition in popular culture -- The Dead Sea expedition and the empire of faith -- Proslavery explorations of South America -- Arctic exploration and US-UK rapprochement.

What Is a Nation? and Other Political Writings
What Is a Nation? and Other Political Writings

Author: Ernest Renan

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-08-28

Total Pages: 535

ISBN-13: 0231547145

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Ernest Renan was one of the leading lights of the Parisian intellectual scene in the second half of the nineteenth century. A philologist, historian, and biblical scholar, he was a prominent voice of French liberalism and secularism. Today most familiar in the English-speaking world for his 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?” and its definition of a nation as an “everyday plebiscite,” Renan was a major figure in the debates surrounding the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, and the birth of the Third Republic and had a profound influence on thinkers across the political spectrum who grappled with the problem of authority and social organization in the new world wrought by the forces of modernization. What Is a Nation? and Other Political Writings is the first English-language anthology of Renan’s political thought. Offering a broad selection of Renan’s writings from several periods of his public life, most previously untranslated, it restores Renan to his place as one of France’s major liberal thinkers and gives vital critical context to his views on nationalism. The anthology illuminates the characteristics that distinguished nineteenth-century French liberalism from its English and American counterparts as well as the more controversial parts of Renan’s legacy, including his analysis of colonial expansion, his views on Islam and Judaism, and the role of race in his thought. The volume contains a critical introduction to Renan’s life and work as well as detailed annotations that assist in recovering the wealth and complexity of his thought.

Theatre and Nation
Theatre and Nation

Author: Nadine Holdsworth

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2010-06-30

Total Pages: 87

ISBN-13: 1350316296

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How has theatre engaged with the nation-state and helped to formulate national identities? What impact have migration and globalisation had on the relationship between theatre and nation? Theatre & Nation explores how theatre institutions, playwrights, theatre-makers and performance artists engage with the nation, nationalism and national identity in their work. The book argues that theatrical representations of the nation are constantly in flux and that the way theatre engages with the nation changes according to different geographical, political, economic, social and cultural circumstances. Foreword by Nicholas Hytner.