Modern Theories Of Performance

The modern era in the theatre is remarkable for the extraordinary role and influence of theoretical practitioners, whose writings have shaped our sense of the possibilities and objectives of performance. This study offers a critical exploration of the theoretical writings of key modern practitioners from Stanlislavski to Boal. Designed to be read alongside primary source material, each chapter offers not only a summary and exposition of these theories, but a critical commentary on their composition as discourses. Close scrutiny of the cultural context and figurative language of these important, and sometimes difficult, texts yields fresh insight into the ideas of these practitioners.

The modern era in the theatre is remarkable for the extraordinary role and influence of theoretical practitioners, whose writings have shaped our sense of the possibilities and objectives of performance. This study offers a critical exploration of the theoretical writings of key modern practitioners from Stanlislavski to Boal. Designed to be read alongside primary source material, each chapter offers not only a summary and exposition of these theories, but a critical commentary on their composition as discourses. Close scrutiny of the cultural context and figurative language of these important, and sometimes difficult, texts yields fresh insight into the ideas of these practitioners.

Theories of Performance invites students to explore the possibilities of performance for creating, knowing, and staking claims to the world. Each chapter surveys, explains, and illustrates classic, modern, and postmodern theories that answer the questions, "What is performance?" "Why do people perform?" and "How does performance constitute our social and political worlds?" The chapters feature performance as the entry point for understanding texts, drama, culture, social roles, identity, resistance, and technologies.

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The book is based on the lectures delivered at the XCIII Session of the École de Physique des Houches, held in August, 2009. The aim of the event was to familiarize the new generation of PhD students and postdoctoral fellows with the principles and methods of modern lattice field theory, which aims to resolve fundamental, non-perturbative questions about QCD without uncontrolled approximations. The emphasis of the book is on the theoretical developments that have shaped the field in the last two decades and that have turned lattice gauge theory into a robust approach to the determination of low energy hadronic quantities and of fundamental parameters of the Standard Model. By way of introduction, the lectures begin by covering lattice theory basics, lattice renormalization and improvement, and the many faces of chirality. A later course introduces QCD at finite temperature and density. A broad view of lattice computation from the basics to recent developments was offered in a corresponding course. Extrapolations to physical quark masses and a framework for the parameterization of the low-energy physics by means of effective coupling constants is covered in a lecture on chiral perturbation theory. Heavy-quark effective theories, an essential tool for performing the relevant lattice calculations, is covered from its basics to recent advances. A number of shorter courses round out the book and broaden its purview. These included recent applications to the nucleon—nucleon interation and a course on physics beyond the Standard Model.

This collection of published and unpublished essays connects antiquity with the present by debating the current prohibiting conceptions of performance theory and the insistence on a limited version of ‘the contemporary’. The theatre is attractive for its history and also for its lively present. These essays explore aspects of historical performance in ancient Greece, and link thoughts on its significance to wider reflections on cultural theory from around the world and performance in the contemporary postmodern era, concluding with ideas on the new theatre of the diaspora. Each section of the book includes a short introduction; the essays and shorter interventions take various forms, but all are concerned with theatre, with practical aspects of theatre and theoretical dimensions of its study. The subjects range from ancient Greece to the present day, and include speculations on the origin of ancient tragic acting, the kinds of festival performance in ancient Athens, how performance is reflected in the tragic scripts, the significance of the presence of the chorus, technology and the ancient theatre, comparative thinking on Greek, Indian and Japanese theory, a critique of the rhetoric of performance theory and of postmodernism, reflections on modernism and theatre, and on the importance of adaptation to theatre, studies of the theatre and diaspora in Britain.

How well do governments do in converting the resources they take from us - like taxes - into services that improve the well-being of individuals, groups, and society as a whole? In other words: how well do they perform? This question has become increasingly prominent in public debates over the past couple of decades, especially in the developed world but also in developing countries. As the state has grown during the second half of the 20th century, so pressures to justify its role in producing public services have also increased. Governments across the world have implemented all sorts of policies aimed at improving performance. But how much do we know about what actually improves performance of public organisations and services? On what theories, explicit or more often implicit, are these policies based? The answer is: too much and too little. There are dozens of theories, models, assumptions, and prescriptions about 'what works' in improving performance. But there's been very little attempt to 'join up' theories about performance and make some sense of the evidence we have within a coherent theoretical framework. This ground-breaking book sets out to begin to fill this gap by creatively synthesising the various fragments and insights about performance into a framework for systematically exploring and understanding how public sector performance is shaped. It focuses on three key aspects: the external 'performance regime' that drives performance of public agencies; the multiple dimensions that drive performance from within; and the competing public values that frame both of these and shape what public expects from public services.