The work of Armand Gatti, outstanding contemporary French experimental dramatist and director, was central to the Popular Theatre Movement in postwar France and today incorporates film, video, and journalism as well play-writing. This volume provides an eyewitness account of the man, an assessment of his work, and insight into political commitment in film and theater.
A French national, born in 1924 of immigrant Italian parents, Armand Gatti worked as a special correspondent in post-war Europe, Siberia, Korea, China and Latin America. He abandoned journalism in the 1950s to write for the theater. A visionary more than an ideologue, a utopian anarchist more than a partisan, Gatti engages with the themes and experiences that shape the 20th century as we know it: destruction on a global scale, injustice and oppression, displacement and survival, identity and language. His writing challenges theatrical and cultural conventions, inviting us to reassess both the world we live in and the forms we use to represent it.
One of a series discussing topics of interest in theatre studies from theoretical, methodological, philosophical and historical perspectives. The books are aimed at drama and theatre teachers, advanced students in schools and colleges, arts authorities, actors, playwrights, critics and directors.
European theatre has been the site of enormous change and struggle since 1960. There have been radical shifts in the nature and understanding of performance, fuelled by increasing cross-cultural and international influence. Theatre has had to fight for its very existence, adapting its methods of operation to survive. European Theatre 1960-1990, first published in 1992, tells that story. The contributors - who in many cases have been theatre practitioners as well as critics - provide a wealth of fascinating information, covering Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Spain and Sweden, as well as Britain. The book offers an historical and descriptive overview of developments across national boundaries, enabling the reader to compare and contrast acting and directing styles, administrative strategies and the relationship between ideology and achievement. Chapters trace the evolution of theatre in all its aspects, including such elements as the end of censorship in many countries, the upsurge in political and personal awareness of the 1960s, shifting patterns of state artistic policy, and the effects on companies, directors, performers and audiences. This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics of theatre studies.
The Holocaust - the systematic attempted destruction of European Jewry and other 'threats' to the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945 - has been portrayed in fiction, film, memoirs, and poetry. Gene Plunka's study will add to this chronicle with an examination of the theatre of the Holocaust. Including thorough critical analyses of more than thirty plays, this book explores the seminal twentieth-century Holocaust dramas from the United States, Europe, and Israel. Biographical information about the playwrights, production histories of the plays, and pertinent historical information are provided, placing the plays in their historical and cultural contexts.
A diverse selection of original texts on theatre by its most creative practitioners – actors, writers, directors and designers. Contributors include Jarry, Ionescu, Shaw, Brecht, Strindberg, Stanislawski, Lorca, Brook, Soyinka, Boal and Barba.
Beginning with Aristotle and the Greeks and ending with semiotics and post-structuralism, Theories of the Theatre is the first comprehensive survey of Western dramatic theory. In this expanded edition the author has updated the book and added a new concluding chapter that focuses on theoretical developments since 1980, emphasizing the impact of feminist theory.
Railway travel has had a significant influence on modern theatre's sense of space and time. Early in the 20th century, breakthroughs--ranging from F.T. Marinetti's futurist manifestos to epic theatre's use of the treadmill--explored the mechanical rhythms and perceptual effects of railway travel to investigate history, technology, and motion. After World War II, some playwrights and auteur directors, from Armand Gatti to Robert Wilson to Amiri Baraka, looked to locomotion not as a radically new space and time but as a reminder of obsolescence, complicity in the Holocaust, and its role in uprooting people from their communities. By analyzing theatrical representations of railway travel, this book argues that modern theatre's perceptual, historical and social productions of space and time were stretched by theatre's attempts to stage the locomotive.
What is the Theatre? is one of the most coherent and systematic descriptions and analyses of the theatre yet compiled. Theatre is, above all, spectacle. It is a fleeting performance, delivered by actors and intended for spectators. It is a work of the body, an exercise of voice and gesture addressed to an audience, most often in a specific location and with a unique setting. This entertainment event rests on the delivery of a thing promised and expected – a particular and unique performance witnessed by spectators who have come to the site of the performance for this very reason. To witness theatre is to take into account the performance, but it is also to take into account the printed text as readable object and a written proposition. In this book, Christian Biet and Christophe Triau focus on the practical, theoretical and historical positions that the spectator and the reader have had in relation to the locations that they frequent and the texts that they handle. They adopt two approaches: analysing the spectacle in its theatrical and historical context in an attempt to seek out the principles and paradigms of approaching the theatre experience on one hand, and analysing the dramaturgy of a production in order to establish lines of interpretation and how to read, represent and stage a text, on the other. This approach allows us to better understand the ties that link those who participate in the theatre to the practitioners who create theatrical entertainment.
Applied Theatre was the first collection to assist practitioners and students in developing critical frameworks for their own community-based theatrical projects. The editors draw on thirty case studies in applied theatre from fifteen countries—covering a wide range of disciplines, from theatre studies to education, medicine, and law—and collect essential readings to provide a comprehensive survey of the field. Infused with a historical and theoretical overview of practical theatre, Applied Theatre offers clear developmental approaches and models for practical application. This third edition offers refreshed case studies from many countries worldwide that provide exemplars for the practice of applied theatre. The book will be useful to both instructors and students, in its focus on providing clear introductory chapters that lay out the scope of the field, dozens of case studies in all areas of the field, and a new chapter on responses to the global pandemic of 2020. Also includes a new section on representation in its final chapter, looking at the issues of how we represent ourselves and others on stage.
