Theatre Body And Pleasure

Breaking new ground in the study of performance theory, this maverick and powerful project from renowned Renaissance scholar and queer theorist Simon Shepherd presents a unique take on theory and the physical reality of theatre. Examining a range of material, Theatre, Body, Pleasure addresses a significant gap in the literary and drama studies arenas and explores the interplay of bodily value, the art of bodies and the physical responses to that art. It explains first how the body makes meaning and carries value. Then it describes the relationships between time and space and body. The book’s features include: * large historical range, from medieval to postmodern * case studies offering close readings of written texts * examples of how to ‘read for the body’, exploring written text as a ‘discipline’ of the body * breadth of cultural reference, from stage plays through to dance culture * a range of theoretical approaches, including dance analysis and phenomenology Writing in accessible prose, Shepherd introduces new ways of analyzing dramatic text and has produced a book which is part theatre history, part dramatic criticism and part theatrical tour de force. Students of drama, theatre and performance studies and cultural studies will find this an absolute must read.

What do we mean when we talk about bodies in theatre? And how does theatre affect the way we think about the human body? Bodies are vital elements of theatre production and spectatorship. But the body is not just physical, it is also conceptual. Drawing on many examples from contemporary performance, Theatre & the Body is a provocative starting point for understanding the surprisingly complex relationship between theatre and the body. Concise and clear, this book explores the revealing tensions between the body, bodies, language, representation and movement in the theatre. Foreword by Marina Abramovic.

Theatre as Voyeurism (re)defines voyeurism as an 'exchange' between performers and audience members, privileging pleasure (erotic and aesthetic) as a crucial factor in contemporary theatre. This intriguing group of essays focuses on artists such as Jan Fabre, Romeo Castellucci, Ann Liv Young, Olivier Dubois and Punchdrunk.

This book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual arts, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection draws on the complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability to address what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, scientific, cultural, and artistic experimentation, and discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Probing “what arouses” in relation to the ethics of representation, the book investigates the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism, underscores the political impact of aroused bodies, and explores how arousal can turn the body into a mediated object.

Community Performance: A Reader is the first book to provide comprehensive teaching materials for this significant part of the theatre studies curriculum. It brings together core writings and critical approaches to community performance work, presenting practices in the UK, USA, Australia and beyond. Offering a comprehensive anthology of key writings in the vibrant field of community performance, spanning dance, theatre and visual practices, this Reader uniquely combines classic writings from major theorists and practitioners such as Augusto Boal, Paolo Freire, Dwight Conquergood and Jan Cohen Cruz, with newly commissioned essays that bring the anthology right up to date with current practice. This book can be used as a stand-alone text, or together with its companion volume, Community Performance: An Introduction, to offer an accessible and classroom-friendly introduction to the field of community performance.

Musicals, it is often said, burst into song and dance when mere words can no longer convey the emotion. This book argues that musicals burst into song and dance when one body can no longer convey the emotion. Rogers shows how the musical’s episodes of burlesque and minstrelsy model the kinds of radical relationships that the genre works to create across the different bodies of its performers, spectators, and creators every time the musical bursts into song. These radical relationships—borne of the musical’s obsessions with “bad” performances of gender and race—are the root of the genre’s progressive play with identity, and thus the source of its subcultural power. However, this leads to an ethical dilemma: Are the musical’s progressive politics thus rooted in its embrace of regressive entertainments like burlesque and minstrelsy? The Song Is You shows how musicals return again and again to this question, and grapple with a guilt that its joyous pleasures are based on exploiting the laboring bodies of its performers. Rogers argues that the discourse of “integration”—which claims that songs should advance the plot—has functioned to deny the radical work that the musical undertakes every time it transitions into song and dance. Looking at musicals from The Black Crook to Hamilton, Rogers confronts the gendered and racial dynamics that have always under-girded the genre, and asks how we move forward.

August Wilson's radical and provocative call to arms.

The Invisible Actor presents the captivating and unique methods of the distinguished Japanese actor and director, Yoshi Oida. While a member of Peter Brook's theatre company in Paris, Yoshi Oida developed a masterful approach to acting that combined the oriental tradition of supreme and studied control with the Western performer's need to characterise and expose depths of emotion. Written with Lorna Marshall, Yoshi Oida explains that once the audience becomes openly aware of the actor's method and becomes too conscious of the actor's artistry, the wonder of performance dies. The audience must never see the actor but only his or her performance. Throughout Lorna Marshall provides contextual commentary on Yoshi Oida's work and methods. In a new foreword to accompany the Bloomsbury Revelations edition, Yoshi Oida revisits the questions that have informed his career as an actor and explores how his skilful approach to acting has shaped the wider contours of his life.

Is directing an art? Do directors need to be trained? What do directors actually do? These questions and more are answered in this accessibly written survey of the art of theatre direction. Its broad scope ranges across the theatres of both America and Europe, looking at practices from Stanislavski up to the present day.

Against queer theory's long-suffering romance with mourning and melancholia and a national agenda that urges homosexuals to renounce pleasure if they want to be taken seriously, Acts of Gaiety seeks to reanimate notions of "gaiety" as a political value for LGBT activism by recovering earlier mirthful modes of political performance. The book mines the archives of lesbian-feminist activism of the 1960s–70s, highlighting the outrageous gaiety—including camp, kitsch, drag, guerrilla theater, zap actions, rallies, manifestos, pageants, and parades alongside "legitimate theater”-- at the center of the social and theatrical performances of the era. Juxtaposing figures such as Valerie Solanas and Jill Johnston with more recent performers and activists including Hothead Paisan, Bitch and Animal, and the Five Lesbian Brothers, Sara Warner shows how reclaiming this largely discarded and disavowed past elucidates possibilities for being and belonging. Acts of Gaiety explores the mutually informing histories of gayness as politics and as joie de vivre, along with the centrality of liveliness to queer performance and protest.