Drama and Resistance

Drama and Resistance PDF Author: Claire Sponsler
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816629275
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Provides a cultural and historical context for medieval popular drama. In Drama and Resistance, Claire Sponsler explores the intertwined histories of bodily subjectivity, commodity culture, and theatricality in late medieval England. In a fascinating consideration of popular drama in the period from 1350 to 1520, she argues that many types of performances during this time represented cultural evasions of the imposition of disciplinary power. The medieval theater was a social site where resistance, masked from the full scrutiny of authority by theatricality, was practiced, articulated, and enacted. Sponsler examines three key discourses of authoritarian bodily and commodity control -- clothing laws, conduct literature, and Books of Hours -- and pairs them with three kinds of theatrical performances that enact resistance to disciplining codes -- Robin Hood performances, morality plays, and Corpus Christi pageants. She considers the contradictions and inconsistencies in the repressive official discourses and analyzes the ways in which the staging of forbidden acts like cross-dressing, social and sexual misbehavior, and violence against the body challenged these discourses. Drawing on recent social theory, Drama and Resistance is an important contribution to medieval studies and the history of theater.

Drama and Resistance

Drama and Resistance PDF Author: Claire Sponsler
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816629275
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Provides a cultural and historical context for medieval popular drama. In Drama and Resistance, Claire Sponsler explores the intertwined histories of bodily subjectivity, commodity culture, and theatricality in late medieval England. In a fascinating consideration of popular drama in the period from 1350 to 1520, she argues that many types of performances during this time represented cultural evasions of the imposition of disciplinary power. The medieval theater was a social site where resistance, masked from the full scrutiny of authority by theatricality, was practiced, articulated, and enacted. Sponsler examines three key discourses of authoritarian bodily and commodity control -- clothing laws, conduct literature, and Books of Hours -- and pairs them with three kinds of theatrical performances that enact resistance to disciplining codes -- Robin Hood performances, morality plays, and Corpus Christi pageants. She considers the contradictions and inconsistencies in the repressive official discourses and analyzes the ways in which the staging of forbidden acts like cross-dressing, social and sexual misbehavior, and violence against the body challenged these discourses. Drawing on recent social theory, Drama and Resistance is an important contribution to medieval studies and the history of theater.

Staging Resistance

Staging Resistance PDF Author: Jeanne Marie Colleran
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472066711
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Fresh perspectives on political theater and its essential contribution to contemporary culture. Focused studies of individual plays complement broad-based discussions of the place of theater in a radically democratic society. This consistently challenging collection describes the art of change confronting the actual processes of change. 17 photos.

Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance

Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance PDF Author: Nandi Bhatia
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472024620
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Despite its importance to literary and cultural texts of resistance, theater has been largely overlooked as a field of analysis in colonial and postcolonial studies. Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance seeks to address that absence, as it uniquely views drama and performance as central to the practice of nationalism and anti-colonial resistance. Nandi Bhatia argues that Indian theater was a significant force in the struggle against oppressive colonial and postcolonial structures, as it sought to undo various schemes of political and cultural power through its engagement with subjects derived from mythology, history, and available colonial models such as Shakespeare. Bhatia's attention to local histories within a postcolonial framework places performance in a global and transcultural context. Drawing connections between art and politics, between performance and everyday experience, Bhatia shows how performance often intervened in political debates and even changed the course of politics. One of the first Western studies of Indian theater to link the aesthetics and the politics of that theater, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance combines in-depth archival research with close readings of dramatic texts performed at critical moments in history. Each chapter amplifies its themes against the backdrop of specific social conditions as it examines particular dramatic productions, from The Indigo Mirror to adaptations of Shakespeare plays by Indian theater companies, illustrating the role of theater in bringing nationalist, anticolonial, and gendered struggles into the public sphere. Nandi Bhatia is Associate Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.

The Theatre of the Absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd PDF Author: Martin Esslin
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307548015
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition. Over four decades after its initial publication, Esslin’s landmark book has lost none of its freshness. The questions these dramatists raise about the struggle for meaning in a purposeless world are still as incisive and necessary today as they were when Beckett’s tramps first waited beneath a dying tree on a lonely country road for a mysterious benefactor who would never show. Authoritative, engaging, and eminently readable, The Theatre of the Absurd is nothing short of a classic: vital reading for anyone with an interest in the theatre.

The Art of Resistance

The Art of Resistance PDF Author: Colette Braeckman
Publisher: Verbrecher Verlag
ISBN: 3957324424
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The Golden Books are a joint project by NTGent and the Berlin publisher Verbrecher Verlag. It is a series comprising programme articles on theatre, aesthetics and politics as well as background pieces on projects by NTGent. A series on both the theory and the practice of an engaged theatre of the future. The Art of Resistance is the fourth volume in this series. It gathers speeches, essays, interviews and manifestos, written and performed by artists, activists, journalists and lawyers. How can we practice solidarity? Fight an unjust system of imperialism and neoliberal capitalism? Give a voice to the unheard? With contributions from Colette Braeckman, Luanda Casella, Maria Lucia Cruz Correia, Aminata Demba, Douglas Estevam da Silva, Heleen Debeuckelaere, Beatrice Delvaux, Ulrike Guerot, Dalilla Hermans, Prince Kihangi, Daniel Lima, Robert Menasse, Ogutu Muraya, Yoonis Osman Nuur, Brunilda Pali, Milo Rau, Hendrik Schoukens, Yvan Sagnet, Lara Staal, Terreyro Coreografico / Daniel Fagus Kairoz, Marc-Antoine Vumilia, Harald Welzer, Veridiana Zurita. All texts in english.

Slavery and Resistance

Slavery and Resistance PDF Author: Anne Devereaux Jordan
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
ISBN: 9780761421788
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
"Describes slavery in the United States from colonial times up to the Civil War"--Provided by publisher.

Revision as Resistance in Twentieth-Century American Drama

Revision as Resistance in Twentieth-Century American Drama PDF Author: M. Malburne-Wade
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137441615
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
American dramas consciously rewrite the past as a means of determined criticism and intentional resistance. While modern criticism often sees the act of revision as derivative, Malburne-Wade uses Victor Turner's concept of the social drama and the concept of the liminal to argue for a more complicated view of revision.

Churchill’s Socialism

Churchill’s Socialism PDF Author: Siân Adiseshiah
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527554678
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Although now celebrated as a world-leading playwright, Caryl Churchill has received little attention for her socialism, which has been frequently overlooked in favour of emphasising gendered identities and postmodernist themes. Churchill’s Socialism examines eight of Churchill’s plays with reference to socialist theories and political movements. This well-researched and dynamic new book reframes Churchill’s work, positioning her plays within socialist discourses, and producing persuasive political readings of her drama that reflect much more of the political challenge that the plays pose. It additionally explores her uneasy relationship with postmodernism, which presents itself particularly in Churchill’s later plays. The book contains a very helpful chapter on socialist contexts, which outlines some of the key events, debates, and movements during the late 1960s up until the early 2000s. This chapter also offers an incisive critique of the easy acceptance by some socialists of a postmodernist rejection of grand narratives and political agency. An in depth examination of the rarely explored interconnections of utopianism and theatre, forms another chapter, where all eight of Churchill’s plays, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Vinegar Tom, Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, Mad Forest, The Skriker, and Far Away, are introduced. The plays are then discussed in pairs in a further four chapters with reference to communist historiography, the class/gender intersection, the end-of-history thesis, ecocritical challenges and postmodernism.

Pure Resistance

Pure Resistance PDF Author: Theodora A. Jankowski
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812235524
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Noting that though Christian thought has consistently held virginity to be purer than married life, a virgin woman has always queer been in social terms, Jankowsky (English, Washington State U.) explores the tensions behind the many representations of virgin women in English stage plays from 1590 to about 1670 and how those representations can be considered queer. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Staging Holocaust Resistance

Staging Holocaust Resistance PDF Author: Gene A. Plunka
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137000619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Plunka argues that drama is the ideal art form to revitalize the collective memory of Holocaust resistance. This comparative drama study examines a variety of international plays - some quite well-known, others more obscure - that focus on collective or individual defiance of the Nazis.