'This book is beautifully written. It will give you itchy feet.' PETER MURTAGH'An exquisite exploration of love and loss' NIAMH FITZPATRICK, Psychologist & AuthorA YEAR THAT CHANGED EVERYTHINGWhen married couple Susan and Chris Bennett both receive a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in the same week, their world tilts overnight. Exhausted and grieving, they make a radical decision: to strip life back to its essential...

What properties of light can be manipulated for aesthetic effect? What role does the perception of the audience play in how stage information is received and processed? How do changes in technology affect methods or approaches to design and practice?This book is designed to introduce key ideas about light and to generate questions and perspectives that will encourage readers to explore light in the theatre more fully in their own critical and creative practices.

How does theatre shape the body and perceptions of it? How do bodies on stage challenge audience assumptions about material evidence and the truth? Theory for Theatre Studies: Bodies responds to these questions by examining how theatre participates in and informs theories of the body in performance, race, queer, disability, trans, gender, and new media studies.Throughout the 20th century, theories of the body have shifted from understanding the body as irrefutable material...

This book offers a wealth of resources, critical overviews and detailed analysis of Ivo van Hove's internationally acclaimed work as the foremost director of theatre, opera and musicals in our time. Stunning production photos capture the power of van Hove's directorial vision, his innovative use of theatrical spaces, and the arresting stage images that have made his productions so popular among audiences worldwide over the last 30 years. Van Hove's own contribution to the book, which inclu...

Theory for Theatre Studies: Emotion explores how emotion is communicated in drama, theatre, and contemporary performance and therefore in society. From Aristotle and Shakespeare to Stanislavski, Brecht and Caryl Churchill, theatre reveals and, informs but also warns about the emotions. The term 'emotion' encompasses the emotions, emotional feelings, affect and mood, and the book explores how these concepts are embodied and experienced within theatrical practice and explained in th...

How do we define movement in performance? Who or what is being moved and how? And which movements are felt, observed, or studied, in theatre?Part of the Theory for Theatre Studies series which introduces core theoretical concepts that underpin the discipline, Movement provides the first overview of relevant critical theory for students and researchers in theatre and performance studies. Exploring areas such as vitality, plasticity, gesture, effort and rhythm, it opens up t...

Space: it's everywhere, all around, a given. It's abstract and yet not abstract at all, because it governs all human relations, shapes the way we understand our place on the planet, and orients us toward others (for better and for worse). How do theatre scholars understand space and place in performance? What tools do they use to theorize the political work space does on – and beyond – the stage? How can students use these tools to unpack the workings of space and place in the performances...

Tackling vital issues of politics, identity and experience in performance, this book asks what Shakespeare's plays mean when extended beyond the English language. From April to June 2012 the Globe to Globe Festival offered the unprecedented opportunity to see all of Shakespeare's plays performed in many different world languages. Thirty-eight productions from around the globe were presented in six weeks as part of the World Shakespeare Festival, which formed a cornerstone of the Cultural O...

Sound provides a lively and engaging overview of relevant critical theory for students and researchers in theatre and performance studies. Addressing sound across history and through progressive developments in relevant technologies, the volume opens up the study of theatrical production and live performance to understand conceptual and pragmatic concerns about the sonic. By way of developed case studies (including Aristophanes's The Frogs, Shakespeare's The Tempest

Bennett explores the relationship between theatre and museums, looking particularly at the collaborative processes that intertwine these two cultural practices. She argues that discourses of performance studies can open up new avenues of inquiry about the production and reception of the museum experience and its place in contemporary culture.

Susan Bennett's highly successful Theatre Audiences is a unique full-length study of the audience as cultural phenomenon, which looks at both theories of spectatorship and the practice of different theatres and their audiences.Published here in a brand new updated edition, Theatre Audiences now includes:• a new preface by the author• a stunning extra chapter on intercultural theatre• a revised up-to-date bibliography.

In this trenchant work, Susan Bennett examines the authority of the past in modern cultural experience and the parameters for the reproduction of the plays. She addresses these issues from both the viewpoints of literary theory and theatre studies, shifting Shakespeare out of straightforward performance studies in order to address questions about his plays and to consider them in the context of current theoretical debates on historiography, post-colonialism and canonicity.