From Text To Performance

For the last two centuries biblical interpretation has been guided by perspectives that have largely ignored the oral context in which the gospels took shape. Only recently have scholars begun to explore how ancient media inform the interpretive process and an understanding of the Bible. This collection of essays, by authors who recognize that the Jesus tradition was a story heard and performed, seeks to reevaluate the constituent elements of narrative, including characters, structure, narrator, time, and intertextuality. In dialogue with traditional literary approaches, these essays demonstrate that an appreciation of performance yields fresh insights distinguishable in many respects from results of literary or narrative readings of the gospels.

This volume explores the impact of printing on the European theatre in the period 1480-1880 and shows that the printing press played a major part in the birth of modern theatre.

This invaluable student handbook is the first detailed guide to explain in detail the relationship between the drama text and the theory and practice of drama in performance. Beginning at the beginning, with accessible explanations of the meanings and methods of semiotics, Theatre as Sign System addresses key drama texts and offers new and detailed information about the theories of performance.

Embedded in modern print culture, biblical scholars have been projecting the assumptions and concepts of print culture onto the texts they interpret. In the ancient world from which those texts originate, however, literacy was confined to only a small number of educated scribes. And, as recent research has shown, even the literate scribes learned texts by repeated recitation, while the nonliterate ordinary people had little if any direct contact with written scrolls. The texts that had taken distinctive form, moreover, were embedded in a broader and deeper cultural repertoire cultivated orally in village communities as well as in scribal circles. Only recently have some scholars struggled to appreciate texts that later became "biblical" in their own historical context of oral communication. Exploration of texts in oral performance--whether as scribal teachers' instruction to their proteges or as prophetic speeches of Jesus of Nazareth or as the performance of a whole Gospel story in a community of Jesus-loyalists--requires interpreters to relinquish their print-cultural assumptions. Widening exploration of texts in oral performance in other fields offers exciting new possibilities for allowing those texts to come alive again in their community contexts as they resonated with the cultural tradition in which they were embedded.

This volume introduces the key elements and approaches in the study of theatre and performance, covering drama, music theatre and dance.

This invaluable student handbook is the first detailed guide to explain in detail the relationship between the drama text and the theory and practice of drama in performance. Beginning at the beginning, with accessible explanations of the meanings and methods of semiotics, Theatre as Sign System addresses key drama texts and offers new and detailed information about the theories of performance.

Text and Performance in Contemporary British Theatre interrogates the paradoxical nature of theatre texts, which have been understood both as separate literary objects in their own right and as material for performance. Drawing on analysis of contemporary practitioners who are working creatively with text, the book re-examines the relationship between text and performance within the specific context of British theatre. The chapters discuss a wide range of theatre-makers creating work in the UK from the 1990s onwards, from playwrights like Tim Crouch and Jasmine Lee-Jones to companies including Action Hero and RashDash. In doing so, the book addresses issues such as theatrical authorship, artistic intention, and the apparent incompleteness of plays as both written and performed phenomena. Text and Performance in Contemporary British Theatre also explores the implications of changing technologies of page and stage, analysing the impact of recent developments in theatre-making, editing, and publishing on the status of the theatre text. Written for scholars, students, and practitioners alike, Text and Performance in Contemporary British Theatre provides an original perspective on one of the most enduring problems to occupy theatre practice and scholarship.

Text Retrieval and Filtering: Analytical Models of Performance is the first book that addresses the problem of analytically computing the performance of retrieval and filtering systems. The book describes means by which retrieval may be studied analytically, allowing one to describe current performance, predict future performance, and to understand why systems perform as they do. The focus is on retrieving and filtering natural language text, with material addressing retrieval performance for the simple case of queries with a single term, the more complex case with multiple terms, both with term independence and term dependence, and for the use of grammatical information to improve performance. Unambiguous statements of the conditions under which one method or system will be more effective than another are developed. Text Retrieval and Filtering: Analytical Models of Performance focuses on the performance of systems that retrieve natural language text, considering full sentences as well as phrases and individual words. The last chapter explicitly addresses how grammatical constructs and methods may be studied in the context of retrieval or filtering system performance. The book builds toward solving this problem, although the material in earlier chapters is as useful to those addressing non-linguistic, statistical concerns as it is to linguists. Those interested in grammatical information should be cautioned to carefully examine earlier chapters, especially Chapters 7 and 8, which discuss purely statistical relationships between terms, before moving on to Chapter 10, which explicitly addresses linguistic issues. Text Retrieval and Filtering: Analytical Models of Performance is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on Information Retrieval or Linguistics, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.