Advanced Directing

A cross-section of the most diverse and dynamic stage directors defining today's American theatre, in conversation with director/producer Jason Loewith. A follow-up to the immensely popular first volume, The Director's Voice, which has sold over eighteen thousand copies Much has changed in the twenty years since The Director's Voice was published. "The nonprofit model has been turned on its head," Loewith notes. "Institution-building is out for these directors; creating a distinctive voice from a multiplicity of influences is in." Together, these directors sketch a compelling portrait of the art form in the new century. Interviews include: Anne Bogart, Mark Brokaw, Peter Brosius, Ping Chong, David Esbjornson, Oskar Eustis, Frank Galati, Michael Kahn, Moisés Kaufman, James Lapine, Elizabeth LeCompte, Emily Mann, Michael Mayer, Marion McClinton, Bill Rauch, Bartlett Sher, Julie Taymor, Theatre de la Jeune Lune (Barbra Berlovitz, Steven Epps, Vincent Gracieux, Robert Rosen, and Dominique Serrand), George C. Wolfe, and Mary Zimmerman.

This book explores how doing dramaturgy is informed by today's highly diverse field of theatre, dance and performance. It does so in dialogue with fourteen performances and their makers, tracing the thinking-through-practice that underlies these creations. The first part of the book looks at how dramaturgs participate in practices of thinking-making and introduces a dramaturgical mode of looking at performances and the processes in which they are created. The second part of the book discusses the performances and creative processes of Manuela Infante, Julian Hetzel, Ivo van Hove, Anouk van Dijk, Falk Richter, Milo Rau, Kris Verdonck, Death Centre, Hotel Modern, Jr.cE.sA.r , Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten, Dries Verhoeven, the LGB Society of Mind, Sanja Mitrović, and Amanda Piña. Showing how ways of making and ways of doing dramaturgy mutually inform each other, this book is an essential resource for students and others aspiring to develop their own dramaturgical practice. Maaike Bleeker is Professor of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at Utrecht University, Netherlands. As a dramaturg, she worked with theatre directors and choreographers on a wide variety of projects. Moving back and forth between theory and practice, she investigates thinking as material and embodied practice, and making theatre as an expression of such thinking.

Fifty Key Theatre Directors covers the work of practitioners who have shaped and pushed back the boundaries of theatre and performance. The authors provide clear and insightful overviews of the approaches and impact of fifty of the most influential directors of the twentieth and twenty-first century from around the world. They include: Anne Bogart Peter Brook Lev Dodin Declan Donnellan Jerzy Grotowski Elizabeth LeCompte Joan Littlewood Ariane Mnouchkine. Each entry discusses a director's key productions, ideas and rehearsal methods, effectively combining theory and practice. The result is an ideal guide to the world of theatre for practitioners, theatregoers and students. Includes: Pina Bausch, Tadeusz Kantor and Yukio Ninagawa.

"An authoritative guide to contemporary debates and practices at a time when gender paradigms are both in flux and at the centre of explosive political battlegrounds. The volume 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. Featuring a series of essential research tools, including a list of resources and an annotated bibliography of key texts, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance"-- Provided by publisher.

Ranging from ancient Greek tragedies to the latest developments around the globe, The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance provides an all-embracing approach that encompasses drama and musical, opera, dance, radio, and non-dramatic performances including circuses and parades. Based on the celebrated two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, this compact, affordable Companion features more than 2,000 up-to-date entries, covering styles and movements, buildings, organizations, and traditions--with a particularly strong focus on biographies of actors, playwrights, directors, and designers. Editor Dennis Kennedy has significantly updated the timeline of historical and cultural events in the world of theatre and performance, and he has added an appendix of useful weblinks, which are supported and accessible through a companion website. Finally, the book includes many new entries that cover the people and companies who have come into prominence since the publication of the Encyclopedia.

The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics is a volume of critical essays, provocations, and interventions on the most important questions faced by today's writers, critics, audiences, and theatre and performance makers. Featuring texts written by scholars and artists who are diversely situated (geographically, culturally, politically, and institutionally), its multiple perspectives broadly address the question "How can we be political now?" To respond to this question, Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan have created eight galvanising themes as frameworks or rubrics to rethink the critical, creative, and activist perspectives on questions of politics and theatre. Each theme is linked to a set of guiding keywords: Post (post consensus, post-Brexit, post-Fukushima, post-neoliberalism, post-humanism, post-global financial crisis, post-acting,  the real) Assembly (assemblage, disappearance, permission, community, citizen, protest, refugee) Gap (who is in and out, what can be seen/heard/funded/allowed) Institution (visibility/darkness, inclusion, rules) Machine (biodata, surveillance economy, mediatisation) Message (performance and conviction, didacticism, propaganda) End (suffering, stasis, collapse, entropy) Re. (reset, rescale, reanimate, reimagine, replay: how to bring complexity back into the public arena, how art can help to do this). These themes were developed in conversation with key thinkers and artists in the field, and the resulting texts engage with artistic works across a range of modes including traditional theatre, contemporary performance, public protest events, activism, and community and participatory theatre. Suitable for academics, performance makers, and students, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics explores questions of how to be political in the early 21st century, by exploring how theatre and performance might provoke, unsettle, reinforce, or productively destabilise the status quo.