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Author: Gary F. Dawson
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 0313304491
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
American documentary theatre records the social issues that continue to shape the United States at the close of the twentieth century. This book provides an historical and critical survey of documentary theatre in the United States since John Reed's The Pageant of the Paterson Strike (1913). It defines documentary theatre as a dramatic representation of societal forces using a close reexamination of events, individuals, or situations. While documentary theatre reinvents itself from time to time, this study demonstrates that its constituent parts remain roughly the same. Because documentary theatre is rooted in oral traditions, it offers an alternative to conventional journalistic treatments of social history. Through a close look at the history of documentary theatre, the volume concludes that a new period of expression is presently underway in the United States. Numerous social issues have marked the growth of the United States, and many of these continue to shape contemporary American culture. While many of these issues have been treated in novels, they have also captured the attention of playwrights. Documentary theatre explores the issues and events at the very heart of society. But in spite of its significance, this dramatic form continues to escape, for the most part, the awareness of the theatre community and its public. This book is an historical and critical survey of documentary theatre in the United States since John Reed's The Pageant of the Paterson Strike (1913). It defines documentary theatre as a dramatic representation of societal forces using a close reexamination of events, individuals, or situations. By listing current and more distant examples of American documentary theatre, the book shows that the genre is richly steeped in the oral history tradition. Therefore, American documentary theatre is an alternative to conventional journalism. For the theatre practitioner, the volume provides valuable insight about the process of making a documentary play. For the investigative researcher, the book shows that documentary theatre possesses a non-Aristotelian dramatic structure, in contrast to the strictly narrative form generally found in conventional drama. Through an overview of numerous plays, the book observes that even though documentary theatre reinvents itself from time to time, its constituent parts remain roughly the same. It concludes that a new period of expression is presently underway in the United States, one that affirms that the theatre is a vital part of society and is as important as religion, education, and government.
Author: Gary F. Dawson
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 0313304491
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
American documentary theatre records the social issues that continue to shape the United States at the close of the twentieth century. This book provides an historical and critical survey of documentary theatre in the United States since John Reed's The Pageant of the Paterson Strike (1913). It defines documentary theatre as a dramatic representation of societal forces using a close reexamination of events, individuals, or situations. While documentary theatre reinvents itself from time to time, this study demonstrates that its constituent parts remain roughly the same. Because documentary theatre is rooted in oral traditions, it offers an alternative to conventional journalistic treatments of social history. Through a close look at the history of documentary theatre, the volume concludes that a new period of expression is presently underway in the United States. Numerous social issues have marked the growth of the United States, and many of these continue to shape contemporary American culture. While many of these issues have been treated in novels, they have also captured the attention of playwrights. Documentary theatre explores the issues and events at the very heart of society. But in spite of its significance, this dramatic form continues to escape, for the most part, the awareness of the theatre community and its public. This book is an historical and critical survey of documentary theatre in the United States since John Reed's The Pageant of the Paterson Strike (1913). It defines documentary theatre as a dramatic representation of societal forces using a close reexamination of events, individuals, or situations. By listing current and more distant examples of American documentary theatre, the book shows that the genre is richly steeped in the oral history tradition. Therefore, American documentary theatre is an alternative to conventional journalism. For the theatre practitioner, the volume provides valuable insight about the process of making a documentary play. For the investigative researcher, the book shows that documentary theatre possesses a non-Aristotelian dramatic structure, in contrast to the strictly narrative form generally found in conventional drama. Through an overview of numerous plays, the book observes that even though documentary theatre reinvents itself from time to time, its constituent parts remain roughly the same. It concludes that a new period of expression is presently underway in the United States, one that affirms that the theatre is a vital part of society and is as important as religion, education, and government.
Author: Paola Hernández
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810143380
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives examines twenty‐first‐century documentary theater in Latin America, focusing on important plays by the Argentine director Vivi Tellas, the Argentine playwright and director Lola Arias, the Mexican theater collective Teatro Línea de Sombra, and the Chilean playwright and director Guillermo Calderón. Paola S. Hernández demonstrates how material objects and archives—photographs, videos, and documents such as witness reports, legal briefs, and letters—come to life onstage. Hernández argues that present-day, live performances catalog these material archives, expanding and reinterpreting the objects’ meanings. These performances produce an affective relationship between actor and audience, visualizing truths long obscured by repressive political regimes and transforming theatrical spaces into sites of witness. This process also highlights the liminality between fact and fiction, questioning the veracity of the archive. Richly detailed, nuanced, and theoretically wide-ranging, Staging Lives in Latin American Theater reveals a range of interpretations about how documentary theater can conceptualize the idea of self while also proclaiming a new mode of testimony through theatrical practices.
Author: Anna Deavere Smith
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 1101911298
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Derived from interviews with a wide range of people who experienced or observed New York's 1991 Crown Heights racial riots, Fires In The Mirror is as distinguished a work of commentary on black-white tensions as it is a work of drama. In August 1991 simmering tensions in the racially polarized Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood of Crown Heights exploded into riots after a black boy was killed by a car in a rabbi's motorcade and a Jewish student was slain by blacks in retaliation. Fires in the Mirror is dramatist Anna Deavere Smith's stunning exploration of the events and emotions leading up to and following the Crown Heights conflict. Through her portrayals of more than two dozen Crown eights adversaries, victims, and eyewitnesses, using verbatim excerpts from their observations derived from interviews she conducted, Smith provides a brilliant, Rashoman-like documentary portrait of contemporary ethnic turmoil.
Author: C. Martin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137295724
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
This book proposes a new way to consider theatre and performance that claims a special relationship to reality, truth and authenticity. It documents innovations in devising and staging theatre and performance that takes reality as its subject, cultural shifts that have generated theatre of the real, some of its problems and some possibilities.
Author: Will Hammond
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1849436657
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
Five specially commissioned discussions of verbatim theatre - in the words of the people who make it. 'What a verbatim play does is flash your research nakedly. It’s like cooking a meal but the meat is left raw.’ - Max Stafford-Clark Plays which use people’s actual words as the basis for their dramaare not a new phenomenon. But from the stages of national theatres to fringe venues and universities everywhere, ‘verbatim’ theatre, as it has come to be known, is currently enjoying unprecedented attention and success. It has also attracted high-profile criticism and impassioned debate. In these wide-ranging essays and interviews, six leading dramatists describe their varying approaches to verbatim, examine the strengths and weaknesses of its techniques and explore the reasons for its current popularity. They discuss frankly the unique opportunities and ethical dilemmas that arise when portraying real people on stage, and consider some of the criticisms levelled at this controversial documentary form. 'The intention is always to arrive at the truth.' - Nicolas Kent
Author: Thomas A. Bogar
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476606803
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 443
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Book Description
Not every presidential visit to the theatre is as famous as Lincoln's last night at Ford's, but American presidents attended the theatre long before and long after that ill-fated night. In 1751, George Washington saw his first play, The London Merchant, during a visit to Barbados. John Quincy Adams published dramatic critiques. William McKinley avoided the theatre while in office, on professional as well as moral grounds. Richard Nixon met his wife at a community theatre audition. Surveying 255 years, this volume examines presidential theatre-going as it has reflected shifting popular tastes in America.
Author: A. Forsyth
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230236944
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
Over the past two decades, theatre practitioners across the West have turned to documentary modes of performance-making to confront new socio-political realities. The essays in this book place this work in context, exploring historical and contemporary examples of documentary and 'verbatim' theatre, and applying a range of critical perspectives.
Author: Sarah L. Delany
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
Warm, feisty, and intelligent, the Delany sisters speak their mind in a book that is at once a vital historical record and a moving portrait of two remarkable women who continued to love, laugh, and embrace life after over a hundred years of living side by side. Their sharp memories tell us about the post-Reconstruction South and Booker T. Washington, Harlem’s Golden Age and Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson. Bessie Delany breaks barriers to become a dentist; Sadie Delany quietly integrates the New York City system as a high school teacher. Their extraordinary story makes an important contribution to our nation’s heritage—and an indelible impression on our lives.
Author: Julia Listengarten
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108570267
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 489
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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre since 1945 provides an overview and analysis of developments in the organization and practices of American theatre. It examines key demographic and geographical shifts American theatre after 1945 experienced in spectatorship, and addresses the economic, social, and political challenges theatre artists have faced across cultural climates and geographical locations. Specifically, it explores artistic communities, collaborative practices, and theatre methodologies across mainstream, regional, and experimental theatre practices, forms, and expressions. As American theatre has embraced diversity in practice and representation, the volume examines the various creative voices, communities, and perspectives that prior to the 1940s was mostly excluded from the theatrical landscape. This diversity has led to changing dramaturgical and theatrical languages that take us in to the twenty-first century. These shifting perspectives and evolving forms of theatrical expressions paved the ground for contemporary American theatrical innovation.
Author: Anna Deavere Smith
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0525564608
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
"Smith’s powerful style of living journalism uses the collective, cathartic nature of the theater to move us from despair toward hope.” —The Village Voice Anna Deavere Smith’s extraordinary form of documentary theater shines a light on injustices by portraying the real-life people who have experienced them. "One of her most ambitious and powerful works on how matters of race continue to divide and enslave the nation” (Variety). Smith renders a host of figures who have lived and fought the system that pushes students of color out of the classroom and into prisons. (As Smith has put it: “Rich kids get mischief, poor kids get pathologized and incarcerated.”) Using people’s own words, culled from interviews and speeches, Smith depicts Rev. Jamal Harrison Bryant, who eulogized Freddie Gray; Niya Kenny, a high school student who confronted a violent police deputy; activist Bree Newsome, who took the Confederate flag down from the South Carolina State House grounds; and many others. Their voices bear powerful witness to a great iniquity of our time—and call us to action with their accounts of resistance and hope.
