"The book... succeeds at refining elements in the problem that semiotics and theater represent to and for one another." -- Choice "The Semiotics of Performance surprisingly retains its revelatory freshness, and actually opens up areas of reseach that could very well supply new incentives for further probing into what semiotics can offer to the study of theatre." -- Theatre Survey
Keir Elam showed how this new 'science' could provide a radical shift in our understanding of theatrical performance, one of our very richest and most complex forms of communication.
This invaluable student handbook is the first detailed guide to explain in detail the relationship between the drama text and the theory and practice of drama in performance. Beginning at the beginning, with accessible explanations of the meanings and methods of semiotics, Theatre as Sign System addresses key drama texts and offers new and detailed information about the theories of performance.
"The most thorough, systematic and convincing semiotics of the theater we have. . . . [L]ike those of Eco, it is an important conceptual synthesis, and a bibliographical gold mine." —Modern Language Notes" . . . impresses with its thoroughness and the informed perspective of its author . . . " —Theatre Survey" . . . a classic text . . . " —Theatre Research International"Immediately accessible to readers with some knowledge of theater but not much of semiotics. . . . For anyone with an interest in theater production and performance, or indeed theater history." —Marvin Carlson
When Jean Genet, the enfant terrible of the French theater, died on April 15, 1986, he left a rich and controversial literary legacy. Genet, a homosexual and ex-convict, wrote about events and in a language that could ruffle the complacency of the most sophisticated reader. His work can be seen as a struggle of the social outcast to be heard from beyond the borders of the dominant, heterosexual culture. This challenging book tracks the effects of this struggle in Genet's novels, plays, film, and political essays by means of a general semiotics of performance. By staging a dialogue between Genet and writers such as Derrida, Bakhtin, Metz, Ricoeur, and Benveniste, Laura Oswald pursues the question of performance in the form of a debate rather than that of a closed theoretical system. Her approach puts into play relations between semiotics and philosophy and provides a means of understanding the relationship between Genet's poetics and his radical politics. By focusing on the role of the double in Genet's literary imagination and by reading Genet with his "others" in the realm of theory, Oswald comes to grips with the overriding concerns of a man whose life in literature was never very far from his life as prisoner, as outcast, as self-proclaimed exile
Signs of Performance provides the beginning student with working examples of theatrical analysis. Its range covers the whole of twentieth century theatre, from Stanislavski to Brecht and Samuel Beckett to Robert Wilson. Colin Counsell takes an historical look at theatre as a cultural practice, clearly tracing connections between: * Key practitioners' ideas about performance * The theatrical practices prompted by those ideas * The resulting signs which emerge in performance * The meanings and political consequences of those signs It provides an understandable theoretical framework for the study of theatre as a an signifying practice, and offers vivid explanations in clear, direct language. It opens up this fascinating field to a broad audience.
n recent years, the post structuralist theories seem to have created a split in theatrological research. But, as André Helbo analyses in this book , a dialectic theory of the semiotic and the symbolic exchange bring to light a specific paradigm. From his wide experience as a semiotician and a theatrologist, the author has developed an analysis for the theory of spectacle. Focusing his study on a critical theory of the performing arts, and examining the fundamental controversies, he then offers new perspectives and new instruments of analysis: the social aspects, readability/visibility, coherence, the spectacle contract.
