Hypertheatre

Hypertheatre: Contemporary Radical Adaptation of Greek Tragedy investigates the adaptation of classical drama for the contemporary stage and explores its role as an active, polemical form of theatre which addresses present-day issues. The book’s premise is that by breaking drama into constituent parts, revising, reinterpreting and rewriting to create a new, culturally and politically relevant construct, the process of adaptation creates a 'hyperplay', newly repurposed for the contemporary world. This process is explored through a diverse collection of postmodern adaptations of Antigone, Medea, and The Trojan Women, analysing their adaptive strategies and the evidence of how these remakings reflect the cultures of which they are a part. Central to this study is the idea that each of these adaptations becomes an entirely new play, redefining its central female figures and invoking reconfigurations of femininity which emphasise individual women’s strengths and female solidarity. Written for scholars of Theatre, Adaptation, Performance Studies, and Literature, Hypertheatre places the Greek classics firmly within a contemporary feminist discourse.

The new, fifth edition of Robert Cohen's Acting One, the text used to teach acting on more campuses than any other, has now been combined for the first time with his Acting Two, (the second edition of his previously-titled Advanced Acting). Together, Acting One/Acting Two provides a comprehensive and fully integrated system of all acting, from the most realistic to the most stylized. Part One (Acting One) covers basic skills such as talking, listening, tactical interplay, physicalizing, building scenes, and making powerful acting choices. Part Two (Acting Two) provides a series of exercises that encourage the student actor's self-extension into radically different styles (historical, literary, fantastical) and characterizations; then coaches the student through scenework in a variety of historical periods (Greek, Commedia, Elizabethan, Molière, Restoration, Belle Epoque), as well as modern hyper-realistic theatrical forms such as the theatres of alienation and the absurd, and exemplary recent dramas by Tony Kushner, Margaret Edson, August Wilson and Doug Wright.

This gorgeous full-colour book documents the dynamic creative arts company Ex Machina, including Robert Lepage's Dragon's Trilogy.

This unique volume collects a series of essays that link new developments in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and recent trends in contemporary cinema. Though Lacanian theory has long had a privileged place in the analysis of film, film theory has tended to ignore some of Lacan's most important ideas. As a result, Lacanian film theory has never properly integrated the disruptive and troubling aspects of the filmic experience that result from the encounter with the Real that this experience makes possible. Many contemporary theorists emphasize the importance of the encounter with the Real in Lacan's thought, but rarely in discussions of film. By bringing the encounter with the Real into the dialogue of film theory, the contributors to this volume present a new version of Lacan to the world of film studies. These essays bring this rediscovered Lacan to bear on contemporary cinema through analysis of a wide variety of films, including Memento, Eyes Wide Shut, Breaking the Waves, and Fight Club. The films discussed here demand a turn to Lacanian theory because they emphasize the disruptive role of the Real and of jouissance in the experience of the human subject. There is a growing number of films in contemporary cinema that speak to film's power to challenge and disturb the complacency of spectators, and the essays in Lacan and Contemporary Film analyze some of these films and bring their power to light. Because of its dual focus on developments in Lacanian theory and in contemporary film, this collection serves as both an accessible introduction to current Lacanian film theory and an introduction to the study of contemporary cinema. Each essay provides an accessible, jargon-free analysis of one or more important films, and at the same time, each explains and utilizes key concepts of Lacanian theory. The collection stages an encounter between Lacanian theory and contemporary cinema, and the result is the enrichment of both.

Within the space of a year, between 1995 and 1996, three highly unusual shows were produced by three celebrated figures in world theatre: Qui Est La, directed by Peter Brook, Elsinore, directed by Robert Lepage, and Hamlet: a monologue, directed by Robert Wilson. Each was a version-at least in part-of Shakespeare's Hamlet, although none of them treated the show in anything like an orthodox manner.

This book is about the shift from the modern university of the nation state to the global virtual university of the future. John Tiffin and Lalita Rajasingham launched the idea of virtual universities on the Internet with the publication of 'In Search of the Virtual Class: Education in an Information Society' in 1995. Since then, virtual universities have multiplied worldwide. However, the authors argue that globalisation and the Internet are still in their infancy, and universities have yet to face the challenges of global free trade in broadband telecommunications, artificial intelligence and HyperReality. Based on material gathered from research in the USA, Japan, Taiwan, Brazil, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand, this book describes how a global university could function in the future and presents a paradigm from which it might be constructed. This unique, visionary text will be critical reading for academics, postgraduate students and for anyone involve din policymaking and planning within the university community and administration.

The Dramaturgy of the Door examines the door as a critical but under-explored feature of theatre and performance, asking how doors function on stage, in site-specific practice and in performances of place. This first book-length study on the topic argues that doors engage in and help to shape broad phenomena of performance across key areas of critical enquiry in the field. Doors open up questions of theatrical space(s) and artistic encounters with place(s), design and architecture, bodies and movement, interior versus exterior, im/materiality, the relationship between the real and the imaginary, and processes of transformation. As doors separate places and practices, they also invite us to see connections and contradictions between each one and to consider the ways in which doors frame the world beyond the stage and between places of performance. With a wide-ranging set of examples – from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to performance installations in the Mojave Desert – The Dramaturgy of the Door is aimed at performance makers and artists as well as advanced students and scholars in the fields of performance studies, cultural theory, and visual arts.

The influence of the women’s movement has long been a scholarly priority in the study of British women’s drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but previous scholarship has largely clustered around two events: the New Woman in the 1890s and the suffrage campaign in the years before the First World War. Women’s Playwriting and the Women’s Movement, 1890–1918 is the first designated study of British women’s drama from a period of exceptional productivity and innovation for female playwrights. Both the British theatre and women’s position within British society underwent fundamental changes in this period, and this book shows how female dramatists carefully negotiated their position in the heated debates about women’s rights that occurred at this time, while staking out a place for themselves in an evolving theatrical landscape. Farkas also identifies the women’s movement as a key influence on the development of female-authored drama between 1890 and 1918, but argues that scholarly prioritizing of the "radicalism" of work associated with the New Woman and the suffrage campaign has had a distorting effect in the past. Ideal for scholars of British and Victorian theatre, Women’s Playwriting and the Women’s Movement, 1890–1918 offers a new perspective which emphasizes the complexity of women playwrights’ engagement with first-wave feminism and links it to the diversification of the British theatre in this period.