A Formalist Theatre

A Formalist Theatre
Author: Michael Kirby
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 1990-06
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780812213348

Michael Kirby was the most outspoken exponent of formalist theater and founded the Structuralist Workshop in the 1960s to explore this style of performance. He called it "Structuralist" (capitalizing the term popularized by Levi-Strauss) to make a distinction between his emphasis on spatial and temporal form (i.e. structure) and the historical association of formalism with styles and abstraction. The book is based on articles written over the course of a decade for the Drama Review, a quarterly journal Kirby edited for fourteen years. In Part I, "Formalist Analysis," analytical continua are developed and applied to acting, style, and structure; Kirby devotes Part II, "The Social Context," to an analysis of the current state of criticism, theatre as a political tool, and the current state of the avant-garde; Part III, "Structuralist Theatre," describes performances produced by Kirby under the auspices of his structuralist workshop as well as several Structuralist films.

A Formalist Theatre

A Formalist Theatre
Author: Michael Kirby
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2011-06-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812205448

Michael Kirby presents a penetrating look a theater theory and analysis. His approach is analytically comprehensive and flexible, and nonevaluative. Case studies demonstrate this unique approach and record performances that otherwise would be lost.

Postdramatic Theatre and Form

Postdramatic Theatre and Form
Author: Michael Shane Boyle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2019-03-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350043176

Postdramatic theatre is an essential category of performance that challenges classical elements of drama, including the centrality of plot and character. Tracking key developments in contemporary European and North American performance, this collection redirects ongoing debates about postdramatic theatre, turning attention to the overlooked issue on which they hinge: form. Contributors draw on literary studies, film studies and critical theory to reimagine the formal aspects of theatre, such as space, media and text. The volume expands how scholars think of theatrical form, insisting that formalist analysis can be useful for studying the ways theatre is produced and consumed, and how theatre makers engage with other forms like dance and visual art. Chapters focus on a range of interdisciplinary artists including Tadeusz Kantor, Ann Liv Young and Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, as well as theatre's enmeshment within institutional formations like funding agencies, festivals, real estate and healthcare. A timely investigation of the aesthetic structures and material conditions of contemporary performance, this collection refines what we mean, and what we don't, when we speak of postdramatic theatre.

Reading Theatre

Reading Theatre
Author: Anne Ubersfeld
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 1999-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780802082404

Ubersfeld show how formal analysis can enrich the work of theatre practioners and offers a reading of the symbolic structures of stage space and time as well as opening up mulitple possibilities for interpreting a play's line of action.

Script Analysis for Actors, Directors, and Designers

Script Analysis for Actors, Directors, and Designers
Author: James Michael Thomas
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 024081049X

Script Analysis specifically for Actors, Directors, and Designers; the only book on this subject that covers the growing area of unconventional plays.

Postdramatic Theatre

Postdramatic Theatre
Author: Hans-Thies Lehmann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2006-09-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1134496834

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.

Dictionary of the Theatre

Dictionary of the Theatre
Author: Patrice Pavis
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 492
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780802081636

An encyclopedic dictionary of technical and theoretical terms, the book covers all aspects of a semiotic approach to the theatre, with cross-referenced alphabetical entries ranging from absurd to word scenery.

The Theater of Transformation

The Theater of Transformation
Author: Kerstin Schmidt
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2016-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9401202478

The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama offers a fresh and innovative reading of the contemporary experimental American theater scene and navigates through the contested and contentious relationship between postmodernism and contemporary drama. This book addresses gender and class as well as racial issues in the context of a theoretical discussion of dramatic texts, textuality, and performance. Transformation is contemporary drama's answer to the questions of postmodernism and a major technique in the development of a postmodern language for the stage. In order to demonstrate the multi-faceted nature of the postmodern theater of transformation, this study draws on a wide range of plays: from early experimental plays of the 1960s by Jean-Claude van Itallie through feminist plays by Megan Terry and Rochelle Owens to more recent drama by the African-American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama is written for anyone interested in contemporary American drama and theater as well as in postmodernism and contemporary literary theory. It appeals even more broadly to a readership intrigued by the ubiquitous aspects of popular culture, by feminism and ethnicity, and by issues pertaining to the so-called 'society of spectacle' and the study of contemporary media.

The Spectre of Tradition and the Aesthetic-Political Movement of Theatre and Performance

The Spectre of Tradition and the Aesthetic-Political Movement of Theatre and Performance
Author: Min Tian
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2022-10-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000737837

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.