Julia Listengarten – författare

Through a collection of original essays and case studies, this innovative book explores theory as an accessible, although complex, tool for theatre practitioners and students. These chapters invite readers to (re)imagine theory as a site of possibility or framework that can shape theatre making, emerge from practice, and foster new ways of seeing, creating, and reflecting. Focusing on the productive tensions and issues that surround creative practice and intellectual processes, the contributing authors present central concepts and questions that frame the role of theory in the theatre. Ultimately, this diverse and exciting collection offers inspiring ideas, raises new questions, and introduces ways to build theoretically-minded, dynamic production work.

Through a collection of original essays and case studies, this innovative book explores theory as an accessible, although complex, tool for theatre practitioners and students. These chapters invite readers to (re)imagine theory as a site of possibility or framework that can shape theatre making, emerge from practice, and foster new ways of seeing, creating, and reflecting. Focusing on the productive tensions and issues that surround creative practice and intellectual processes, the contributing authors present central concepts and questions that frame the role of theory in the theatre. Ultimately, this diverse and exciting collection offers inspiring ideas, raises new questions, and introduces ways to build theoretically-minded, dynamic production work.

The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre since 1945 provides an overview and analysis of developments in the organization and practices of American theatre. It examines key demographic and geographical shifts American theatre after 1945 experienced in spectatorship, and addresses the economic, social, and political challenges theatre artists have faced across cultural climates and geographical locations. Specifically, it explores artistic communities, collaborative practices, and theatre methodologies across mainstream, regional, and experimental theatre practices, forms, and expressions. As American theatre has embraced diversity in practice and representation, the volume examines the various creative voices, communities, and perspectives that prior to the 1940s was mostly excluded from the theatrical landscape. This diversity has led to changing dramaturgical and theatrical languages that take us in to the twenty-first century. These shifting perspectives and evolving forms of theatrical expressions paved the ground for contemporary American theatrical innovation.

The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre since 1945 provides an overview and analysis of developments in the organization and practices of American theatre. It examines key demographic and geographical shifts American theatre after 1945 experienced in spectatorship, and addresses the economic, social, and political challenges theatre artists have faced across cultural climates and geographical locations. Specifically, it explores artistic communities, collaborative practices, and theatre methodologies across mainstream, regional, and experimental theatre practices, forms, and expressions. As American theatre has embraced diversity in practice and representation, the volume examines the various creative voices, communities, and perspectives that prior to the 1940s was mostly excluded from the theatrical landscape. This diversity has led to changing dramaturgical and theatrical languages that take us in to the twenty-first century. These shifting perspectives and evolving forms of theatrical expressions paved the ground for contemporary American theatrical innovation.

Grotowski's Process is a passionate dialogue between progressive Polish scholarship, represented by Dariusz Kosinski, and an investigative scholarship in the American Milieu, represented by Kris Salata.These two scholarly perspectives seek reconciliation in their interrogation and analysis of the performance-making and performer-training of one of the world’s foremost formative figures in twentieth-century theatre, Jerzy Grotowski, who shattered the traditional understanding of theatrical legacy.Grotowski’s cutting-edge theatrical and post-theatrical laboratory work continues to challenge the approaches to performance-making. This book reintroduces Grotowski’s main ideas in ways that are directly meaningful to contemporary theatre makers as practical investigations of the nature of performance.The authors consult and quote from Grotowski’s texts and unpublished archival documents, to explore how the actor’s process was re-examined as an interdisciplinary and intercultural endeavour.

Shortlisted for the 2023 TaPRA Edited Collection PrizeThis book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual arts, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection draws on the complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability to address what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, scientific, cultural, and artistic experimentation, and discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Probing “what arouses” in relation to the ethics of representation, the book investigates the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism, underscores the political impact of aroused bodies, and explores how arousal can turn the body into a mediated object.

The Decades of Modern American Drama series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material.The major playwrights and their plays to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include:* Theresa Rebeck: Omnium Gatherum (2003), Mauritius (2007), and The Understudy (2008);* Sarah Ruhl: Eurydice (2003), Clean House (2004), and In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) (2009);* Lynn Nottage: Intimate Apparel (2003), Fabulation or Re-Education of Undine (2004), and Ruined (2008);* Charles Mee: Big Love (2000), Wintertime (2005), and Hotel Cassiopeia (2006).

Shortlisted for the 2023 TaPRA Edited Collection PrizeThis book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual arts, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection draws on the complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability to address what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, scientific, cultural, and artistic experimentation, and discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Probing “what arouses” in relation to the ethics of representation, the book investigates the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism, underscores the political impact of aroused bodies, and explores how arousal can turn the body into a mediated object.

Combining theory and historiography, this book presents a new means for considering rhythm in postdramatic performance by examining the creative processes of three major international companies: Mime Omnibus (Montreal, Canada), Dairakudakan (Tokyo, Japan), and SITI Company (New York, US).While rhythm is unanimously acknowledged as fundamental to performance, critical in every role from performing and directing to design and dramaturgy, studies on the subject are limited and the phenomenon remains obscure. This book remedies that, offering a unique focus on ‘rhythmanalysis’, bringing distinctive and insightful attention to rhythm as permeating key areas of performance process.By focusing on recent work from these three major companies, the book provides a glimpse into each company's latest devising processes, enriched by scholarly and archival research, while personal interviews give voice to performers often absent in performance analysis and criticism. Through its theoretical and practical offerings, this book brings greater understanding by putting forth a simplified model that can be applied to both interdisciplinary practices and theoretical analysis. The reader gains not only a greater understanding of rhythm in contemporary performance, but also significant insights into the working methods of each company.

This edited collection includes contributions across various disciplines to analyze performances of political resistance and protest to Russia’s authoritarian and hegemonic practices after the collapse of the Berlin wall and specifically under Putin. It examines how these performances operate as an immediate response to the oppressive moment but also harbour 'the possibility of difference… the possibility that the past may yet have another future' (DeFranz and Furtado). In the context of Russia’s Post-Soviet histories of rising nationalism and neo-colonialism, the volume addresses such questions as, What are the ways to consider expressions of resistance and their potential to contest or disrupt autocracy and coloniality on a historical continuum and today? How do the expressions, languages, and forms of resistance reemerge, replicate, and intersect across past decades and artistic mediums? And how do they perform marginality, reveal perspectives of the other, and gesture toward the future?International and interdisciplinary in scope, it considers performance of protest in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Hungary, Poland, and the Caucasus and Central Asian regions of the former Soviet Union. The range of performances of resistance is equally broad, encompassing performing a social or religious ritual in a public sphere, public speaking, collective or individual reenactments of past traumatic events, traditional storytelling, and social media activism or journalism.

This book examines the role of the visual and performing arts in higher education and argues for the importance of socially engaged transdisciplinary practices, not just to the college curriculum but also to building an informed and engaged citizenry.