American Women In The Performing Arts

Presents biographical profiles of 150 American women of achievement in the field of performing arts, including birth and death dates, major accomplishments, and historical influence.

A to Z of American Women in the Performing Arts, Second Edition is an engaging resource that provides readers with insightful, up-to-date biographiesof select women in the performing arts from the 19th century to the present.

Presents biographical profiles of American women of achievement in the field of visual arts, including birth and death dates, major accomplishments, and historical influence.

The Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Literature covers a period dating back to the eighteenth century. These specially commissioned essays highlight the artistry, complexity and diversity of a literary tradition that ranges from Lucy Terry to Toni Morrison. A wide range of topics are addressed, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement, and from the performing arts to popular fiction. Together, the essays provide an invaluable guide to a rich, complex tradition of women writers in conversation with each other as they critique American society and influence American letters. Accessible and vibrant, with the needs of undergraduate students in mind, this Companion will be of great interest to anybody who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of this important and vital area of American literature.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

These essays examine the history of women in musical theatre, providing biographical descriptions; interpretations of their productions; and several accounts of how being a woman affected their careers.

"This book is a detailed study of the powerful and innovative role women artists played in the development and expansion of performance art. This hybrid art form, which combines the visual arts with ingredients drawn from experimental dance, theater, music, and poetry, emerged in the late 1960's at the same time as the women's movement. Many women artists turned to performance art in order to translate and capture visually the concerns, demands and visions of the women's movement; thus women led the way in performance art's explorations of autobiography, ritual, mass spectacle and the creation of characters and personae. The Amazing Decade, edited by Moira Roth, with an introduction by Mary Jan Jacob, culls the best from women's performance history, highlighting pivotal works, chronicling changes and projecting future directions: the book contains a major essay by Roth on the history and character of women's performance art; individual profiles on thirty-seven artists and collectives; an extensive bibliography; and a year-by-year chronology from 1956 onward in which women's performance art is set in the context of history and the women's movement. Profusely illustrated, The Amazing Decade is an indispensable reference book and an invaluable teaching tool"--

In this unprecedented, fascinating book which covers women in theatre from the 1910s to the 2010s, author Lynne Greeley notes that, for the purposes of this study, "feminism" is defined as the political impulse toward economic and social empowerment for females or the female-identified, a position perceived by many feminists as oppositional to ideas of femininity that they see as personally and politically constraining and that "femininity" comprises social behaviors and practices that mean as "many different things as there are women," some of which are empowering and others of which are not. This book illuminates how throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, playwrights and artists in American theatre both embodied and disrupted the feminine of their times. Through approaches as wide ranging as performing their own recipes, energizing silences, raging against war and rape, and inviting the public to inscribe their naked bodies, theatre artists have used performance as a site to insert themselves between the physicality of their female presence and the liminality of their disrupting the role of the feminine. Capturing that place of liminality, a neither-here-nor-there place that is often unsafe, where the established order is overturned by acts as banal as raising a plant, women have written and performed and disrupted their way through one hundred years of theatre history, even within the constraints of a variably rigid and usually unsympathetic social order. Creating a feminist femininity, they have reinscribed their place in the culture and provided models for their audiences to do the same. This comprehensive tome, part of the Cambria Contemporary Global Performing Arts headed by John Clum (Duke University) is an essential addition for theater studies and women's studies.