The Theatre Of Urban

Because of its powerful socializing effects, the school has always been a site of cultural, political, and academic conflict. In an age where terms such as 'hard-to-teach,' and 'at-risk' beset our pedagogical discourses, where students have grown up in systems plagued by anti-immigrant, anti-welfare, 'zero-tolerance' rhetoric, how we frame and understand the dynamics of classrooms has serious ethical implications and powerful consequences. Using theatre and drama education as a special window into school life in four urban secondary schools in Toronto and New York City, The Theatre of Urban examines the ways in which these schools reflect the cultural and political shifts in big city North American schooling policies, politics, and practices of the early twenty-first century. pResisting facile comparisons of Canadian and American schooling systems, Kathleen Gallagher opts instead for a rigorous analysis of the context-specific features, both the differences and similarities, between urban cultures and urban schools in the two countries. Gallagher re-examines familiar 'urban issues' facing these schools, such as racism, classism, (hetero)sexism, and religious fundamentalism in light of the theatre performances of diverse young people and their reflections upon their own creative work together. By using theatre as a sociological lens, emThe Theatre of Urban

In every major city, there exists a complex exchange between urban space and the institution of the theatre. City Stages is an interdisciplinary and materialist analysis of this relationship as it has existed in Toronto since 1967. Locating theatre companies – their sites and practices – in Toronto’s urban environment, Michael McKinnie focuses on the ways in which the theatre has adapted to changes in civic ideology, environment, and economy. Over the past four decades, theatre in Toronto has been increasingly implicated in the civic self-fashioning of the city and preoccupied with the consequences of the changing urban political economy. City Stages investigates a number of key questions that relate to this pattern. How has theatre been used to justify certain forms of urban development in Toronto? How have local real estate markets influenced the ways in which theatre companies acquire and use performance space? How does the analysis of theatre as an urban phenomenon complicate Canadian theatre historiography? McKinnie uses the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts and the Toronto Centre for the Performing Arts as case studies and considers theatrical companies such as Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto Workshop Productions, Buddies in Bad Times, and Necessary Angel in his analysis. City Stages combines primary archival research with the scholarly literature emerging from both the humanities and social sciences. The result is a comprehensive and empirical examination of the relationship between the theatrical arts and the urban spaces that house them.

Mark Jenkins is redefining sculpture as part of the urban environment. The Urban Theater, his first monograph, documents Jenkins's compelling, often disturbing street installations and demonstrates his talent for provoking reactions from passersby. For Jenkins, these spontaneous responses and interactions are an integral part of the life cycle of his works.

This book explores theatre and performance as participatory research practices for exploring the everyday of the city. Taking an inner-city suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa as its central case study, the book considers how theatre and performance might be both useful practical tools in considering the everyday city, as well as conceptual lenses for understanding it. The author establishes an understanding of space as ever evolving and formed through the ongoing relationship between things, human and non-human, and considers how theatre and performance offer useful paradigms for learning about and working with city spaces. As ephemeral, embodied, material artistic practices, theatre and performance mirror the nature of everyday life. The book discusses theatre and performance games and placemaking processes as offering valuable ways of discovering daily acts of place-making and providing insights that more conventional research methods may not allow. Yet the book also considers how seeing daily city life as a kind of performance, a kind of theatre in its own right, helps to further understandings of city spaces as ever evolving through complex webs of relationships. This book will be of interest to academics, academic practitioners and post-graduate students in the fields of theatre and performance studies, urban studies and cultural geography.

What makes young people care about themselves, others, their communities, and their futures? In Why Theatre Matters, Kathleen Gallagher uses the drama classroom as a window into the daily challenges of marginalized youth in Toronto, Boston, Taipei, and Lucknow. An ethnographic study which mixes quantitative and qualitative methodology in an international multi-site project, Why Theatre Matters ties together the issues of urban and arts education through the lens of student engagement. Gallagher’s research presents a framework for understanding student involvement at school in the context of students’ families and communities, as well as changing social, political, and economic realities around the world. Taking the reader into the classroom through the voices of the students themselves, Gallagher illustrates how creative expression through theatre can act as a rehearsal space for real, material struggles and for democratic participation. Why Theatre Matters is an invigorating challenge to the myths that surround urban youth and an impressive study of theatre’s transformative potential.

Extensively illustrated with oringinal sketches, watercolours, plans and photographs of Urban's work both in Vienna and America, detailed biography covering the full breadth of his work, tall quarto bound in dark blue cloth, fine copy in fine dustwrapper, check postage a large heavy book which may require additional postage. Renaissance man Joseph Urban (1872-1933) is rediscovered in this first full-scale biography and appreciation. Urban acquired a reputation in fin-de-siecle Vienna for architecture, stage design, and book illustration. He arrived in America in 1911 to design productions for the Boston Opera and stayed to make an impact on theater stagecraft, opera and movie sets, Art Deco and International Style architecture, and industrial design. Relying on the vast Urban Archives at Columbia University and interviews with Urban's daughter Gretl, this rigorously researched and lavishly illustrated volume (with 282 images, 129 in color) revives the spirit and personality of one of the century's most talented designers. An important choice for academic and larger public libraries with specialized interests.

If the city is the theatre of urban life, how does architecture act in its many performances? This book reconstructs the spatial experiments of Art et Action, a theatre troupe active in 1920s Paris, and how their designs for theater buildings show how the performance spaces interacted with actors and spectators according to their type.

Shortlist, 2021 Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize In a city struggling to determine just how neoliberal it can afford to be, what kinds of performing arts practices and institutions are necessary—and why? Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, political and economic agendas in the reunified German capital have worked to dismantle long-standing traditions of state‐subsidized theater even as the city has redefined itself as a global arts epicenter. Institutional Theatrics charts the ways theater artists have responded to these shifts and crises both on- and offstage, offering a method for rethinking the theater as a vital public institution. What is the future of the German theater, grounded historically in large ensembles, extensive repertoires, and auteur directors? Examining the restructuring of Berlin’s theatrical landscape and most prominent performance venues, Brandon Woolf argues that cultural policy is not simply the delegation and distribution of funds. Instead, policy should be thought of as an artistic practice of institutional imagination. Woolf demonstrates how performance can critique its patron institutions in order to transform the relations between the stage and the state, between the theater and the infrastructures of its support. Bold, nuanced, and rigorously documented, Institutional Theatrics offers new insights about art, its administration, and the forces that influence cultural production.

Theatres of Independence is the first comprehensive study of drama, theatre, and urban performance in post-independence India. Combining theatre history with theoretical analysis and literary interpretation, Aparna Dharwadker examines the unprecedented conditions for writing and performance that the experience of new nationhood created in a dozen major Indian languages and offers detailed discussions of the major plays, playwrights, directors, dramatic genres, and theories of drama that have made the contemporary Indian stage a vital part of postcolonial and world theatre.The first part of Dharwadker's study deals with the new dramatic canon that emerged after 1950 and the variety of ways in which plays are written, produced, translated, circulated, and received in a multi-lingual national culture. The second part traces the formation of significant postcolonial dramatic genres from their origins in myth, history, folk narrative, sociopolitical experience, and the intertextual connections between Indian, European, British, and American drama. The book's ten appendixes collect extensive documentation of the work of leading playwrights and directors, as well as a record of the contemporary multilingual performance histories of major Indian, Western, and non-Western plays from all periods and genres. Treating drama and theatre as strategically interrelated activities, the study makes post-independence Indian theatre visible as a multifaceted critical subject to scholars of modern drama, comparative theatre, theatre history, and the new national and postcolonial literatures.

Explores the cultural, social, and poltical aspects of theatrical architecture, from the threatres of ancient Greece of the present.