Live performance continues to be created every time it is performed. This book explores the dynamic relationship between creative process, presentation and spectator response to provide students and scholars in Drama with new insights on performance from poetry to pantomime.
These essays make parallels between areas of performance that are rarely, if ever, compared. They present the basis for an overall theory of how ’conception’, ’development’, ’presentation’ and ’reception’ are fused together to make up the overall ’performance’. This study investigates the relationship between the process of creating performance and spectator response, and how this exchange is embedded into the product itself.
These essays make parallels between areas of performance that are rarely, if ever, compared. They present the basis for an overall theory of how ’conception’, ’development’, ’presentation’ and ’reception’ are fused together to make up the overall ’performance’. This study investigates the relationship between the process of creating performance and spectator response, and how this exchange is embedded into the product itself.
The authors draw on theoretical approaches from a range of sources, and examine the work of contemporary dramatists, choreographers, poets and performers including:
• Sarah Kane
• Iain Baxter
• Yolande Snaith
• Slobodan Snajder
• Phylis Nagy
• Steve Benson
• David Fielding
• David Antin
• Bette Midler
• Karen Malpede
• Stephen Daldry
• Mai Lanfang
Its construction of a new, wide-ranging approach to performance research makes this book a valuable resource for the student as well as the broader academic community. It has application both as a textbook and for supplementary research on drama courses nationwide.
Table of Contents
Editor Introduction
Roberta Mock
1 Desperate Acts
The Role of the Audience in the Process of Playwriting
Christine Roberts
2 Poetry & Performance
Tony Lopez
3 Minor Asides of Performance in Some Works of Iain Baxter and the N.E. Thing Company
Beginnings to 1970
Lorenzo Buj
4 Collaborative Practice and the Phenomenal Dancer
Yolande Snaith’s Theatredance
Ruth Way
5 Re-Cognizing Corporeality
Henry Daniel
6 The Soul of Jingju
Ruru Li & David W. Jiang
7 “Your Mother is Up Here Working!”
Bette Midler, the Continental Baths, and the Mainstreaming of Gay Male Sensibility
Kevin Winkler
8 The Moebius Strip
Act and Imitation in English Pantomime Performance
Robert Cheesmond
9 Reception of the Image
Ellie Parker
10 Theatre of Witness
Passage into a New Millennium
Karen Malpede
Roberta Mock
1 Desperate Acts
The Role of the Audience in the Process of Playwriting
Christine Roberts
2 Poetry & Performance
Tony Lopez
3 Minor Asides of Performance in Some Works of Iain Baxter and the N.E. Thing Company
Beginnings to 1970
Lorenzo Buj
4 Collaborative Practice and the Phenomenal Dancer
Yolande Snaith’s Theatredance
Ruth Way
5 Re-Cognizing Corporeality
Henry Daniel
6 The Soul of Jingju
Ruru Li & David W. Jiang
7 “Your Mother is Up Here Working!”
Bette Midler, the Continental Baths, and the Mainstreaming of Gay Male Sensibility
Kevin Winkler
8 The Moebius Strip
Act and Imitation in English Pantomime Performance
Robert Cheesmond
9 Reception of the Image
Ellie Parker
10 Theatre of Witness
Passage into a New Millennium
Karen Malpede