Audience Revolution: Dispatches from the Field
Audience Revolution: Dispatches from the Field

Author: Caridad Svich

Publisher: Theatre Communications Group

Published: 2016-07-04

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1559368640

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A collection of thoughtful and provocative reflections on how theatre practitioners think about and engage with audiences, as well as define and explore sites for performance. Through shared experience and ritual, live performance functions as a catalytic medium for progress and evolution. In the hands of artists and audience, the stage is set for the re-makings of commonwealth, or necessary revolution. Caridad Svich received a 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theater, a 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award for GUAPA, and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based on the Isabel Allende novel.

The National Stage
The National Stage

Author: Loren Kruger

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1992-08

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780226454962

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

Postdramatic Theatre and Form
Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Author: Michael Shane Boyle

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-03-21

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1350043184

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Postdramatic theatre is an essential category of performance that challenges classical elements of drama, including the centrality of plot and character. Tracking key developments in contemporary European and North American performance, this collection redirects ongoing debates about postdramatic theatre, turning attention to the overlooked issue on which they hinge: form. Contributors draw on literary studies, film studies and critical theory to reimagine the formal aspects of theatre, such as space, media and text. The volume expands how scholars think of theatrical form, insisting that formalist analysis can be useful for studying the ways theatre is produced and consumed, and how theatre makers engage with other forms like dance and visual art. Chapters focus on a range of interdisciplinary artists including Tadeusz Kantor, Ann Liv Young and Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, as well as theatre's enmeshment within institutional formations like funding agencies, festivals, real estate and healthcare. A timely investigation of the aesthetic structures and material conditions of contemporary performance, this collection refines what we mean, and what we don't, when we speak of postdramatic theatre.

The Revolution’s Echoes
The Revolution’s Echoes

Author: Nomi Dave

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-10-02

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 022665477X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Music has long been an avenue for protest, seen as a way to promote freedom and equality, instill hope, and fight for change. Popular music, in particular, is considered to be an effective form of subversion and resistance under oppressive circumstances. But, as Nomi Dave shows us in The Revolution’s Echoes, the opposite is also true: music can often support, rather than challenge, the powers that be. Dave introduces readers to the music supporting the authoritarian regime of former Guinean president Sékou Touré, and the musicians who, even long after his death, have continued to praise dictators and avoid dissent. Dave shows that this isn’t just the result of state manipulation; even in the absence of coercion, musicians and their audiences take real pleasure in musical praise of leaders. Time and again, whether in traditional music or in newer genres such as rap, Guinean musicians have celebrated state power and authority. With The Revolution’s Echoes, Dave insists that we must grapple with the uncomfortable truth that some forms of music choose to support authoritarianism, generating new pleasures and new politics in the process.

Feeling Revolution
Feeling Revolution

Author: Anna Toropova

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-05-20

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0192566830

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Stalin-era cinema was designed to promote emotional and affective education. The filmmakers of the period were called to help forge the emotions and affects that befitted the New Soviet Person - ranging from happiness and victorious laughter, to hatred for enemies. Feeling Revolution shows how the Soviet film industry's efforts to find an emotionally resonant language that could speak to a mass audience came to centre on the development of a distinctively 'Soviet' cinema. Its case studies of specific film genres, including production films, comedies, thrillers, and melodramas, explore how the genre rules established by Western and prerevolutionary Russian cinema were reoriented to new emotional settings. 'Sovietising' audience emotions did not prove to be an easy feat. The tensions, frustrations, and missteps of this process are outlined in Feeling Revolution, with reference to a wide variety of primary sources, including the artistic council discussions of the Mosfil'm and Lenfil'm studios and the Ministry of Cinematography. Bringing the limitations of the Stalinist ideological project to light, Anna Toropova reveals cinema's capacity to contest the very emotional norms that it was entrusted with crafting.

Close Up
Close Up

Author: Hamid Dabashi

Publisher: Verso

Published: 2001-11-17

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9781859843321

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Arguing that Iranian cinema has emerged as "the staple of cultural currency that defies the logic of nativism and challenges the problems of globalization," Dabashi (Iranian studies, Columbia U.) concentrates on the contributions on four key filmmakers, presenting critical readings of their work and interviews with a couple of his subjects. An introductory chapter seeks to place Iranian cinema in the context of modernity. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Meanings of Audiences
Meanings of Audiences

Author: Richard Butsch

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-08-15

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1135043051

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In today’s thoroughly mediated societies people spend many hours in the role of audiences, while powerful organizations, including governments, corporations and schools, reach people via the media. Consequently, how people think about, and organizations treat, audiences has considerable significance. This ground-breaking collection offers original, empirical studies of discourses about audiences by bringing together a genuinely international range of work. With essays on audiences in ancient Greece, early modern Germany, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Zimbabwe, contemporary Egypt, Bengali India, China, Taiwan, and immigrant diaspora in Belgium, each chapter examines the ways in which audiences are embedded in discourses of power, representation, and regulation in different yet overlapping ways according to specific socio-historical contexts. Suitable for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, this book is a valuable and original contribution to media and communication studies. It will be particularly useful to those studying audiences and international media.

A Continuous Revolution
A Continuous Revolution

Author: Barbara Mittler

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 1684175186

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Cultural Revolution Culture, often denigrated as nothing but propaganda, was liked not only in its heyday but continues to be enjoyed today. A Continuous Revolution sets out to explain its legacy. By considering Cultural Revolution propaganda art—music, stage works, prints and posters, comics, and literature—from the point of view of its longue durée, Barbara Mittler suggests it was able to build on a tradition of earlier art works, and this allowed for its sedimentation in cultural memory and its proliferation in contemporary China. Taking the aesthetic experience of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) as her base, Mittler juxtaposes close readings and analyses of cultural products from the period with impressions given in a series of personal interviews conducted in the early 2000s with Chinese from diverse class and generational backgrounds. By including much testimony from these original voices, Mittler illustrates the extremely multifaceted and contradictory nature of the Cultural Revolution, both in terms of artistic production and of its cultural experience.

Political Participation and Democratic Capability in Authoritarian States
Political Participation and Democratic Capability in Authoritarian States

Author: Lien Pham

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-02-22

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1000348334

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book provides an innovative theoretical and empirical exploration of the political participation and democratic capability of people living in authoritarian states. Merging perspectives from sociology and political science, the book demonstrates that despite autocratic restrictions on opposition, there is often still leeway for people to express themselves as political agents and to develop democratic capability. The first two chapters problematise political participation and develop an interdisciplinary three-domain framework that allows for critical engagement with and appreciation of the contexts and varied ways in which participatory activities occur. This framework is applied to analyse six country case studies: Singapore, Jordan, Belarus, Cuba, Nigeria, and Vietnam. Drawing on a range of data sources and different analytical entry points, the book investigates the substantive opportunities people have in exercising political agency and the implications for democratic capability. The book concludes by summarising the emergent themes and examining the potential of applying this method of inquiry in other political contexts. Encompassing both governmental and societal practices, the book offers insights into state-society relations and their role in constructing political values and goals for participation, which people negotiate and mediate to inform their choices, modes, and forms of civic engagement. These insights present a broad approach towards the study of participation, with relevance for understanding political participation in various societies under non-democratic and democratic rule alike. This book will be useful for researchers and students interested in political dynamics and intersections with economic, cultural, and social aspects of development. It will also be beneficial for practitioners interested in participatory actions and social change.