Bruce McConachie - Böcker

All performance depends upon our abilities to create, perceive, remember, imagine and empathize. This book provides an introduction to the evolutionary and cognitive foundations of theatrical performing and spectating and argues that this scientific perspective challenges some of the major assumptions about what takes place in the theatre.

This collection of essays defines and explores American theatres that consciously appealed primarily to workers. The scope of the book extends from the 1830s to the 1980s. Different authors focus on how various plays related to the audience as a class, the historically dynamic interaction between spectators and actors, and why certain plays gained popularity. The collection encompasses essays concerning New York theatre in the 1830s and 1840s, Pittsburgh theatre in the 1870s, various immigrant productions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the politically radical theatre of the 1930s, a concluding section on recent and contemporary theatre for workers, and an overview of the history, politics, and aesthetics of theatres doing shows for working-class audiences today. An original and comprehensive bibliographical essay regarding the history of theatres for workers in the United States completes the volume.

This anthology is the first of its kind. In addition to opening up fresh perspectives on theatre studies – with applications for dramatic criticism, performance analysis, acting practice, audience response, theatre history, and other important areas – the book sets the agenda for future work, helping to map the emergence of this new approach. Following a comprehensive introduction, the contributors examine:the interfaces between cognitive studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis, phenomenology and communication theorydifferent ideas from cognitive studies that open up the meanings of several playsthe process of acting and the work of Antonio Damasiotheatrical response: the dynamics of perception, and the riots that greeted the 1907 production of The Playboy of the Western World.This original and authoritative work will be attractive to scholars and graduate students of drama, theatre, and performance.

This anthology is the first of its kind. In addition to opening up fresh perspectives on theatre studies – with applications for dramatic criticism, performance analysis, acting practice, audience response, theatre history, and other important areas – the book sets the agenda for future work, helping to map the emergence of this new approach. Following a comprehensive introduction, the contributors examine:the interfaces between cognitive studies and Lacanian psychoanalysis, phenomenology and communication theorydifferent ideas from cognitive studies that open up the meanings of several playsthe process of acting and the work of Antonio Damasiotheatrical response: the dynamics of perception, and the riots that greeted the 1907 production of The Playboy of the Western World.This original and authoritative work will be attractive to scholars and graduate students of drama, theatre, and performance.

The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science integrates key findings from the cognitive sciences (cognitive psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary studies and relevant social sciences) with insights from theatre and performance studies. This rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field dynamically advances critical and theoretical knowledge, as well as driving innovation in practice. The anthology includes 30 specially commissioned chapters, many written by authors who have been at the cutting-edge of research and practice in the field over the last 15 years. These authors offer many empirical answers to four significant questions: How can performances in theatre, dance and other media achieve more emotional and social impact? How can we become more adept teachers and learners of performance both within and outside of classrooms? What can the cognitive sciences reveal about the nature of drama and human nature in general? How can knowledge transfer, from a synthesis of science and performance, assist professionals such as nurses, care-givers, therapists and emergency workers in their jobs? A wide-ranging and authoritative guide, The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science is an accessible tool for not only students, but practitioners and researchers in the arts and sciences as well.

Culture and cognition work together dynamically every time a spectator interprets meaning during a performance. In this study, Bruce McConachie examines the biocultural basis of all performance, from its origins and the cognitive processes that facilitate it, to what keeps us coming back for more. To effect this major reorientation, McConachie works within the scientific paradigm of enaction, which explains all human activities, including performances, as the interactions of mental, bodily, and ecological networks. He goes on to use our biocultural proclivity for altruism, as revealed in performance, to explore our species' gradual ethical progress on such matters as the changing norms of religious sacrifice, slavery, and LGBT rights. Along the way, the book engages with a wide range of performances, including Richard Pryor's stand-up, the film Titanic, aerialist performances, American football, and the stage and film versions of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Culture and cognition work together dynamically every time a spectator interprets meaning during a performance. In this study, Bruce McConachie examines the biocultural basis of all performance, from its origins and the cognitive processes that facilitate it, to what keeps us coming back for more. To effect this major reorientation, McConachie works within the scientific paradigm of enaction, which explains all human activities, including performances, as the interactions of mental, bodily, and ecological networks. He goes on to use our biocultural proclivity for altruism, as revealed in performance, to explore our species' gradual ethical progress on such matters as the changing norms of religious sacrifice, slavery, and LGBT rights. Along the way, the book engages with a wide range of performances, including Richard Pryor's stand-up, the film Titanic, aerialist performances, American football, and the stage and film versions of A Streetcar Named Desire.

The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science integrates key findings from the cognitive sciences (cognitive psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary studies and relevant social sciences) with insights from theatre and performance studies. This rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field dynamically advances critical and theoretical knowledge, as well as driving innovation in practice. The anthology includes 30 specially commissioned chapters, many written by authors who have been at the cutting-edge of research and practice in the field over the last 15 years. These authors offer many empirical answers to four significant questions: How can performances in theatre, dance and other media achieve more emotional and social impact? How can we become more adept teachers and learners of performance both within and outside of classrooms? What can the cognitive sciences reveal about the nature of drama and human nature in general? How can knowledge transfer, from a synthesis of science and performance, assist professionals such as nurses, care-givers, therapists and emergency workers in their jobs? A wide-ranging and authoritative guide, The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science is an accessible tool for not only students, but practitioners and researchers in the arts and sciences as well.

Grzegorz Niziolek’s The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust is a pioneering analysis of the impact and legacy of the Holocaust on Polish theatre and society from 1945 to the present. It reveals the role of theatre as a crucial medium of collective memory – and collective forgetting – of the trauma of the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis on Polish soil. The period gave rise to two of the most radical and influential theatrical ideas during work on productions that addressed the subject of the Holocaust, Grotowski’s Poor Theatre and Kantor’s Theatre of Death, but the author examines a deeper impact in the role that theatre played in the processes of collective disavowal to being a witness to others’ suffering. In the first part, the author examines six decades of Polish theatre shaped by the perspective of the Holocaust in which its presence is variously visible or displaced. Particular attention is paid to the various types of distortion and the effect of ‘wrong seeing’ enacted in the theatre, as well as the traces of affective reception: shock, heightened empathy, indifference. In part two, Niziolek examines a range of theatrical events, including productions by Leon Schiller, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Warlikowski and Ondrej Spišák. He considers how these productions confronted the experience of bearing witness and were profoundly shaped by the legacy of the Holocaust.The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust reveals how – by testifying about society’s experience of the Holocaust – theatre has been the setting for fundamental processes taking place within Polish culture as it confronts suppressed traumatic wartime experiences and a collective identity shaped by the past.

George Farquhar (1677–1707) is one of the most successful and enduringly popular Restoration playwrights. His two masterpieces, The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux’ Stratagem, are still regularly performed today. Yet aspects of Farquhar’s biography, and in particular his Irish roots and family life, have remained obscure. This is the first study to treat Farquhar’s works as documents of migration and the fragmented identity that resulted. Told in reverse chronological order, beginning with Farquhar’s last and best-known works, it reveals previously undiscovered material about his life and connections.Born in Londonderry, Farquhar arrived in London at the end of the 1690s but struggled throughout his life to find acceptance in the English literary culture. David Roberts explores how Farquhar used comedy to negotiate his Anglo-Irish Protestant identity while perpetually being treated as an outsider. George Farquhar: A Migrant Life Reversed challenges traditional critical thinking on historiographic approaches to scholarly biography and offers a complex but highly readable account of the interpenetrating pasts, presents and futures of the migrant writer.

The era known as the Thaw (1953-64) was a crucial period in the history of the Soviet Union. It was a time when the legacies of Stalinism began to unravel and when brief moments of liberalisation saw dramatic changes to society. By exploring theatre productions, plays and cultural debates during the Thaw, this book sheds light on a society in flux, in which the cultural norms, values and hierarchies of the previous era were being rethought.Jesse Gardiner demonstrates that the revival of avant-garde theatre during the Thaw was part of a broader re-engagement with cultural forms that had been banned under Stalin. Plays and productions that had fallen victim to the censor were revived or reinvented, and their authors and directors rehabilitated alongside waves of others who had been repressed during the Stalinist purges. At the same time, new theatre companies and practitioners emerged who reinterpreted the stylized techniques of the avant-garde for a post-war generation. This book argues that the revival of avant-garde theatre was vital in allowing the Soviet public to reimagine its relationship to state power, the West and its own past. It permitted the rethinking of attitudes and prejudices, and led to calls for greater cultural diversity across society. Playwrights, directors and actors began to work in innovative ways, seeking out the theatre of the future by re-engaging with the proscribed forms of the past.

This study of British amateur theatre in the inter-war period examines five different but interwoven examples of the belief, common in theatrical and educational circles at the time, that amateur drama had a purpose beyond recreation.Amateur theatre was at the height of its popularity as a cultural practice between the wars, so that by 1939 more British people had practical experience of putting on plays than at any time before or since.Providing an original account of the use of drama in adult education projects in deprived areas, and of amateur theatre in government-funded centres for the unemployed in the 1930s, it discusses repertoires, participation by working- class people and pioneering techniques of play-making. Amateur drama festivals and competitions were intended to raise standards and educate audiences. This book assesses their effect on play-making, and the use of innovative one-act plays to express contentious material, as well as looking at the Left Book Club Theatre Guild as an attempt to align the amateur theatre movement with anti-fascist and anti-war movements. A chapter on the Second World War rectifies the neglect of amateur theatre in war-time cultural studies, arguing that it was present and important in every aspect of war-time life.Don Watson builds on current scholarship and makes use of archival sources, local newspapers, unpublished scripts and the records of organizations not usually associated with the theatre. His work explores the range and diversity of amateur drama between the wars and the contributions it made to British theatre. This edition is published in association with the Society of Theatre Research.

This book is an exploration of metropolitan bohemian and counter-cultural movements in theatre, design and popular culture in the Irish Free State.Were there flappers in Ireland? Was there really a Cabaret Club in Dublin in 1926? Using photographs, theatre and costume designs, letters, newspaper accounts, novels and other historical sources, Performing Modernity offers a wholly new perspective on metropolitan life in the Irish Free State where people listen to jazz and go dancing, watch German Expressionist theatre, are interested in Soviet design, and attend pageants, cabarets and fancy dress balls. The early years of Irish independence are often characterised as isolated and conservative as the country recovered from the effects of the Civil War. This book argues that there was also ambition and optimism among the citizens of the new State as they embraced the promise of modernity in theatre, film and popular culture during the 1920s and 1930s.

This open access book proposes a revision of 19th-century theatre history and examines the contribution of amateur theatre practice to European theatre, by shifting the focus to theatre as a cultural, social and aesthetic practice.Non-professional theatre practice has been largely neglected due to deeply rooted prejudice about its aesthetic standards: a prejudice whose origins can be traced back to influential thinkers in the 18th century. Although it was a massive phenomenon in Europe around 1800, amateur theatre has been overshadowed by professional theatre through a privileging of literary and canonical perspectives in the writing of history. This book argues that amateur theatricals contributed to mainstreaming key concepts of aesthetic education and identity building, as well as establishing educative and aesthetic concepts of bourgeois theatre.Amateur theatres not only provide their audiences with an aesthetic experience, they also give their members the opportunity to become involved in social gatherings and performative schemes of self-learning and self-education. During the late Enlightenment, amateur theatres became an important medium to practice and promote concepts of citizenship and the idea of theatre as a key educational factor in society. Focusing on German-speaking amateur theatricals, with regard to a larger frame of European cultural history, this study investigates how citizen identities were shaped and consolidated through amateur performance practices on page, on stage and behind the scenes.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

The era known as the Thaw (1953-64) was a crucial period in the history of the Soviet Union. It was a time when the legacies of Stalinism began to unravel and when brief moments of liberalisation saw dramatic changes to society. By exploring theatre productions, plays and cultural debates during the Thaw, this book sheds light on a society in flux, in which the cultural norms, values and hierarchies of the previous era were being rethought.Jesse Gardiner demonstrates that the revival of avant-garde theatre during the Thaw was part of a broader re-engagement with cultural forms that had been banned under Stalin. Plays and productions that had fallen victim to the censor were revived or reinvented, and their authors and directors rehabilitated alongside waves of others who had been repressed during the Stalinist purges. At the same time, new theatre companies and practitioners emerged who reinterpreted the stylized techniques of the avant-garde for a post-war generation. This book argues that the revival of avant-garde theatre was vital in allowing the Soviet public to reimagine its relationship to state power, the West and its own past. It permitted the rethinking of attitudes and prejudices, and led to calls for greater cultural diversity across society. Playwrights, directors and actors began to work in innovative ways, seeking out the theatre of the future by re-engaging with the proscribed forms of the past.

This book explores new developments in the dialogues between science and theatre and offers an introduction to a fast-expanding area of research and practice.The cognitive revolution in the humanities is creating new insights into the audience experience, performance processes and training. Scientists are collaborating with artists to investigate how our brains and bodies engage with performance to create new understanding of perception, emotion, imagination and empathy. Divided into four parts, each introduced by an expert editorial from leading researchers in the field, this edited volume offers readers an understanding of some of the main areas of collaboration and research:1. Dances with Science 2. Touching Texts and Embodied Performance 3. The Multimodal Actor 4. Affecting Audiences Throughout its history theatre has provided exciting and accessible stagings of science, while contemporary practitioners are increasingly working with scientific and medical material. As Honour Bayes reported in the Guardian in 2011, the relationships between theatre, science and performance are 'exciting, explosive and unexpected'. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science charts new directions in the relations between disciplines, exploring how science and theatre can impact upon each other with reference to training, drama texts, performance and spectatorship.The book assesses the current state of play in this interdisciplinary field, facilitating cross disciplinary exchange and preparing the way for future studies.

This book explores new developments in the dialogues between science and theatre and offers an introduction to a fast-expanding area of research and practice.The cognitive revolution in the humanities is creating new insights into the audience experience, performance processes and training. Scientists are collaborating with artists to investigate how our brains and bodies engage with performance to create new understanding of perception, emotion, imagination and empathy. Divided into four parts, each introduced by an expert editorial from leading researchers in the field, this edited volume offers readers an understanding of some of the main areas of collaboration and research:1. Dances with Science 2. Touching Texts and Embodied Performance 3. The Multimodal Actor 4. Affecting Audiences Throughout its history theatre has provided exciting and accessible stagings of science, while contemporary practitioners are increasingly working with scientific and medical material. As Honour Bayes reported in the Guardian in 2011, the relationships between theatre, science and performance are 'exciting, explosive and unexpected'. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science charts new directions in the relations between disciplines, exploring how science and theatre can impact upon each other with reference to training, drama texts, performance and spectatorship.The book assesses the current state of play in this interdisciplinary field, facilitating cross disciplinary exchange and preparing the way for future studies.

This book outlines the evolution of our political nature over two million years and explores many of the rituals, plays, films, and other performances that gave voice and legitimacy to various political regimes in our species’ history.