Edward Gordon Craig And The Periodical As Performance

No study of modern theater is complete without a thorough understanding of the enormous influence of visionary genius Edward Gordon Craig. Born in England in 1872, Craig went on to become famous world-wide as an actor, manager, director, playwright, designer, and most importantly an author and theorist, whose books were translated into German, Russian, Japanese, Dutch, Hungarian, and Danish. Although an essential parallel to the European avant-garde, Craig was often read as "exceptional" and highly innovative in his native Britain, thus, The Mask not only appears as Craig's main cosmopolitan project but also at times functions as a surrogate stage for his experiments in theater practice. The book has a comprehensive chronology, extensive notes and a bibliography making it an essential text for undergraduates, postgraduates, actors, theatre professionals, designers, directors, researchers and writers in the fields of theatre studies (especially theater set and lighting) and theater history.

No study of modern theater is complete without a thorough understanding of the enormous influence of visionary genius Edward Gordon Craig. Born in England in 1872, Craig went on to become famous world-wide as an actor, manager, director, playwright, designer, and most importantly an author and theorist, whose books were translated into German, Russian, Japanese, Dutch, Hungarian, and Danish. Although an essential parallel to the European avant-garde, Craig was often read as "exceptional" and highly innovative in his native Britain, thus, The Mask not only appears as Craig's main cosmopolitan project but also at times functions as a surrogate stage for his experiments in theater practice. The book has a comprehensive chronology, extensive notes and a bibliography making it an essential text for undergraduates, postgraduates, actors, theatre professionals, designers, directors, researchers and writers in the fields of theatre studies (especially theater set and lighting) and theater history.

This book places the work of Edward Gordon Craig within the context of the European avant-garde and the broader framework of performance and Modernity. Through a detailed study of the journal The Mask Craig is contextualised and theorised in terms of his contemporaries, his historical precedents and in terms of the legacy he has left for succeeding generations of theatre experimenters. Since Craig was often preoccupied with creating a 'theory' of performance rather than working on specific productions, The Mask provided him with a metaphorical and physical stage for the manifesto-like character of his writings. It also helps shed light on some of the contradictory aspects of Craigian thought.

Taking into account politics, history, and aesthetics, this edited volume explores the main expressions of primitivism in Iberian and Transatlantic modernisms. Ten case studies are thoroughly analyzed concerning both the circulations and exchanges connecting the Iberian and Latin American artistic and literary milieus with each other and with the Parisian circles. Chapters also examine the patterns and paradoxes associated with the manifestations of primitivism, including their local implications and cosmopolitan drive. This book opens up and deepens the discussion of the ties that Spain and Portugal maintained with their imperial pasts, which extended into European twentieth-century colonialism, as well as the nationalist and folk aesthetics promoted by the cultural industry of Iberian dictatorships. The book significantly rethinks long-established ideas about modern art and the production of primitivist imagery. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Iberian studies, Latin American studies, colonialism, and modernism. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Subscription Theater asks why turn-of-the-century British and Irish citizens spent so much time, money, and effort adding their names to subscription lists. Shining a spotlight on private play-producing clubs, public repertory theaters, amateur drama groups, and theatrical magazines, Matthew Franks locates subscription theaters in a vast constellation of civic subscription initiatives, ranging from voluntary schools and workers' hospitals to soldiers' memorials and Diamond Jubilee funds. Across these enterprises, Franks argues, subscribers created their own spaces for performing social roles from which they had long been excluded. Whether by undermining the authority of the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays and London's commercial theater producers, or by extending rights to disenfranchised women and property-less men, a diverse cast of subscribers including typists, plumbers, and maids acted as political representatives for their fellow citizens, both inside the theater and far beyond it. Citizens prized a "democratic" or "representative" subscription list as an end in itself, and such lists set the stage for the eventual public subsidy of subscription endeavors. Subscription Theater points to the importance of printed ephemera such as programs, tickets, and prospectuses in questioning any assumption that theatrical collectivity is confined to the live performance event. Drawing on new media as well as old, Franks uses a database of over 23,000 stage productions to reveal that subscribers introduced nearly a third of the plays that were most frequently revived between 1890 and the mid-twentieth century, as well as nearly half of all new translations, and they were instrumental in staging the work of such writers as Shaw and Ibsen, whose plays featured subscription lists as a plot point or prop. Although subscribers often are blamed for being a conservative force in theater, Franks demonstrates that they have been responsible for how we value audience and repertoire today, and their history offers a new account of the relationship between ephemera, drama, and democracy.

In-depth case-studies of significant aspects of early twentieth-century English music-theatre, which engage with notions of Englishness and the idea of a 'musical renaissance'

In this lively and varied tribute to Martin Banham, Layiwola has assembled critical commentaries and two plays which focus primarily on Nigerian theatre - both traditional and contemporary. Dele Layiwola, Dapo Adelugba and Sonny Oti trace the beginnings of the School of Drama in 1960, at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, where Martin Banham played a key and influential role in the growth of thriving Nigerian theatre repetoire and simulaneously encouraging the creation of a new theatre based on traditional Nigerian theatre forms. This comparative approach is taken up in Dele Layiwola's study of ritual and drama in the context of various traditions worldwide, while Oyin Ogunba presents a lucid picture of the complex use of theatre space in Yoruba ritual dramadar drama. Harsh everyday realitites, both physical and political, are graphically demonstrated by Robert McClaren (Zimbabwe) and Oga Steve Abah (Nigeria) who both show surprising and alarming links between extreme actual experiences and theatre creation and performance. The texts of the two plays - When Criminals Turn Judges by Ola Rotimi, The Hand that Feeds the King by Wale Ogunyemi, are followed by Austin O. Asagba's study of oral tradition and text in plays by Osofisan and Agbeyegbe, and Frances Harding's study on power, language, and imagery in Wole Soyinka's plays.

Can art change the world? Or can art produce new knowledge that facilitates radical change in our slowly-evolving communities? If so, then we must ask: How does cultural transformation, whether super or slight, affect our understanding of culture and the world? Operating under the rubric of resistance and reform, R|EVOLUTIONS: Mapping Culture, Community and Change is a unique scholarly collection that seeks to illuminate current understandings of art, aesthetics, and the revolutionary impulse. The resulting work interrogates intersections between culture and community, revolution and evolution. At the same time, it examines how enduring social issues intertwine with current concerns, such as representations of the body or the book. Multidisciplinary in approach, topics run from subversive uses of the body in Renaissance drama to the effect of the atom bomb on postmodern culture. From Mark Wallinger’s Turner Prize-winning performance in a bear suit, to Angela Carter’s concept of sexual multiplicity in The Passion of New Eve. Cutting-edge and politically engaging, R|Evolutions will appeal to general readers as well as the specialist, and it is designed for scholars not only interested in issues of cultural production, but also in the evolution of politics and perception over time.