The Legacy Of Stylistic Theatre In The Creation Of A Modern Sinhala Drama In Sri Lanka

This book explores the development of Sinhala stylistic drama from its earliest manifestations to the post-independence era. Bulathsinghala examines the impact of indigenous and imported folk theatrical forms on the work of the most significant postcolonial stylistic dramatists and on key plays that they produced. In the process, the book explores a number of myths and misunderstandings regarding Sri Lanka’s folk heritage and seeks to establish more reliable information on the principal indigenous Sri Lankan folk dramatic forms and their characteristics. At the same time, by drawing connections between folk drama and the post-independence stylistic theatrical movement, the author demonstrates the essential role of the former in Sinhala culture prior to the advent of Western and other influences and shows how both continue to inflect Sri Lankan drama today. This book will help to open the field of South Asian drama studies to an audience consisting not only of scholars and students but also of general readers who are interested in the fields of drama and theatre and Asian studies.

This book examines the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of a single year, 1964. The book analyses specific events that occurred in 1964 as benchmarks of the Civil Right Movement, making the case that 1964 was a watershed year. Each chapter considers individually politics, rhetoric, sports, dramatic literature, film, art, and music, breaking down the events and illustrating their importance to the social and political life in the United States in 1964. This study emphasizes 1964 as a nodal point in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, arguing that it was within this single year that the tide against racism and injustice turned markedly. This book will be of great interest to the scholars and students of civil rights, theatre and performance, art history, and drama literature.

This book examines performance practices that involve people in recovery from addiction, theorising such practices as recovery-engaged. Focusing on examples of practice from a growing movement of UK-based recovery arts practitioners and performers, it highlights a unique approach to performance that infuses an understanding of lived experiences of addiction and recovery with creative practice. It offers a philosophy of being in recovery that understands lived experience, and performance practice, as a dynamic system of interrelations with the human and nonhuman elements that make up the societal settings in which recovery communities struggle to exist. It thereby frames the process of recovery, and recovery-engaged performance, as an affective ecology – a system of messy connections. Building upon ideas from posthumanist research on addiction, cultural theory on identity and new materialist interpretations of performance practice, it considers how such contemporary theory might offer additional ways of thinking and doing arts practice with people affected by addiction. The discussion highlights the distinct aesthetics, ethics and politics of this area of performance practice. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in Applied Theatre and Critical Arts and Mental Health studies.

This book argues that dramaturgy makes things visible and does so in two distinct and interrelating ways: creative processes and formal elements of performance are rendered visible and readable; and performance dramaturgy becomes an expanded practice in which performance is a locus for creating wide-ranging events and activities. This exploration defines dramaturgy as a perceptibly transforming agency in the construction, presentation and reception of contemporary performance; and it shows how contemporary performance has an intrinsic dramaturgical aspect whose proliferation of dramaturgical practices has led to a far-reaching reinvention of what contemporary theatre is. In doing so, this book deals with a careful selection of performance practices, including theatrical adaptations, new media dramaturgy, contemporary dance, installation-performance, postdramatic theatre, visionary works by auteurs, and revivals of well-known stage shows. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater studies, performance studies, cultural studies, curating, and dance scholarship.

This book develops theoretical intersections between theatre and human rights and provides methodologies to investigate human rights questions from within the perspective of theatre as a complex set of disciplines. While human rights research and programming often employ the arts as representations of human rights-related violations and abuses, this study focuses on dramatic form and structure, in addition to content, as uniquely positioned to interrogate important questions in human rights theory and practice. This project positions theatre as a method of examination in addition to the important purposes the arts serve to raise consciousness that accompany other, often considered more primary modes of analysis. A main feature of this approach includes emphasis on dialectical structures in drama and human rights and integration of applied theatre and critical ethnography with more traditional theatre. This integration will demonstrate how theatre and human rights operates beyond the arts as representation model, offering a primary means of analysis, activism, and political discourse. This book will be of great interest to theatre and human rights practitioners and activists, scholars, and students.

This study explores the formation, establishment, expansion, and disintegration of stage design as a modern profession and a recognized artform in Finnish theatres. Drawing on oral or written recollections and thoughts of stage designers from different decades, the author asks how their artistic agencies, occupational identities, and theoretical self-understanding have been constituted. She analyses Finnish theatre history from new perspectives by shifting the focus from finished performances to largely unknown practices behind the scenes. This book examines the cultural institutions that have constituted the stage designers’ role and position, like the professional city theatre system, the craft union, and education. This research shows how modern and postmodern scenographic innovations have been assimilated to local contexts, and how material and cultural circumstances have reshaped the artistic practices. Without bypassing canonical trendsetters or hegemonic cultural mindsets, the focus is directed on the everyday grassroot level of stage design practices. Personal interviews with over 20 designers make visible an ample repertoire of unwritten knowledge stored in habitual ways of working and dealing creatively with the complex system of theatre making. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies with a focus on scenography.

This book explores postmodern choreographic engagements of pregnant bodies in the US over the last 70 years. Johanna Kirk discusses how choreographers negotiate identification with the look of their pregnant bodies to maintain a sense of integrity as artists and to control representations of their gender and physical abilities while pregnant. Across chapters, the artists discussed include Anna Halprin, Trisha Brown, Twyla Tharp, Sandy Jamrog, Jane Comfort, Jody Oberfelder, Jawole Willa, Miguel Gutiérrez, Yanira Castro, Noémie LaFrance, and Meg Foley. By presenting their bodies in performance, these artists demonstrate how their experiences surrounding pregnancy intersect not only with their artform and its history but also with their personal experiences of race, gender, and sexual identification. In these pages, Johanna Kirk argues that choreography offers them tools that are alternative to medicine (or other forms of social representation) for understanding what/how pregnant bodies do and feel and what they can mean for individuals and their communities. The works within these chapters invite readers to see dancing bodies and pregnant bodies in new ways and for their potential to manifest new possibilities. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars exploring dance, theatre and performance, race, and gender.

This book explores the relationship of the life and work of the remarkable Parisian-Jewish writer Georges Perec (1936–1983) to dance. "Dancing" addresses art-making parallels and their personal and sociocultural contexts, including Perec’s childhood loss of his parents in the Holocaust and its repercussions in the significance of the body, everydayness, space, and attention permeating his work. This book, emerging from the author Leslie Satin’s perspective as a dancer and scholar, links Perec’s concerns with those of dance and demonstrates that Perec’s work has implications for dance and how we think about it. Moreover, it is framed as a performative autobiographical enactment of the author's relationship to Perec, periodically linking their written, danced, and imagined lives. This exploration will be of great interest to dancers, dance scholars, and dance students interested in contemporary experimental dance and contemporary dance.