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This volume explores the relationship between the emphasis on performance in Elizabethan humanist education and the flourishing of literary brilliance around the turn of the sixteenth century. This study asks us what lessons we can learn today from Shakespeare's Latin grammar school. What were the cognitive benefits of an education so deeply rooted in what Demosthenes and Quintilian called'actio'—acting? Because of the vast difference between educational practice then and now, we have not often followed one essential thread: the focus on performance. This study examines the connections relevant to the education offered in schools today. This book will be of great interest to teachers, scholars, and administrators in performing arts and education.

For young people, the space of the drama classroom can be a space for deep learning as they struggle across difference to create something together with common purpose. Collaborating across institutions, theatres, and community spaces, the research in Hope in a Collapsing World mobilizes theatre to build its methodology and create new data with young people as they seek the language of performance to communicate their worries, fears, and dreams to a global network of researchers and a wider public. A collaboration between a social scientist and a playwright and using both ethnographic study and playwriting, Hope in a Collapsing World represents a groundbreaking hybrid format of research text and original script – titled Towards Youth: A Play on Radical Hope – for reading, experimentation, and performance.

If at its most elemental, the theater is an art form of human bodies in space, what becomes of the theater as suicide capitalism pushes our world into a posthuman age? Waste: Capitalism and the Dissolution of the Human in Twentieth-Century Theater traces the twentieth-century theater's movement from dramaturgies of efficiency to dramaturgies of waste, beginning with the observation that the most salient feature of the human is her ability to be ashamed of herself, to experience herself as excess, the waster and the waste of the world. By examining theatrical representations of capitalism, war, climate change, and the permanent refugee crisis, Waste traces the ways in which these human-driven events signal a tendency toward prodigality that terminates with self-destruction. Defying its promise of abundance for all, capitalism poisons all relationships with competition and fear. The desire to dominate in war is revealed to be the desire to obliterate the self in collective conflagration. The refugee crisis raises the urgent question of our responsibility to the other, but the climate crisis renders the question of anthropocentric obligations moot. Waste proposes that the theater is the form best suited to confronting the human's perverse relationship to its finitude. Everything about the theater is suffused with existential shame, with an acute awareness of its provisionality. Unlike the dominant narrative of the human, which is bound up with a fantasy of infinite growth, the theater is not deluded about its nature, origins, and destiny. At its best, the theater gathers artist and audience in one space to die together for a little while, to consciously waste, and not spend, their time.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This edited collection brings together essays presenting an interdisciplinary dialogue between theatre and performance and the fields of care ethics, care studies, health and social care. The book advances our understanding of performance as a mode of care, challenging existing debates in this area by re-thinking the caring encounter as a performed, embodied experience and interrogating the boundaries between care practice and performance. Through an examination of a wide range of different care performances drawn from interdisciplinary and international settings, the book interrogates how performance might be understood as caring or uncaring, careless or careful, and correlatively how care can be conceptualised as artful, aesthetic, authentic or even ‘fake'and ‘staged'.

This book combines performance analysis with contemporary political philosophy to advance new ways of understanding both political performance and the performativity of the politics of the street.Our times are pre-eminently political times and have drawn radical responses from many theatre and performance practitioners. However, a decade of conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the eruption of new social movements around the world, the growth of anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation struggles, the upsurge of protests against the blockades of neoliberalism, and the rising tide of dissent and anger against corporate power, with its exorbitant social costs, have left theatre and performance scholarship confronting something of a dilemma: how to theorize the political antagonisms of our day? Drawing on the resources of ‘post-Marxist'political thinkers such as Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, the book explores how new theoretical horizons have been made available for performance analysis.

Life as Theater is about understanding people and how the dramaturgical way of thinking helps or hinders such understanding. A volume that has deservedly attained the status of a landmark work, this was the first book to explore systematically the material and subject matter of social psychology from the dramaturgical viewpoint. It has been widely used and quoted, and has sparked ferment and debate in fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, speech communication, and formal theater studies.Life as Theater is organized around five substantive issues in social psychology: Social Relationships as Drama; The Dramaturgical Self; Motivation and Drama; Organizational Dramas; and Political Dramas. This classic text was revised and updated for a second edition in 1990, and includes approximately 66 percent new materials, all featuring individual introductions that provide the dramaturgical perspective and reflect the most learned thinking and work being done within this point of view. This book's sophistication will appeal to the scholar, and its clarity and conciseness to the student. Like its predecessor, it is designed to serve as a primary text or supplementary reader in classes. This new paperback edition includes an introduction by Robert A. Stebbins that explains why, even fifteen years after its publication,Life as Theater remains the best single sourcebook on the dramaturgic perspective as applied in the social sciences.

Whatever else they may be doing, human beings are also and always expressing themselves whenever they are in the awareness of others. As such, the metaphor of life as theater - of people playing roles to audiences who review them and then coordinate further action - is an ancient idea that has been resurrected by social scientists as an organizing simile for the analysis and understanding of social life. The Drama of Social Life examines this dramaturgical approach to social life, bringing together the latest original work from leading contemporary dramaturgical thinkers across the social sciences. Thematically organized, it explores: ¢ the work of classical and contemporary thinkers who have contributed most to this theoretical framework ¢ the foundational concepts of the dramaturgical approach ¢ a rich array of substantive areas of empirical investigation to which dramaturgy continues to contribute ¢ directions for future dramaturgical thinking. An indispensable collection that updates and extends the dramaturgical framework, The Drama of Social Life will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, social psychology, performance studies, cultural studies, communication, film studies, and anthropology - and all those interested in the work of Goffman and symbolic interactionist theory and practice.

Ethnotheatre transforms research about human experiences into a dramatic presentation for an audience. Johnny Saldaña, one of the best-known practitioners of this research tradition, outlines the key principles and practices of ethnotheatre in this clear, concise volume. He covers the preparation of a dramatic presentation from the research and writing stages to the elements of stage production. Saldaña nurtures playwrights through adaptation and stage exercises, and delves into the complex ethical questions of turning the personal into theatre. Throughout, he emphasizes the vital importance of creating good theatre as well as good research for impact on an audience and performers. The volume includes multiple scenes from contemporary ethnodramas plus two complete play scripts as exemplars of the genre.

Spanning across playwrights, performers, critics, and theatrical commemorations, this book raises controversy about familiar figures and brings attention to neglected ones. Thomas F. Connolly opens his book with a provocative essay subtitled'Notional Culture.'The first sentence:'Postmodernism makes others of us all,'introduces Connolly's confrontational approach to the study of culture. The introduction takes readers from Montaigne's'Cannibals'to Madison Avenue'gangsta'wannabes, while explicating the impulses behind formal classification that have driven intellectual pursuits from the Early Modern Period through postmodernism. The chapter on Eugene O'Neill argues that his colossal status as the'greatest American playwright'has been imposed upon him and reduces his stature as a world playwright. Connolly is the major scholar of American drama critics and the essay on John Mason Brown has been called'a fascinating and important piece'by leading theatre historian David Savran. Other chapters on major European performers: Noël Coward, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Alexander Moissi and Viennese theatrical culture, offer analysis of self-creation, the superficiality of national identity, and the ways governments use performers. Genus Envy is an important book for all theatre, cultural studies, and literature collections.

In Performing Loss: Rebuilding Community through Theater and Writing, author Jodi Kanter explores opportunities for creativity and growth within our collective responses to grief. Performing Loss provides teachers, students, and others interested in performance with strategies for reading, writing, and performing loss as communities—in the classroom, the theater, and the wider public sphere. From an adaptation of Jose Saramago's novel Blindness to a reading of Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play, from Kanter's own experience creating theater with terminally ill patients and federal prisoners to a visual artist's response to September 11th, Kanter shows in practical, replicable detail how performing loss with community members can transform experiences of isolation and paralysis into experiences of solidarity and action. Drawing on academic work in performance, cultural studies, literature, sociology, and anthropology, Kanter considers a range of responses to grief in historical context and goes on to imagine newer, more collaborative, and more civically engaged responses. Performing Loss describes Kanter's pedagogical and artistic processes in lively and vivid detail, enabling the reader to use her projects as models or to adapt the techniques to new communities, venues, and purposes. Kanter demonstrates through each example the ways in which writing and performing can create new possibilities for mourning and living together.