There are many encyclopedias and handbooks that provide overviews of drama topics. To locate some of these try this search:
"oxford reference" (theatre OR theater OR drama) and you will get links to:
You can also search for handbooks on theatre. Limit by date and to Queen's collections. A handbook provides an overview of topics in a specific field: handbook (theatre OR theater OR drama). This leads to:
Blowing up the Skirt of History: recovered and reanimated plays by early Canadian women dramatists, 1876-1920 by
From history and politics to fantasy and farce, the first flourish of women's theatre in Canada questioned the discourses that formed and informed ideas of gender, sex, and sexuality. This book revives ten theatrical comedies that staged the promise of social change.
Digital Theatre: the making and meaning of live mediated performance, US & UK, 1990-2020 by
Digital Theatre is a rich and varied art form evolving between performing bodies gathered together in shared space and the ever-expanding flexible reach of the digital technology that shapes our world. This book explores live theatre performances which incorporate video projection, animation, motion capture and triggering, telematics and multisite performance, robotics, VR, and AR. Through examples from practitioners like George Coates, the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre, Troika Ranch, David Saltz, Mark Reaney, The Builder's Association, and ArtGrid, a picture emerges of how and why digital technology can be used to effectively create theatre productions matching the storytelling and expressive needs of today's artists and audiences. It also examines how theatre roles such as director, actor, playwright, costumes, and set are altered, and how ideas of body, place, and community are expanded.
Directing Professionally : a practical guide to developing a successful career in today's theatre
How do you develop both the craft of directing as well as a professional career in freelance directing in today's theatre industry? Drawing on his own extensive experience and that of other theatre professionals from the US and UK, Kent Thompson illuminates a pathway from training, apprenticeship and assistant directing to an established career as a director. Directing Professionally first lays out paths for aspirant directors to train, grow and succeed as directors, then advises freelance directors on how to establish and accelerate their professional careers. It also reveals the most significant ways those directors become artistic directors today. With a frank, thoughtful and often humorous examination of the job of professional direction and artistic direction, Thompson writes about the passion, commitment, artistic vision, directorial experience, leadership skills, and powerful persuasive gifts needed to succeed in this extraordinary field. Featuring case studies and brief interviews with professional theatre directors, artistic directors, producers, critics, managing/executive directors, and theatre leaders currently working in the field in the UK and the US, this volume will equip you to develop your career as a professional director in today's theatre.
Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: playmakers and their strategies by
Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europemoves away from the customary conceptual framework that artificially separates 'medieval' from 'early modern' drama to explore the role of drama and spectacle in England, France, the Low Countries, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and the German-speaking areas that now constitute Austria and Germany. This book investigates the ranges of dramatic and performative techniques and strategies that playmakers across Europe used to adapt their work to the changing contexts in which they performed, and to the changing or expanding audiences that they faced. It considers the different views expressed through drama and spectacle on shared historical events, how communities coped with similar issues and why they ritually recycled these themes through reinvented or alternative forms that replaced or existed alongside their predecessors. A wide variety of genres of play are discussed throughout, including visitatio sepulchri(visit to the tomb) plays; Easter and Passion Plays and morality plays; the French civic mystère; Italian sacre rappresentazioni performed by choirboys in the context of the church; Bürgertheaterfrom the Swiss Confederacy; drama performed for the purpose of royal entertainment and propaganda; May and Summer games; and the commercial, professional theatre of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. Examining the strength of drama in relation to the larger cultural forces to which it adapted, and demonstrating the use of social, political, economic and artistic networks to educate and support the social structures of communities, Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe offers a broader understanding of a shared European past across the traditional chronological divide of 1500. It is ideal for students of social history, and the history of medieval and early modern drama or literature.
Mapping Global Theatre Histories by
This textbook provides a global, chronological mapping of significant areas of theatre, sketched from its deepest history in the evolution of our brain's 'inner theatre' to ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern developments. It considers prehistoric cave art and built temples, African trance dances, ancient Egyptian and Middle-Eastern ritual dramas, Greek and Roman theatres, Asian dance-dramas and puppetry, medieval European performances, global indigenous rituals, early modern to postmodern Euro-American developments, worldwide postcolonial theatres, and the hyper-theatricality of today's mass and social media. Timelines and numbered paragraphs form an overall outline with distilled details of what students can learn, encouraging further explorations online and in the library. Questions suggest how students might reflect on present parallels, making their own maps of global theatre histories, regarding geo-political theatrics in the media, our performances in everyday life, and the theatres inside our brains.
Privileged Spectatorship : Theatrical Interventions in White Supremacy by
Many professional theater artists attempt to use live performances in formal theater spaces to disrupt racism and create a more equitable society. Privileged Spectatorship: Theatrical Interventions in White Supremacy examines the impact of such projects, looking at how and why they do and do not intervene in white supremacy. In this incisive study, Dani Snyder-Young examines audience responses to a range of theatrical events that focus on race-related conflict or racial identity in the contemporary United States. The audiences for these performances, produced at mainstream not-for-profit professional theaters in major American cities in 2013-18, reflect dominant patterns of theater attendance: the majority of spectators are older, affluent, white, and describe themselves as politically progressive. Snyder-Young studies the ways these audience members consume the stories of racialized others and analyzes how different artistic, organizational, and programmatic strategies can (or cannot) mitigate white privilege. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of theater, performance studies, and critical ethnic studies and for theater practitioners interested in equity and inclusion.
Restaging Feminisms by
Restaging Feminisms offers a re-encounter with the tripartite modelling of liberal, radical, and socialist feminisms foundational to establishing feminist approaches to theatre. This lucid account of past-present connections to the staging of feminism assesses the legacies and renewals of all three feminist dynamics as they intersect with austerity Britain, the Weinstein watershed, and the #MeToo movement. Feminist politics, concepts, and the role of affect in the making of political attachments inform an approach that values understanding feminism's past as critical to reanimating and restaging socially progressive, feminist futures. The volume includes case studies of productions staged between 2016 and 2019: Caryl Churchill's Escaped Alone; David Greig's version of The Suppliant Women; Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's Emilia; Nina Raine's Consent; Townsend Theatre's We Are The Lions Mr Manager; and Laura Wade's Home, I'm Darling. From an author with a pioneering and thirty-year-long commitment to the study of feminism and British theatre, Restaging Feminisms is for an intergenerational feminist-theatre readership: for those who are discovering relations between feminism and theatre for the first time and those re-encountering the feminist dynamics and their renewed resonance on the contemporary British stage.
World Political Theatre and Performance: theories, histories, practices by
World Political Theatre and Performance: Theories, Histories, Practicesis the second collection of essays to emerge from the Political Performances Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research. Bringing together scholars and practitioners from multiple locations, the book analyses a range of examples - historical and contemporary - of counter-hegemonic theatre and performance. Part 1 offers a diachronic view of the relationship between activism and performance; Part 2 focuses on the changing nature of what constitutes 'political theatre' today. Case studies from Finland to India and from Chile to China are framed by section introductions that underline both commonalities and tensions, while the general introduction reflects on what a radical practice can look like in the face of global neoliberalism. Contributors: Julia Boll, Paola Botham, Marco Galea, Aneta Głowacka, Pujya Ghosh, Camila González Ortiz, Bérénice Hamidi-Kim, Fatine Bahar Karlıdağ, Madli Pesti, José Ramón Prado-Pérez, Trish Reid, Mikko-Olavi Seppälä, Andy Smith, Evi Stamatiou, Wei Zheyu.
