Living Theatre

Provides a biography of the Living Theatre a radical American theatrical group known for violating taboos of culture and government

This book offers the first in-depth look at avant-garde theatre in the United States from the early 1950s to the 1990s looking at its origins and its theoretical foundations through an examination of literature, cinema and art.

"This work looks at how experimental art and the avant-garde artists' lifestyles have influenced the larger American culture since the mid-19th century. The study explores the many ways in which America's experimental artists have impacted upon, and at times transformed, the culture of a modern industrial nation"--Provided by publisher.

Written soon before and in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic when theatre ground to a halt and spectatorship was suspended, this book takes stock of spectatorship as theatre’s living archive and affirms its value in the midst of the present crisis. Drawing from a manifold affective archive of performances and installations by Marina Abramović, Ron Athey, Forced Entertainment, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Blast Theory, LIGNA, Doris Salcedo, Graeme Miller, Lenz Rifrazioni, Cristina Rizzo ..., and expanding on the work of many theorists and scholars like Roland Barthes and Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou, Nicholas Ridout and Alan Read, among others, the book focuses on the spectator as the subject, rather than the object, of investigation. This is the right time to remember their secret power and theorise their collective time in the theatre. This book is an archive of their adventure and a manifesto rooted in their potentiality. It boldly posits the spectator as the inaugurator of theatre, the surplus that survives it. The book will be of great interest to spectators all and sundry, to scholars and students of theatre and performance studies, of spectatorship and politics.

Examines the artistry, politics, and legacies of radical theater groups that came to prominence in the US during the period of the late sixties and early seventies. This book considers how radical theaters sought to redefine the relationship between theater and political activism, and how they challenged the foundations of theater itself.

"This new and updated Guide, with over 2,700 cross-referenced entries, covers all aspects of the American theatre from its earliest history to the present. Entries include people, venues and companies scattered through the U.S., plays and musicals, and theatrical phenomena. Additionally, there are some 100 topical entries covering theatre in major U.S. cities and such disparate subjects as Asian American theatre, Chicano theatre, censorship, Filipino American theatre, one-person performances, performance art, and puppetry. Highly illustrated, the Guide is supplemented with a historical survey as introduction, a bibliography of major sources published since the first edition, and a biographical index covering over 3,200 individuals mentioned in the text."--BOOK JACKET.

A groundbreaking, cross-cultural reference work exploring the diversity of expression found in rituals, festivals, and performances, uncovering acting techniques and practices from around the world. * A–Z entries span every region of the world and cover diverse topics from Ireland's Abbey Theatre to China's Zhang Mu (rod-puppet theater) * Beautiful illustrations include masks used in classical Greek dramas, an advertisement for a performance of Punch and Judy, the humorous puppet characters, and photographs of actors, performances, and ceremonies from Monty Python to young Balinese dancers performing the Legong dance

The complex nature of the relationship between theatre and politics is explored in this study of the Polish theatre scene. It traces the development of the alternative theatre movement from its origins, in the 1950s, through to its decline in the late 1980s.

An update of this popular history of experimental American theater

Brings together essays on direct audience participation in the work of fourteen widely varied theatrical and dance artists, covering performance genres of the past and present, popular entertainment and high art.

Essays discuss Ibsen, Strindberg, O'Neill, Brecht, Shaw, acting styles, theater controversies, translation, regional drama, and the nature of theater.

In 1952, John Cage shocked audiences with 4'33," his composition showcasing the power of silence. From Cage's minimalism to Chris Burden's radical performance art two decades later, the post-war avant-garde sought to liberate the art world by shattering the divide between high and low art. Feast of Excess presents an engaging and accessible portrait of the cultural extremism that emerged in the United States after World War II. This "New Sensibility," as termed by Susan Sontag, was predicated upon excess, pushing and often crossing boundaries whether in the direction of minimalism ormaximalism. Through brief vignette profiles of prominent figures in literature, music, visual art, poetry, theater and journalism, George Cotkin leads readers on a focused journey through the interconnected stories of prominent figures such as Andy Warhol, Anne Sexton, John Cage, John Coltrane, BobDylan, Erica Jong, and Chris Burden, among many others, who broke barriers between artist and audience with their bold, shocking, and headline-grabbing performances. This inventive narrative captures the sentiment of liberation from high and low culture in artistic endeavors spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s and reveals the establishment of excess in American culture as the norm. A detailed emersion in the history of cultural extremism, Feast of Excess leavesreaders to consider the provocative revelation that the essence of excess remains in our culture today, for good and ill.

This is the ultimate guide to Jack Kerouac's New York, packed with photos from the '50s and '60s, and filled with information and anecdotes about the people and places that made history.

Assembling a remarkable group of scholars, these essays explore how the circulation and exchange of 'vectors of the radical' shape the avant-garde. Mapping the movement of scripts, theatre activists, performances, and other material entities, they provide unprecedented perspectives on the transnational performance culture of the avant-garde.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater collects a critical mass of border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theatre. Taking corporeality as an idea that unites the work of dance and theater scholars and artists, and embodiment as a negotiation of power dynamics with important stakes, these essays focus on the politics and poetics of the moving body in performance both on and off stage. Contemporary stage performances have sparked global interest in new experiments between dance and theater, and this volume situates this interest in its historical context by extensively investigating other such moments: from pagan mimes of late antiquity to early modern archives to Bolshevik Russia to post-Sandinista Nicaragua to Chinese opera on the international stage, to contemporary flash mobs and television dance contests. Ideologically, the essays investigate critical race theory, affect theory, cognitive science, historiography, dance dramaturgy, spatiality, gender, somatics, ritual, and biopolitics among other modes of inquiry. In terms of aesthetics, they examine many genres such as musical theater, contemporary dance, improvisation, experimental theater, television, African total theater, modern dance, new Indian dance theater aesthetics, philanthroproductions, Butoh, carnival, equestrian performance, tanztheater, Korean Talchum, Nazi Movement Choirs, Lindy Hop, Bomba, Caroline Masques, political demonstrations, and Hip Hop. The volume includes innovative essays from both young and seasoned scholars and scholar/practitioners who are working at the cutting edges of their fields. The handbook brings together essays that offer new insight into well-studied areas, challenge current knowledge, attend to neglected practices or moments in time, and that identify emergent themes. The overall result is a better understanding of the roles of dance and theater in the performative production of meaning.

The coverage of this book ranges from Jack Kerouac's tales of freedom-seeking Bohemian youth to the frenetic paintings of Jackson Pollock, including 60 years of the Beat Generation and the artists of the Age of Spontaneity. * Over 250 A–Z entries on the most important people, places, movements, themes, and scholarship, including entries on related cultural movements outside the United States, which set the Beats in an international context * A chronology highlighting artistic and historical events including the legendary poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and others at the 6 Gallery * Over 40 illustrations of Beat clothing, the Beat "pad," and the styles and tastes of the period * Images of the most photographed literary group in history and maps of their travels, such as Jack Kerouac and his legendary freight train journeys across the United States and Mexico

Volume three of a unique three-volume history covering all aspects of American theatre.

"...an elegant and entertaining walk through the urban jungle of U.S. literary culture since the 1930s... casts new light on famous texts, and reveals the multiple forms of textual masculinity...and the paradoxical connections between hard and soft masculinities in U.S. public culture. ...A valuable contribution to both literary studies and gender analysis."---Raewyn Connell, author of Masculinities "James Penner takes readers on a thrilling---and, at times, unnerving---grand tour of mid-20th-century masculinities, documenting the never-ending struggle between the hard, macho man and the soft, sensitive, artistic soul. Careening between Alfred Kinsey and Jack Kerouac, Tennessee Williams and Eldridge Cleaver, Penner surveys an extraordinary range of novels, films, plays, and criticism to demonstrate how deeply entrenched these opposing mythologies are in American culture."---David Savran, The Graduate Center, City University of New York Pinks, Pansies, and Punks charts the construction of masculinity within American literary culture from the 1930s to the 1970s. Penner documents the emergence of "macho criticism," and explores how debates about "hard" and "soft" masculinity influenced the class struggle of the 1930s, anti-communism in the 1940s and 1950s, and the clash between the Old and New Left in the 1960s. By extending literary culture to include not just novels, plays, and poetry, but diaries, journals, manifestos, screenplays, and essays on psychology and sociology, Penner unveils the multiplicity of gender attitudes that emerge in each of the decades he addresses.