Staging Decadence

Staging Decadence PDF Author: Adam Alston
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135023706X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
How is decadence being staged today – as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for? This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value – namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism. Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse – and what might lie in its wake.

Staging Decadence

Staging Decadence PDF Author: Adam Alston
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135023706X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book

Book Description
How is decadence being staged today – as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for? This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value – namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism. Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse – and what might lie in its wake.

Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s

Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s PDF Author: Dustin Friedman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009081632
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 676

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Book Description
The 1890s were once seen as marginal within the larger field of Victorian studies, which tended to privilege the realist novel and the authors of the mid-century. In recent decades, the fin de siècle has come to be viewed as one of the most dynamic decades of the Victorian era. Viewed by writers and artists of the period as a moment of opportunity, transition, and urgency, the 1890s are pivotal for understanding the parameters of the field of Victorian studies itself. This volume makes a case for why the decade continues to be an area of perennial fascination, focusing on transnational connections, gender and sexuality, ecological concerns, technological innovations, and other current critical trends. This collection both calls attention to the diverse range of literature and art being produced during this period and foregrounds the relevance of the Victorian era's final years to issues and crises that face us today.

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre PDF Author: Sean Metzger
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350123196
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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Book Description
This is a guide to contemporary debates and theatre practices at a time when gender paradigms are both in flux and at the centre of explosive political battlegrounds. The confluence of gender and theatre has long created intense debate about representation, identification, social conditioning, desire, embodiment, and lived experience. As this handbook demonstrates, from the conventions of early modern English, Chinese, Japanese and Hispanic theatres to the subversion of racialized binaries of masculinity and femininity in recent North American, African, Asian, Caribbean and European productions, the matter of gender has consistently taken centre stage. This handbook examines how critical discourses on gender intersect with key debates in the field of theatre studies, as a lens to illuminate the practices of gender and theatre as well as the societies they inform and represent across space and time. Of interest to scholars in the interrelated areas of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, and globalization and diasporic studies, this book demonstrates how researchers are currently addressing theatre about gender issues and gendered theatre practices. While synthesizing and summarizing foundational and evolving debates from a contemporary perspective, this collection offers interpretations and analyses that do not simply look back at existing scholarship, but open up new possibilities and understandings. Featuring essential research tools, including a survey of keywords and an annotated play list, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance.

Decadent Plays: 1890–1930

Decadent Plays: 1890–1930 PDF Author: Adam Alston
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350171859
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Poisoned cigars, seductive apparitions, minds and empires in the last of their decline and the most notorious kiss in dramatic history – decadent plays challenged the moral as much as the dramatic imagination of their own day, and continue to probe horizons of taste and the possibilities of stagecraft. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many writers reacted to urban modernity by embracing decadent themes and styles, and dramatists were no exception. Decadence offered these writers a framework for exploring nonconformist identities and beliefs that challenged behavioural norms as much as the desirability of modern progress. Decadent plays were at once behind the times in their celebration of antiquity, and forward-thinking in their staging of themes that have become all the more timely in the 21st century, including queerness, unconventional eroticism, and critiques of empire and industrial progress. Equally, the diversity of decadent drama cannot be pigeon-holed; many of these plays still have the capacity to offend worldviews, and invite us to interrogate present-day conventions and propriety. International in scope and eclectic in content, this edited anthology is an authoritative and accessible introduction to a fast-expanding field of decadent literature. The first publication of its kind to deal with decadent drama, and featuring plays translated into English for the first time, Decadent Plays: 1890 to 1930 breaks new ground by foregrounding decadence as a dramatic sensibility in this most pivotal of periods in the history of modern drama. Featuring canonical and little-known works by Oscar Wilde, Michael Field, Lesya Ukrainka, Rachilde, Remy de Gourmont, Jean Lorrain, Leonid Andreyev, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Maurice Maeterlinck, Izumi Kyoka, and Djuna Barnes, this anthology is an essential introduction to decadent drama that will pique the interest of specialists and non-specialists alike.

Decadence

Decadence PDF Author:
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN:
Category : Degeneration
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Book Description


Decadent Plays: 1890–1930

Decadent Plays: 1890–1930 PDF Author: Adam Alston
Publisher: Methuen Drama
ISBN: 1350171824
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Witty satire, political drama, transgressive social commentary, mystical meditation; for years, these topics were banned from the stage. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries decadent writers turned to decadence as a means of responding to urban modernity, and dramatists were no exception. Decadence offered these writers a framework for exploring nonconformist identities and beliefs that challenged narrow ideas about taste, decency, and progress, and recurring motifs included queer sexualities and genders, elitism, social class, degeneracy and decay. International in scope and eclectic in content, this edited anthology is an authoritative and accessible introduction to this fast-expanding field of decadent literature . The first publication of its kind to deal specifically with decadent dramatic works in the pre-modernist and modernist periods, Decadent Plays breaks new ground by exploring how the concept of decadence cuts across genre, styles, and culture, and by including little-known works that are currently out-of-print. Featuring work Oscar Wilde, Michael Field, Lesya Ukrainka, Rachilde, Remy de Gourmont, Jean Lorrain, Leonid Andreyev, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Maurice Maeterlinck, Izumi Kyoka, and Djuna Barnes, this anthology includes a selection of mainstream and marginal plays, some of which have been translated into English for the first time. An essential and influential introduction to the fast-expanding field of decadent literature, this edited anthology is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, and specialists and non-specialists alike.

English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920

English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Decadence

Decadence PDF Author: David Weir
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190610220
Category : SOCIAL SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
Introduction -- Rome: classical decadence -- Paris: cultural decadence -- London: social decadence -- Vienna and Berlin: socio-cultural decadence -- Afterword: legacies of decadence

The Arts Council Bulletin

The Arts Council Bulletin PDF Author: Arts Council of Great Britain
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature

Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Periodicals
Languages : en
Pages : 1678

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Book Description