Author: Helen Nicholson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137508108
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
This book is the first major study of amateur theatre, offering new perspectives on its place in the cultural and social life of communities. Historically informed, it traces how amateur theatre has impacted national repertoires, contributed to diverse creative economies, and responded to changing patterns of labour. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research, it traces the importance of amateur theatre to crafting places and the ways in which it sustains the creativity of amateur theatre over a lifetime. It asks: how does amateur theatre-making contribute to the twenty-first century amateur turn?
Author: David Bullen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040095267
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 114
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Book Description
Through a series of case studies, this book explores the interrelations among Greek tragedy, theatre practices, and education in the United Kingdom. This is situated within what the volume proposes as ‘the Classics ecology’. The term ‘ecology’, frequently used in Theatre Studies, understands Classics as a field of cultural production dependent on shared knowledge circulated via formal and informal networks, which operate on the basis of mutually beneficial exchange. Productions of Greek tragedy may be influenced by members of the team studying Classics subjects at school or university, or reading popular works of Classical scholarship, or else by working with an academic consultant. All of these have some degree of connection to academic Classics, albeit filtered through different lenses, creating a network of mutual influence and benefit (the ecology). In this way, theatrical productions of Greek drama may, in the long term, influence Classics as an academic discipline, and certainly contribute to attesting to the relevance of Classics in the modern world. The chapters in this volume include contributions by both theatre makers and academics, whose backgrounds vary between Theatre Studies and Classics. They comprise a variety of case studies and approaches, exploring the dissemination of knowledge about the ancient world through projects that engage with Greek tragedy, theories and practices of theatre making through the chorus, and practical relationships between scholars and theatre makers. By understanding the staging of Greek tragedy in the United Kingdom today as being part of the Classics ecology, the book examines practices and processes as key areas in which the value of engaging with the ancient past is (re)negotiated. This book is primarily suitable for students and scholars working in Classical Reception and Theatre Studies who are interested in the reception history of Greek tragedy and the intersection of the two fields. It is also of use to more general Classics and Theatre Studies audiences, especially those engaged with current debates around ‘saving Classics’ and those interested in a structural, systemic approach to the intersection between theatre, culture, and class.
Author: Lisa Woynarski
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030558533
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
This book addresses theatre’s contribution to the way we think about ecology, our relationship to the environment, and what it means to be human in the context of climate change. It offers a detailed study of the ways in which contemporary performance has critiqued and re-imagined everyday ecological relationships, in more just and equitable ways. The broad spectrum of ecologically-oriented theatre and performance included here, largely from the UK, US, Canada, Europe, and Mexico, have problematised, reframed, and upended the pervasive and reductive images of climate change that tend to dominate the ecological imagination. Taking an inclusive approach this book foregrounds marginalised perspectives and the multiple social and political forces that shape climate change and related ecological crises, framing understandings of the earth as home. Recent works by Fevered Sleep, Rimini Protokoll, Violeta Luna, Deke Weaver, Metis Arts, Lucy + Jorge Orta, as well as Indigenous activist movements such as NoDAPL and Idle No More, are described in detail.
Author: Bonnie White
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000997952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Women’s Amateur Theatre in Rural Britain is the first book-length study of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes’ amateur drama groups, which served as an umbrella organisation for women’s amateur drama. This work addresses a key historical gap by covering the activities, lives, and labour of women in rural England, Wales, and Scotland. It challenges gender-based assumptions about the value of women’s amateur theatre, highlighting the need for leisure opportunities and social connections in rural villages. The rapid expansion of women’s amateur drama groups is assessed in conjunction with major developments of the period, including the effect of post-1918 reconstruction efforts in rural regions, the revaluation of informal adult education schemes, the law’s influences and restrictions on amateur performances, and the impact of the Second World War on the ability of the Women’s Institutes to carve out a space for all-women’s drama groups that empowered women through education and skill-building programmes to aid in personal and community development. The broad scope of this research will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars, and non-specialists interested in cultural history and the lives of rural women after the First World War.
Author: Don Watson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350232068
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
This study of British amateur theatre in the inter-war period examines five different but interwoven examples of the belief, common in theatrical and educational circles at the time, that amateur drama had a purpose beyond recreation. Amateur theatre was at the height of its popularity as a cultural practice between the wars, so that by 1939 more British people had practical experience of putting on plays than at any time before or since. Providing an original account of the use of drama in adult education projects in deprived areas, and of amateur theatre in government-funded centres for the unemployed in the 1930s, it discusses repertoires, participation by working- class people and pioneering techniques of play-making. Amateur drama festivals and competitions were intended to raise standards and educate audiences. This book assesses their effect on play-making, and the use of innovative one-act plays to express contentious material, as well as looking at the Left Book Club Theatre Guild as an attempt to align the amateur theatre movement with anti-fascist and anti-war movements. A chapter on the Second World War rectifies the neglect of amateur theatre in war-time cultural studies, arguing that it was present and important in every aspect of war-time life. Don Watson builds on current scholarship and makes use of archival sources, local newspapers, unpublished scripts and the records of organizations not usually associated with the theatre. His work explores the range and diversity of amateur drama between the wars and the contributions it made to British theatre.
Author: Matthew Franks
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812297415
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Subscription Theater asks why turn-of-the-century British and Irish citizens spent so much time, money, and effort adding their names to subscription lists. Shining a spotlight on private play-producing clubs, public repertory theaters, amateur drama groups, and theatrical magazines, Matthew Franks locates subscription theaters in a vast constellation of civic subscription initiatives, ranging from voluntary schools and workers' hospitals to soldiers' memorials and Diamond Jubilee funds. Across these enterprises, Franks argues, subscribers created their own spaces for performing social roles from which they had long been excluded. Whether by undermining the authority of the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays and London's commercial theater producers, or by extending rights to disenfranchised women and property-less men, a diverse cast of subscribers including typists, plumbers, and maids acted as political representatives for their fellow citizens, both inside the theater and far beyond it. Citizens prized a "democratic" or "representative" subscription list as an end in itself, and such lists set the stage for the eventual public subsidy of subscription endeavors. Subscription Theater points to the importance of printed ephemera such as programs, tickets, and prospectuses in questioning any assumption that theatrical collectivity is confined to the live performance event. Drawing on new media as well as old, Franks uses a database of over 23,000 stage productions to reveal that subscribers introduced nearly a third of the plays that were most frequently revived between 1890 and the mid-twentieth century, as well as nearly half of all new translations, and they were instrumental in staging the work of such writers as Shaw and Ibsen, whose plays featured subscription lists as a plot point or prop. Although subscribers often are blamed for being a conservative force in theater, Franks demonstrates that they have been responsible for how we value audience and repertoire today, and their history offers a new account of the relationship between ephemera, drama, and democracy.
Author: Baz Kershaw
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521877164
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
A study into the relationships between performance, theatre and environmental ecology.
Author: Katharine M Cockin
Publisher: Pen and Sword Family History
ISBN: 1526732084
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
How can you find out about the lives of ancestors who were involved in the world of theater: on stage and on film, in the music halls and traveling shows, in the circus and in all sorts of other forms of public performance? Katharine Cockin’s handbook provides a fascinating introduction for readers searching for information about ancestors who had clearly defined roles in the world of the theater and performance as well as those who left only a few tantalizing clues behind. The wider history of public performance is outlined, from its earliest origins in church rituals and mystery plays through periods of censorship driven by campaigns on moral and religious grounds up to the modern world of stage and screen. Case studies, which are a special feature of the book, demonstrate how the relevant records and be identified and interpreted, and they prove how much revealing information they contain. Information on relevant archives, books, museums and websites make this an essential guide for anyone who is keen to explore the subject.
Author: Claire Cochrane
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350034312
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography is an authoritative guide to contemporary debates and practices in this field. The book covers the key themes and methods that are current in theatre history research, with a particular focus on expanding the object of study to include engagement with theatre and performance practices and the development of theatre histories around the world. Central to the book are eighteen specially commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars from a wide range of international contexts, whose discussion of individual case studies is predicated on their understanding and experience of their 'local' landscape of theatre history. These essays reveal where important work continues to be done in the field and, most valuably, draws on academic contexts beyond the Western academy to expand our knowledge of the exciting directions that such an approach opens up. Prefaced by an introduction tracing the development of the discipline of theatre history and changing historiographical approaches, the Handbook explores current issues pertaining to theatre and performance history research, as well as providing up to date and robust introductions to the methods and historiographic questions being explored by researchers in the field. Featuring a series of essential research tools, including a detailed list of resources and an annotated bibliography of key texts, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance history and historiography.
Author: Helen Nicholson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100084823X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 109
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Book Description
Theatre in Towns offers a contemporary perspective on the role of theatre in the cultural life of towns in England. Exploring volunteer-led, professional and community theatres, this book investigates the rich and diverse ways that theatres in towns serve their locality, negotiate their civic role, participate in networks of mutual aid and exchange, and connect audiences beyond their geographical borders. With a geographical focus on post-industrial, seaside, commuter and market towns in England, the book opens questions about how theatre shapes the narratives of town life, and how localism, networks and partnerships across and between towns contribute to living sustainably. Each chapter is critically and historically informed, drawing on original research in towns, including visits to performances and many conversations with townspeople, from theatre-makers, performers, set-builders, front-of-house volunteers, to audience members and civic leaders. Theatre in Towns asks urgent questions about how the relationships between towns and theatres can be redefined in new and equitable ways in the future. Theatre in Towns brings new research to scholars and students of theatre studies, cultural geography, cultural and social policy and political sociology. It will also interest artists, policy-makers and researchers wanting to develop their own and others’ understanding of the value of active theatre cultures in towns. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
