Theatre Is More Beautiful Than War

Theatre Is More Beautiful Than War PDF Author: Marvin Carlson
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587298929
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
In almost every area of production, German theatre of the past forty years has achieved a level of distinction unique in the international community. This flourishing theatrical culture has encouraged a large number of outstanding actors, directors, and designers as well as video and film artists. The dominant figure throughout these years, however, has remained the director. In this stimulating and informative book, noted theatre historian Marvin Carlson presents an in-depth study of the artistic careers, working methods, and most important productions of ten of the leading directors of this great period of German staging. Beginning with the leaders of the new generation that emerged in the turbulent late 1960s—Peter Stein, Peter Zadek, and Claus Peymann, all still major figures today—Carlson continues with the generation that appeared in the 1980s, particularly after reunification—Frank Castorf, Anna Viebrock, Andrea Breth, and Christoph Marthaler—and concludes with the leading directors to emerge after the turn of the century, Stefan Pucher, Thomas Ostermeier, and Michael Thalheimer. He also provides information not readily available elsewhere in English on many of the leading actors and dramatists as well as the designers whose work, much of it for productions of these directors, has made this last half century a golden age of German scenic design. During the late twentieth century, no country produced so many major theatre directors or placed them so high in national cultural esteem as Germany. Drawing on his years of regular visits to the Theatertreffen in Berlin and other German productions, Carlson will captivate students of theatre and modern German history and culture with his provocative, well-illustrated study of the most productive and innovative theatre tradition in Europe.

Theatre Is More Beautiful Than War

Theatre Is More Beautiful Than War PDF Author: Marvin Carlson
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587298929
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
In almost every area of production, German theatre of the past forty years has achieved a level of distinction unique in the international community. This flourishing theatrical culture has encouraged a large number of outstanding actors, directors, and designers as well as video and film artists. The dominant figure throughout these years, however, has remained the director. In this stimulating and informative book, noted theatre historian Marvin Carlson presents an in-depth study of the artistic careers, working methods, and most important productions of ten of the leading directors of this great period of German staging. Beginning with the leaders of the new generation that emerged in the turbulent late 1960s—Peter Stein, Peter Zadek, and Claus Peymann, all still major figures today—Carlson continues with the generation that appeared in the 1980s, particularly after reunification—Frank Castorf, Anna Viebrock, Andrea Breth, and Christoph Marthaler—and concludes with the leading directors to emerge after the turn of the century, Stefan Pucher, Thomas Ostermeier, and Michael Thalheimer. He also provides information not readily available elsewhere in English on many of the leading actors and dramatists as well as the designers whose work, much of it for productions of these directors, has made this last half century a golden age of German scenic design. During the late twentieth century, no country produced so many major theatre directors or placed them so high in national cultural esteem as Germany. Drawing on his years of regular visits to the Theatertreffen in Berlin and other German productions, Carlson will captivate students of theatre and modern German history and culture with his provocative, well-illustrated study of the most productive and innovative theatre tradition in Europe.

The Show and the Gaze of Theatre

The Show and the Gaze of Theatre PDF Author: Erika Fischer-Lichte
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 9781587290633
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Theatre, in some respects, resembles a market. Stories, rituals, ideas, perceptive modes, conversations, rules, techniques, behavior patterns, actions, language, and objects constantly circulate back and forth between theatre and the other cultural institutions that make up everyday life in the twentieth century. These exchanges, which challenge the established concept of theatre in a way that demands to be understood, form the core of Erika Fischer-Lichte's dynamic book. Each eclectic essay investigates the boundaries that separate theatre from other cultural domains. Every encounter between theatre and other art forms and institutions renegotiates and redefines these boundaries as part of an ongoing process. Drawing on a wealth of fascinating examples, both historical and contemporary, Fischer-Lichte reveals new perspectives in theatre research from quite a number of different approaches. Energetically and excitingly, she theorizes history, theorizes and historicizes performance analysis, and historicizes theory.

Kitchen Sink Realisms

Kitchen Sink Realisms PDF Author: Dorothy Chansky
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609383753
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
From 1918’s Tickless Time through Waiting for Lefty, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Prisoner of Second Avenue to 2005’s The Clean House, domestic labor has figured largely on American stages. No dramatic genre has done more than the one often dismissively dubbed “kitchen sink realism” to both support and contest the idea that the home is naturally women’s sphere. But there is more to the genre than even its supporters suggest. In analyzing kitchen sink realisms, Dorothy Chansky reveals the ways that food preparation, domestic labor, dining, serving, entertaining, and cleanup saturate the lives of dramatic characters and situations even when they do not take center stage. Offering resistant readings that rely on close attention to the particular cultural and semiotic environments in which plays and their audiences operated, she sheds compelling light on the changing debates about women’s roles and the importance of their household labor across lines of class and race in the twentieth century. The story begins just after World War I, as more households were electrified and fewer middle-class housewives could afford to hire maids. In the 1920s, popular mainstream plays staged the plight of women seeking escape from the daily grind; African American playwrights, meanwhile, argued that housework was the least of women’s worries. Plays of the 1930s recognized housework as work to a greater degree than ever before, while during the war years domestic labor was predictably recruited to the war effort—sometimes with gender-bending results. In the famously quiescent and anxious 1950s, critiques of domestic normalcy became common, and African American maids gained a complexity previously reserved for white leading ladies. These critiques proliferated with the re-emergence of feminism as a political movement from the 1960s on. After the turn of the century, the problems and comforts of domestic labor in black and white took center stage. In highlighting these shifts, Chansky brings the real home.

Performing Whitely in the Postcolony

Performing Whitely in the Postcolony PDF Author: Megan Lewis
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609384474
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
What does it mean to perform whiteness in the postcolonial era? To answer this question—crucial for understanding the changing meanings of race in the twenty-first century—Megan Lewis examines the ways that members of South Africa’s Afrikaner minority have performed themselves into, around, and out of power from the colonial period to the postcolony. The nation’s first European settlers and in the twentieth century the architects of apartheid, since 1994 Afrikaners have been citizens of a multicultural, multilingual democracy. How have they enacted their whiteness in the past, and how do they do so now when their privilege has been deflated? ​ Performing Whitely examines the multiple speech acts, political acts, and theatrical acts of the Afrikaner volk or nation in theatrical and public life, including pageants, museum sites, film, and popular music as well as theatrical productions. Lewis explores the diverse ways in which Afrikaners perform whitely, and the tactics they use, including nostalgia, melodrama, queering, abjection, and kitsch. She first investigates the way that apartheid’s architects leveraged whiteness in support of their nation-building efforts in the early twentieth century. In addition to re-enacting national pilgrimages of colonial-era migrations and building massive monuments at home, Afrikaner nationalists took their show to the United States, staging critical events of the Boer War at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition. A case study of the South African experience, Performing Whitely also offers parables for global whitenesses in the postcolonial era.

Isabelle Huppert

Isabelle Huppert PDF Author: Darren Waldron
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501348922
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Featuring a lineup of distinguished academics, this collection remedies the absence of scholarly attention to French cinematic legend Isabelle Huppert. This volume deconstructs Huppert's star persona and public profile through critical and theoretical analysis of her various screen roles-from her very early appearances alongside Romy Schneider in César et Rosalie (Sautet, 1972) and Gérard Depardieu in Les Valseuses (1974) to a number of celebrated collaborations with high-profile European auteurs such as Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke and Joseph Losey, and with more popular auteurs such as Claude Chabrol and François Ozon. Known for a cerebral internalization of characterization, a technical mastery of extreme emotions, and a singular brand of icy intellectualism, Huppert's performances continue to impress, stun and surprise audiences. By focusing on several theoretical questions that relate to image, identity, sexuality and place, this volume situates Huppert's star persona in the more practical creative contexts of performance, authorship, genre and collaboration. This volume contrasts complementary critical accounts of her stardom by working across the different periods and territories of her career.

Symptoms of the Self

Symptoms of the Self PDF Author: Roberta Barker
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609388615
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
"Symptoms of the Self offers the first full study of one of the most paradoxically popular figures in transatlantic theatre history: the stage consumptive. Consumption, or tuberculosis, remains one of the world's most deadly epidemic diseases; in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Britain, and North America, it was a leading killer, responsible for the deaths of as many as one in four members of the population. Despite-or perhaps because of-their horrific experiences of tubercular mortality, throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century audiences in these same countries flocked to see consumptive characters love, suffer, and die onstage. Beginning with the origins of the stage consumptive in Romantic-era France and ranging through to the queer theatres of New York City in the 1970s, this book explores famous plays such as La dame aux camélias (Camille) and Uncle Tom's Cabin alongside rediscovered sentimental dramas, frontier melodramas, and naturalistic problem plays. It shows how theatre artists used the symptoms of tuberculosis to perform the inward emotions and experiences of the modern self, and how the new theatrical vocabulary of realism emerged out of the innovations of the sentimental stage. In the theatre, the consumptive character became a vehicle through which-for better and for worse-standards of health, beauty, and virtue were imposed; constructions of class, gender, and sexuality were debated; the boundaries of nationhood were transgressed or maintained; and an exceedingly fragile whiteness was held up as a dominant social ideal. By telling the story of tuberculosis on the transatlantic stage, Symptoms of the Self aims to uncover some of the wellsprings of modern Western theatrical practice-and of ideas about the self that still affect the way human beings live and die"--

Susan Glaspell's Poetics and Politics of Rebellion

Susan Glaspell's Poetics and Politics of Rebellion PDF Author: Emeline Jouve
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 160938508X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Analyzing plays from the early Trifles (1916) through Springs Eternal (1943) and the undated, incomplete Wings, author Emeline Jouve illustrates the way that Susan Glaspell's dramas addressed issues of sexism, the impact of World War I on American values, and the relationship between individuals and their communities, among other concerns. Jouve argues that Glaspell turns the playhouse into a courthouse, putting the hypocrisy of American democracy on trial. A must for students of Glaspell and her contemporaries, as well as scholars of American theatre and literature of the first half of the twentieth century.

Rowdy Carousals

Rowdy Carousals PDF Author: J. Chris Westgate
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609389484
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Rowdy Carousals makes important interventions in nineteenth-century theatre history with regard to the Bowery Boy, a raucous, white, urban character most famously exemplified by Mose from A Glance at New York in 1848. Theatrical representations of the Bowery Boy emphasized the privileges of whiteness against nonwhite workers including enslaved and free African Americans during the Antebellum Period, an articulation of white superiority that continued through the early twentieth century with Jewish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants. The book’s examination of working-class whiteness on stage, in the theatre, and in print culture invites theatre historians and critics to check the impulse to downplay or ignore questions about race and ethnicity in discussion of the Bowery Boy. J. Chris Westgate further explores links between the Bowery Boy’s rowdyism in the nineteenth century and the resurgence of white supremacy in the early twenty-first century.

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Berlin

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Berlin PDF Author: Andrew Webber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107062004
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
This book provides an informative overview of literary developments in Berlin since 1750, with more detailed readings of exemplary key texts.

German in the World

German in the World PDF Author: James Hodkinson
Publisher: Studies in German Literature L
ISBN: 1640140336
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Weighs the value of Germanophone culture, and its study, in an age of globalization, transnationalism, and academic change.