The notion of the sacred has long informed the work of British dramatists like Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Ralph Yarrow’s Sacred Theatre is the first book to examine the role of the sacred in the practice, process, and performance of drama. While leaving enough room for the personal and experiential, Yarrow draws on concepts from sociology, anthropology, and critical theory as well as analytical readings of plays and performance events to examine how theater interacts with the...

Improvisation is a tool for many things: performance training, rehearsal practice, playwriting, therapeutic interaction and somatic discovery. This book opens up the significance of improvisation across cultures, histories and ways of performing our life, offering key insights into the what, the how and the why of performance.It traces the origins of improvisation and its influences, both as a social and political phenomenon and its position in performance training. Including histo...

European theatre has been the site of enormous change and struggle since 1960. There have been radical shifts in the nature and understanding of performance, fuelled by increasing cross-cultural and international influence. Theatre has had to fight for its very existence, adapting its methods of operation to survive. European Theatre 1960-1990, first published in 1992, tells that story. The contributors - who in many cases have been theatre practitioners as well as critics - provi...

Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre brings together the first collection of essays in English to focus on Lecoq's school of mime and physical theatre. For four decades, at his school in Paris, Jacques Lecoq trained performers from all over the world and effected a quiet evolution in the theatre.The work of such highly successful Lecoq graduates as Theatre de Complicite (The Winter's Tale with the Royal Shakespeare Company and The Visit, The Street of Crocodiles a...

This is Volume 7, Part I of the Contemporary Theatre Review, an International Journal, with this edition focusing on Prescence and pre-expressivity. Covering topics such as Body in Mind: Exploring Pre-Expressivity; Peter Brook and Traditional Thought; Grotowski, Holiness, and the Pre-Expressive; Barba's Concepts of the Pre-Expressive and the Third Organ of the Body of the Theatre and Theories of Consciousness; Pre-Expressivity: Some Thoughts from the Rehearsal Floor.

Jana Sanskriti is internationally recognised as the most iconic post-Boalian Theatre of the Oppressed operation in the world today.This fully illustrated book by the Bengali company's founder and artistic director Sanjoy Ganguly, edited by Ralph Yarrow, collects and explains their programme of workshop exercises, placing them in the context of their social and activist work. A set of interviews with Ganguly complements these practical sequences, drawing in topics such as the role o...

Regarded by Augusto Boal as the international icon of his vision, Jana Sanskriti are the leading practitioners of Theatre of the Oppressed and Forum Theatre in India and the East.The group has worked continuously with rural communities in West Bengal since its beginnings in 1985 to reconfigure social and political relationships through theatre, achieving both a solid regional presence and an international reputation.This book combines:a biography of ...

THE EYES OF THE SKINFirst published in 1996, The Eyes of the Skin has become a classic of architectural theory. It asks the far-reaching question why, when there are five senses, has one single sense – sight – become so predominant in architectural culture and design? With the ascendancy of the digital and the all-pervasive use of the image electronically, it is a subject that has become all the more pressing and topical since the first edition’s publicati...

Archaeologies of Presence is a brilliant exploration of how the performance of presence can be understood through the relationships between performance theory and archaeological thinking. Drawing together carefully commissioned contributions by leading international scholars and artists, this radical new work poses a number of essential questions:What are the principle signifiers of theatrical presence?How is presence achieved through th...

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference. In this Very Short Introduction the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object - either in art, in nature, or the human form - beautiful, and examining how we can compare differing judgements of beauty when it is evident all around...

Informing the designs of architects as diverse as Peter Zumthor, Steven Holl, Hans Scharoun and Colin St. John Wilson, the work of Martin Heidegger has proved of great interest to architects and architectural theorists.The first introduction to Heidegger’s philosophy written specifically for architects and students of architecture introduces key themes in his thinking, which has proved highly influential among architects as well as architectural historians and theorists. This guide...

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze remarked in his book Negotiations that ‘things and thoughts advance or grow out from the middle, and that’s where you have to get to work, that’s where everything unfolds’. This prompts the question, How does an artist get to work in the middle of a process that is continuously becoming? The thesis is an unfolding narrative of the author’s attempt to experientially answer the question by way of an art practice, leading to an examination of the issue of...