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Reflecting on Derek Walcott’s early relationship with movement, dance and ritual, this article sheds light on the centrality of embodied memory in Walcott’s work for the stage and reflects on the relationship between memory and materiality in his epistemology of performance. Walcott’s ideas shaped his approach to dramaturgy in the late 1950s and position his work in relation to global debates around materialism (Brecht) and ritualism (Grotowski) in the theatre. A discussion of two plays, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Pantomime, examines the use of gestural language in specific performances of each. Such an approach demonstrates that the importance of embodied memory, as reflected in the staging of these plays, relates to certain Afro-Caribbean belief systems, which have exerted much influence on Walcott’s work. The article also emphasizes how Walcott’s theatre functions as a decolonial praxis that fosters the emergence of empowered subjectivities and Africanist modes of humanness that challenge the cultural order of colonialism. Jason Allen-Paisant is a lecturer in Caribbean Poetics and Decolonial Thought at the University of Leeds, and Director of the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. He is currently at work on the monograph Staging Black Futures in the Twenty-First Century.

Though his fame rests upon his poetry, T. S. Eliot spent a significant portion of his career writing about drama and composing plays. Before he was the author of The Waste Land or the editor of the Criterion , before he converted to Anglicanism or won the Nobel Prize for literature, Eliot was a critic and theorist of the stage, profoundly concerned with the state of contemporary theatre and determined to change its direction. His productions eventually drew the best actors from Hollywood and London and won him great commercial success. This chapter seeks to emphasize Eliot's lifelong commitment to the theatre and especially to plays composed in verse rather than in prose. He regarded drama as a genre of poetry, like lyric or epic, rather than as a distinct form. And he believed, like many of his contemporaries, that naturalistic prose plays had severely limited its range and expressiveness. “The prose play,” he frequently insists, offers “only a part of what the theatre can give,” adding that “the verse play is capable of something much more intense and exciting.” Eliot found examples of that intensity and excitement in ancient Greek and Renaissance English sources: Aeschylus and Sophocles, Marlowe and Jonson. But the form also flourished in the nineteenth century, as he recognized: “Nearly all the greater poets of the last century,” he admits, “tried their hands at verse plays” ( OPP 27). Though frequently critical toward them in his essays, Eliot was influenced by the verse plays of Byron, Shelley, Browning, and Tennyson. He was drawn to the tragedies of Swinburne, especially Atalanta in Calydon (1865); and he admired Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) and Hardy's The Dynasts (1904–8). Of course he found a stalwart ally in W. B. Yeats, whose ritualistic, abstract play At the Hawk's Well (1916) he attended when it opened. And he promoted the theatrical experiments of W. H. Auden, whose Paid on Both Sides: A Charade (1930) first appeared in the Criterion and whose collaborations with Christopher Isherwood were indebted to Eliot's own work, especially to the many essays and reviews in which he had begun to elaborate his theories of dramaturgy.

Joruri refers to the vocal art of dramatic narration. Since the Tokugawa period, joruri works have been grouped into ko-joruri and toryu-joruri, which begins in 1685 with Shusse Kagekiyo by the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Chikamatsu Monzaemon composed over one hundred plays for the puppet theater stage over four decades. Chikamatsu's exposure to kabuki dramaturgy profoundly affected his approach to playwriting and later greatly influenced his joruri composition. All of Chikamatsu's most celebrated joruri were composed after his return from the kabuki theater. Modern Japanese anthologies of his plays devote their annotation efforts exclusively to his late-period plays. The golden age of joruri, spanning the years from 1715 until 1751, opened with the first performance of Kokusenya kassen, which enjoyed an unprecedented seventeen-month run at the Takemoto theater. Finally, joruri evolved into a theatrical form that produced cultural artifacts that were immersed in and shared characteristics with the literary and visual cultures of Tokugawa Japan.

The Vakhtangov Theatre, established in 1922, is named after Stanislavski's protege, Evgeny Vakhtangov. The theatre perpetuates the distinctive dramatic technique of its founder, embodied in Vakhtangov's Imaginative or Fantastic Realism ( fantasticheskii realism ), which contrasts fundamentally with Stanislavski's own naturalistic dramaturgy. With its ironic style of acting and emphasis on elements of the grotesque, Vakhtangov's experimental physicality and psychological intensity continue to inform the company's artistry. For this Russian Measure for Measure , Vakhtangov's ‘grotesque’ and ‘ironic’ formulations served to highlight the visual and aural intensity of the drama. Since the play is not particularly well known in Russia, its director, Yuri Butusov, felt free to adapt it to suit the company's stylistic needs. Butusov's most radical alteration was to double Duke Vicentio ( sic ) with Angelo. The impressively tall Sergy Epishev, who towered menacingly over his fellow actors, played both duke and deputy. As the duke, Epishev presented a self-controlled aristocrat whose effeteness accounted for Vienna's moral decline. As Angelo, Epishev became a gangling bureaucrat, uncomfortable in his ill-fitting suit and straitjacketed in his moral outwardness. It was, however, in disguise as Friar Lodowick that Epishev's physicality offered the most striking visual analogue. In black-hooded habit, Epishev appeared more Mephistophelean opportunist than ducal manipulator.

Writing about the out-of-town premiere of her play A Raisin in the Sun in a letter to her mother, Lorraine Hansberry remarked: Mama, it is a play that tells the truth about people. Negroes and life and I think it will help a lot of people to understand how we are just as complicated as they are—and just as mixed up—but above all, that we have among our miserable and downtrodden ranks—people who are the very essence of human dignity. That is what, after all the laughter and tears, the play is supposed to say. Hansberry’s emphasis on telling the truth and infusing her plays with comedy and pathos equally describes the works of Eulalie Spence and Alice Childress, whose plays blazed a trail for Hansberry with their investment in the overlapping effects of racism and class status within mid-twentieth-century black life. Accordingly, this chapter not only engages class, race, and gender issues; it serves a recuperative purpose that introduces the theatres of two seminal playwrights who inspired, or otherwise forged a path for Hansberry. The interstices of the Great Depression, World War ii , and the Civil Rights Movement shaped the careers of these three significant African American playwrights. All three nurtured their dramaturgy and activism in New York while working with the social and cultural leaders of their era, each achieved critical acclaim, and each saw her plays published and produced during her lifetime. Though it is challenging to categorize their work, as all three have resisted tidy structuralist groupings, their plays are at once about black life and culture, and about all humanity.

It is my intention, if I live long enough, to add to this work the passions Remorse, Jealousy, and Revenge. Joy, Grief, and Anger, as I have already said, are generally of too transient a nature, and are too frequently the attendants of all our other passions to be made the subjects of an entire play … Of all our passions, Remorse and Jealousy appear to me to be the best for representation. Joanna Baillie, “To the Reader,” Series of Plays (1812) This chapter explores issues and problems posed by Coleridge's Remorse . Performed twenty times before the Public at Drury Lane in early 1813 and soon after in various provincial and American theaters, reviewed with some favor, and printed versions admired by Byron and Shelley, it's the only tragedy by a major writer of the period to achieve such public success. Yet, despite substantial and provocative critical reckonings in recent decades, it remains infrequently read and rarely if ever performed even in academic or coterie theaters, where productions of Shelley's The Cenci , and even of Byron's Sardanapalus and Wordsworth's Borderers have come to life. More important, crucial aspects of its dramaturgy remain largely unnoticed and unappreciated, dark poetic employments that relate not only to Coleridge's claims on our attention as a playwright at work with a theater company and as a theorist and critic of drama, but also to ongoing, intensified troubles in his life, particularly the agonizing upheavals in his relations with Sara Hutchinson and Wordsworth.

Caryl Churchill's drama shows a sustained and deepening engagement with ecological issues from her 1971 radio drama Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen , through Fen (1983) (developed for the stage with the members of the Joint Stock theatre company), to the collaborative combination of dance, song and drama Lives of the Great Poisoners (1991), the more recent plays The Skriker (1994) and Far Away (2000), and her 2006 choral work We Turned on the Light . Her focus moves from localized environmental concerns (as in Fen ) to the ecological effects of globalization and the alienated consumerism of late capitalism (for example, in Far Away and The Skriker ), but there is not so much a simple progression in her work as a recursive, intense dialogue in which elements of her earlier plays are repurposed and complex issues are revisited. In particular, Churchill returns to the idea of the commons - which can be understood both as a localized place, a plot of land unenclosed and of equal access, and also as a planetary concept of shared resources, where the nature of the sharing (perhaps beyond the human?) is open to philosophical inquiry. Churchill works with time as well as place in her ecological dramaturgy, deploying temporal shifts which hint at the multiple rhythms of biology and of capitalist exchange, exploring conceptual legacies of the past which inform current understanding of our relationship to the natural world, and historicizing in the Brechtian sense as she shows paths not taken.

August Strindberg is one of the most enduring of nineteenth-century dramatists, and is also an internationally recognised novelist, autobiographer, and painter. This Companion presents contributions by leading international scholars on different aspects of Strindberg's highly colourful life and work. The essays focus primarily on his most celebrated plays; these include the Naturalist Dramas, The Father and Miss Julie; the experimental dramas with which he created a true modernist theatre – To Damascus and A Dream Play; and the Chamber Plays of 1908 which, like so much of his work, exerted a powerful influence on much later twentieth-century drama. His plays are contextualised for what they contribute both to the history of drama and developments in theatre practice, and other essays clarify the enormous importance to these dramas of his other work, most notably the autobiographical novel Inferno, and his lifelong interest in science, the occult, sexual politics, and the visual arts.

'The Friends' The war separated Me, the writer of plays, from my friend the stage designer. The cities where he worked are no longer there. When I walk through the cities that still are At times I say: that blue piece of washing My friend would have placed it better. ( Poems , p. 415) The contribution of Brecht to the scenography of the twentieth century goes far beyond important changes in the appearance of the stage. In his writing and in his practice, he deconstructs the human complexity of the 'director-designer relationship' and offers a mode of creating theatre which, in an organic way, links not only the end products of dramaturgy and scenography, but also centralises within this process the working practices of dramatist, director and scenographer. We have to consider therefore the relationship between Brecht's political and philosophical view of theatre and his expectations of scenography; the way in which these expectations developed in the collaboration with Caspar Neher; and finally the reverberant effects which these ideas and practices have had, and still have, upon contemporary theatre.

Brian Friel is widely recognized as Ireland's greatest living playwright, winning an international reputation through such acclaimed works as Translations (1980) and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990). This 2006 collection of specially commissioned essays includes contributions from leading commentators on Friel's work (including two fellow playwrights) and explores the entire range of his career from his 1964 breakthrough with Philadelphia, Here I Come! to his most recent success in Dublin and London with The Home Place (2005). The essays approach Friel's plays both as literary texts and as performed drama, and provide the perfect introduction for students of both English and Theatre Studies, as well as theatregoers. The collection considers Friel's lesser-known works alongside his more celebrated plays and provides a comprehensive critical survey of his career. This is a comprehensive study of Friel's work, and includes a chronology and further reading suggestions.

Brecht's theory and practice of the dramaturg have brought systematic institutional and artistic reforms to German-speaking, central and Eastern European theatre. There dramaturgs in Brecht's mould are at the heart of theatre practice and operate quite uncontroversially. In Canada and the United States the professionalisation of the dramaturg has occurred since the 1970s and is now well established, though always accompanied by a good deal of hotly contentious debate. In non-German-speaking Western Europe the appointment of dramaturgs is a familiar practice in Scandinavia, Holland and France, whereas in Britain and Spain dramaturgs tend to be deployed on short-term projects, are not regarded as integral to theatre-making, and there is a greater confusion about what they do. In Britain, whilst there is no question of Brecht's international status as a playwright, nor of his place as one of the most significant theatrical thinkers of the twentieth century, the official recognition of dramaturgs is much more recent and the numbers employed have sharply increased over the last five years. What is most odd is that although the practice of Brechtian dramaturgs has demonstrably had an enormous influence in the West since the 1960s, Brecht's actual theorisations on the dramaturg have scarcely been addressed at all. This has led to considerable misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Brecht's theory and practice of the dramaturg spread to the English-speaking West in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly through the discipleship of directors and dramaturgs either working at or formerly employed at Brecht's theatre, and through John Willett's 1965 translation of Der Messingkauf .

The Intention/Reception (I/R) project concerns an investigation of the relationship between composer intention and listener response in electroacoustic (E/A) compositions. Phase one of the project focuses on E/A compositions that contain or are perceived to contain real-world sound references (RWE/A). The methodology involves introducing works that are unknown to the listening subjects and then evaluating their listening experience. Through repeated listening and the introduction of the composers' articulation of intent (through a work's title, inspiration, elements that the composer intends to be communicated, eventually elements of the compositional process itself – in short, the ‘dramaturgy’ of the work) listening responses are monitored. The purpose here is to investigate to what extent familiarity contributes to access and appreciation and to what extent intention and reception are meeting in this particular corpus of E/A art music.This paper offers an introduction to the I/R project outlining its background, its context and presenting pertinent points concerning the design and operation of its methodology. Following this, some of the key results discovered thus far, including the first presentation of test data that formed the basis of the conclusions of a recently completed doctoral thesis, will be shared.

Sistematizzazione delle strutture e del funzionamento drammaturgico rilevabili nelle opere di G. Rossini

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Preface and abbreviations 1. Introduction: Rossini's operatic operas Emanuele Senici Part I. Biography and Reception: 2. Rossini's life Richard Osborne 3. Rossini and France Benjamin Walton 4. The Rossini Renaissance Charles S. Brauner Part II. Words and Music: 5. Librettos and librettists Paulo Fabbri 6. Compositional methods Philip Gossett 7. The dramaturgy of the operas Marco Beghelli 8. Melody and ornamentation Damien Colas 9. Off the stage Richard Osborne Part III. Representative Operas: 10. Tancredi and Semiramide Heather Hadlock 11. Il barbiere di Siviglia Janet Johnson 12. Guillaume Tell Cormac Newark Part IV. Performance: 13. Singing Rossini Leonella Grasso Caprioli 14. Staging Rossini Mercedes Viale Ferrero 15. Editing Rossini Patricia B. Brauner List of works Bibliography Index.