Elite Theatre In Ming China, 1368-1644
$109.25
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Elite Theatre In Ming China, 1368-1644
Theatre in Ming China represents a golden age of Asian performance, when an enthusiasm for theatre on the part of the national populace became a nationwide phenomena.
Theatre occupied a particularly important place in the life of the elite, for whom owning a theatre troupe was highly fashionable and for whom theatre performances were an integral part of formal gatherings, various rituals and ceremonies. This book provides an overview of elite theatre in Ming China. It is based on an exploration of the original historical records, and includes comparisons with other forms of ancient theatre, and an examination of the details of theatrical performance.
Drama
Talking To The Audience
$99.7
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Talking To The Audience
This unique study investigates the ways in which the staging convention of direct address-talking to the audience-can construct dramatic subjectivity, or selfhood, in Shakespeare plays. By focusing specifically on the relationship between performer and audience, Talking to the Audience examines what happens when the audience is in the presence of a dramatic figure who knows they are there. It is a book concerned with theatrical illusion; with the pleasures and disturbances of seeing characters produced in the moment of performance.Through analysis of contemporary productions by a wide range of companies throughout the world, Talking to the Audience serves to demonstrate how the study of recent performance helps us to understand both Shakespeare's cultural moment and our own, while never losing sight of the theatrical pleasures and challenges offered by the plays. Its exploration of how theory and practice can inform each other make this essential reading for all those studying Shakespeare in either a literary or theatrical context.
Drama
Death, the One and the Art of Theatre
$94.95
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Death, the One and the Art of Theatre
in this deceptively slight volume, Howard Barker writes with an unprecedented emotional immediacy and arc of conceptual ambition.... Death, the One and the Art of Theatre represents an important advance on Arguments for a Theatre ... surpassing even the range and depth of the earlier collection.... A landmark achievement
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David Ian Rabey, University of Wales AberystwythHoward Barker is an internationally renowned playwright whose works are regularly produced throughout Europe and the US. He is widely known for his controversial and satirical explorations into contemporary tragedy, and his anti-Brechtian focus on the irrational and the catastrophic. He is often credited as a major influence on the generation of playwrights which includes Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill.Death, the One and the Art of Theatre is the latest collection of Barker's distinctive and revelatory philosophical musings on theatre. It is a stunning array of speculations, deductions, prose poems and poetic apercus, which cast a unique and unflinching light on the nature of tragedy, eroticism, love and theatre.
Exploring the juncture between aesthetics and metaphysics, the books looks at the human experience of love and death as life at its most intrinsically theatrical. It is a profoundly unsettling and inspiring piece of writing which extends Barker's challenge to orthodox morality first presented in Arguments for a Theatre-which he described as men and women's secret longing for the incomprehensible nature of pain.
Drama
The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama
$87.95
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The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama
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Drama
As You Like It
$75.99
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As You Like It
One of Shakespeare's early plays, written in 1598 or 1599, AS YOU LIKE IT is in many ways a typical Elizabethan romantic comedy, but it is also a satire in which Shakespeare ridicules many of the courtly-love conventions that were still current in his day: love as a disease, for example, and the lover as slave to his imperious mistress. In AS YOU LIKE IT, when these notions rear their heads, they are presented as silly absurdities. Orlando is in thrall to Rosalind, the simple shepherd Silvius is put through mental tortures by Phoebe--but ridiculing such formulaic excesses (Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love) and keeping the play grounded in reality, Shakespeare reminds his audience that true love can bring happiness and is a force for good. In Jaques's famously acerbic soliloquy on the stages of a man's life (which end in a second childhood followed by oblivion), he speaks of the naturalness and inevitability of change--and as the characters in AS YOU LIKE IT enter the Forest of Arden, they undergo changes that will ultimately lead to a transformation in their attitudes. Embittered men are reunited with the brothers they loathed, the rightful Duke is returned to his throne, and four absurdly warring couples are reconciled. The forest provides--as it does in many plays of the period--a pastoral interval in which the characters come to their senses and return to the city better people. In the course of the play, despite its light-hearted tone, Shakespeare does tackle some difficult questions involving love, aging, nature, and the coming of death.
Drama