Sean Metzger

Roberta Mock

This wide-ranging handbook examines how critical discourses on gender intersect with key debates in the field of theatre studies.

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre

This is a guide to contemporary debates and theatre practices at a time when gender paradigms are both in flux and at the centre of explosive political battlegrounds. The confluence of gender and theatre has long created intense debate about representation, identification, social conditioning, desire, embodiment, and lived experience. As this handbook demonstrates, from the conventions of early modern English, Chinese, Japanese and Hispanic theatres to the subversion of racialized binaries of masculinity and femininity in recent North American, African, Asian, Caribbean and European productions, the matter of gender has consistently taken centre stage. This handbook examines how critical discourses on gender intersect with key debates in the field of theatre studies, as a lens to illuminate the practices of gender and theatre as well as the societies they inform and represent across space and time. Of interest to scholars in the interrelated areas of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, and globalization and diasporic studies, this book demonstrates how researchers are currently addressing theatre about gender issues and gendered theatre practices. While synthesizing and summarizing foundational and evolving debates from a contemporary perspective, this collection offers interpretations and analyses that do not simply look back at existing scholarship, but open up new possibilities and understandings. Featuring essential research tools, including a survey of keywords and an annotated play list, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance.

Joshua Sofaer works across boundaries, borders, and disciplines to create artworks that engage with all levels of society. In cultural institutions or on the street, for art galleries or personal homes, staged as operas or cast as golden sculptures, Sofaer's work weaves with and through social fabric to consider the ideas that hold us together. Copublished with the Live Art Development Agency, this lavishly illustrated volume is the first in-depth study of the artist's work, featuring discussions with producers and participants, documentary images and a new photographic essay, interviews with the artist himself, and thirteen commissioned essays by scholars, curators, and artists from the perspectives of performance studies, archaeology, and opera criticism. With a mixture of intellect, humor, and striking design, Joshua Sofaer: Performance - Objects - Participation analyzes the artist's oeuvre in the contexts of liveness, visual art, and participatory practices. It explores the binding aesthetics of his approach as a model for contemporary practice, and it considers the impact of his work on audiences, institutions, and pedagogy, as well as on fine art and performance ecologies as a whole.

Performance, Objects, Participation

Joshua Sofaer

Live performance continues to be created every time it is performed. This book explores the dynamic relationship between creative process, presentation and spectator response to provide students and scholars in Drama with new insights on performance from poetry to pantomime. These essays make parallels between areas of performance that are rarely, if ever, compared. They present the basis for an overall theory of how 'conception', 'development', 'presentation' and 'reception' are fused together to make up the overall 'performance'. This study investigates the relationship between the process of creating performance and spectator response, and how this exchange is embedded into the product itself. The authors draw on theoretical approaches from a range of sources, and examine the work of contemporary dramatists, choreographers, poets and performers including: • Sarah Kane • Iain Baxter • Yolande Snaith • Slobodan Snajder • Phylis Nagy • Steve Benson • David Fielding • David Antin • Bette Midler • Karen Malpede • Stephen Daldry • Mai Lanfang Its construction of a new, wide-ranging approach to performance research makes this book a valuable resource for the student as well as the broader academic community. It has application both as a textbook and for supplementary research on drama courses nationwide.

Performing Processes

This collection charts three projects by performance-makers who generate autobiographical writing by taking walks. It includes performance texts and photographs, as well as essays by the artists that discuss processes of development, writing and performance.The Crab Walks and Crab Steps Aside are performances made by Phil Smith based on an initial exploratory walking of an area of South Devon where he was taken for childhood holidays and then on to Munich, Herm and San Gimignano. Both shows were accompanied by the distribution of maps seeking to provoke the audience to make their own exploratory walks. Mourning Walk is a performance that relates to a walk Carl Lavery made to mark the anniversary of his father’s death. Lavery shows how a secret can be both shared and hidden through the act of communication as he explores “an ethics of autobiographical performance”. In Tree, the result of a multi-disciplinary collaborative process, Dee Heddon occupies a single square foot of soil, and discovers that by standing stationary and looking closely she can travel across continents and centuries, making unexpected connections through an extroverted autobiographical practice.The work of all three artists, taken together and separately, raises important issues about memory, ritual, life writing, textuality, subjectivity, and site in performance.

Roberta Mock

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