Casting a Movement brings together US-based actors, directors, educators, playwrights, and scholars to explore the cultural politics of casting.Drawing on the notion of a "welcome table"—a space ...where artists of all backgrounds can come together as equals to create theatre—the book’s contributors discuss casting practices as they relate to varying communities and contexts, including Middle Eastern American theatre, Disability culture, multilingual performance, Native American theatre, color- and culturally-conscious casting, and casting as a means to dismantle stereotypes. Syler and Banks suggest that casting is a way to invite more people to the table so that the full breadth of US identities can be reflected onstage, and that casting is inherently a political act; because an actor’s embodied presence both communicates a dramatic narrative and evokes cultural assumptions associated with appearance, skin color, gender, sexuality, and ability, casting choices are never neutral. By bringing together a variety of artistic perspectives to discuss common goals and particular concerns related to casting, this volume features the insights and experiences of a broad range of practitioners and experts across the field.As a resource-driven text suitable for both practitioners and academics, Casting a Movement seeks to frame and mobilize a social movement focused on casting, access, and representation.
The stages of property Surwillo, Lisa
The stages of property,
c2007, 20071222, 2007, 2007-01-01
eBook
Through an integrative historicist approach to a wide range of literary texts and archival documents,The Stages of Propertymakes an important statement about the cultural, societal, and political ...roles of the theatre in Spain during the 1800s.
In Europa rückte die Herausbildung eines modernen Berufstheaters vielerorts ins Zentrum nationalkulturellen Selbstbewusstseins. Die Commedia dell’arte, Werke von Shakespeare, Lope de Vega oder ...Molière avancierten dabei zum kulturellen Kapital. Im deutschsprachigen Raum stehen entsprechende nationalkulturelle »Leistungen« hingegen mit der Verdrängung des Berufstheaters nach Maßgabe der Aufklärung in Verbindung. Zu zeigen, was in der deutschen Theatergeschichte verdrängt wird, ist ein Ziel dieser Edition. Die publizierten Spieltexte stehen beispielsweise mit dem Elisabethanischen Theater, der Amsterdamer Schouwburg, dem Jesuitentheater oder Molière in Verbindung, womit ein deutschsprachiges »Internationaltheater«, das sich an Bedürfnissen des Publikums orientierte, neu entdeckt wird. In Europe, the emergence of a modern professional theatre in many places became a focus of national self-esteem. The Commedia dell'arte, works by Shakespeare, Lope de Vega or Moliere, became a weighty cultural capital. In German-speaking countries, however, corresponding cultural "achievements" are connected with the repression of the traditional theatre profession in accordance with the Enlightenment. To show what is being repressed in German theatre history is one aim of this edition. For example, the published plays are related to the Elizabethan Theater, the Amsterdam Schouwburg, the Jesuit Theater or Moliere, thus revealing a German-language "international theatre" that was oriented towards the expectations of its audience.
Acting on stage is a mode of performing an action, in the context of which the bodily aspects implicitly at work in acting reveal their own significance and power. This event can actualize a wound ...incarnated in human beings, because the actor acts and does not act at the same time and hence the concept of being ‘the doer’ unmasks itself as being illusionary. One could call it a kind of ‘symbolic death’ (Mueller), an ‘anthropological mutation’ (Agamben)––an event of great interest because of its highly ethical call.The book “Actors and the Art of Performance. Under Exposure” opens with a cascade of contradictory motives for becoming an actor. But, if theatre is no longer understood as a theatre of representation, then what takes place on stage is a transformation at play with truth, in which ethics are realized by the aesthetic. Insofar the book summarizes the attempt to explore and map guidelines of acting as being under the perspective of be-coming. That may sound fairly harmless in theory, but it feels anything but harmless when you experience it on your own body. For example, for being physical under exposure actors have to learn that there exists no fundamental dualism between mind and matter. Furthermore, actors are espoused to a dynamic shifting ground in the name of creativity. They have to carry the burden that the self is no sovereign identity as we generally suppose, but rather a threshold of permanent be-coming. One could call it the outstanding gift of acting. In the German language, gift means “poison”, in German ears the word has the double meaning of poison and present, thus expressing the fact that a gift is disturbing and blessing at the same time. Loaded with fear and joy as the crucial point of acting, which attacks and attracts actors and spectators most.
Wird Theater nicht mehr als Repräsentation verstanden, werden im „Spiel mit der Wahrheit“ eine Fülle von Fragen über den Vollzug und das Ereignis unseres Daseins provoziert, die in einem ethischen Anspruch im Ästhetischen münden. Das klingt in der Theorie harmloser als es seinem physischen Ereignis nach ist. Denn der schöpferische Akt katapultiert SchauspielerInnen in eine Zone zwischen aktiv und passiv, in der sie nicht mehr alleinige Täter und souveräne Subjekte ihres Spiels sind.
As the prominence of the recent #WakingTheFeminists movement illustrates, the Irish theatre world is highly conscious of the ways in which theatre can foster social emancipation. This volume of ...essays uncovers a wide range of marginalised histories by reflecting on the emancipatory role that the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) has played in Irish culture and society, both historically and in more recent times. The Gate’s founders, Hilton Edwards and Michéal mac Liammóir, promoted the work of many female playwrights and created an explicitly cosmopolitan stage on which repressive ideas about gender, sexuality, class and language were questioned. During Selina Cartmell’s current tenure as director, cultural diversity and social emancipation have also featured prominently on the Gate’s agenda, with various productions exploring issues of ethnicity in contemporary Ireland. The Gate thus offers a unique model for studying the ways in which cosmopolitan theatres, as cultural institutions, give expression to and engage with the complexities of identity and diversity in changing, globalised societies.
This thematic issue is focused on Russian theatre of the first third of the twentieth century. One of the main topics discussed is the correlation and mutual influence of theatre and literature in ...the broadest sense. Theatre’s new relationship with the literary foundation required the creation of acting techniques adapted for the “universal actor”. In the 1910s, theatre’s development attracted universal interest. It was not only theatrical figures who took part in critical discussions about theatre, but also writers and literary theorists, artists, composers and music connoisseurs, cinematographers, lawyers and politicians. Theatre directors found themselves in the very centre of all these problems – the era of “director’s theatre” was underway. In modern theatre studies, there is a common problem of an unequal degree of study of various theatres and of the creativity of directors, actors, theatre artists, and composers. This thematic issue offers some contribution to its resolution.
Tadeusz Kantor was a Polish artist and theater director who directly influenced the conceptual understanding of theater, especially in Argentina following two visits to Buenos Aires with his troupe ...Cricot 2 in the 1980s. He exerted a particularly strong influence on the Periférico de Objetos The Periphery of Objects, a troupe founded in Buenos Aires in 1989 by Daniel Veronese, Ana Alvarado and Emilio García Wehbi, labelled by critics as “the Argentine theatre of the image”. Despite radically different socio-cultural contexts, elements arising from Kantor’s theater practices (especially his idea of the “poor object” and his concept of “reality of the lowest rank”) acquired distinctly different meanings in Latin America from those coined by Kantor. A nuanced examination of the Periférico de Objetos indicates that Kantor’s concepts, which in their original context resisted politicization, played an important role in the creation of a socially and politically engaged theatre. His concepts, adapted to local realities by the Periférico de Objetos, were reflected in debates surrounding the recent Argentinian past, most notably, the post-dictatorship period.
