Women's Comedic Art as Social Revolution

Women's Comedic Art as Social Revolution PDF Author: Domnica Radulescu
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786488581
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Though comic women have existed since the days of Baubo, the mythic figure of sexual humor, they have been neglected by scholars and critics. This pioneering volume tells the stories of five women who have created revolutionary forms of comic performance and discourse that defy prejudice. The artists include 16th-century performer Isabella Andreini, 17th-century improviser Caterina Biancolelli, 20th-century Italian playwright Franca Rame, and contemporary performance artists Deb Margolin and Kimberly Dark. All create humor that subverts patriarchal attitudes, conventional gender roles, and stereotypical images. The book ends with a practical guide for performers and teachers of theater.

Women's Comedic Art as Social Revolution

Women's Comedic Art as Social Revolution PDF Author: Domnica Radulescu
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786488581
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book Here

Book Description
Though comic women have existed since the days of Baubo, the mythic figure of sexual humor, they have been neglected by scholars and critics. This pioneering volume tells the stories of five women who have created revolutionary forms of comic performance and discourse that defy prejudice. The artists include 16th-century performer Isabella Andreini, 17th-century improviser Caterina Biancolelli, 20th-century Italian playwright Franca Rame, and contemporary performance artists Deb Margolin and Kimberly Dark. All create humor that subverts patriarchal attitudes, conventional gender roles, and stereotypical images. The book ends with a practical guide for performers and teachers of theater.

Writing and Performing Female Identity in Italian Culture

Writing and Performing Female Identity in Italian Culture PDF Author: Virginia Picchietti
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319408356
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This volume investigates the ways in which Italian women writers, filmmakers, and performers have represented female identity across genres from the immediate post-World War II period to the turn of the twenty-first century. Considering genres such as prose, poetry, drama, and film, these essays examine the vision of female agency and self-actualization arising from women artists’ critique of female identity. This dual approach reveals unique interpretations of womanhood in Italy spanning more than fifty years, while also providing a deep investigation of the manipulation of canvases historically centered on the male subject. With its unique coupling of generic and thematic concerns, the volume contributes to the ever expanding female artistic legacy, and to our understanding of postwar Italian women’s evolving relationship to the narration of history, gender roles, and these artists’ use and revision of generic convention to communicate their vision.

Theorising the Popular

Theorising the Popular PDF Author: Michael Brennan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443893714
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
While chiefly a site of popular pleasure and merriment, popular culture also offers a profound sense of meaning-making, where it functions as a site and source through which identities are inhabited, brokered and contested. As a significant domain within contemporary society, popular culture is both shaped by and has the capacity to shape developments occurring at the wider social, cultural and political levels of human life. Taking popular culture seriously – as an arena of everyday life that has merit in its own right – the contributors to this wide-ranging collection of essays offer unique insight into various elements of contemporary popular culture. Drawn from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as the performing arts and creative industries, this volume offers theoretical reflections on the significance of particular elements of popular culture: from the performative effects of interactive and immersive theatre, through developments in the shifting cultural landscape of a post-television age, to contemporary popular literature of various sorts and its basis for identity and fandom. Above all else, what these essays demonstrate is the radically porous nature of popular culture, and the ways in which it continually defies attempts at neat categorisation by transcending traditional boundaries and genres.

Theater of War and Exile

Theater of War and Exile PDF Author: Domnica Radulescu
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476619190
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
In what ways does political trauma influence the art arising from it? Is there an aesthetic of war and exile in theatrical works that emerge from such experiences? Are there cultural markers defining such works from areas like Eastern Europe and Israel? This book considers these questions in an examination of plays, performances and theater artists that speak from a place of political violence and displacement. The author's critical inquiry covers a variety of theatrical experimentations, including Brechtian distancing, black humor, pastiche, surreal and hyper-real imagery, reversed chronologies and disrupted narratives. Drawing on postmodern theories and performance studies as well as interviews and personal statements from the artists discussed, this study explores the transformative power of the theater arts and their function as catalysts for social change, healing and remembrance.

Fifty Key Figures in Queer US Theatre

Fifty Key Figures in Queer US Theatre PDF Author: Jimmy A. Noriega
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100063888X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Whether creating Broadway musicals, experimental dramas, or outrageous comedies, the performers, directors, playwrights, designers, and producers profiled in this collection have contributed to the representation of LGBTQ lives and culture in a variety of theatrical venues, both within the queer community and across the US theatrical landscape. Moving from the era of the Stonewall Riots to today, notable scholars in the field bring a wide variety of queer theatre artists into conversation with each other, exploring connections and differences in race, gender, physical ability, national origin, class, generation, aesthetic modes, and political goals, creating a diverse and inclusive study of 50 years of queer theatre. For readers seeking an introduction to or a deeper understanding of LGBTQ theatre, this volume offers thought-provoking analyses of theatre-makers both celebrated and lesser-known, mainstream and subversive, canonical and new.

Posthumorism

Posthumorism PDF Author: Frances McDonald
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350264628
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Examining the multiple non-humorous meanings of laughter, this book explores a unique strain of laughter in modernism that is without humor, without humans, and without humanism. Providing a bold new theory of modernism's affects, Posthumorism chronicles the scattered emergence of a particular strain of humorless laughter in twentieth-century literature, film, and philosophy. From William James's trippy experiments with laughing gas to the wide-open suicide shriek of Major Kong in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, modernity is strewn with examples of such laughter – defined by its ability to “crack up” and destroy, whilst opening new horizons of perception. Examining the creative operation of posthumorist laughter, this book explores how various stylists of the form-from Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut to Georges Bataille and Hélène Cixous-use it as a tool to unsettle, reconfigure the individual human, and shape different forms of humanist discourse.

Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy

Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy PDF Author: Rashi Bhargava
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000827518
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy explores the new forms, voices and venues of stand-up comedy in different parts of the world and its potential role as a counterhegemonic tool for satire, commentary and expression of identity especially for the disempowered or marginalised. The title brings together essays and perspectives on stand-up and satire from different cultural and political contexts across the world which raise pertinent issues regarding its role in contemporary times, especially with the increased presence of OTT platforms and internet penetration that allows for easy access to this art form. It examines the theoretical understanding of the different aspects of the humour, aesthetics and politics of stand-up comedy, as well as the exploration of race, gender, politics and conflicts, urban culture and LGBTQ+ identities in countries such as Indonesia, Finland, France, Iran, Italy, Morocco, India and the USA. It also asks the question whether, along with contesting and destabilising existing discursive frameworks and identities, a stand-up comic can open up a space for envisaging a new social, cultural and political order? This book will appeal to people interested in performance studies, media, popular culture, digital culture, sociology, digital sociology and anthropology, and English literature. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) 4.0 license. Funded by the University of Helsinki.

The Commedia dell’Arte

The Commedia dell’Arte PDF Author: Domenico Pietropaolo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350144215
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
What were the origins of commedia dell'arte and how did it evolve as a dramatic form over time and as it spread from Italy? How did its relationship to the ruling ideology of the day change during the Enlightenment? What is its legacy today? These are just some of the questions addressed in this authoritative overview of the dramatic, ideological and aesthetic form of commedia dell'arte. The book's 3 sections examine the changing role of performers and playwrights, improvisatory scenarios and scripted performance, and its function as a vehicle for social criticism, to offer readers a clear understanding of commedia dell'arte's evolution in Renaissance Italy and beyond. This study throws new light on the role of women performers; on the changing ideological discourse of commedia dell'arte, which included social reform and, later, conservatism as well as the alienation of ethnic minorities in complicity with its audience; and on its later adaptation into hybrid forms including grotesque dance and the giullarata typified by the work of Dario Fo.

Humour and Politics in Africa

Humour and Politics in Africa PDF Author: Daniel Hammett
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1529219728
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Analyses of humour often focus primarily on the Global North, with little consideration for examples and practices from elsewhere. This book provides a vital contribution to humour theory by developing a Global South perspective. Taking a wide-ranging view across the whole of the continent, the book examines the relationship between humour and politics in Africa. It considers the context of the production and reception of humour in African contexts and argues that humour is more than just symbolic. Moving beyond the idea of humour as a mode of resistance, the book investigates the ‘political work’ that humour does and explores the complex entanglements in which the politics, practices and performances of humour are located.

The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell'Arte

The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell'Arte PDF Author: Judith Chaffee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317613376
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description
From Commedia dell’Arte came archetypal characters that are still with us today, such as Harlequin and Pantalone, and the rediscovered craft of writing comic dramas and masked theatre. From it came the forces that helped create and influence Opera, Ballet, Pantomime, Shakespeare, Moliere, Lopes de Vega, Goldoni, Meyerhold, and even the glove puppet, Mr Punch. The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte is a wide-ranging volume written by over 50 experts, that traces the history, characteristics, and development of this fascinating yet elusive theatre form. In synthesizing the elements of Commedia, this book introduces the history of the Sartori mask studio; presents a comparison between Gozzi and Goldoni’s complicated and adversarial approaches to theatre; invites discussions on Commedia’s relevance to Shakespeare, and illuminates re-interpretations of Commedia in modern times. The authors are drawn from actors, mask-makers, pedagogues, directors, trainers and academics, all of whom add unique insights into this most delightful of theatre styles. Notable contributions include: • Donato Sartori on the 20th century Sartori mask • Rob Henke on form and freedom • Anna Cottis on Carlo Boso • Didi Hopkins on One Man, Two Guv’nors • Kenneth Richards on acting companies • Antonio Fava on Pulcinella • Joan Schirle on Carlo Mazzone-Clementi and women in Commedia • and M.A. Katritzky on images Olly Crick is a performer, trainer and director, having trained in Commedia under Barry Grantham and Carlo Boso. He is founder of The Fabulous Old Spot Theatre Company. Judith Chaffee is Associate Professor of Theatre at Boston University, and Head of Movement Training for Actors. She trained in Commedia with Antonio Fava, Julie Goell, Stanley Allen Sherman, and Carlos Garcia Estevez.