New Directions in Theatre – serie

'...this superb book should be required reading for every drama and literature student and all trainee actors and directors.' Times Higher Educational Supplement

The boom in interest in theatre studies at school and in further and higher education signals a new interest in the relationship between the theory and the practice of performance. The best tool you can give the learner is a good theory, and from this collection of theories, learners can choose the tools that best suit their approach to theatre studies. They range from reception theory and semiotics, to the anthropology of the audience and the carnivalesque to hermeneutics and computing.

This collection of essays is in no way an attempt to instruct people in ways to teach Drama. Nor is it homogeneous in its range of arguments. What is attempted is a lively discourse on a variety of practices that, by recognising their clearly rooted and often diverse ideologies, we may term praxis. The challenge here is that no practice may claim an ideological innocence, appealing to some vague transcendental natural state of existence. One of the problems when we encounter practical work in the context of the university Drama department is its uneasy relationship with the more conventionally accepted disciplines. Often the answer has been in the form of a retreat into subjectivity and mystery; denying the place of practice in the material world. Each of the essays in this volume challenges that perception, but all of them challenge it in very different ways. What they do have in common is a rejection of the idea that learning is a passive activity.

This collection of essays is in no way an attempt to instruct people in ways to teach Drama. Nor is it homogeneous in its range of arguments. What is attempted is a lively discourse on a variety of practices that, by recognising their clearly rooted and often diverse ideologies, we may term praxis. The challenge here is that no practice may claim an ideological innocence, appealing to some vague transcendental natural state of existence. One of the problems when we encounter practical work in the context of the university Drama department is its uneasy relationship with the more conventionally accepted disciplines. Often the answer has been in the form of a retreat into subjectivity and mystery; denying the place of practice in the material world. Each of the essays in this volume challenges that perception, but all of them challenge it in very different ways. What they do have in common is a rejection of the idea that learning is a passive activity.