Theatre of the Rule of Law

Theatre of the Rule of Law
Author: Stephen Humphreys
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2010-11-11
Genre: Law
ISBN: 113949533X

Theatre of the Rule of Law presents a sustained critique of global rule of law promotion - an expansive industry at the heart of international development, post-conflict reconstruction and security policy today. While successful in articulating and disseminating an effective global public policy, rule of law promotion has largely failed in its stated objectives of raising countries out of poverty and taming violent conflict. Furthermore, in its execution, this work deviates sharply from 'the rule of law' as commonly conceived. To explain this, Stephen Humphreys draws on the history of the rule of law as a concept, examples of legal export during colonial times, and a spectrum of contemporary interventions by development agencies and international organisations. Rule of law promotion is shown to be a kind of theatre, the staging of a morality tale about the good life, intended for edification and emulation, but blind to its own internal contradictions.

Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770-1911

Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770-1911
Author: Derek Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-04-16
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781108441698

In the nineteenth century, copyright law expanded to include performances of theatrical and musical works. These laws transformed how people made and consumed performances. Exploring precedent-setting litigation on both sides of the Atlantic, this book traces how courts developed definitions of theater and music to suit new performance rights laws. From Gilbert and Sullivan battling to protect The Mikado to Augustin Daly petitioning to control his spectacular 'railroad scene', artists worked with courts to refine vague legal language into clear, functional theories of drama, music, and performance. Through cases that ensnared figures including Lord Byron, Laura Keene, and Dion Boucicault, this book discovers how the law theorized central aspects of performance including embodiment, affect, audience response, and the relationship between scripts and performances. This history reveals how the advent of performance rights reshaped how we value performance both as an artistic medium and as property.

Negotiating Copyright in the American Theatre: 1856–1951

Negotiating Copyright in the American Theatre: 1856–1951
Author: Brent S. Salter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2022-01-06
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108620353

Drawing on fascinating archival discoveries from the past two centuries, Brent Salter shows how copyright has been negotiated in the American theatre. Who controls the space between authors and audiences? Does copyright law actually protect playwrights and help them make a living? At the center of these negotiations are mediating businesses with extraordinary power that rapidly evolved from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries: agents, publishers, producers, labor associations, administrators, accountants, lawyers, government bureaucrats, and film studio executives. As these mediators asserted authority over creativity, creators organized to respond, through collective minimum contracts, informal guild expectations, and professional norms, to protect their presumed rights as authors. This institutional, relational, legal, and business history of the entertainment history in America illuminates both the historical context and the present law. An innovative new kind of intellectual property history, the book maps the relations between the different players from the ground up.

Theatre and Law

Theatre and Law
Author: Alan Read
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2015-11-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350316032

Theatre & Law offers the first comprehensive account of the complex relations between legal process and performances. Through ten major principles of performance within law, it establishes how law itself is a performative mode of practice and reflects upon the co-dependence of law, performance and politics in celebrated works of theatre.

Subject Stages

Subject Stages
Author: María Mercedes Carrión
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1442641088

Subject Stages argues that the discourses and practices of marital legislation, litigation, and theatrics informed each other in early modern Spain in ways that still have a critical bearing on contemporary events in Spain, such as the legalization of divorce in 1978 and of same-sex marriage in 2005.

Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law

Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law
Author: G. Guterman
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2014-07-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137411007

How has contemporary American theatre presented so-called undocumented immigrants? Placing theatre artists and their work within a context of on-going debate, Guterman shows how theatre fills an essential role in a critical conversation by exploring the powerful ways in which legal labels affect and change us.

Law as Performance

Law as Performance
Author: Julie Stone Peters
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2022-04-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192653598

Tirades against legal theatrics are nearly as old as law itself, and yet so is the age-old claim that law must not merely be done: it must be "seen to be done." Law as Performance traces the history of legal performance and spectatorship through the early modern period. Viewing law as the product not merely of edicts or doctrines but of expressive action, it investigates the performances that literally created law: in civic arenas, courtrooms, judges' chambers, marketplaces, scaffolds, and streets. It examines the legal codes, learned treatises, trial reports, lawyers' manuals, execution narratives, rhetoric books, images (and more) that confronted these performances, praising their virtues or denouncing their evils. In so doing, it recovers a long, rich, and largely overlooked tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a performance practice. This tradition not only generated an elaborate poetics and politics of legal performance. It provided western jurisprudence with a set of constitutive norms that, in working to distinguish law from theatrics, defined the very nature of law. In the crucial opposition between law and theatre, law stood for cool deliberation, by-the-book rules, and sovereign discipline. Theatre stood for deceptive artifice, entertainment, histrionics, melodrama. And yet legal performance, even at its most theatrical, also appeared fundamental to law's realization: a central mechanism for shaping legal subjects, key to persuasion, essential to deterrence, indispensable to law's power, —as it still does today.

Staged

Staged
Author: Minou Arjomand
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2018-09-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231545738

Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term “show trials” suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era’s great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages? In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions.

The Methuen Drama Dictionary of the Theatre

The Methuen Drama Dictionary of the Theatre
Author: Jonathan Law
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 833
Release: 2013-10-28
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 140814591X

The Methuen Drama Dictionary of the Theatre is an essential reference tool and companion for anyone interested in the theatre and theatre-going. Containing over 2500 entries it covers the international spectrum of theatre with particular emphasis on the UK and USA. With biographical information on playwrights, actors and directors, entries on theatres and theatre companies, explanation of technical terms and theatrical genres, and synopses of major plays, this is an authoritative, trustworthy and comprehensive compendium. Included are: synopses of 500 major plays biographical entries on hundreds of playwrights, actors, directors and producers definitions of nearly 200 genres and movements entries on over 100 key characters from plays information about more than 250 theatres and companies Unlike similar products, The Methuen Drama Dictionary of the Theatre avoids a dry, technical approach with its sprinkling of anecdotal asides and fascinating trivia, such as how Michael Gambon gave his name to a corner of a racing track following an incident on BBC's Top Gear programme, and under 'advice to actors' the sage words of Alec Guinness: 'First wipe your nose and check your flies', and the equally wise guidance from the master of his art, Noël Coward: 'Just know your lines and don't bump into the furniture.' As a companion to everything from the main stage to the fringes of theatrical fact and folklore, this will prove an irresistible book to all fans of the theatre.

Theatrical Worlds (Beta Version)

Theatrical Worlds (Beta Version)
Author: Charles Mitchell
Publisher: Orange Grove Texts Plus
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Arts
ISBN: 9781616101664

"From the University of Florida College of Fine Arts, Charlie Mitchell and distinguished colleagues form across America present an introductory text for theatre and theoretical production. This book seeks to give insight into the people and processes that create theater. It does not strip away the feeling of magic but to add wonder for the artistry that make a production work well." -- Open Textbook Library.