This is a guide to contemporary debates and theatre practices at a time when gender paradigms are both in flux and at the centre of explosive political battlegrounds. The confluence of gender and theatre has long created intense debate about representation, identification, social conditioning, desire, embodiment, and lived experience. As this handbook demonstrates, from the conventions of early modern English, Chinese, Japanese and Hispanic theatres to the subversion of racialized binaries of masculinity and femininity in recent North American, African, Asian, Caribbean and European productions, the matter of gender has consistently taken centre stage. This handbook examines how critical discourses on gender intersect with key debates in the field of theatre studies, as a lens to illuminate the practices of gender and theatre as well as the societies they inform and represent across space and time. Of interest to scholars in the interrelated areas of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, and globalization and diasporic studies, this book demonstrates how researchers are currently addressing theatre about gender issues and gendered theatre practices. While synthesizing and summarizing foundational and evolving debates from a contemporary perspective, this collection offers interpretations and analyses that do not simply look back at existing scholarship, but open up new possibilities and understandings. Featuring essential research tools, including a survey of keywords and an annotated play list, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance.

The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art offers a comprehensive guide to the major issues and interdisciplinary debates concerning performance in art contexts that have developed over the last decade. It understands performance art as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label or object. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization and mainstreaming of performance, the book's chapters identify a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art, and explore how this development is reflective of capitalist approaches to art and event production. Embracing what we perceive to be the 'oxymoronic status' of performance art-where it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitable-the essays in this book map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction. This Companion adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to present performance art's legacies and its current practices. It brings together specially commissioned essays from leading innovative scholars from a wide range of approaches including art history, visual and performance studies, dance and theatre scholarship in order to provide a comprehensive and multifocal overview of the emerging research trends and methodologies devoted to performance art.

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography is an authoritative guide to contemporary debates and practices in this field. The book covers the key themes and methods that are current in theatre history research, with a particular focus on expanding the object of study to include engagement with theatre and performance practices and the development of theatre histories around the world. Central to the book are eighteen specially commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars from a wide range of international contexts, whose discussion of individual case studies is predicated on their understanding and experience of their 'local' landscape of theatre history. These essays reveal where important work continues to be done in the field and, most valuably, draws on academic contexts beyond the Western academy to expand our knowledge of the exciting directions that such an approach opens up. Prefaced by an introduction tracing the development of the discipline of theatre history and changing historiographical approaches, the Handbook explores current issues pertaining to theatre and performance history research, as well as providing up to date and robust introductions to the methods and historiographic questions being explored by researchers in the field. Featuring a series of essential research tools, including a detailed list of resources and an annotated bibliography of key texts, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance history and historiography.

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance explores ground-breaking new directions and critical discourse in the field of intercultural theatre and performance while surveying key debates concerning interculturalism as an aesthetic and ethical series of encounters in theatre and performance from the 1960s onwards. The handbook's global coverage challenges understandings of intercultural theatre and performance that continue to prioritise case studies emerging primarily from the West and executed by elite artists. By building on a growing field of scholarship on intercultural theatre and performance that examines minoritarian and grassroots work, the volume offers an alternative and multi-vocal view of what interculturalism might offer as a theoretical keyword to the future of theatre and performance studies, while also contributing an energized reassessment of the vociferous debates that have long accompanied its critical and practical usage in a performance context. By exploring anew what happens when interculturalism and performance intersect as embodied practice, The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance offers new perspectives on a seminal theoretical concept still as useful as it is controversial. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including a fully annotated bibliography, this is the essential scholarly handbook for anyone working in intercultural theatre and performance, and performance studies.

Using an examination of theatrical and musical performance in a small Valleys town as a focus, this work puts forward an argued discussion of contemporary Welsh theatre in its cultural context. The text uses the south Wales valleys as a means of locating and exploring certain key issues: those connected to coercive ideas about what ideal theatre is; the relationship between politics and performance; the conundrum of community theatre; the role of theatre practice in marginalized regions; and the significance of class to theatre and the problem of a system of arts subsidy which foists inappropriate external theatre product on indigenous audiences.

Women fought against slavery and offered shelter to hunted runaways, demanded economic justice for the starving or working poor, raised their voices when rights were trampled, raised their fists when their children were murdered. Women's collective acts of resistance have played, and continue to play, a vital but often unacknowledged role in humanizing social, political, and economic policies. To death, danger, and oppression women have frequently responded in life-affirming ways, their contributions concealed in invisibility and silence for too long, without stories of resistance and opposition. But no more. This is the tale of the Raging Grannies. Their beginning and growth, the invention of their identity, the educational and bold potential of their activism, the values expressed in their actions and songs, and their impact on issues, stereotypes, media, and people. At a time when environmental destruction and war threatened, when the growing chasm between poor and rich endangered justice, a group of women stood up with courageous irreverence to denounce government lies, corporate greed and short-sightedness, and in the process, created a new cultural figure that challenged authority as well as stereotypes of women. The Grannies' distinctive approach is surprisingly popular and effective: in sixteen years, more than fifty groups of Raging Grannies exist across Canada, in the United States, and as far away as the UK, Australia and Greece (Greek Grannies call themselves Furies). Their popularity reveals the power of creativity and humour, which allow them to claim their space on the political scene, refusing to be dismissed or ignored. The Raging Grannies both records and celebrates this vibrant activism. Bursting with adventures, this is the tale of the Raging Grannies: their beginning, the invention of their identity and their impact on issues, stereotypes, media and people.

Contributed articles on social status of middle class women in India presented earlier at a conference held at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi in October 2003.

A history of theater, providing background information on each theatrical era from Ancient Greece through the late twentieth century, and discussing the activities and accomplishments of playwrights, performers, managers, architects, and designers.