This book focuses on experimental theatre company, GAle GAtes, credited as "the true innovator" of the contemporary immersive movement. The Immersive Theatre of GAle GAtes is a case-study of this little-known but visionary company, with a focus on its development and dramaturgy. Through rare archival and primary research, as well as historical context, the text chronicles company narrative and celebrates the artistic impulse. The book employs descriptive-narrative and dramaturgical analysis and is composed of historical research, rare archives, and primary source interviews. Chapters focus on the trajectory of the avant-garde leading up to the climate in which the company formed, company formative years, and major works and a discussion on the interdisciplinary and theoretical frameworks critical to its understanding. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies and essential reading for theatre artist and historian alike, with a focus on the experimental theatre landscape.

"This book focuses on experimental theatre company, GAle GAtes, credited as "the true innovator" of the contemporary immersive movement. The Immersive Theatre of GAle GAtes is a case-study of this little known but visionary company, with a focus on its development and dramaturgy. Through rare archival and primary research, as well as historical context, this text chronicles company narrative and celebrates the artistic impulse. This book employs descriptive-narrative and dramaturgical analysis, and is composed of historical research, rare archives, and primary source interviews. Chapters focus on the trajectory of the avant-garde leading up to the climate in which the company formed, company formative years and major works, and a discussion on the interdisciplinary and theoretical frameworks critical to its understanding. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies and an essential reading for theatre artist and historian alike, with a focus on the experimental theatre landscape"--

Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference THEATRE HISTORY STUDIES, VOLUME 38 PART I: Studies in Theatre History ELIZABETH COEN Hanswurst’s Public: Defending the Comic in the Theatres of Eighteenth-Century Vienna BRIDGET MCFARLAND “This Affair of a Theatre”: The Boston Theatre Controversy and the Americanization of the Stage RYAN TVEDT From Moscow to Simferopol: How the Russian Cubo-Futurists Accessed the Provinces DANIELLA VINITSKI MOONEY So Long Ago I Can’t Remember: GAle GAtes et al. and the 1990s Immersive Theatre Part II: The Site-Based Theatre Audience Experience: Dramaturgy and Ethics —EDITED BY PENELOPE COLE AND RAND HARMON PENELOPE COLE Site-Based Theatre: The Beginning PENELOPE COLE Becoming the Mob: Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson’s Coriolan/us SEAN BARTLEY A Walk in the Park: David Levine’s Private Moment and Ethical Participation in Site-Based Performance DAVID BISAHA “I Want You to Feel Uncomfortable”: Adapting Participation in A 24-Decade History of Popular Music at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre COLLEEN RUA Navigating Neverland and Wonderland: Audience as Spect-Character GUILLERMO AVILES-RODRIGUEZ, PENELOPE COLE, RAND HARMON, AND ERIN B. MEE Ethics and Site-Based Theatre: A Curated Discussion PART III: The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay from the 1038 Mid-America Theatre Conference MICHELLE GRANSHAW Inventing the Tramp: The Early Tramp Comic on the Variety Stage

What is physical dramaturgy? While the traditional dramaturg shares research intellectually, the physical dramaturg does so viscerally and somatically. By combining elements of text, history, dramatic structure, and the author’s intent with movement analysis and physical theatre pedagogies, the physical dramaturg gives actors the opportunity to manifest their work in a connected and intuitive manner and creates a field that is as varied and rich as the theatre itself. Physical Dramaturgy: Perspectives from the Field explores the ways in which this unique role can benefit the production team during the design and rehearsal phases of both traditional and devised productions. Individual chapters look at new ways of approaching a wealth of physical worlds, from the works of Shakespeare and other period playwrights to the processes of Jerzy Grotowski, Lloyd Williamson, Richard Schechner, and Michael Chekhov, and devising original works in a variety of contexts from Pig Iron, Dell’Arte International, Bill Bowers and mime, Tectonic Theater Project, and Liz Lerman’s Dance Exchange. This anthology gives dramaturgs, actors, and directors new ways of looking at existing methods and provides examples of how to translate, combine, and adapt them into new explorations for training, rehearsal, or research.

This anthology examines maternity in contemporary performance at the intersection of a wide range of topics from nationhood to mental health, queer parenting, embodied dramaturgy, cultural practice, and immigration. Across the breadth of these themes, we interrogate the cultural implications and politics of how we script, perform, receive, and define mothers, challenging many of the normalizing and patriarchal tropes associated with the mother-as-character. This book includes critical essays examining twenty-first century dramatic literature, first-hand ethnographic accounts of motherhood in practice, interviews, feminist manifestos, and artist reflections. In its deliberately curated variety, this collection seeks to resist homogeneity and offer instead a range of approaches to key questions: what versions of motherhood get staged, and why? And what do dramatic representations tell us about the role of mothers in our own fraught contemporary moment? This collection will be of great interest to those in academia who are teaching, researching, or studying in the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, American Studies, and Feminist and Gender Studies.

This book provides an engaging and contextualised insight into a South African township-based arts centre that has survived the vicissitudes of steady militarisation in townships during some of the worst years of apartheid as well as the exhilaration of a new democratic policy while attempting to circumnavigate different policies and funding dispensations. Sibikwa provides arts centres across the world and especially those in decolonising countries with strategies for survival in tumultuous times. This multi-disciplinary book maps and co-ordinates wider historical, political, and social contextual concerns and events with matters specific to a community-based east of Johannesburg and provides an exploration and analysis by experts of authentic theatre-making and performance, dance, indigenous music, arts in education and NGO governance. It has contemporary significance and raises important questions regarding inclusivity and transformation, the function and future of arts centres, community-based applied arts practices, creativity, and international partnerships. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance, indigenous music, dance, and South African history.

This book offers a unique Australian perspective on the global crisis in refugee protection. Using performance as both an object and a lens, this volume explores the politics and aesthetics of migration control, border security and refugee resistance. The first half of the book, titled On Stage, examines performance objects such as verbatim and documentary plays, children’s theatre, immersive performance, slam poetry, video art and feature films. Specifically, it considers how refugees, and their artistic collaborators, assert their individuality, agency and authority as well as their resistance to cruel policies like offshore processing through performance. The second half of the book, titled Off Stage, employs performance as a lens to analyse the wider field of refugee politics, including the relationship between forced migrants and the forced displacement of First Nations peoples that underpins the settler-colonial state, philosophies of cosmopolitanism, the role of the canon in art history and the spectacle of bordering practices. In doing so, it illuminates the strategic performativity—and nonperformativity—of the law, philosophy, the state and the academy more broadly in the exclusion and control of refugees. Taken together, the chapters in this volume draw on, and contribute to, a wide range of disciplines including theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, border studies and forced migration studies, and will be of great interest to students and scholars in all four fields.

This book charts the impact of Shakespeare’s works on Harold Pinter’s career as a playwright. This exploration traces Shakespeare’s influence through Pinter’s pre-theatre writings (1950-1956), to his collaboration with Sir Peter Hall (starting properly at the RSC in 1962 and continuing until 1983), and a late, unpublished screenplay for an adaptation of The Tragedy of King Lear (2000). Adding to studies of playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and James Joyce as significant influences on Harold Pinter’s work, this study aims to highlight the significant and lasting impact that Shakespeare had both formatively and performatively on the playwright’s career. Through exploring this influence, Morton gains not only a greater understanding of the shaping of Pinter’s artistic outlook and how this affected his writing, but it also sheds light on the various forms of Shakespeare’s continued influence on new writing, and what can be gained from this. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies.

This book examines the performance of Bauls, ‘folk’ performers from Bengal, in the context of a rapidly globalizing Indian economy and against the backdrop of extreme nationalistic discourses. Recognizing their scope beyond the musical and cultural realm, Sukanya Chakrabarti engages in discussing the subversive and transformational potency of Bauls and their performances. In-Between Worlds argues that the Bauls through their musical, spiritual, and cultural performances offer ‘joy’ and ‘spirituality,’ thus making space for what Dr. Ambedkar in his famous 1942 speech had identified as ‘reclamation of human personality’. Chakrabarti destabilizes the category of ‘folk’ as a fixed classification or an origin point, and fractures homogeneous historical representations of the Baul as a ‘folk’ performer and a wandering mendicant exposing the complex heterogeneity that characterizes this group. Establishing ‘folk-ness’ as a performance category, and ‘folk festivals’ as sites of performing ‘folk-ness,’ contributing to a heritage industry that thrives on imagined and recreated nostalgia, Chakrabarti examines different sites that produce varied performative identities of Bauls, probing the limits of such categories while simultaneously advocating for polyvocality and multifocality. While this project has grounded itself firmly in performance studies, it has borrowed extensively from fields of postcolonial studies and subaltern histories, literature, ethnography and ethnomusicology, and cosmopolitan studies.

Instruments of Embodiment draws on fashion theory and the philosophy of embodiment to investigate costuming in contemporary dance. It weaves together philosophical theory and artistic practice by closely analyzing acclaimed works by contemporary choreographers, considering interviews with costume designers, and engaging in practice-as-research. Topics discussed include the historical evolution of contemporary dance costuming, Merce Cunningham’s innovative collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg, and costumes used in Ohad Naharin’s Virus (2001) and in a ground-breaking Butoh solo by Tatsumi Hijikata. The relationship between dance costuming and high fashion, wearable computing, and the role costume plays in dance reconstruction are also discussed and, along the way, an anarchist materialism is articulated which takes an egalitarian view of artistic collaboration and holds that experimental costume designs facilitate new forms of embodied experience and ways of seeing the body. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars working in performance philosophy, philosophy of embodiment, dance and performance studies, and fashion theory.