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This book explores how avant-garde directors in French theatre play on their audiences' frustration to generate an encounter with the real.Focusing on the work of directors such as Gisèle Vienne, Jan Lauwers, Rodrigo Garcia, Jan Fabre and Romeo Castellucci, the book looks at how these directors manipulate their audiences to experience a raw perception of materiality and physical bodies on stage, set within narratives of mystery and the uncanny. This approach has led to these directors' work described as 'obscene', 'pretentious', 'demagogic' and 'provocative'. Because of this, the act of spectating and the nature of spectatorship itself becomes complicated and tends to leave French audiences doubting traditional codes and practices. It leads to the directors' work being misjudged and to contradictory discourses between critics, researchers and directors. The book examines how directors implement strategies on stage to trigger such experiences, while evaluating how problematic these strategies are. It develops critical and philosophical tools that help spectators extend their field of perception and better engage with these contemporary practices. And, in doing so, it analyses a fascinating paradox: the French theatre scene hosting both active avant-garde practices, especially when it comes to spectator experience, and strong rejections from audiences.

Forty years after Britain's entry to the European Economic Community, the country's political and cultural landscapes are still marked by scepticism or resistance to 'continental' Europe. Encountering Europe on British Stages is the first book-length study of the ways in which British theatre and performance have engaged with Europe and European identities since the end of the Cold War. The book explores images and ideas of Europe and Europeanness as produced on British stages and studies the reactions to works that have negotiated Europe, its past and present, its peoples and their experiences. It also investigates the determining effects of British and European cultural policies and structures. What can we learn from the British performing arts scene of the last quarter-century about what Europe, as a cultural construct and political formation, means for Britain today? It considers the work of dramatists and theatre companies which engaged with the emerging reality of the 'New' Europe in the 1990s: including Howard Barker, Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, David Edgar, David Greig, Sarah Kane, Harold Pinter and companies Complicite and Suspect Culture. Against a changing context that covers the narratives of expansion and utopian feelings at the turn of the millennium; the 'failure' of multiculturalism; the transformations precipitated by the global recession in 2008 and the 'Eurozone crisis'; the migration crisis and the referendum on Britain's European Union membership, the work of playwrights including Mark Ravenhill, Simon Stephens, Zinnie Harris, Tena Stivicic, Caire Bayley and Anders Lustgarten is examined.

Is postdramatic theatre political and if so how? How does it relate to Brecht''s ideas of political theatre, for example? How can we account for the relationship between aesthetics and politics in new forms of theatre, playwriting, and performance?The chapters in this book discuss crucial aspects of the issues raised by the postdramatic turn in theatre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: the status of the audience and modes of spectatorship in postdramatic theatre; the political claims of postdramatic theatre; postdramatic theatre''s ongoing relationship with the dramatic tradition; its dialectical qualities, or its eschewing of the dialectic; questions of representation and the real in theatre; the role of bodies, perception, appearance and theatricality in postdramatic theatre; as well as subjectivity and agency in postdramatic theatre, dance and performance.Offering analyses of a wide range of international performance examples, scholars in this volume engage with Hans-Thies Lehmann''s theoretical positions both affirmatively and critically, relating them to other approaches by thinkers ranging from early theorists such as Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin, to contemporary thinkers such as Fischer-Lichte, Rancière and others

To what extent is theatre a contagious practice, capable of undoing and enlivening people and cultures? Theatres of Contagion responds to some of the anxieties of our current political and cultural climate by exploring theatre's status as a contagious cultural force, questioning its role in the spread or control of medical, psychological and emotional conditions and phenomena. Observing a diverse range of practices from the early modern to contemporary period, the volume considers how this contagion is understood to happen and operate, its real and imagined effects, and how these have been a source of pleasure and fear for theatre makers, audiences and authorities. Drawing on perspectives from medicine, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, law and affect theory, essays investigate some of the ways in which theatre can be viewed as a powerful agent of containment and transmission. Among the works analysed include a musical adaptation and an intercultural variation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet; a contemporary queer take on Hamlet; Grand­ Guignol and theatres of horror; the writings and influence of Artaud; immersive theatre and the work of Punchdrunk, and computer gaming and smartphone apps

Robert Lepage/Ex Machina: Revolutions in Theatrical Space provides an ideal introduction to one of our most innovative companies - and a much-needed and timely reappraisal of Lepage's oeuvre. International, interdisciplinary and intercultural to the core, Ex Machina have negotiated some of the most complex creative and cultural challenges of our time. This book maps the story of that journey by analysing the full spectrum of their richly varied work. Through a comprehensive historiography of productions since 1994, Robert Lepage/Ex Machina offers a detailed picture of the relationship between director and company, while connecting Ex Machina to culturally specific features of Québec, and its theatre. This book reveals for the first time how overlooked aspects of creativity and culture shaped the company's early work, while installing a dynamic interplay between director and company that would spark a unique and ongoing evolution of praxis. Central to this re-evaluation of practice is the book's identification of an architectural aesthetic at the heart of Ex Machina's work, an aesthetic which provides its artistic and political centres of gravity. Moreover, this architectural aesthetic powers the emergence of concrete narrative as a new and distinctive mode of theatrical storytelling - uniting story and space, body and technology, content and form - and demanding that we discover the politics of these performances in the energetic gestures of theatre design, and space itself. Drawing on extensive interviews with Lepage, Ex Machina personnel and collaborative partners, Robert Lepage/Ex Machina calls upon us to revise both our creative and critical perceptions of this vital and distinctive practice.

Performing Architectures offers a coherent introduction to the fields of performance and contemporary architecture, exploring the significance of architecture for performance theory and theatre and performance practice. It maps the diverse relations that exist between these disciplines and demonstrates how their aims, concerns and practices overlap through shared interests in space, action and event. Through a wide range of international examples and contributions from scholars and practitioners, it offers readers an analytical survey of current practices and equips them with the tools for analyzing site-specific and immersive theatre and performance.The essays in this volume, contributed by leading theorists and practitioners from both disciplines, focus on three key sites of encounter:* Projects: examines recent trends in architecture for performance; * Practices: looks at cross-currents in artistic practice, including spatial dramaturgies, performance architectonics and performative architectures; and * Pedagogies: considers the uses of performance in architectural education and architecture in teaching performance.The volume provides an essential introduction to the ways in which performance and architecture, as socio-spatial processes and as things made or constructed, operate as generating, shaping and steering forces in understanding and performing the other.

Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd is an innovative collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of theatre, performance and eco-criticism, which reconfigures absurdist theatre through the optics of ecology and environment. As well as offering strikingly new interpretations of the work of canonical playwrights such as Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Adamov, Albee, Kafka, Pinter, Shepard and Churchill, the book playfully mimics the structure of Martin Esslin''s classic text The Theatre of the Absurd, which is commonly recognised as one of the most important scholarly publications of the 20th century. By reading absurdist drama, for the first time, as an emergent form of ecological theatre, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd interrogates afresh the very meaning of absurdism for 21st-century audiences, while at the same time making a significant contribution to the development of theatre and performance studies as a whole. The collection''s interdisciplinary approach, accessibility, and ecological focus will appeal to students and academics in a number of different fields, including theatre, performance, English, French, geography and philosophy. It will also have a major impact on the new cross disciplinary paradigm of eco-criticism.