The Directors Lab

A new manual containing the collected advice Evan Tsitsias has received from hundreds of directors all over the world through his decade of involvement with The Directors Lab.

"After spending ten years in international Directors Lab programs--first in New York and Chicago, then co-founding Directors Lab North in Toronto--Evan Tsitsias has amassed an extensive amount of advice, examples, and notes that prove essential reading for theatre creators and artists across disciplines. Combined with master classes and interviews with established, emerging, and mid-career directors, this manual is an artistic, logistic, and pedagogical exploration into the mechanics of theatre creation through the perspective of a director. With so much useful material, readers become honorary "labbies," ready to leave their own mark on the theatrical landscape."--

An introduction to the mysterious theater role of a dramaturg by a legend in the field Anne Cattaneo was among the first Americans to fill the role of dramaturg, one of theater’s best kept secrets. A combination of theater artist, scholar, researcher, play advocate, editor, and writer’s friend, it is the job of a dramaturg to “reflect light back on the elements that are already in play,” while bringing a work of theater to life. Cattaneo traces the field from its beginnings in the eighteenth century to the present and chronicles the multitude and variety of tasks a dramaturg undertakes before, during, and after a production is brought to the stage. Using detailed stories from her work with theater artists such as Tom Stoppard, Wendy Wasserstein, Robert Wilson, Shi-Zheng Chen, and Sarah Ruhl, as well as the discovery of a ‘lost’ play by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Cattaneo provides an invaluable manual to those studying, working in, and interested in this most fascinating profession.

The concept of the avant garde is highly contested, whether one consigns it to history or claims it for present-day or future uses. The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on the kinds of radical art theory and partisan practices that are possible in today’s world of global art markets and creative industry entrepreneurialism. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers, exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis. The manifest strategies, temporalities, and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics are expressed through an international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas that covers the fields of film, video, architecture, visual art, art activism, literature, poetry, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.

"Lab Dynamics is a book about the challenges to doing science and dealing with the individuals involved, including oneself. The authors, a scientist and a psychotherapist, draw on principles of group and behavioral psychology but speak to scientists in their own language about their own experiences. They offer in-depth, practical advice, real-life examples, and exercises tailored to scientific and technical workplaces on topics as diverse as conflict resolution, negotiation, dealing with supervision, working with competing peers, and making the transition from academia to industry." "This is a uniquely valuable contribution to the scientific literature, on a subject of direct importance to lab heads, postdocs, and students. It is also required reading for senior staff concerned about improving efficiency and effectiveness in academic and industrial research."--BOOK JACKET

As a research methodology, walking has a diverse and extensive history in the social sciences and humanities, underscoring its value for conducting research that is situated, relational, and material. Building on the importance of place, sensory inquiry, embodiment, and rhythm within walking research, this book offers four new concepts for walking methodologies that are accountable to an ethics and politics of the more-than-human: Land and geos, affect, transmaterial and movement. The book carefully considers the more-than-human dimensions of walking methodologies by engaging with feminist new materialisms, posthumanisms, affect theory, trans and queer theory, Indigenous theories, and critical race and disability scholarship. These more-than-human theories rub frictionally against the history of walking scholarship and offer crucial insights into the potential of walking as a qualitative research methodology in a more-than-human world. Theoretically innovative, the book is grounded in examples of walking research by WalkingLab, an international research network on walking (www.walkinglab.org). The book is rich in scope, engaging with a wide range of walking methods and forms including: long walks on hiking trails, geological walks, sensory walks, sonic art walks, processions, orienteering races, protest and activist walks, walking tours, dérives, peripatetic mapping, school-based walking projects, and propositional walks. The chapters draw on WalkingLab’s research-creation events to examine walking in relation to settler colonialism, affective labour, transspecies, participation, racial geographies and counter-cartographies, youth literacy, environmental education, and collaborative writing. The book outlines how more-than-human theories can influence and shape walking methodologies and provokes a critical mode of walking-with that engenders solidarity, accountability, and response-ability. This volume will appeal to graduate students, artists, and academics and researchers who are interested in Education, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Affect Studies, Geography, Anthropology, and (Post)Qualitative Research Methods.

Illuminates the historical and aesthetic relationship of print to avant-garde performance

This book investigates how Pragmatist philosophy as a philosophical method contributes to the understanding and practice of interdisciplinary dance research. It uses the author's own practice-based research project, Later Rain, to illustrate this. Later Rain is a post-dramatic dance theater work that engages primarily with issues in the philosophy of religion and socio-political philosophy. It focuses on ecstatic states that arise in Appalachian charismatic Pentecostal church services, states characterized by dancing, paroxysms, shouting, and speaking in tongues (glossolalia). Research for this work is interdisciplinary as it draws on studio practice, ethnographic field work, cultural history, Pentecostal history and theology, folk aesthetics, anthropological understandings of ecstatic religious rituals, and dance history regarding acclaimed works that have sought to present aspects of religious ecstasy on stage; Doris Humphrey's The Shakers (1931), Mark Godden’s Angels in the Architecture (2012), Martha Clarke’s Angel Reapers (2015) and Ralph Lemon’s Geography trilogy (2005). The project thereby demonstrates a process model of dance philosophy, showing how philosophy and dance artistry intertwine in a specific creative process.