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The Palgrave Handbook of Disability and Communication covers a broad spectrum of topics related to how we perceive and understand disability and the language, constructs, constraints and communication behavior that shape disability discourse within society. The essays and original research presented in this volume address important matters of disability identity and intersectionality, broader cultural narratives and representation, institutional constructs and constraints, and points related to disability justice, advocacy, and public policy. In doing so, this book brings together a diverse group of over 40 international scholars to address timely problems and to promote disability justice by interrogating the way people communicate not only to people with disabilities, but also how we communicate about disability, and how people express themselves through their disabled identity.

This book explores poetry and pedagogy in practice across the lifespan. Poetry is directly linked to improved literacy, creativity, personal development, emotional intelligence, complex analytical thinking and social interaction: all skills that are crucial in contemporary educational systems. However, a narrow focus on STEM subjects at the expense of the humanities has led educators to deprioritize poetry and to overlook its interdisciplinary, multi-modal potential. The editors and contributors argue that poetry is not a luxury, but a way to stimulate linguistic experiences that are formally rich and cognitively challenging. To learn through poetry is not just to access information differently, but also to forge new and different connections that can serve as reflective tools for lifelong learning. This interdisciplinary book will be of value to teachers and students of poetry, as well as scholars interested in literacy across the disciplines.

This book describes the evolution of the community development sector over the past 50 years, and it presents a framework and road map for how community development organizations can advance their mission through strategic partnerships that utilize their core competencies. The authors describe the current community development ecosystem, define a range of essential community development competencies, and demonstrate, through seven case studies, how using comparative advantages built on core competencies can improve outcomes for communities. By recognizing and leading with their competencies and strengths, organizations can bring their specialized areas of expertise to address complex and interconnected community challenges, and effectively meet their missions and objectives.

This book follows a physically disabled researcher's journey from stigmatized embodiment on her way to creating accessible storytelling performances. These unique performances function not only as traditional, peer-reviewed forms of critical qualitative research, but also as ‘narrative teaching productions'that guide students and their audiences in the pursuit of social justice and equality. The book begins by developing the author's personal standpoint, and provides an evocative discussion of the multiple perceptions and identities experienced by those with disabled bodies. It negotiates how performance research can be created and conducted within the confines of course learning objectives, moves through complications encountered in research design and data collection, and explores a range of insightful responses from community members, social activists, and performance critics, as well as more traditional academic audiences. Critical autoethnographic personal narratives, performance scripts, and poetry are used to illuminate struggles over legitimate methodological practice and storytelling performance pedagogy. Each chapter confronts the fear of mortality that presses us to stigmatize those who remind us of our inescapably vulnerable embodiments and offers hope for an inclusive, adaptable culture. The book will be compelling reading for scholars in Performance Studies, Disability Studies, Cultural Studies, Narrative Methodology, Ethnography, Higher Education, Autoethnography, Creative Nonfiction and everyone interested embodiment and/or storytelling for social change.Please visit www.uncwstorytelling.org/chapter-summaries-1 to access supplementary material for the book.

2017 Freedley Award Finalist, Theatre Library Association 2016 Best Circus Book of the Year, Stuart Thayer Prize, Circus Historical Society The 1960s American hippie-clown boom fostered many creative impulses, including neo-vaudeville and Ringling's Clown College. However, the origin of that impulse, clowning with a circus, has largely gone unexamined. David Carlyon, through an autoethnographic examination of his own experiences in clowning, offers a close reading of the education of a professional circus clown, woven through an eye-opening, sometimes funny, occasionally poignant look at circus life. Layering critical reflections of personal experience with connections to wider scholarship, Carlyon focuses on the work of clowning while interrogating what clowns actually do, rather than using them as stand-ins for conceptual ideas or as sentimental figures.

Child labor greatly contributed to the cultural and economic success of the British Victorian theatrical industry. This book highlights the complexities of the battle for child labor laws, the arguments for the needs of the theatre industry, and the weight of opposition that confronted any attempt to control employers.

This book examines the processes of production, circulation and reception of images of America in late nineteenth century Spain. When late nineteenth century Spaniards looked at the United States, they, like Tocqueville, ‘saw more than America'. What did they see? Between the ‘glorious'liberal revolution of 1868 and the run-up to the 1898 war with the US that would end Spain's New World empire, Spanish liberal and democratic reformers imagined the USA as a place where they could preview the ‘modern way of life', as a political and social model (or anti-model) to emulate, appropriate or reject, and above all as a 100 year experiment of republicanism, democracy and liberty in practice. Through their writings and discussions of the USA, these Spaniards debated and constructed their own modernity and imagined the place of their nation in the modern world.

Vaudeville is often viewed as the source of some of the crude stereotypes that positioned the Irish immigrant in America as the antithesis of native-born American citizens. Using primary archival material, Mooney argues that the vaudeville stage was an important venue in which an Irish-American identity was constructed, negotiated, and refined.

Drawing upon Broadway musicals ranging from Irene (1919) to Gypsy (1959), American Cinderellas on the Broadway Musical Stage considers how Broadway musicals from the 1920s through the 1950s adapted and transformed Perrault's fairy tale icon in order to address changing social and professional roles for American women. Drawing heavily upon historical research in American culture and gender studies, Cantu analyzes female lyricists and librettists who were significant in translating Perrault's heroine to the contexts and concerns of the American'working girl.'In exploring how these and other writers (of both sexes) adapted the Cinderella myth to a twentieth-century urban landscape, this book challenges traditional assumptions about the American musical's relationship to both feminism and modernism - placing the Cinderella story into the Broadway musical canon.

No play in the history of the American Stage has been as ubiquitous and as widely viewed as Uncle Tom's Cabin. This book traces the major dramatizations of Stowe's classic from its inception in 1852 through modern versions on film. Frick introduce the reader to the artists who created the plays and productions that created theatre history.

Twenty years after Tony Kushner's influential Angels in America seemed to declare a revitalized potency for the popular political play, there is a'No Politics'prejudice undermining US production and writing. This book explores the largely unrecognized cultural patterns that discourage political playwriting on the contemporary American stage.

Children have been exploited as performers and wooed energetically as consumers throughout history. These essays offer scholarly investigations into the employment and participation of children in the entertainment industry with examples drawn from historical and contemporary contexts.

This book explores the religious foundations, political and social significance, and aesthetic aspects of the theatre created by the leaders of the Occult Revival. Lingan shows how theatre contributed to the fragmentation of Western religious culture and how contemporary theatre plays a part in the development of alternative, occult religions.

The Cleveland Play House has mirrored the achievements and struggles of both the city of Cleveland and the American theatre over the past one hundred years. This book challenges the established history (often put forward by the theatre itself) and long-held assumptions concerning the creation of the institution and its legacy.

Spanish Golden Age drama has resurfaced in recent years, however scholarly analysis has not kept pace with its popularity. This book problematizes and analyzes the approaches to staging reconstruction taken over the past few decades, including historical, semiotic, anthropological, cultural, structural, cognitive and phenomenological methods.

W. C. Fields was a virtuoso comedian, often called a comic genius, legendary iconoclast, and'Great Man,'who brought so much laughter to millions while enduring so much anguish. This book explores his little-known, long stage career from 1898 to 1930, which had a major influence on his comedy and screen presence.

Drawing on traditional archival research, reception theory, cultural histories of slumming, and recent work in critical theory on literary representations of poverty, Westgate argues that the productions of slum plays served as enactments of the emergent definitions of the slum and the corresponding ethical obligations involved therein.

By tracing the effects of unprecedented immigration, the advent of the new woman, and the little-known vaudeville careers of performers like the Elinore Sisters, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers, DesRochers examines the relation between comedic vaudeville acts and progressive reformers as they fought over the new definition of'Americanness.'

Examining twenty-five years of theatre history, this book covers the major plays that feature representations of the Industrial Workers of the World. American class movement and class divisions have long been reflected on the Broadway stage and here Michael Schwartz presents a fresh look at the conflict between labor and capital.

The Group Theatre, a groundbreaking ensemble collective, started the careers of many top American theatre artists of the twentieth century and founded what became known as Method Acting. This book is the definitive history, based on over thirty years of research and interviews by the foremost theatre scholar of the time period, Helen Chinoy.

As outdoor entertainment venues in American cities, pleasure gardens were public spaces where people could explore what it meant to be American. Stubbs examines how these venues helped form American identity and argues the gardens allowed for the exploration of what it meant to be American through performance, both on and off the stage.

In Shanghai in the early twentieth century, a hybrid theatrical form, wenmingxi, emerged that was based on Western spoken theatre, classical Chinese theatre, and a Japanese hybrid form known as shinpa. This book places it in the context of its hybridized literary and performance elements, giving it a definitive place in modern Chinese theatre.

Begun as an audacious experiment, for thirty years the Hedgerow Theatre prospered as America's most successful repertory company. While known for its famous alumnae (Ann Harding and Richard Basehart), Hedgerow's legacy is a living library of over 200 productions created by Jasper Deeter's idealistic and determined pursuit of'truth and beauty.'

From Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers to Arthur Kopit and Brian Friel, agent Audrey Wood encouraged and guided the unique talents of playwrights in the Broadway theatre of her day. Her quiet determination and burning enthusiasm brought America's finest mid-century playwrights to prominence and altered stage history.

In 1845, John Franklin's Northwest Passage expedition disappeared. The expedition left an archive of performative remains that entice one to consider the tension between material remains and memory and reflect on how substitution and surrogation work alongside mourning and melancholia as responses to loss.

Exploring the performance of masculinity on and off the nineteenth-century American stage, this book looks at the shift from the passionate muscularity to intellectual restraint as not a linear journey toward national refinement; but a multitude of masculinities fighting simultaneously for dominance and recognition.

Plunka argues that drama is the ideal art form to revitalize the collective memory of Holocaust resistance. This comparative drama study examines a variety of international plays - some quite well-known, others more obscure - that focus on collective or individual defiance of the Nazis.

There is a complex relationship between performance, youth, and the shifting material circumstances (social, cultural, economic, ideological, and political) under which theatre for children and youth is generated and perceived. This book explores different aspect of theatre for young audiences using examples from theatrical events globally.

No play in the history of the American stage has been as ubiquitous and as widely viewed as Uncle Tom's Cabin. This book traces the major dramatizations of Stowe's classic from its inception in 1852 through modern versions on film. Frick introduces the reader to the artists who created the plays and productions that created theatre history.

By casting designers as authors, cultural critics, activists, entrepreneurs, and global cartographers, Essin tells a story about scenic images on the page, stage, and beyond that helped American audiences see the everyday landscapes and exotic destinations from a modern perspective.

This comprehensive, interdisciplinary collection, examines disability from a theoretical perspective, challenging views of disability that dominate mainstream thinking. Throughout, social theories of disability intersect with ideas associated with sex/gender, race/ethnicity, class and nation.

In studying performances of marriage in modern and contemporary British and American drama, Clum highlights the fact that - paradoxically - at a time when theatre was both popular entertainment and high culture, many of the most commercially and artistically successful plays about marriage were written by homosexual men. Beginning with Oscar Wilde and focusing on some of the most successful British and American playwrights of the past century, including Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan, and Emlyn Williams in England and Clyde Fitch, George Kelly, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Edward Albee in the US, The Drama of Marriagelooks at how the plays they wrote about heterosexual marriage continue to impact contemporary gay playwrights and the depiction of marriage today.

The first book-length study in any language of the presence and influence of Mei Lanfang, the internationally known Chinese actor who specialized in female roles on the twentieth-century international stage. Tian investigates Mei Lanfang's presence and influence and the transnational and intercultural appropriations of his art.

Over the last hundred years, musical theatre artists - from Berlin to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim - have developed a form that corresponds directly to the Americanization of the increasingly Jewish New York audience; and that audience's aspirations and concerns have played out in the shows themselves. Musicals thus became a paradigm which instructed newcomers in how to assimilate while correspondingly envisioning'American Dream'America as democratic and inclusive. Broadway musicals still continue to function today as'cultural Ellis Islands'for fringe populations seeking acceptance into the nation's mainstream - including women, blacks, Latinos, and gays - all essentially modeled upon the Jewish example. Stuart J. Hecht offers a fascinatingexamination of the relationship between Jews, assimilation, and the changing face of the American musical.

This book explores the possibilities and limitations re-theorizing disability using historical materialism in the interdisciplinary contexts of social theory, cultural studies, social and education policy, feminist ethics, and theories of citizenship.

Frontier dramas were among the most popular and successful of early-twentieth-century Broadway type plays. The long runs of contemporary dramas not only indicate the popularity of these plays but also tell us that these plays offered views about the frontier that original audiences could and did embrace.

Examining the work of impresarios, financiers, and the press as well as the artists themselves, Hohman demonstrates how a variety of Russian theatrical styles were introduced and incorporated into American theatre and dance during the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal plan to fund theatre and other live artistic performances during the Great Depression, had the primary goal of employing out-of-work artists, writers, and directors, with the secondary aim of entertaining poor families and creating relevant art. These case studies explore the ties between the Federal Theatre Project and regional communities throughout the United States.

Hijikata Tatsumi's explosive 1959 debut Forbidden Colors sparked a new genre of performance in Japan - butoh: an art form of contrasts, by turns shocking and serene. Since then, though interest has grown exponentially, and people all over the world are drawn to butoh's ability to enact paradox and contradiction, audiences are less knowledgeable about the contributions and innovations of the founder of butoh. Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh traces the rollicking history of the creation and initial maturation of butoh, and locates Hijikata's performances within the intellectual, cultural, and economic ferment of Japan from the sixties to the eighties.

Performances in hospices and on beaches; cross-cultural myth making in Wales, New Zealand and the US; communal poetry among mental health system survivors: this book, now in paperback, presents a senior practitioner/critic's exploration of arts-based research processes sustained over more than a decade - a subtle engagement with disability culture.

This text analyzes the cultural work of spectacular suffering in contemporary discourse and late-medieval France, reading recent dramatizations of torture and performances of self-mutilating conceptual art against late-medieval saint plays.

Lady Macbeth has haunted American history since the conflicts of Shakespeare s England spilled over into New England s real witch hunts. To reveal how Lady Macbeth entered American politics as an icon for the First Lady, this investigation focuses on the prominent actresses in the role, how they performed, and their effect on audiences anxious about the country s First Lady and her influence over the President - especially at times of war. Smith ably shows how the various Lady Macbeths have both reflected and shaped the image their contemporaries have of the ambitious political wife, producing parallels that converge dramatically in twentieth-century'witch hunts.'

Theatre and Religion on Krishna s Stage examines the history and form of India's râs lila folk theatre, and discusses how this theatre functions as a mechanism of worship and spirituality among Krishna devotees in India. From analyses of performances and conversations with performers, audience, and local scholars, Mason argues that râs lila actors and audience alike actively assume roles that locate them together in the spiritual reality that the play represents. Correlating Krishna devotion and theories of religious experience, this book suggests that the emotional experience of theatrical fiction may arise from the propensity of audiences to play out roles of their own through which they share a performance's reality.

This book explores manifestations of physical disability in Spanish American narrative fiction and performance, from José Martí's late nineteenth century crónicas, to Mario Bellatín's twenty-first century novels, from the performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco to the testimonio and filmic depictions of Gabriela Brimmer.

Mendel's Theatre offers a new way of thinking about early twentieth-century American drama by uncovering the rich convergence of heredity theory, the American eugenics movement, and innovative modern drama from the 1890s to 1930.

Rogue Performances recovers eighteenth and nineteenth-century American culture s fascination with outcast and rebellious characters. Highwaymen, thieves, beggars, rioting mobs, rebellious slaves, and mutineers dominated the stage in the period s most popular plays. Peter Reed also explores ways these characters helped to popularize theatrical forms such as ballad opera, patriotic spectacle, blackface minstrelsy, and melodrama. Reed shows how both on and offstage, these paradoxically powerful, persistent, and troubling figures reveal the contradictions of class and the force of the disempowered in the American theatrical imagination. Through analysis of both well known and lesser known plays and extensive archival research, this book challenges scholars to re-think their assumptions about the role of class in antebellum American drama.

Through an examination of plays, actors, reviews, and audience response of the period, this study traces the development of Broadway as a source of'mature'American drama, and the simultaneous development of Professional-Managerial Class consciousness and habitus.

Danjuro's Girls is a fascinating history of Japan's female kabuki troupes, offering a penetrating investigation into three generations of kabuki actresses associated with the renowned Ichikawa Danjuro acting dynasty. Contextually grounding early female precedents in kabuki, the book focuses on the Ichikawa Girls'Kabuki Troupe, a unique and trailblazing company founded after Japan's defeat in World War II. The troupe became a national sensation in the 1950s, briefly becoming part of the otherwise impenetrable all-male kabuki establishment. Drawing on numerous interviews, as well as written and visual primary sources, Danjuro's Girls challenges readers to re-examine conventional notions about gender, performance, and traditional Japanese theatre.

Staging Stigma is a captivating excursion into the bizarre world of the American freak show. Chemers critically examines several key moments of a performance tradition in which the truth is often stranger than the fiction. Grounded in meticulous historical research and cultural criticism, Chemers analysis reveals untold stories of freaks that will change the way we understand both performance and disability in America. This book is a must-have for serious students of freakery or anyone who is curious about the hidden side of American theatrical history.

Performing Magic on the Western Stage examines magic as a performing art and as a meaningful social practice, linking magic to cultural arenas such as religion, finance, gender, and nationality and profiling magicians from Robert-Houdin to Pen& Teller.