This book interrogates anew the phenomenon of tradition in a dialogical debate with a host of Western thinkers and critical minds. In contrast to the predominantly Western approaches, which look at traditions (Western and non-Western) from a predominantly (Western) modernist perspective, this book interrogates, from an intercultural perspective, the transnational and transcultural consecration, translation, (re)invention, and displacement of traditions (theatrical and cultural) in the aesthetic-political movement of twentieth-century theatre and performance, as exemplified in the case studies of this book. It looks at the question of traditions and modernities at the centre of this aesthetic-political space, as modernities interculturally evoke and are haunted by traditions, and as traditions are interculturally refracted, reconstituted, refunctioned, and reinvented. It also looks at the applicability of its intercultural perspective on tradition to the historical avant-garde in general, postmodern, postcolonial, and postdramatic theatre and performance and to the twentieth-century "classical" intercultural theatre and the twenty-first-century "new interculturalisms" in theatre and performance. To conclude, it looks at the future of tradition in the ecology of our globalized theatrum mundi and considers two important interrelated concepts, future tradition and intercultural tradition. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance studies.

This book provides a fascinating and concise history of devised theatre practice. As both a founding member of Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theater Company and a Professor, Telory Arendell begins this journey with a brief history of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and Living Newspapers through Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble and Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre to the racially inflected commentary of Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino and Ariane Mnouchkine’s collaboration with Théâtre de Soleil. This book explores the impact of devised theatre on social practice and analyzes Goat Island’s use of Pina Bausch’s gestural movement, Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed in Giving Voice, Anna Deavere Smith’s devised envelope for Verbatim Theatre, The Tectonic Theatre Project’s moment work, Teya Sepinuck’s Theatre of Witness, Pig Iron’s use of Lecoq mime to build complex physical theatre scripts, and The Riot Group’s musical arrangement of collaborative devised text. Included are a foreword by Allen J. Kuharski and three devised plays by Theatre of Witness, Pig Iron, and The Riot Group. Replete with interviews from the initial Pig Iron collaborators on subjects of writing, directing, choreographing, teaching, and developing a pedagogical platform that supports devised theatre.

A Sourcebook of Performance Labor presents the views and experiences of collaborators in other artists’ works. This book reorients well-known works of contemporary performance and social practice around the workers who have shaped, enacted, and supported them. It emerges from perspectives on maintenance, care, affective labor, and the knowledges created and preserved through gesture and intersubjectivity. This compilation of interviews is filled with the voices of collaborators in notable works attributed to established contemporary artists, including Francis Alÿs, Tania Bruguera, Suzanne Lacy, Ernesto Pujol, Asad Raza, Dread Scott, and Tino Sehgal. In the spirit of the artworks under discussion, this book reinvests in the possibilities for art as a collective effort to explore new ways of finding ourselves in others and others in ourselves. The Sourcebook collection is a contribution for further theorizing a largely unaddressed perspective in contemporary art. This collection will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance studies and art history.

Mothering Performance is a combination of scholarly essays and creative responses which focus on maternal performance and its applications from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. This collection extends the concept and action of ‘performance’ and connects it to the idea of ‘mothering’ as activity. Mothering, as a form of doing, is a site of never-ending political and personal production; it is situated in a specific place, and it is undertaken by specific bodies, marked by experience and context. The authors explore the potential of a maternal sensibility to move us towards maternal action that is explicitly political, ethical, and in relation to our others. Presented in three sections, Exchange, Practice, and Solidarity, the book includes international contributions from scholars and artists covering topics including ecology, migration, race, class, history, incarceration, mental health, domestic violence, intergenerational exchange, childcare, and peacebuilding. The collection gathers diverse maternal performance practices and methodologies which address aesthetics, dramaturgy, activism, pregnancy, everyday mothering, and menopause. The book is a great read for artists, maternal health and care professionals, and scholars. Researchers with an interest in feminist performance and motherhood, within the disciplines of performance studies, maternal studies, and women’s studies, and all those who wish to gain a deeper understanding of maternal experience, will find much of interest. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Funded by University of South Wales

• The book demonstrates how a vernacular British performance form emerged as a hybrid of forms from Afro-American and minstrel, as well as French mime and Italian commedia dell’arte roots. • Theatre history is an essential part of theatre and drama courses across the UK and would be recommended reading. • There is no comparable book which makes critical analysis of British pierrot troupes and concert parties in existence – the only ones that do exist on the specific topic are written as reminiscence and anecdote.

This book maps contemporary playwriting and theatre translation practices and ecologies in the European continent. Whether you are a scholar researching contemporary drama and translation, or a theatre practitioner looking for ways to navigate theatrical conventions in other countries, this book is for you. Through questionnaires and one-to-one interviews with key stakeholders, Dr Laera collects qualitative and quantitative data about how each national theatre culture supports living dramatists, what conventions drive the production and translation (or lack thereof) of contemporary plays, and what perceptions are held by gatekeepers, theatre-makers and other cultural operators about the theatre system in which they work. Through country-by-country descriptions and analyses; interviews with playwrights, translators, directors and gatekeepers; a list of key facts and best practices; and a rigorous assessment of its methodologies, this volume is indispensable for those interested in contemporary European theatre practice.

Verbatim theatre, a type of performance based on actual words spoken by ''real people'', has been at the heart of a remarkable and unexpected renaissance of the genre in Great Britain since the mid-nineties. The central aim of the book is to critically explore and account for the relationship between contemporary British verbatim theatre and realism whilst questioning the much-debated mediation of the real in theses theatre practices.

Newly adapted for the Anglophone reader, this is an excellent translation of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s groundbreaking study of the new theatre forms that have developed since the late 1960s, which has become a key reference point in international discussions of contemporary theatre. In looking at the developments since the late 1960s, Lehmann considers them in relation to dramatic theory and theatre history, as an inventive response to the emergence of new technologies, and as an historical shift from a text-based culture to a new media age of image and sound. Engaging with theoreticians of 'drama' from Aristotle and Brecht, to Barthes and Schechner, the book analyzes the work of recent experimental theatre practitioners such as Robert Wilson, Tadeusz Kantor, Heiner Müller, the Wooster Group, Needcompany and Societas Raffaello Sanzio. Illustrated by a wealth of practical examples, and with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby providing useful theoretical and artistic contexts for the book, Postdramatic Theatre is an historical survey expertly combined with a unique theoretical approach which guides the reader through this new theatre landscape.

This powerful reinterpretation of Greek tragedy focuses on the performative - the physical and civic - dimension of tragedy. It challenges the idealist, humanist, and universalist approaches that have informed our most cherished philosophical, psychoanalytical, and modern interpretations of Greek tragedy and, in doing so, asks us to renew our relation to these works and to our literary and philosophical inheritance.The book reassesses tragic form in relation to Athenian democracy and links it with a performative discourse that both excludes the feminine and relies on civic and private forms of mourning. At the same time, it explores the centrality of tragedy for thinkers of Modernity such as Holderlin, Nietzsche, Hegel, Freud, Brecht and Benjamin. Through a persuasive analysis of both classical theorists - Plato and Aristotle - and modern theorists - Benjamin, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida and Butler - the book significantly shifts the emphasis from a Sophoclean model of tragedy to a Euripidean one. Close readings of the performance aspects of Greek play-texts help illuminate these ideas.Features* Compelling new interpretation of Greek tragedy * Performance based * Attentive to issues of gender

The Russian tradition is a major area of theatre studies Uses a range of historical and archival material, including previously unpublished material from the Michael Chekov archives International market - UK, America. Potential interest in Russia and France