Author: Jeehee Hong
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082485540X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
In eleventh-century China, both the living and the dead were treated to theatrical spectacles. Chambers designed for the deceased were ornamented with actors and theaters sculpted in stone, molded in clay, rendered in paint. Notably, the tombs were not commissioned for the scholars and officials who dominate the historical record of China but affluent farmers, merchants, clerics—people whose lives and deaths largely went unrecorded. Why did these elites furnish their burial chambers with vivid representations of actors and theatrical performances? Why did they pursue such distinctive tomb-making? In Theater of the Dead, Jeehee Hong maintains that the production and placement of these tomb images shed light on complex intersections of the visual, mortuary, and everyday worlds of China at the dawn of the second millennium. Assembling recent archaeological evidence and previously overlooked historical sources, Hong explores new elements in the cultural and religious lives of middle-period Chinese. Rather than treat theatrical tomb images as visual documents of early theater, she calls attention to two largely ignored and interlinked aspects: their complex visual forms and their symbolic roles in the mortuary context in which they were created and used. She introduces carefully selected examples that show visual and conceptual novelty in engendering and engaging dimensions of space within and beyond the tomb in specifically theatrical terms. These reveal surprising insights into the intricate relationship between the living and the dead. The overarching sense of theatricality conveys a densely socialized vision of death. Unlike earlier modes of representation in funerary art, which favored cosmological or ritual motifs and maintained a clear dichotomy between the two worlds, these visual practices show a growing interest in conceptualizing the sphere of the dead within the existing social framework. By materializing a “social turn,” this remarkable phenomenon constitutes a tangible symptom of middle-period Chinese attempting to socialize the sacred realm. Theater of the Dead is an original work that will contribute to bridging core issues in visual culture, history, religion, and drama and theater studies.
Author: Brad Garcia
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1684709407
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 454
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Book Description
What if you found out you had just died? Where do you go when you die? Who would you find on the other side of life?
Author: Irwin Shaw
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Inc
ISBN: 9780822201656
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 52
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Book Description
In an unnamed war, six dead soldiers refuse to allow themselves to be buried in the trench dug by two of their buddies, causing consternation among the army's generals.
Author: Jean Claude Van Itallie
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
ISBN: 9780822211488
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 62
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Book Description
THE STORY: Based on the classic Buddhist text, the play deals with the transmigration of the soul and the choices to be made as the spirit hovers in suspended animation. Brilliantly theatrical in concept and execution, the piece blends music, mime,
Author: George Reinblatt
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 0573651396
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 91
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Book Description
Based on Sam Raimi¿s 80s cult classic films, EVIL DEAD tells the tale of 5 college kids who travel to a cabin in the woods and accidentally unleash an evil force. And although it may sound like a horror, it's not! The songs are hilariously campy and the show is bursting with more farce than a Monty Python skit. EVIL DEAD: THE MUSICAL unearths the old familiar story: boy and friends take a weekend getaway at abandoned cabin, boy expects to get lucky, boy unleashes ancient evil spirit, friends turn into Candarian Demons, boy fights until dawn to survive. As musical mayhem descends upon this sleepover in the woods, ¿camp¿ takes on a whole new meaning with uproarious numbers like ¿All the Men in my Life Keep Getting Killed by Candarian Demons,¿ ¿Look Who¿s Evil Now¿ and ¿Do the Necronomicon.¿
Author: Richard Nelson
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 9780573627835
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 68
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Book Description
Adapted from Joyce's literary masterpiece set in 1904, the last and best known of the short stories collected in The Dubliners, this intimate musical portrays a homespun Yuletide party with Irish music, dancing, food, drink and good fellowship. Sparkling songs, many of them traditional sounding Irish melodies that are performed as entertainment by the partygoers, are all original. Christopher Walken starred in a production that moved from Playwrights Horizon to Broadway.
Author: Brent Wood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429582218
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
The Tragic Odes of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead is a multifaceted study of tragedy in the group’s live performances showing how Garcia brought about catharsis through dance by leading songs of grief, mortality, and ironic fate in a collective theatrical context. This musical, literary, and historical analysis of thirty-five songs with tragic dimensions performed by Garcia in concert with the Grateful Dead illustrates the syncretic approach and acute editorial ear he applied in adapting songs of Robert Hunter, Bob Dylan, and folk tradition. Tragically ironic situations in which Garcia found himself when performing these songs are revealed, including those related to his opiate addiction and final decline. This book examines Garcia’s musical craftsmanship and the Grateful Dead’s collective art in terms of the mystery-rites of ancient Greece, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Dionysus, 20th century American music rooted in New Orleans, Hermann Hesse’s Magic Theater, and the Greek Theatre at Berkeley, offering a clear prospect on an often misunderstood phenomenon. Featuring interdisciplinary analysis, close attention to musical and poetic strategies, and historical and critical contexts, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of Popular Music, Musicology, Cultural Studies, and American Studies, as well as to the Grateful Dead’s avid listeners.
Author: Vikram Paralkar
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1948226545
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
A surgeon must bring a dead family back to life in this fabulist debut novel set in rural India, called “otherworldly” and “a haunting contemplation of life, death, the liminal space in between, and the dogged search for resurrection” (Kirkus Reviews, starred). Fleeing scandal in the city, a surgeon accepts a job at a village clinic. He buys antibiotics out of pocket, squashes roaches, and chafes at the interventions of the corrupt officer who oversees his work. But his outlook on life changes one night when a teacher, his pregnant wife, and their young son appear. Killed in a violent robbery, they tell the surgeon that they have been offered a second chance at living if the surgeon can mend their wounds before sunrise. So begins a night of quiet work, “as if the crickets had been bribed,” during which the surgeon realizes his future is tied more closely to that of the dead family than he could have imagined. By dawn, he and his assistant have gained knowledge no mortal should have. In this inventive novel charged with philosophical gravity and sly humor, Vikram Paralkar takes on the practice of medicine in a time when the right to health care is frequently challenged. Engaging earthly injustice and imaginaries of the afterlife, he asks how we might navigate corrupt institutions to find a moral center. Encompassing social criticism and magically unreal drama, Night Theater is a first novel as satisfying for its existential inquiry as for its enthralling story of a skeptical physician who arrives at a greater understanding of life's miracles.
Author: Marjorie Susan Venit
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780521806596
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Spanning the life of the ancient city almost from 331 BCE through its transformation into a Christian metropolis, Alexandria's monumental tombs provide the single richest source of information about the ancient city. They attest to the diversity and the cohesion of the community, its population's wealth and love of luxury, sense of theatricality and pomp, and cosmopolitan attitude. Alexandria's monumental tombs confirm the changing ethos of the city's populace, as the tombs provide the stage on which the city's continuity and shifting concerns are played out.
Author: Tom Stoppard
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 155584894X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 134
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Book Description
Acclaimed as a modern dramatic masterpiece, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead is the fabulously inventive tale of Hamlet as told from the worm’s-eve view of the bewildered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two minor characters in Shakespeare’s play. In Tom Stoppard’s best-known work, this Shakespearean Laurel and Hardy finally get a chance to take the lead role, but do so in a world where echoes of Waiting for Godot resound, where reality and illusion intermix, and where fate leads our two heroes to a tragic but inevitable end. Tom Stoppard was catapulted into the front ranks of modem playwrights overnight when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in London in 1967. Its subsequent run in New York brought it the same enthusiastic acclaim, and the play has since been performed numerous times in the major theatrical centers of the world. It has won top honors for play and playwright in a poll of London Theater critics, and in its printed form it was chosen one of the “Notable Books of 1967” by the American Library Association.
