The ideal theater appreciation text for courses focusing on theater elements, "The Theater Experience" encourages students to be active theater-goers as they learn about the fundamentals of a production. By addressing the importance of the audience, Wilson brings the art of performance to life for students who may have little experience with the medium. .

This book is the first full-length monograph to focus on Punchdrunk, the internationally-renowned theatre company known for its pioneering approach to immersive theatre. With its promises of empowerment, freedom and experiential joy, immersive theatre continues to gain popularity - this study brings necessary critical analysis to this rapidly developing field. What exactly do we mean by audience “immersion”? How might immersion in a Punchdrunk production be described, theorised, situated or politicised? What is valued in immersive experience - and are these values explicit or implied? Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience draws on rehearsals, performances and archival access to Punchdrunk, providing new critical perspectives from cognitive studies, philosophical aesthetics, narrative theory and computer games. Its discussion of immersion is structured around three themes: interactivity and game; story and narrative; environment and space. Providing a rigorous theoretical toolkit to think further about the form’s capabilities, and offering a unique set of approaches, this book will be of significance to scholars, students, artists and spectators.

Draws on musicals, plays and experimental performances to show what theatre is made of and how we experience it.

The Art of Experience provides an interdisciplinary analysis of selected plays from Ireland’s premier female playwright, Marina Carr. Dagmara Gizło explores the transformative impact of a theatrical experience in which interdisciplinary boundaries must be crossed. This book demonstrates that theatre is therapeutic and therapy is theatrical. The role of emotions, cognitions, and empathy in the theatrical experience is investigated throughout. Dagmara Gizło utilises the methodological tools stemming from modern empirically grounded psychology (such as cognitive-behavioural therapy or CBT) to the study of theatre’s transformative potential. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, performance, and literature, and will be a fascinating read for those at the intersection of cognitive studies and the humanities.

Audiences are not what they used to be. Munching crisps or snapping selfies, chatting loudly or charging phones onstage – bad behaviour in theatre is apparently on the rise. And lately some spectators have begun to fight back... The Reasonable Audience explores the recent trend of ‘theatre etiquette’: an audience-led crusade to bring ‘manners and respect’ back to the auditorium. This comes at a time when, around the world, arts institutions are working to balance the traditional pleasures of receptive quietness with the need to foster more inclusive experiences. Through investigating the rhetorics of morality underpinning both sides of the argument, this book examines how models of 'good' and 'bad' spectatorship are constructed and legitimised. Is theatre etiquette actually snobbish? Are audiences really more selfish? Who gets to decide what counts as ‘reasonable’ within public space?Using theatre etiquette to explore wider issues of social participation, cultural exclusion, and the politics of identity, Kirsty Sedgman asks what it means to police the behaviour of others.

The ideal theater appreciation text for courses focusing on theater elements, "The Theater Experience" encourages students to be active theater-goers as they learn about the fundamentals of a production. By addressing the importance of the audience, Wilson brings the art of performance to life for students who may have little experience with the medium. .

The Theatre Experience prepares students to be well-informed, well-prepared theatre audience members. With an audience-centered narrative that engages today's students, a vivid photo program that brings concepts to life, and features that teach and encourage a variety of skill sets, students master core concepts and learn to think critically about the theatre and the world around them. As a result, students are better prepared for class, and better prepared for theatre going.

The Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim traces the thread of jouissance (the simultaneous experience of radical pleasure and pain) through three major theatre figures of the twentieth century. Gina Masucci MacKenzie's work engages theatrical text and performance in dialogue with the Lacanian Real, so as to re-envision modern theatre as the cultural site where author, actor, and audience come into direct contact with personal and collective traumas. By showing how a transgressively free subject may be formed through theatrical experience, MacKenzie concludes that modern theatre can liberate the individual from the socially constructed self. The Theatre of the Real revises views of modern theatre by demonstrating how it can lead to a collaborative effort required for innovative theatrical work. By foregrounding Yeats's "dancer" plays, the author shows how these intimate pieces contribute to the historical development of musical as well as modern theatre. Beckett's universal dramas then pave the way for Sondheim's postmodern cacophonies of idea and spirit as they introduce comic abjection into modernism's tragic mode. This exciting work from a new author will leave readers with fresh insight to theatrical performance and its necessity in our lives.

Since the turn of the century, Performance Studies has emerged as an increasingly vibrant discipline. Its concerns - embodiment, ethical research and social change - are held in common with many other fields, however a unique combination of methods and applications is used in exploration of the discipline. Bridging live art practices - theatre, performance art and dance - with technological media, and social sciences with humanities, it is truly hybrid and experimental in its techniques. This Companion brings together specially commissioned essays from leading scholars who reflect on their own experiences in Performance Studies and the possibilities this offers to representations of identity, self-and-other, and communities. Theories which have been absorbed into the field are applied to compelling topics in current academic, artistic and community settings. The collection is designed to reflect the diversity of outlooks and provide a guide for students as well as scholars seeking a perspective on research trends.

This collection of essays, which originally appeared as a book in 1962, is virtually the complete works of an editor of Commentary magazine who died, at age 37, in 1955. Long before the rise of Cultural Studies as an academic pursuit, in the pages of the best literary magazines of the day, Robert Warshow wrote analyses of the folklore of modern life that were as sensitive and penetrating as the writings of James Agee, George Orwell, and Walter Benjamin. Some of these essays--notably "The Westerner," "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," and the pieces on the New Yorker, Mad Magazine, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and the Rosenberg letters--are classics, once frequently anthologized but now hard to find. Along with a new preface by Stanley Cavell, The Immediate Experience includes several essays not previously published in the book--on Kafka and Hemingway--as well as Warshow's side of an exchange with Irving Howe.

The ideal theater appreciation text for courses focusing on theater elements, "The Theater Experience" encourages students to be active theater-goers as they learn about the fundamentals of a production. By addressing the importance of the audience, Wilson brings the art of performance to life for students who may have little experience with the medium. .

The re-imagined twelfth edition of The Theatre Experience is students' ticket to the best seat in the house. From Broadway to makeshift theater spaces around the world, the author demonstrates the active and lively role they play as audience members by engaging them in the collaborative and creative processes behind and in front of the curtain. Wilson introduces students to the roles of the performers, directors, producers and designers, while emphasizing the insights they as audience members bring to any production. Recast as fifteen chapters, the twelfth edition better accommodates today's teaching schedules, as well as improves accessibility for students by concise insight and up-to-date vibrant production visuals. Students join the creative process with The Theatre Experience, and rehearse for their role as life-long audience members.

Living Theater: A History conveys the excitement and variety of theater throughout time and the dynamic way in which our interpretation of theater history is informed by contemporary scholarship. Rather than presenting readers with a mere catalog of historical facts and figures, Wilson and Goldfarb set each period in context through an exploration of the social, political and economic conditions of the day, and create a vivid study of the developments in theater during that time. Changes to the third edition include the addition of new biographies of key players in the dramatic world, expanded existing biographies, and a completely revised chapter on early Asian theater.

For years theater director Bryan Doerries has been producing ancient Greek tragedies for a wide range of at-risk people in society. His is the personal and deeply passionate story of a life devoted to reclaiming the timeless power of an ancient artistic tradition to comfort the afflicted. Doerries leads an innovative public health project—Theater of War—that produces ancient dramas for current and returned soldiers, people in recovery from alcohol and substance abuse, tornado and hurricane survivors, and more. Tracing a path that links the personal to the artistic to the social and back again, Doerries shows us how suffering and healing are part of a timeless process in which dialogue and empathy are inextricably linked. The originality and generosity of Doerries’s work is startling, and The Theater of War—wholly unsentimental, but intensely felt and emotionally engaging—is a humane, knowledgeable, and accessible book that will both inspire and enlighten.

What happens to politics when it takes the form of theatre? How has theatre both exploited and undermined politics both in society and on the stage? Theatre & Politics explores the complex relationship between theatre and politics, questioning some of the assumptions that often arise when they are brought together. Challenging ideas about 'entertainment' and 'communication', the book draws on a broad range of key writing from Plato to Rancière, and theatrical examples from Shakespeare and his adaptors through Peter Handke to debbie tucker green.

"Meisel begins with a look at matters often taken for granted in coding and convention, and then - under 'Beginnings' - at what is entailed in establishing and entering the invented world of the play. Each succeeding chapter is a gesture at enlarging the scope. The final chapters explore ways in which both the drive for significant understanding and the appetite for wonder can and do find satisfaction and delight." "Cultivated in tone and jargon-free, How Plays Work is illuminated by dozens of judiciously chosen examples from western drama - from classical Greek dramatists to contemporary playwrights, both canonical and relatively obscure. It will appeal as much to the serious student of the theatre as to the playgoer who likes to read a play before seeing it performed."--BOOK JACKET.

"Structured as an evening in the theatre, this book is analytical but straightforward, serious but entertaining. Mayo Simon presents a working playwright's view of what really happens between the stage and the audience, from the beginning of the play until the end." --BOOK JACKET.

What is the Theatre?is one of the most coherent and systematic descriptions and analyses of the theatre yet compiled. Theatre is, above all, spectacle. It is a fleeting performance, delivered by actors and intended for spectators. It is a work of the body, an exercise of voice and gesture addressed to an audience, most often in a specific location and with a unique setting. This entertainment event rests on the delivery of a thing promised and expected - a particular and unique performance witnessed by spectators who have come to the site of the performance for this very reason. To witness theatre is to take into account the performance, but it is also to take into account the printed text as readable object and a written proposition. In this book, Christian Biet and Christophe Triau focus on the practical, theoretical and historical positions that the spectator and the reader have had in relation to the locations that they frequent and the texts that they handle. They adopt two approaches: analysing the spectacle in its theatrical and historical context in an attempt to seek out the principles and paradigms of approaching the theatre experience on one hand, and analysing the dramaturgy of a production in order to establish lines of interpretation and how to read, represent and stage a text, on the other. This approach allows us to better understand the ties that link those who participate in the theatre to the practitioners who create theatrical entertainment. equent and the texts that they handle. They adopt two approaches: analysing the spectacle in its theatrical and historical context in an attempt to seek out the principles and paradigms of approaching the theatre experience on one hand, and analysing the dramaturgy of a production in order to establish lines of interpretation and how to read, represent and stage a text, on the other. This approach allows us to better understand the ties that link those who participate in the theatre to the practitioners who create theatrical entertainment.

Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre revolutionized the field of human-computer interaction, offering ideas that inspired generations of interface and interaction designers-and continue to inspire them. Laurel's insight was that effective interface design, like effective drama, must engage the user directly in an experience involving both thought and emotion. Her practical conclusion was that a user's enjoyment must be a paramount design consideration, and this demands a deep awareness of dramatic theory and technique, both ancient and modern. Now, two decades later, Laurel has revised and revamped her influential work, reflecting back on enormous change and personal experience and forward toward emerging technologies and ideas that will transform human-computer interaction yet again. Beginning with a clear analysis of classical drama theory, Laurel explores new territory through the lens of dramatic structure and purpose. Computers as Theatre, Second Edition, is directed to a far wider audience, is written more simply and elegantly, is packed with new examples, and is replete with exciting and important new ideas. This book Draws lessons from massively multiplayer online games and systems, social networks, and mobile devices with embedded sensors Integrates values-driven design as a key principle Integrates key ideas about virtual reality Covers new frontiers, including augmented reality, distributed and participatory sensing, interactive public installations and venues, and design for emergence Once more, Brenda Laurel will help you see the connection between humans and computers as you never have before-and help you build interfaces and interactions that are pleasurably, joyously right!

This work takes a phenomenological approach to analyzing the dramatic form, focusing not on the interpretation of plays, but rather on Brownstein's perceptions and their sources. The distinct aspects of the dramatic art form are discussed using a wide variety of well-known plays, from ancient Greece to the present day. Brownstein offers a theoretical survey of the "perception shift" that infuses even the smallest element of a play, the forces that are expressed through major dramatic strategies, and the ways in which a single narrative sequence may serve both prospective and retrospective strategies.