Methuen Drama Handbooks – serie

Shortlisted for the 2021 TaPRA Edited Collection PrizeThe Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography is an authoritative guide to contemporary debates and practices in this field. The book covers the key themes and methods that are current in theatre history research, with a particular focus on expanding the object of study to include engagement with theatre and performance practices and the development of theatre histories around the world. Central to the book are eighteen specially commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars from a wide range of international contexts, whose discussion of individual case studies is predicated on their understanding and experience of their ‘local’ landscape of theatre history. These essays reveal where important work continues to be done in the field and, most valuably, draws on academic contexts beyond the Western academy to expand our knowledge of the exciting directions that such an approach opens up. Prefaced by an introduction tracing the development of the discipline of theatre history and changing historiographical approaches, the Handbook explores current issues pertaining to theatre and performance history research, as well as providing up to date and robust introductions to the methods and historiographic questions being explored by researchers in the field.Featuring a series of essential research tools, including a detailed list of resources and an annotated bibliography of key texts, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance history and historiography.

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance explores ground-breaking new directions and critical discourse in the field of intercultural theatre and performance while surveying key debates concerning interculturalism as an aesthetic and ethical series of encounters in theatre and performance from the 1960s onwards. The handbook’s global coverage challenges understandings of intercultural theatre and performance that continue to prioritise case studies emerging primarily from the West and executed by elite artists. By building on a growing field of scholarship on intercultural theatre and performance that examines minoritarian and grassroots work, the volume offers an alternative and multi-vocal view of what interculturalism might offer as a theoretical keyword to the future of theatre and performance studies, while also contributing an energized reassessment of the vociferous debates that have long accompanied its critical and practical usage in a performance context. By exploring anew what happens when interculturalism and performance intersect as embodied practice, The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance offers new perspectives on a seminal theoretical concept still as useful as it is controversial. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including a fully annotated bibliography, this is the essential scholarly handbook for anyone working in intercultural theatre and performance, and performance studies.

The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art offers a comprehensive guide to the major issues and interdisciplinary debates concerning performance in art contexts that have developed over the last decade. It understands performance art as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label or object. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization and mainstreaming of performance, the book’s chapters identify a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art, and explore how this development is reflective of capitalist approaches to art and event production. Embracing what we perceive to be the 'oxymoronic status' of performance art—where it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitable—the essays in this book map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction.This Companion adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to present performance art’s legacies and its current practices. It brings together specially commissioned essays from leading innovative scholars from a wide range of approaches including art history, visual and performance studies, dance and theatre scholarship in order to provide a comprehensive and multifocal overview of the emerging research trends and methodologies devoted to performance art.

Shortlisted for the 2024 TaPRA Edited Collection PrizeThis 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.

The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art offers a comprehensive guide to the major issues and interdisciplinary debates concerning performance in art contexts that have developed over the last decade. It understands 'performance art' as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label or object. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization and mainstreaming of performance and its methods of display, representation, and mediation in the wider cultural sphere, the book’s chapters identify a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art and its institutional curating and presenting practices, reflective of an advanced stage of capitalism that approaches art production in tandem with event production. Embracing what we perceive to be the 'oxymoronic status' of performance art—where it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitable—the essays in this book map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction.The Companion activates an interdisciplinary perspective to better attend to performance art’s legacies and its current practices. It brings together specially commissioned essays from leading innovative scholars from a wide range of approaches including art history, visual and performance studies, dance and theatre scholarship in order to provide a non-hierarchical merging of the disciplines within and between the humanities. It provides ten methodological directions that examine possibilities of transformative change—the core of performance art’s transgressive radical legacy. The book also includes a section on new directions and resources devoted to performance art. The chapters will thus provide multifocal perspectives on recent research trends to offer an array of intertwined methodologies.

Shortlisted for the 2021 TaPRA Edited Collection PrizeThe Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography offers an authoritative guide to contemporary debates and practices in this field. The book covers current key themes and methods in theatre history research, and expands the object of study to include engagement with theatre and performance practices and the development of theatre histories around the world. Central to the book are 16 specially commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars from a wide range of international contexts, whose discussion of individual case studies is predicated on their understanding and experience of their ‘local’ landscape of theatre history. These essays reveal where important work continues to be done in the field and, most valuably, draw on academic contexts beyond the Western academy to expand our knowledge of the exciting directions that such an approach opens up. Prefaced by an introduction tracing the development of the discipline of theatre history and changing historiographical approaches, the handbook explores current issues pertaining to theatre and performance history research, and provides up to date and robust introductions to the methods and historiographic questions being explored by researchers in the field.Featuring a series of essential research tools, including a detailed list of resources and an annotated bibliography of key texts, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance history and historiography.

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance explores ground-breaking new directions and critical discourse in the field of intercultural theatre and performance while surveying key debates concerning interculturalism as an aesthetic and ethical series of encounters in theatre and performance from the 1960s onwards. The handbook’s global coverage challenges understandings of intercultural theatre and performance that continue to prioritise case studies emerging primarily from the West and executed by elite artists. By building on a growing field of scholarship on intercultural theatre and performance that examines minoritarian and grassroots work, the volume offers an alternative and multi-vocal view of what interculturalism might offer as a theoretical keyword to the future of theatre and performance studies, while also contributing an energized reassessment of the vociferous debates that have long accompanied its critical and practical usage in a performance context.By exploring anew what happens when interculturalism and performance intersect as embodied practice, The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance offers new perspectives on a seminal theoretical concept still as useful as it is controversial. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including a fully annotated bibliography, this is the essential scholarly handbook for anyone working in intercultural theatre and performance, and performance studies.

Shortlisted for the STR Theatre Book Prize 2026This handbook provides a detailed exploration of the rich and diverse theatrical work produced by women in the first two decades of 21st-century British theatre.The book explores key issues and methodologies relevant to women working in the UK’s theatre industry, including the legacies of feminism and its role in shaping contemporary work by women, the politics of visibility and inclusion in theatrical institutions, and collaborative strategies in creating original work. It closely examines how women in contemporary British theatre tackle urgent social issues such as environmental risk, the representation of marginalized identities and mental and physical wellbeing.Chapters by both established and early-career scholars from a variety of international contexts present new perspectives on significant questions and issues underpinning women’s work in 21st-century British theatre by engaging with contemporary debates from theatre and performance studies and cultural theory. A concluding roundtable with women theatre practitioners addresses key questions pertaining to their work, including working conditions, the politics of funding and of ageing, disability and care.With a foreword by the Guardian’s chief theatre critic, Arifa Akbar, and featuring research tools such as introductions to sections, a detailed list of sources and an annotated bibliography, this is an authoritative study for anyone with a keen research interest in the distinct contribution of women to contemporary British theatre and performance.

How are theatre and performance makers seeking to address social inequalities and support political change through socially engaged work?Presenting a sweeping view of performance practice, innovation, and reformation from around the world, this anthology demonstrates how the arts and theatre makers are urgently reshaping the way we must now represent, facilitate, and protest.Featuring contributions from scholars and practitioners who are making activist interventions in the social justice crises of the world, this collection showcases the many ways in which artists are engaging with communities to bring about change: from prison theatre in Brazil, to digital theatre experiments in Calcutta during the COVID-19 lockdown, from using theatre to tackle ageism and shame, to a participatory theatre project with LGBTIQ+ Zimbabwean youth. Featuring applied theatre work that addresses specific and localized community issues, as well as chapters theorizing how broader strategies could be employed in a variety of contexts, the handbook shows how performance and social action is both a philosophy and a call to action. Together these perspectives demonstrate how through work in theatres, communities, and classrooms we may continue what Augusto Boal advised us to do—to rehearse for the futures we would like to inhabit.

Shortlisted for the 2024 TaPRA Edited Collection PrizeThis 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.