Dramaturgy

The Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage brings together an incredible range of international theatre thinking, plays and performance texts, many published here for the first time, that ask questions about how we have come to understand reality and truth in the twenty-first century and analyze the presentation of non-fiction on the international stage.

This book illuminates the shift in approaches to the uses of theatre and performance technology in the past twenty-five years and develops an account of new media dramaturgy (NMD), an approach to theatre informed by what the technology itself seems to want to say. Born of the synthesis of new media and new dramaturgy, NMD is practiced and performed in the work of a range of important artists from dumb type and their 1989 analog-industrial machine performance pH, to more recent examples from the work of Kris Verdonck and his A Two Dogs Company.

This book contains all that is essential for training a professional stage director and/or dramaturg, including the "plot-bead" technique for analysing play scripts developed by Scanlan. It details all the steps for the full implementation of "Production Dramaturgy" as it is practiced in professional theatres, and treats form andaction as foundational cornerstones of all performance, rather than "story" elements - a frequent and debilitating misprision in theatre practice. Scanlan's unique approach offers practical training that is supported by detailed diagrams and contextualised instructions, serving stage directors, dramaturgs, actors, designers, and playwrights.

The Process of Dramaturgy: A Handbook is a guide to dramaturgy for students. Its practical approach is to "committing acts of dramaturgy," and contains exercises, models, and examples of how the dramaturg works to make his or her thoughtful and creative contributions to a theatrical production, from pre-production work through the rehearsal process The book provides specific exercises, examples, and models to assist the student or emerging dramaturg in developing the ability to: 1) apply critical methodologies (among them literary theory) to production; 2) better communicate with directors, designers and playwrights within the context of rehearsal and production. It includes a case study for analysis, Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues.

John Meagher explores major resources and limitations that formed the context of Shakespeare's playmaking, and are now the context of our examination of the plays. He argues that we can see evidence of particular intentional designs in the texts, indicating Shakespeare's careful planning of the production.

This collection focuses on contemporary dramaturgical practice, bringing together contributions not only from academics but also from prominent working dramaturgs. The inclusion of both means a strong level of engagement with current issues in dramaturgy, from the impact of social media to the ongoing centrality of interdisciplinary and intermedial processes. The contributions survey the field through eight main lenses: world dramaturgy and global perspective dramaturgy as function, verb and skill dramaturgical leadership and season planning production dramaturgy in translation adaptation and new play development interdisciplinary dramaturgy play analysis in postdramatic and new media dramaturgy social media and audience outreach.

An international group of scholars, critics and directors explore this complex pattern of signification or meaning in both his dramatic discourse and the actual staging of the plays. Their aim is to better understand Strindberg's impact on 20th century theatre from this dual point; the dialetic tension between text and stage characterizes every chapter in the book.
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Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgy offers fresh perspectives on how dramaturgs can support a production beyond rigid disciplinary expectations about what information and ideas are useful and how they should be shared. The sixteen contributors to this volume offer personal windows into dramaturgy practice, encouraging theater practitioners, students, and general theater-lovers to imagine themselves as dramaturgs newly inspired by the encounters and enquiries that are the juice of contemporary theater. Each case study is written by a dramaturg whose body of work explores important issues of race, cultural equity, and culturally-specific practices within a wide range of conventions, venues, and communities. The contributors demonstrate the unique capacity of their craft to straddle the ravine between stage and stalls, intention and impact. By unpacking, in the most up-to-date ways, the central question of "Why this play, at this time, for this audience?," this collection provides valuable insights and dramaturgy tools for scholars and students of Dramaturgy, Directing, and Theater Studies.

Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre is the first substantial history of the origins of dramaturgs and literary managers. It frames the recent explosion of professional appointments in England within a wider continental map reaching back to the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century Germany, examining the work of the major theorists and practitioners of dramaturgy, from Granville Barker and Gotthold Lessing to Brecht and Tynan. This study is the first to position Brecht's model of dramaturgy as central to the world-wide revolution in theatre-making practices, and is also the first work to make a substantial argument for Granville Barker's and Tynan's contributions to the development of literary management today. With the territories of play and performance-making being increasingly hotly contested, and the public's appetite for new plays showing no sign of diminishing, Mary Luckhurst investigates the dramaturg as a cultural and political phenomenon.

The first-century Roman tragedies of Seneca, like all ancient drama, do not contain the sort of external stage directions that we are accustomed to today; nevertheless, a careful reading of the plays reveals such stage business as entrances, exits, setting, sound effects, emotions of the characters, etc. The Dramaturgy of Senecan Tragedy teases out these dramaturgical elements in Seneca's work and uses them both to aid in the interpretation of the plays and to show the playwright's artistry. Thomas D. Kohn provides a detailed overview of the corpus, laying the groundwork for appreciating Seneca's techniques in the individual dramas. Each of the chapters explores an individual tragedy in detail, discussing the dramatis personae and examining how the roles would be distributed among a limited number of actors, as well as the identity of the Chorus.

Sound is born and dies with action. In this surprising, resourceful study, Mladen Ovadija makes a case for the centrality of sound as an integral element of contemporary theatre. He argues that sound in theatre inevitably "betrays" the dramatic text, and that sound is performance. Until recently, theatrical sound has largely been regarded as supplemental to the dramatic plot. Now, however, sound is the subject of renewed interest in theatrical discourse. Dramaturgy of sound, Ovadija argues, reads and writes a theatrical idiom based on two inseparable, intertwined strands - the gestural, corporeal power of the performer's voice and the structural value of stage sound. His extensive research in experimental performance and his examination of the pioneering work by Futurists, Dadaists, and Expressionists enable Ovadija to create a powerful study of autonomous sound as an essential element in the creation of synesthetic theatre. Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-garde and Postdramatic Theatre presents a cogent argument about a continuous tradition in experimental theatre running from early modernist to contemporary works.

Offers useful and entertaining answers to the confounding questions: What, exactly, is dramaturgy, and what does a dramaturg do? According to Michael Mark Chemers, dramaturgs are the scientists of the theater world their primary responsibility is to query the creative possibilities in every step of the production process, from play selection to costume design, and then research the various options and find ways to transform that knowledge into useful ideas. "Ghost Light" is divided into three sections. Part 1, Philosophy, describes what dramturgs do, presents a detailed history of dramaturgy, and summarizes many of the critical theories needed to analyze and understand dramatic texts. Analysis teaches the two essential skills of a dramaturg: reading and writing. Practice, the third part, delves into the relationships that dramaturgs forge and offers useful advice about collaborating with other artists. "Ghost Light" was written with undergraduate students in mind and is perfectly suited for the classroom.

"A theatre which is able to speak to each spectator in a different and penetrating language is not a fantastic idea, nor a utopia. This is the theatre for which many of us, directors and leaders of groups, trained for a long time....." - from the Introduction On Directing is Eugenio Barba's unprecedented account of his own life and work. This is a major retrospective of Barba's working methods, his practical techniques, and the life experiences which fed directly into his theatre-making. On Directing is an inspirational resource. It is a dramaturgy of dramaturgies, and a professional autobiography, from one of the most significant and influential directors and theorists working today. It provides unique insights into a philosophy and practice of directing for the beginning student, the experienced practitioner, and everyone in between.

Attempts to document, by way of articles, statements, and bibliographies, the dramaturg's profession, which began with Lessing in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century and was instituted in the United States two hundred years later during the rise of the regional theatre movement. What Is Dramaturgy? is dedicated in the end not only to promoting the dramaturg's function, but also to anticipating their creation of an intellectually illumined American theatre.