"In this volume, Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan liturgical poetry from Late Antiquity (ca. 3rd-4th c. CE) is examined not only from within the context of religious traditions of biblical interpretation and conventions of prayer but also through the lenses of performance, entertainment, and spectacle. Recognizing that liturgical poets were as invested engaging their listeners as orators and actors were, this study analyses hymnody as a performative genre akin to oratory and theatre, the two primary modes of public performance from the wider societal context. Attention to liturgical poetry's "theatricality" draws our attention to a range of subjects, from how biblical stories were adapted to the liturgical stage, much in the way that the classical works of Greco-Roman antiquity were themselves popularized in this Late Antique period; to the adaptation of physical techniques and material structures to augment the ability of performers to engage their audiences. Specific techniques associated with both oratory and acting in antiquity will offer concrete means for elucidating the affinities of liturgical presentations and other modes of performance: indications of direct address, for example, and apostrophe, as well as the creation of character through speech (ethopoeia); and appeals to the audience's senses, including vivid descriptions (ekphrasis), a technique especially popular in antiquity. A serious consideration of performance also demands that we make the difficult leap to imagining the world beyond the page. While Late Antique hymnody has come down to the present primarily in textual form, the written word constitutes something quite remote from the actual experience these scripts reflect. We will thus attempt to consider more speculative but recognizably essential elements of these works' reception, including ways in which liturgical poetry could have borrowed from the gestures and body language of oratory, mime, and pantomime, and how poets may have used the physical spaces of performance and accelerated changes visible in the archaeological record"--

"In this volume, Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan liturgical poetry from Late Antiquity (ca. 3rd-4th c. CE) is examined not only from within the context of religious traditions of biblical interpretation and conventions of prayer but also through the lenses of performance, entertainment, and spectacle. Recognizing that liturgical poets were as invested engaging their listeners as orators and actors were, this study analyses hymnody as a performative genre akin to oratory and theatre, the two primary modes of public performance from the wider societal context. Attention to liturgical poetry's "theatricality" draws our attention to a range of subjects, from how biblical stories were adapted to the liturgical stage, much in the way that the classical works of Greco-Roman antiquity were themselves popularized in this Late Antique period; to the adaptation of physical techniques and material structures to augment the ability of performers to engage their audiences. Specific techniques associated with both oratory and acting in antiquity will offer concrete means for elucidating the affinities of liturgical presentations and other modes of performance: indications of direct address, for example, and apostrophe, as well as the creation of character through speech (ethopoeia); and appeals to the audience's senses, including vivid descriptions (ekphrasis), a technique especially popular in antiquity. A serious consideration of performance also demands that we make the difficult leap to imagining the world beyond the page. While Late Antique hymnody has come down to the present primarily in textual form, the written word constitutes something quite remote from the actual experience these scripts reflect. We will thus attempt to consider more speculative but recognizably essential elements of these works' reception, including ways in which liturgical poetry could have borrowed from the gestures and body language of oratory, mime, and pantomime, and how poets may have used the physical spaces of performance and accelerated changes visible in the archaeological record"--

In Staging Harmony, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how the relationship between drama, music, and religious change across England's long sixteenth century moved religious discourse to more moderate positions. It did so by reproducing the complex personal attachments, nostalgic overtones, and bodily effects that allow performed music to evoke the feeling, if not always the reality, of social harmony. Brokaw demonstrates how theatrical music from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries contributed to contemporary discourses on the power and morality of music and its proper role in religious life, shaping the changes made to church music as well as people’s reception of those changes. In representing social, affective, and religious life in all its intricacy, and in unifying auditors in shared acoustic experiences, staged musical moments suggested the value of complexity, resolution, and compromise rather than oversimplified, absolutist binaries worth killing or dying for.The theater represented the music of the church’s present and past. By bringing medieval and early Tudor drama into conversation with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brokaw uncovers connections and continuities across diverse dramatic forms and demonstrates the staying power of musical performance traditions. In analyzing musical practices and discourses, theological debates, devotional practices, and early staging conditions, Brokaw offers new readings of well-known plays (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale) as well as Tudor dramas by playwrights including John Bale, Nicholas Udall, and William Wager.

The three directors gathered in this volume all approach theatre-making in part as an act of citizenship. Jesusa Rodríguez, Peter Sellars, and Reza Abdoh differ markedly in many important respects, but they all come to the theatre as an intervention in the public sphere. Rodríguez, Sellars, and Abdoh blend a spirit of social critique with acts of democratic community building. These essays examine how theatre, for them, is not a sphere of aesthetic experience insulated from the divisions, antagonisms, and alliances of a conflicted society. It is a way to forge fleeting but consequential communities that might reverberate through that society and affect its future development. The Great North American Stage Directors series provides an authoritative account of the art of directing in North America by examining the work of twenty-four major practitioners from the late 19th century to the present. Each of the eight volumes examines three directors and offers an overview of their practices, theoretical ideas, and contributions to modern theatre. The studies chart the life and work of each director, placing his or her achievement in the context of other important theatre practitioners and broader social history. Written by a team of leading experts, the series presents the genealogy of directing in North America while simultaneously chronicling crucial trends and championing contemporary interpretation.

Huston Diehl sees Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as both a product of the Protestant Reformation—a reformed drama—and a producer of Protestant habits of thought—a reforming drama. According to Diehl, the popular London theater, which flourished in the years after Elizabeth reestablished Protestantism in England, rehearsed the religious crises that disrupted, divided, energized, and in many respects revolutionized English society. Drawing on the insights of symbolic anthropologists, Diehl explores the relationship between the suppression of late medieval religious cultures, with their rituals, symbols, plays, processions, and devotional practices, and the emergence of a popular theater under the Protestant monarchs Elizabeth and James. Questioning long-held assumptions that the reformed religion was inherently antitheatrical, she shows how the reformers invented new forms of theater, even as they condemned a Roman Catholic theatricality they associated with magic, sensuality, and duplicity. Using as her central texts the tragedies of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, Diehl maintains that plays of the period reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive. Employing a reformed rhetoric that is both powerful and profoundly disturbing, they disrupt their own stunning spectacles. Out of this creative tension between theatricality and antitheatricality emerges a distinctly Protestant aesthetic.

This book introduces the evocative but largely unknown tradition of Samaritan religious poetry from late antiquity to a new audience. These verses provide a unique window into the Samaritan religious world during a formative period. Prepared by Laura Suzanne Lieber, this anthology presents annotated English translations of fifty-five Classical Samaritan poems. Lieber introduces each piece, placing it in context with Samaritan religious tradition, the geopolitical turmoil of Palestine in the fourth century CE, and the literary, liturgical, and performative conventions of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, shared by Jews, Christians, and polytheists. These hymns, composed by three generations of poets—the priest Amram Dara; his son, Marqah; and Marqah’s son, Ninna, the last poet to write in Samaritan Aramaic in the period prior to the Muslim conquest—for recitation during the Samaritan Sabbath and festival liturgies remain a core element of Samaritan religious ritual to the present day. Shedding important new light on the Samaritans’ history and on the complicated connections between early Judaism, Christianity, the Samaritan community, and nascent Islam, this volume makes an important contribution to the reception of the history of the Hebrew Bible. It will appeal to a wide audience of students and scholars of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, early Judaism and early Christianity, and other religions of late antiquity.

For centuries, the Feast of Fools has been condemned and occasionally celebrated as a disorderly, even transgressive Christian festival, in which reveling clergy elected a burlesque Lord of Misrule, presided over the divine office wearing animal masks or women's clothes, sang obscene songs, swung censers that gave off foul-smelling smoke, played dice at the altar, and otherwise parodied the liturgy of the church. Afterward, they would take to the streets, howling, issuing mock indulgences, hurling manure at bystanders, and staging scurrilous plays. The problem with this popular account—intriguing as it may be— is that it is wrong.In Sacred Folly, Max Harris rewrites the history of the Feast of Fools, showing that it developed in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as an elaborate and orderly liturgy for the day of the Circumcision (1 January)—serving as a dignified alternative to rowdy secular New Year festivities. The intent of the feast was not mockery but thanksgiving for the incarnation of Christ. Prescribed role reversals, in which the lower clergy presided over divine office, recalled Mary's joyous affirmation that God "has put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble." The "fools" represented those chosen by God for their lowly status.The feast, never widespread, was largely confined to cathedrals and collegiate churches in northern France. In the fifteenth century, high-ranking clergy who relied on rumor rather than firsthand knowledge attacked and eventually suppressed the feast. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians repeatedly misread records of the feast; their erroneous accounts formed a shaky foundation for subsequent understanding of the medieval ritual. By returning to the primary documents, Harris reconstructs a Feast of Fools that is all the more remarkable for being sanctified rather than sacrilegious.

This fascinating volume offers a transdisciplinary and transcultural approach to understanding the senses by exploring themes in anthropologies of sound, sight, smell, taste, touch, and movement as expressed through aesthetic, perceptual, religious, and spiritual experiences. In drawing upon comparative perspectives from Indian and Western theories, the essays demonstrate the integral relation of senses with each other as well as with allied notions of the body, emotion and cultural memory. Stressing the continued relevance of senses as they manifest in a globalized world under the influence of new media, this work will interest scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, ritual studies, psychology, religion, philosophy, and history.

Staging Dance is a practical handbook that covers all aspects of putting on a dance production. It highlights the current diversity of dance activities, choosing examples from working dance groups and from individual dancers. The book includes sections on choreography, music and sound, designing and making sets and costumes, lighting design and technical implementation and stage management. Funding, planning and publicity are also covered. Staging Dance will prove invaluable not only to dance artists, but also those working along side them: musicians, designers, lighting technicians, administrators and directors.

Singing was just one element of blues performance in the early twentieth century. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and other classic blues singers also tapped, joked, and flaunted extravagant costumes on tent show and black vaudeville stages. The press even described these women as "actresses" long before they achieved worldwide fame for their musical recordings. In Staging the Blues, Paige A. McGinley shows that even though folklorists, record producers, and festival promoters set the theatricality of early blues aside in favor of notions of authenticity, it remained creatively vibrant throughout the twentieth century. Highlighting performances by Rainey, Smith, Lead Belly, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee in small Mississippi towns, Harlem theaters, and the industrial British North, this pioneering study foregrounds virtuoso blues artists who used the conventions of the theater, including dance, comedy, and costume, to stage black mobility, to challenge narratives of racial authenticity, and to fight for racial and economic justice.