Theatre and the Threshold of Death

Theatre and the Threshold of Death PDF Author: Kathleen Gough
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350385522
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
On the eve of a global pandemic, Kathleen Gough, a theatre professor, becomes immersed in the lives of five artist-mystics, each of whom is a pioneer in her field: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the first known musical composer; Eleanora Duse (1858-1924), the first modern actor in the Western world; Simone Weil (1909-1943), philosopher, activist, and mystic, whom Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our time”; Marina Abramovic (b. 1946), “the grandmother of performance art”; and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), the first known (and belatedly acknowledged) abstract painter. Each time Gough crosses a threshold into their world, she is compelled to attend courses, seminars and workshops that are simultaneously about dying and healing. Curious to learn more about the relationships between art practice, dying, and healing, Gough imagines the five artists as wisdom teachers in a mystery school. In a series of eight lectures, she turns to performance theory to provide a framework for engaging with the unknown world. In Theatre and the Threshold of Death, Gough makes a persuasive argument for the world-making power of relational thinking in our increasingly polarized age.

Theatre and the Threshold of Death

Theatre and the Threshold of Death PDF Author: Kathleen Gough
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350385522
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
On the eve of a global pandemic, Kathleen Gough, a theatre professor, becomes immersed in the lives of five artist-mystics, each of whom is a pioneer in her field: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the first known musical composer; Eleanora Duse (1858-1924), the first modern actor in the Western world; Simone Weil (1909-1943), philosopher, activist, and mystic, whom Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our time”; Marina Abramovic (b. 1946), “the grandmother of performance art”; and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), the first known (and belatedly acknowledged) abstract painter. Each time Gough crosses a threshold into their world, she is compelled to attend courses, seminars and workshops that are simultaneously about dying and healing. Curious to learn more about the relationships between art practice, dying, and healing, Gough imagines the five artists as wisdom teachers in a mystery school. In a series of eight lectures, she turns to performance theory to provide a framework for engaging with the unknown world. In Theatre and the Threshold of Death, Gough makes a persuasive argument for the world-making power of relational thinking in our increasingly polarized age.

Theatre and the Threshold of Death

Theatre and the Threshold of Death PDF Author: Kathleen M. Gough
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350385566
Category : Life cycle, Human, in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"On the eve of a global pandemic, a theatre professor becomes immersed in the lives of five artist-mystics, each of whom is a "first" in her field: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the first known musical composer, Eleanora Duse (1858-1924), the first modern actor in the Western world, Simone Weil (1909-1943), philosopher, activist and mystic, who Albert Camus called "the only great spirit of our time," Marina Abramovic (b. 1946), "the grandmother of performance art," and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), the first known (and belatedly acknowledged) abstract painter. Each time Gough crosses a threshold into their world she is compelled to attend courses, seminars, and workshops that are simultaneously about dying and about healing. What does it mean to follow artists to practices where being in a healing relationship to other bodies is a fundamental requirement? Turning to the performance theories she has taught for twenty years, she begins to chart her experience through the dramaturgy of the first medieval mystery play - a play with hidden, mystical significance that begins with a visit to a tomb to discover a missing body who is alive in another way. Imagining these five mystics as a hierophantic faculty in a mystery school, Gough creates a series of lectures that move in that liminal space between skepticism and knowledge to ask questions about subjectivity, personhood, and the necessity of staying in relationship with the unknown world. Like the serial method in art practice, Gough's lecture series make a persuasive argument for relational thinking, and the urgency of keeping open the questions that implore us to stay in a fully embodied relationship with our collective present-tense"--

The Theatre of Death – The Uncanny in Mimesis

The Theatre of Death – The Uncanny in Mimesis PDF Author: Mischa Twitchin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137478721
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This book is concerned with such questions as the following: What is the life of the past in the present? How might “the theatre of death” and “the uncanny in mimesis” allow us to conceive of the afterlife of a supposedly ephemeral art practice? How might a theatrical iconology engage with such fundamental social relations as those between the living and the dead? Distinct from the dominant expectation that actors should appear life-like onstage, why is it that some theatre artists – from Craig to Castellucci – have conceived of the actor in the image of the dead? Furthermore, how might an iconology of the actor allow us to imagine the afterlife of an apparently ephemeral art practice? This book explores such questions through the implications of the twofold analogy proposed in its very title: as theatre is to the uncanny, so death is to mimesis; and as theatre is to mimesis, so death is to the uncanny. Walter Benjamin once observed that: “The point at issue in the theatre today can be more accurately defined in relation to the stage than to the play. It concerns the filling-in of the orchestra pit. The abyss which separates the actors from the audience like the dead from the living...” If the relation between the living and the dead can be thought of in terms of an analogy with ancient theatre, how might avant-garde theatre be thought of in terms of this same relation “today”?

Theatre and Death

Theatre and Death PDF Author: Mark Robson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350315958
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 74

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Book Description
This new title in the Theatre And series confronts the complex relationship between theatre and death. Taking the position that all humans need to 'live' with the reality of death, Mark Robson draws on a range of examples, from Greek theatre to contemporary practitioners, in order to testify to the potency of both theatre and death in contemporary culture. Striking and thought-provoking, this book is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students of theatre and performance, or English literature students with an interest in tragedy.

The Broken Window

The Broken Window PDF Author: Jane Alison Hale
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9780911198829
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
The author defines and analyzes the new type of theatricalperspective invented by Samuel Beckett. She begins with an overview of thechanges of the definition of twentieth century-knowledge (e.g, art, science,philosophy, and psychology) then discusses the concepts of time, space, andmovement which underlie Beckett's notion and use of perspective in the theater.The Broken Window shows how Beckett translates a number of twentieth-centuryesthetic and philosophical concerns - the impossibility of separating subjectand object, the indeterminacy of time and space, the inevitability of movementand change - into specific dramatic techniques and traces their evolutionthrough close textual analyses of six plays. Hale is the first critic to define Beckett's theatricaltechniques in terms of the notion of perspective and to link them to similarinnovations in the plastic arts. In addition, no critic has so exhaustivelyelaborated Beckett's premises of indeterminacy, the inevitability ofperception, and the breakdown of the subject/object relationship.

Contemporary European Theatre Directors

Contemporary European Theatre Directors PDF Author: Maria M. Delgado
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429682190
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
This expanded second edition of Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ambitious and unprecedented overview of many of the key directors working in European theatre over the past 30 years. This book is a vivid account of the vast range of work undertaken in European theatre during the last three decades, situated lucidly in its artistic, cultural, and political context. Each chapter discusses a particular director, showing the influences on their work, how it has developed over time, its reception, and the complex relation it has with its social and cultural context. The volume includes directors living and working in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Russia, Romania, the UK, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, offering a broad and international picture of the directing landscape. Now revised and updated, Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ideal text for both undergraduate and postgraduate directing students, as well as those researching contemporary theatre practices, providing a detailed guide to the generation of directors whose careers were forged and tempered in the changing Europe following the end of the Cold War.

Tragedy

Tragedy PDF Author: Sarah Dewar-Watson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350309729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Tragedy is one of the oldest and most revered forms of literature in the western world. Over the centuries, tragedy has shown a tremendous capacity to reinvent itself, often emerging at crucial moments in the evolution of cultural, political and intellectual history. Not only is tragedy marked by its diversity, the critical literature surrounding the genre is equally diverse. This Reader's Guide offers a comprehensive introduction to the key criticism and debates on tragedy, from Aristotle through to the present day. Sarah Dewar-Watson presents the work of canonical theorists and lesser-known but, nonetheless, influential critics, bringing together a strong sense of the critical tradition and an awareness of current scholarly trends. Stimulating and engaging, this essential resource helps students to navigate their way around the subject of tragedy and its rich critical terrain.

Theatre of Apollo

Theatre of Apollo PDF Author: R. Drew Griffith
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780773515000
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Literary critics have consistently marginalized the role of Apollo in Sophocles' Oedipus the King: some declare him to be inscrutable, others ignore him, and still others deny his existence altogether. In defiance of this long-standing critical consensus, Drew Griffith offers a new interpretation of the play by arguing that Apollo brings about Oedipus' downfall as just punishment for his hubris.

Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination

Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination PDF Author: Bernd Huppauf
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113660359X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
In this interdisciplinary anthology, essays study the relationship between the imagination and images both material and mental. Through case studies on a diverse array of topics including photography, film, sports, theater, and anthropology, contributors focus on the role of the creative imagination in seeing and producing images and the imaginary.

Yeats on Theatre

Yeats on Theatre PDF Author: Christopher Morash
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009033026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
W. B. Yeats is recognised globally as one of the most significant poets of the past century. And yet, in his Nobel address, he singled out his work in the theatre as his main accomplishment. Yeats on Theatre restores Yeats not only a playwright, but as a writer and thinker who, over forty years, produced a body of theory covering all aspects of theatre, including the possibilities of performance space, the role of the audience and the nature of tragedy. When read as whole, in conjunction with his plays, letters, and extensive manuscript materials, Yeats's theatre writings emerge as a radical, cohesive, theatrical aesthetic, at odds with – and in advance of – the theatre of his time. Ultimately, the Yeats who takes shape in Yeats on Theatre is an artist who thinks through theatre, providing us with an urgently needed reassertion of the value of theatre as embodied thought.