Theatres Of Feeling

Why is it that in going to see plays we are also touched or moved by them, and is there more than metaphor involved in such claims? Considering these and other questions, this book examines a range of contemporary performance works in which performers and their audiences occupy a shared realm of feelings, in which the play is not always the thing.

Engaging account of theatregoing in the later eighteenth century that explores how audiences responded emotionally to the performances.

A collection of essays by seasoned and emerging scholars that take the emotional temperature of Canadian performances.

Forms of Emotion analyses how drama, theatre and contemporary performance present emotion and its human and nonhuman diversity. This book explores the emotions, emotional feelings, mood, and affect, which make up a spectrum of ‘emotion’, to illuminate theatrical knowledge and practice and reflect the distinctions and debates in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and other disciplines. This study asserts that specific forms of emotion are intentionally unified in drama, theatre, and performance to convey meaning, counteract separation and subversively champion emotional freedom. The book progressively shows that the dramatic and theatrical representation of the nonhuman reveals how human dominance is offset by emotional connection with birds, animals, and the natural environment. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers interested in the emotions and affect in dramatic literature, theatre studies, performance studies, psychology, and philosophy as well as artists working with emotionally expressive performance.

How does a tragedy arouse pity and fear? How do music and lighting set a mood or convey an emotional tone for an audience? Why does theatre move us? Theatre & Feeling explores the idea that, for many people, theatre is a passion. It provides an intellectual framework for the range of emotional experience engendered by the theatre, establishing a base-line for further thinking and practice in this rich and emergent area of inquiry. Moving across western dramatic theory and theatre history, the book demonstrates the centrality of feeling to the theatre. Foreword by Anne Bogart.

How does a tragedy arouse pity and fear? How do music and lighting set a mood or convey an emotional tone for an audience? Why does theatre move us? Theatre & Feeling explores the idea that, for many people, theatre is a passion. It provides an intellectual framework for the range of emotional experience engendered by the theatre, establishing a base-line for further thinking and practice in this rich and emergent area of inquiry. Moving across western dramatic theory and theatre history, the book demonstrates the centrality of feeling to the theatre. Foreword by Anne Bogart.

This book explores the various manifestations of affects in British theatre of the 21st century. The introduction gives a concise survey of existing and emerging theoretical and research trends and argues in favour of a capacious understanding of affects that mediates between more autonomous and more social approaches. The twelve chapters in the collection investigate major works in Britain by playwrights and theatre makers including Mojisola Adebayo, Mike Bartlett, Alice Birch, Caryl Churchill, Tim Crouch and Andy Smith, Rachel De-lahay, Reginald Edmund, James Fritz, David Greig, Idris Goodwin, Zinnie Harris, Kieran Hurley, Lucy Kirkwood, Anders Lustgarten, Yolanda Mercy, Anthony Neilson, Lucy Prebble, Sh!t Theatre, Penelope Skinner, Stef Smith, Kae Tempest and debbie tucker green. The interpretations identify significant areas of tension as they relate affects to the fields of cognition, politics and hope. In this, the chapters uncover interrelations of thought, intention and empathy; they reveal the nexus between identities, institutions and ideology; and, finally, they explore how theatre can accomplish the transition from a sense of crisis to utopian visions.

This title considers how the architecture that enables human cognitive processing interacts with cultural and historical contexts. Organised into five parts (Narrative, History, and Imagination; Emotions and Empathy; The New Unconscious; Empirical and Qualitative Studies of Literature; and Cognitive Theory and Literary Experience), the volume considers case studies from a wide range of historical periods and national literary traditions.