Theatre Across Borders

Is there a fundamental connection between New York's Elevator Repair Service's 9-hour production of The Great Gatsby and a Kathakali performance? How can we come to appreciate the slowness of Kabuki theatre as much as the pace of the Whatsapp theatre of post-Arab Spring Turkey? Can we go beyond our own culture's contemporary definition of a 'good play' and think about the theatre in a deep and pluralistic manner? Drawing on his extensive experience working with theatre artists, students and thinkers across the globe - up to and including an hour-long audience with the Dalai Lama - playwright Abhishek Majumdar considers why we make theatre and how we see it in different parts of the world. His own work has taken him from theatre in Japan to dance companies in the Phillippines, writers in Lebanon and Palestine, theatre groups in Burkina Faso, war-torn areas like Kashmir and North Eastern India, and to China and Tibet, Argentina and Mexico. Via a far-reaching and provocative collection of essays that is informed by this wealth of experience, Majumdar explores: - how different cultures conceive theatre and how the norm of one place is the experiment of another; - the ways in which theatre across the world mirrors its socio political and philosophical climate; - how, for thousands of years, theatre has been a tool to both disrupt and to heal; - and how, even within the many differences, there are universals from which we can all learn and how theatre does cross borders Of interest to theatre makers everywhere - be they writers, actors, directors or designers - this book offers an oversight, as well as interrogation, into the place of theatre in the world today.

10 Isabel Farnese and the Sexual Politics of the Spanish Court Theater -- Index

How do nationalized stereotypes inform the reception and content of the migrant comedian’s work? How do performers adapt? What gets lost (and found) in translation? Border-Crossing and Comedy at the Théâtre Italien, 1716-1723 explores these questions in an early modern context. When a troupe of commedia dell’arte actors were invited by the French crown to establish a theatre in Paris, they found their transition was anything but easy. They had to learn a new language and adjust to French expectations and demands. This study presents their story as a dynamic model of coping with the challenges of migration, whereby the actors made their transnational identity a central focus of their comedy. Relating their work to popular twenty-first century comedians, this book also discusses the tools and ideas that contextualize the border-crossing comedian’s work—including diplomacy, translation, improvisation, and parody—across time.

A truly cosmopolitan Irish writer, George Moore (1852-1933) was a fascinating figure of the fin de siècle, moving between countries, crossing genre and medium boundaries, forever exploring and promulgating aesthetic trends and artistic developments: Naturalism in the novel and the theatre, Impressionism in painting, Decadence and the avant-garde, Literary Wagnerism, the Irish Literary Revival, New Woman culture. This volume on border-crossings offers a variety of critical perspectives to approach Moore’s multifaceted oeuvre and personality. The essays by Contributors from various national backgrounds and from a wide range of disciplines establish original points of contact between literary creation, art history, Wagnerian opera, gender studies, sociology, and altogether reposition Moore as a major representative of European turn-of-the-century culture.

As performative and political acts, translation, intervention, and participation are movements that take place across, along, and between borders. Such movements traverse geographic boundaries, affect social distinctions, and challenge conceptual categorizations - while shifting and transforming lines of separation themselves. This book brings together choreographers, movement practitioners, and theorists from various fields and disciplines to reflect upon such dynamics of difference. From their individual cultural backgrounds, they ask how these movements affect related fields such as corporeality, perception, (self-)representation, and expression.

This book makes a significant contribution to interdisciplinary engagements between Theatre Studies and Cultural Geography in its analysis of how theatre articulates transnational geographies of Asian culture and identity. Deploying a geographical approach to transnational culture, Rogers analyses the cross-border relationships that exist within and between Asian American, British East Asian, and South East Asian theatres, investigating the effect of transnationalism on the construction of identity, the development of creative praxis, and the reception of works in different social fields. This book therefore examines how practitioners engage with one another across borders, and details the cross-cultural performances, creative opportunities, and political alliances that result. By viewing ethnic minority theatres as part of global — rather than simply national — cultural fields, Rogers argues that transnational relationships take multiple forms and have varying impetuses that cannot always be equated to diasporic longing for a homeland or as strategically motivated for economic gain. This argument is developed through a series of chapters that examine how different transnational spatialities are produced and re-worked through the practice of theatre making, drawing upon an analysis of rehearsals, performances, festivals, and semi-structured interviews with practitioners. The book extends existing discussions of performance and globalization, particularly through its focus on the multiplicity of transnational spatiality and the networks between English-language Asian theatres. Its analysis of spatially extensive relations also contributes to an emerging body of research on creative geographies by situating theatrical praxis in relation to cross-border flows. Performing Asian Transnationalisms demonstrates how performances reflect and rework conventional transnational geographies in imaginative and innovative ways.

Laura Levin is an Associate Professor of Theatre at York University, Toronto. She is Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Theatre Review and Editor of Theatre and Performance in Toronto (2011). --Book Jacket.

Who are the artists who are currently invigorating Canadian theatre? They are the artists who come to the theatre through the "back door" -- eccentrics, absurdists, puppeteers, clowns, raconteurs, and solo performance artists who are looking at our place in the world through physical comedy, satire, subversive humour, ingenuity. Their creations are generous, inventive and always infused with a high level of virtuosity. Much of this work is "borderless" -- that is to say it breaks down the borders between the public and performer -- mocking our preoccupations and pretensions, communicating stories with images, allusion, metaphor and unforgettable characters that fully engage the audience. The artists profiled in this lively book have toured their works extensively, have performed to audiences around the globe to great acclaim and have influenced young performers through teaching and performance. Through in-depth interviews, photographs and representative texts, readers are also given the opportunity to be introduced to an astounding cross-section of influential English and French Canadian performance artists who are truly creating theatre without borders.