This volume captures the rich diversity of European performance practice evident in the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first century. Written by leading directors, actors, dancers, scenographers and academics from across Europe, the collection spans a broad range of subject areas including dance, theatre, live art, multimedia performance an
This volume captures the rich diversity of European performance practice evident in the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first century. Written by leading directors, actors, dancers, scenographers and academics from across Europe, the collection spans a broad range of subject areas including dance, theatre, live art, multimedia performance and street protest. The essays are divided into three sections on: performers and performing; staging performance; representation and reception, and document innovations in acting, performance and stagecraft by key practitioners. Articles also explore the ways that performance has been used to stage debates around major preoccupations of the age such as war, the human condition, globalization, the impact of new technologies and identity politics. This volume, which features previously published performance manifestoes, articles, and book chapters on the most frequently discussed and debated topics in the field, is an indispensable reference work for both academics and students.
Contents: Part I Acting and Performance: When acting is an art,
Constantin Stanislavski, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood; Michael Chekhov
on the technique of acting: Was Don Quixote true to life?, Franc
Chamberlain; The dance of the future, Isadora Duncan; The actor and the
Ć¼ber-marionette, Edward Gordon Craig; Actors on Brecht, Margaret Eddershaw;
Introduction, Rudolf Laban; Samuel Beckett as director: the art of mastering
failure, Anna McMullan; Performance, Jennifer Kumiega; Theatre theory:
sociology and the actors technique, Ian Watson; The masks of Jacques Lecoq,
John Wright; Woman, man, dog, tree: two decades of intimate and monumental
bodies in Pina Bauschs Tanztheater, Gabrielle Cody; On risk and investment,
Tim Etchells; On seeing the invisible, Peggy Phelan. Part II Staging
Performance: Of the futility of the theatrical in the theater, Alfred
Jarry; Ideas on a reform of our mise en scčne, Adolphe Appia; The founding
and manifesto of futurism, Filuppo T. Marinetti; Biomechanics and
constructivism, Edward Braun; The naked stage, John Rudlin; Theater (BĆ¼hne),
Oskar Schlemmer; The documentary play, Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht
(1898-1956) and Caspar Neher (1897-1962), Joslin McKinney and Philip
Butterworth; Production and metaphysics, Antonin Artaud; Myth and theatre
laboratories, Peter Brook; After ideology: Heiner MĆ¼ller and the theatre of
catastrophe, David Kilpatrick; 1789, Victoria Nes Kirby; Notes on political
street theatre, Paris: 1968, 1969, Jean-Jacques Lebel; Make-believe:
SocĆetas Raffaello Sanzio do theatre, Nicholas Ridout; Spectacle, synergy
and megamusicals: the global-industrialisation of the live-entertainment
economy, Jonathan Burston; The digital double, Steve Dixon. Part III
Representation and Reception: Womens suffrage drama, Katharine Cockin; A
propertyless theatre for the propertyless class, Tom Thomas; Modern dance in
the Third Reich: six positions and a coda, Susan A. Manning; Reading The
Blacks through t
Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick and Geoff Willcocks is Head of the Department for Performing Arts at Coventry University, UK.
