Rehearsing Revolutions

Rehearsing Revolutions PDF Author: Mary McAvoy
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609386418
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2019 George Freedley Memorial Award Finalist, 2020 Between the world wars, several labor colleges sprouted up across the U.S. These schools, funded by unions, sought to provide members with adult education while also indoctrinating them into the cause. As Mary McAvoy reveals, a big part of that learning experience centered on the schools’ drama programs. For the first time, Rehearsing Revolutions shows how these left-leaning drama programs prepared American workers for the “on-the-ground” activism emerging across the country. In fact, McAvoy argues, these amateur stages served as training grounds for radical social activism in early twentieth-century America. Using a wealth of previously unpublished material such as director’s reports, course materials, playscripts, and reviews, McAvoy traces the programs’ evolution from experimental teaching tool to radically politicized training that inspired overt—even militant—labor activism by the late 1930s. All the while, she keeps an eye on larger trends in public life, connecting interwar labor drama to post-war arts-based activism in response to McCarthyism, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights movement. Ultimately, McAvoy asks: What did labor drama do for the workers’ colleges and why did they pursue it? She finds her answer through several different case studies in places like the Portland Labor College and the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

Rehearsing Revolutions

Rehearsing Revolutions PDF Author: Mary McAvoy
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609386418
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book Here

Book Description
Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2019 George Freedley Memorial Award Finalist, 2020 Between the world wars, several labor colleges sprouted up across the U.S. These schools, funded by unions, sought to provide members with adult education while also indoctrinating them into the cause. As Mary McAvoy reveals, a big part of that learning experience centered on the schools’ drama programs. For the first time, Rehearsing Revolutions shows how these left-leaning drama programs prepared American workers for the “on-the-ground” activism emerging across the country. In fact, McAvoy argues, these amateur stages served as training grounds for radical social activism in early twentieth-century America. Using a wealth of previously unpublished material such as director’s reports, course materials, playscripts, and reviews, McAvoy traces the programs’ evolution from experimental teaching tool to radically politicized training that inspired overt—even militant—labor activism by the late 1930s. All the while, she keeps an eye on larger trends in public life, connecting interwar labor drama to post-war arts-based activism in response to McCarthyism, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights movement. Ultimately, McAvoy asks: What did labor drama do for the workers’ colleges and why did they pursue it? She finds her answer through several different case studies in places like the Portland Labor College and the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

Rehearsing the Revolution

Rehearsing the Revolution PDF Author: Odai Johnson
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874137248
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
It charts the limits of representation within the royal theater where Whig playwrights were challenging Stuart mythography, before moving out onto the streets where the contracts of representation were less circumscribed by royal interests. It was on the streets of London that the Whig party staged massive civic performances - the Pope-Burning pageants - that allowed the circulation of the Exclusion platform."--BOOK JACKET.

Staging Postcommunism

Staging Postcommunism PDF Author: Vessela S. Warner
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609386787
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Theatre in Eastern and Central Europe was never the same after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In the transition to a postcommunist world, “alternative theatre” found ways to grapple with political chaos, corruption, and aggressive implementation of a market economy. Three decades later, this volume is the first comprehensive examination of alternative theatre in ten former communist countries. The essays focus on companies and artists that radically changed the language and organization of theatre in the countries formerly known as the Eastern European bloc. This collection investigates the ways in which postcommunist alternative theatre negotiated and embodied change not only locally but globally as well. Contributors: Dennis Barnett, Dennis C. Beck, Violeta Decheva, Luule Epner, John Freedman, Barry Freeman, Margarita Kompelmakher, Jaak Rahesoo, Angelina Ros ̧ca, Ban ̧uta Rubess, Christopher Silsby, Andrea Tompa, S. E. Wilmer

American Idyll

American Idyll PDF Author: Catherine Liu
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609380517
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
A trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum, American Idyll argues that social mobility, once a revered hallmark of American society, has ebbed, as higher education has become a mechanistic process for efficient sorting that has more to do with class formation than anything else. Academic freedom and aesthetic education are reserved for high-scoring, privileged students and vocational education is the only option for economically marginal ones. Throughout most of American history, antielitist sentiment was reserved for attacks against an entrenched aristocracy or rapacious plutocracy, but it has now become a revolt against meritocracy itself, directed against what insurgents see as a ruling class of credentialed elites with degrees from exclusive academic institutions. Catherine Liu reveals that, within the academy and stemming from the relatively new discipline of cultural studies, animosity against expertise has animated much of the Left’s cultural criticism. By unpacking the disciplinary formation and academic ambitions of American cultural studies, Liu uncovers the genealogy of the current antielitism, placing the populism that dominates headlines within a broad historical context. In the process, she emphasizes the relevance of the historical origins of populist revolt against finance capital and its political influence. American Idyll reveals the unlikely alliance between American pragmatism and proponents of the Frankfurt School and argues for the importance of broad frames of historical thinking in encouraging robust academic debate within democratic institutions. In a bold thought experiment that revives and defends Richard Hofstadter’s theories of anti-intellectualism in American life, Liu asks, What if cultural populism had been the consensus politics of the past three decades? American Idyll shows that recent antielitism does nothing to redress the source of its discontent—namely, growing economic inequality and diminishing social mobility. Instead, pseudopopulist rage, in conservative and countercultural forms alike, has been transformed into resentment, content merely to take down allegedly elitist cultural forms without questioning the real political and economic consolidation of powers that has taken place in America during the past thirty years.

Rehearsing for Doomsday

Rehearsing for Doomsday PDF Author: Scott Cook
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476644934
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
In 1988, Scott Cook was a boarding school PE teacher responsible for the proper inflation of dodge balls. A year later, he was operating an underground strategic missile control center with 10 intercontinental nuclear weapons capable of obliterating an entire country. This unexpected journey took him from the serene hills of Virginia through months of intensive training on the California coast to the front lines of the Cold War, beneath the frozen plains of North Dakota. His frank, entertaining memoir describes the insular and secretive military subculture of men and women who lived with the sobering burden of potentially unleashing global devastation, and how an easy-going gym coach ended up in an organization whose unofficial motto was "To err is human; to forgive is not Strategic Air Command policy."

Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution PDF Author: Madame de Staël (Anne-Louise-Germaine)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description


Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism

Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism PDF Author: Patricia A. Ybarra
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810136473
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism traces how Latinx theater in the United States has engaged with the policies, procedures, and outcomes of neoliberal economics in the Americas from the 1970s to the present. Patricia A. Ybarra examines IMF interventions, NAFTA, shifts in immigration policy, the escalation of border industrialization initiatives, and austerity programs. She demonstrates how these policies have created the conditions for many of the most tumultuous events in the Americas in the last forty years, including dictatorships in the Southern Cone; the 1994 Cuban Rafter Crisis; femicides in Juárez, Mexico; the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico; and the rise of narcotrafficking as a violent and vigorous global business throughout the Americas. Latinx artists have responded to these crises by writing and developing innovative theatrical modes of representation about neoliberalism. Ybarra analyzes the work of playwrights María Irene Fornés, Cherríe Moraga, Michael John Garcés, Caridad Svich, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Victor Cazares, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Tanya Saracho, and Octavio Solis. In addressing histories of oppression in their home countries, these playwrights have newly imagined affective political and economic ties in the Americas. They also have rethought the hallmark movements of Latin politics in the United States—cultural nationalism, third world solidarity, multiculturalism—and their many discontents.

Your Band Sucks

Your Band Sucks PDF Author: Jon Fine
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698170318
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
• A New York Times Summer Reading List selection • A Publishers Weekly Best Summer Book of 2015 • A Business Insider Best Summer Read • An Esquire Father’s Day Book selection • A New York Observer Best Music Book of 2015 • A memoir charting thirty years of the American independent rock underground by a musician who knows it intimately Jon Fine spent nearly thirty years performing and recording with bands that played various forms of aggressive and challenging underground rock music, and, as he writes in this memoir, at no point were any of those bands “ever threatened, even distantly, by actual fame.” Yet when members of his first band, Bitch Magnet, reunited after twenty-one years to tour Europe, Asia, and America, diehard longtime fans traveled from far and wide to attend those shows, despite creeping middle-age obligations of parenthood and 9-to-5 jobs, testament to the remarkable staying power of the indie culture that the bands predating the likes of Bitch Magnet--among them Black Flag, Mission of Burma, and Sonic Youth --willed into existence through sheer determination and a shared disdain for the mediocrity of contemporary popular music. In indie rock’s pre-Internet glory days of the 1980s, such defiant bands attracted fans only through samizdat networks that encompassed word of mouth, college radio, tiny record stores and ‘zines. Eschewing the superficiality of performers who gained fame through MTV, indie bands instead found glory in all-night recording sessions, shoestring van tours and endless appearances in grimy clubs. Some bands with a foot in this scene, like REM and Nirvana, eventually attained mainstream success. Many others, like Bitch Magnet, were beloved only by the most obsessed fans of this time. Like Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, Your Band Sucks is an insider’s look at a fascinating and ferociously loved subculture. In it, Fine tracks how the indie-rock underground emerged and evolved, how it grappled with the mainstream and vice versa, and how it led many bands to an odd rebirth in the 21 st Century in which they reunited, briefly and bittersweetly, after being broken up for decades. Like Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Your Band Sucks is a unique evocation of a particular aesthetic moment. With backstage access to many key characters in the scene—and plenty of wit and sharply-worded opinion—Fine delivers a memoir that affectionately yet critically portrays an important, heady moment in music history.

Rehearsal for Reconstruction

Rehearsal for Reconstruction PDF Author: Willie Lee Rose
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820320618
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Just seven months into the Civil War, a Union fleet sailed into South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound, landed a ground force, and then made its way upriver to Beaufort. Planters and farmers fled before their attackers, allowing virtually all their major possessions, including ten thousand slaves, to fall into Union hands. Rehearsal for Reconstruction, winner of the Allan Nevins Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Charles S. Sydnor Prize, is historian Willie Lee Rose’s chronicle of change in this Sea Island region from its capture in 1861 through Reconstruction. With epic sweep, Rose demonstrates how Port Royal constituted a stage upon which a dress rehearsal for the South’s postwar era was acted out.

Beyond Ridiculous

Beyond Ridiculous PDF Author: Kenneth Elliott
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609389190
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Beyond Ridiculous tells the story of Theatre-in-Limbo. Elliott narrates in first-person the company's Cinderella tale of fun, heartbreak, and dishy drama. At the center of the book is a young Charles Busch, an unforgettable personality fighting to be seen, be heard, and express his unique style as a writer-performer. The tragedy of AIDS among treasured friends in the company, the struggle for mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ theatre during the reign of President Ronald Reagan, and the exploration of new ways of being a gay theatre artist make the book a bittersweet and joyous ride.