European Theatre Performance Practice, 1900 to the Present

This volume captures the rich diversity of European performance practice evident in the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first century. Written by leading directors, actors, dancers, scenographers and academics from across Europe, the collection spans a broad range of subject areas including dance, theatre, live art, multimedia performance and street protest. The essays are divided into three sections on: performers and performing; staging performance; representation and reception, and document innovations in acting, performance and stagecraft by key practitioners. Articles also explore the ways that performance has been used to stage debates around major preoccupations of the age such as war, the human condition, globalization, the impact of new technologies and identity politics. This volume, which features previously published performance manifestoes, articles, and book chapters on the most frequently discussed and debated topics in the field, is an indispensable reference work for both academics and students.

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick and Geoff Willcocks is Head of the Department for Performing Arts at Coventry University, UK.

Contents: Part I Acting and Performance: When acting is an art, Constantin Stanislavski, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood; Michael Chekhov on the technique of acting: 'Was Don Quixote true to life?', Franc Chamberlain; The dance of the future, Isadora Duncan; The actor and the Ã-ber-marionette, Edward Gordon Craig; Actors on Brecht, Margaret Eddershaw; Introduction, Rudolf Laban; Samuel Beckett as director: the art of mastering failure, Anna McMullan; Performance, Jennifer Kumiega; Theatre theory: sociology and the actor's technique, Ian Watson; The masks of Jacques Lecoq, John Wright; Woman, man, dog, tree: two decades of intimate and monumental bodies in Pina Bausch's Tanztheater, Gabrielle Cody; On risk and investment, Tim Etchells; On seeing the invisible, Peggy Phelan. Part II Staging Performance: Of the futility of the 'theatrical' in the theater, Alfred Jarry; Ideas on a reform of our mise en scène, Adolphe Appia; The founding and manifesto of futurism, Filuppo T. Marinetti; Biomechanics and constructivism, Edward Braun; The naked stage, John Rudlin; Theater (BÃ-hne), Oskar Schlemmer; The documentary play, Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and Caspar Neher (1897-1962), Joslin McKinney and Philip Butterworth; Production and metaphysics, Antonin Artaud; Myth and theatre laboratories, Peter Brook; After ideology: Heiner MÃ-ller and the theatre of catastrophe, David Kilpatrick; 1789, Victoria Nes Kirby; Notes on political street theatre, Paris: 1968, 1969, Jean-Jacques Lebel; Make-believe: Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio do theatre, Nicholas Ridout; Spectacle, synergy and megamusicals: the global-industrialisation of the live-entertainment economy, Jonathan Burston; The digital double, Steve Dixon. Part III Representation and Reception: Women's suffrage drama, Katharine Cockin; A propertyless theatre for the propertyless class, Tom Thomas; Modern dance in the Third Reich: six positions and a coda, Susan A. Manning; Reading The Blacks through t