Spectators and audiences are everywhere in contemporary culture. However, even in conventional performance, whether in the theatre, in film or television, or at a sporting event, it is difficult to discuss spectators with any authority, since each of us experiences and understands the display in different ways and all methods of analyzing spectators are flawed or unreliable. This book provides instead a series of investigations into specific types of performance activity, and how they relate to their audiences. Specific topics discussed include the relationship of audiences to the rise of the director, the avant-garde, tourism, gambling, the effect of cinema on live performance and sport, including crowd violence. Spectatorship is an area of increasing importance in the field of theatre and performance studies, and this engaging study is a valuable contribution to the development of thinking about audiences and spectators.
Spectators and audiences are everywhere in contemporary culture. However, even in conventional performance, whether in the theatre, in film or television, or at a sporting event, it is difficult to discuss spectators with any authority, since each of us experiences and understands the display in different ways and all methods of analyzing spectators are flawed or unreliable. This book provides instead a series of investigations into specific types of performance activity, and how they relate to their audiences. Specific topics discussed include the relationship of audiences to the rise of the director, the avant-garde, tourism, gambling, the effect of cinema on live performance and sport, including crowd violence. Spectatorship is an area of increasing importance in the field of theatre and performance studies, and this engaging study is a valuable contribution to the development of thinking about audiences and spectators.
Addressing both theoretical and practical questions surrounding Shakespeare in contemporary Asia, this book asks why Shakespeare has been of use in these vast regions of the world that have no need to call on him. By investigating some of the ways Shakespeare has been reinvented and deployed, the study notes the differences between standard western approaches and those that can be seen in Japan, China, India, and South East Asia. The contributors come from a wide variety of backgrounds and traditions, West and East, and present distinctive, and sometimes conflicting, views on topics as diverse as speaking Shakespeare in Japanese, the importation and exportation of Shakespeare in Asia, and the uses of the English national poet in Indian film and Japanese popular culture. The debates which occur within the book highlight the diversity of production and reception for the world's most popular playwright, whose work is now global cultural capital.
Addressing both theoretical and practical questions surrounding Shakespeare in contemporary Asia, this book asks why Shakespeare has been of use in these vast regions of the world that have no need to call on him. By investigating some of the ways Shakespeare has been reinvented and deployed, the study notes the differences between standard western approaches and those that can be seen in Japan, China, India, and South East Asia. The contributors come from a wide variety of backgrounds and traditions, West and East, and present distinctive, and sometimes conflicting, views on topics as diverse as speaking Shakespeare in Japanese, the importation and exportation of Shakespeare in Asia, and the uses of the English national poet in Indian film and Japanese popular culture. The debates which occur within the book highlight the diversity of production and reception for the world's most popular playwright, whose work is now global cultural capital.
This is the first full treatment of Harley Granville Barker's active work in the theatre. It sheds new light on the actor, director, manager, playwright and critic who was one of the most fascinating and versatile men of the twentieth-century stage, and provides vivid accounts of the crucial productions of the time. Granville Barker was the chief force in establishing a place in Edwardian London for the 'New Drama' of Shaw and the European playwrights, and he also became known for his revolutionary productions of Shakespeare and Euripides. By 1915 he was generally regarded as the most important theatre artist in England. Using original documents and contemporary press reports, Dennis Kennedy recreates the excitement of Granville Barker's accomplishment in the context of an era that proved a turning-point for the arts in general. The book is supported by more than forty photographs from his theatre productions, most of them published here for the first time since the Edwardian years.
Shakespeare has long been considered the pre-eminent poet and dramatist of the English-speaking world. But although he is the most frequently performed playwright in the world, little attention has be
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He turned away from his life of wealth and privilege to live with lepers, the "untouchables" of his society. He preached the idea of the sanctity of all life, becoming an advocate of animal rights an
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