Fluid stages, morphing theatre spaces, ambulant spectators, and occasionally disappearing performers: these are some of the key ingredients of nomadic theatre. They are also theatre's response to life in the 21st century, which is increasingly marked by the mobility of people, information, technologies and services. While examining how contemporary theatre exposes and queries this mobile turn in society, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink introduces the concept of nomadic theatre as a vital tool for...

Thinking Through Theatre and Performance presents a bold and innovative approach to the study of theatre and performance. Instead of topics, genres, histories or theories, the book starts with the questions that theatre and performance are uniquely capable of asking: How does theatre function as a place for seeing and hearing? How do not only bodies and voices but also objects and media perform? How do memories, emotions and ideas continue to do their work when the performance is ...

In recent years we have witnessed an increasing convergence of work in International Politics and Performance Studies around the troubled, and often troubling, relationship between politics and aesthetics. Whilst examination of political aesthetics, aesthetic politics, and politics of aesthetic practice has been central to research in both disciplines for some time, the emergence of a distinctive ‘performative turn’ in International Politics and a critical return to the centrality of polit...

The field of literary studies has long recognised the centrality of psychoanalysis as a method for looking at texts in a new way. But rarely has the relationship between psychoanalysis and performance been mapped out, either in terms of analysing the nature of performance itself, or in terms of making sense of specific performance-related activities. In this volume some of the most distinguished thinkers in the field make this exciting new connection and offer original perspectives on a wi...

The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, on September 1 1997, prompted public demonstrations of grief on an almost unprecented global scale. But, while global media coverage of the events following her death appeared to create an international 'community of mourning', popular reacions in fact reflected the complexities of the princess's public image and the tensions surrounding the popular conception of royalty.Mourning Diana examines the events which followed the death of Di...

In Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Iain Chambers unravels how our sense of place and identity is realised as we move through myriad languages, worlds and histories. The author explores the uncharted impact of cultural diversity on today's world, from the 'realistic' eye of the painter to the 'scientific' approach of the cultural anthropologist or the critical distance of the historian; from the computer screen to the Walkman and 'World Music'. Migrancy, Culture and Identity ...

Postmodernism has been a buzzword in contemporary society for the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler challenges and explores the key ideas of postmodernists, and their engagement with theory, literature, the visual arts, film, architecture, and music. He treats artists, intellectuals, critics, and social scientists 'as if they were all members of a loosely constituted and quarrelsome political party' - a party which includes such memb...

This revolutionary introductory performance studies coursebook brings together classic texts in critical theory and shows how these texts can be used in the analysis of performance. The editors put their texts to work in examining such key topics as: * decoding the sign * the politics of performance * the politics of gender and sexual identity * performing ethnicity * the performing body * the space of performance * audience and spectatorship * the borders of performance. Each reading is c...

The fourteen essays in this book develop a conception of human culture, which is humane and traditionalist. Focusing particularly on notions of beauty and the aesthetic, it sees within our culture intimations of the transcendent, and in two essays the nature of religion is directly addressed. A number of essays also explore the relation between politics and tradition.

How can war be represented on stage? How does the theatre examine the structures leading to violence and war and explore their transformation of societies? Springing from the discussion about 'New Wars' in the age of globalisation, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how these 'New Wars' bring forth new plays about war.

Transgression is truly a key idea for our time. Society is created by constraint and boundaries, but as our culture is increasingly subject to uncertainty and flux we find it more and more difficult to determine where those boundaries lie. In this fast moving study, Chris Jenks ranges widely over the history of ideas, the major theorists, and the significant moments in the formation of the idea of transgression. He looks at the definition of the social and its boundaries by Durkheim, Dougl...

Dick Hebdige looks at the creation and consumption of objects and images as diverse as fashion and documentary photographs, 1950's streamlined cars, Italian motor scooters, 1980's 'style manuals', Biff cartoons, the Band Aid campaign, Pop Art and promotional music videos. He assesses their broad cultural significance and charts their impact on contemporary popular tastes.