Theory for Theatre Studies: Emotion

Peta Tait is professor of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. She is an academic scholar and playwright with an extensive background in theatre, dramatic literature, performance theory and creative arts practice. She researches in the interdisciplinary humanities fields of emotions, body theory and gender identity. Professor Tait has authored four scholarly books, and edited and co-edited three further books, with sixty other publications including articles in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama and Performance Research.

Emotions are the staple ingredient of Theatre and Performance, but our understanding of them has been notably elastic, if not contradictory, over the years. Peta Tait’s deeply scholarly survey of this complex field does all of us wanting to practice and teach the art of emotion a huge favour. Deftly chosen and lively case studies, from Aristotle to Abramovic, bring clarity and definition to emotion studies and paint a vivid picture of how the shifting sands of mood, feeling and affect have settled on the world stage in such different, eye-catching patterns.

• AcknowledgementsSeries PrefaceIntroduction: Approach and Concepts The Emotions Emotional Feelings Affect and its Theory Mood Cultural Complexities and Empathy Section one: Legacies and Case Studies Aristotle on tragic pity and Euripides’ Medea Shakespeare’s comic lovers: Performing the Passions The actor’s paradox: eighteenth– and nineteenth-century staging Stanislavski’s Emotion Memory and realist theatre Controversial psychologies in Method Acting Brecht’s separations: theatre for a scientific age Brecht’s political emotions: The Caucasian Chalk Circle Emotional practice from Forum Theatre to Rasaboxes Section two: Affect and Case Studies Emotional feeling to affect in A Doll’s House Affect and technology: live art and spectacle Real identities and political affect Empathy enabled: Empathy Museum to Back to Back Suffering in Jane Harrison’s Stolen Feeling sound and images: Robert Lepages’s Needles and Opium and 887 Section three: Mood and Case Studies Mysterious aesthetic Audience expectations and The Lion King Ambience from Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio Music functions and Rimini Protokoll’s Brain Projects 00Economic mood dis/orders: Alladeen to Dear Evan Hansen Immoral objects and The Wooster Group Share economies and Marina Abramovic Collaborative eco-moods Anticipation Conclusion: Intensity References Index