This book is the first study of the prolific German filmmaker, performance artist, and TV host Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) that identifies him as a practitioner of realism in the theater and lays out how theatrical realism can offer an aesthetic frame sturdy enough to hold together his experiments across media and genres. This volume traces Schlingensief’s developing realism through his theater work in conventional theater venues, in less conventional venues, his opera work focusing on the production of Wagner’s Parsifal at Bayreuth, and his art installations on revolving platforms called Animatographs. This book will be of great interest to scholars of theater, film, and performance art and practitioners.

Opera Village Africa, a participatory art experiment by the late German multimedia artist Christoph Schlingensief, serves as a testing ground for a critical interrogation of Richard Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Sarah Hegenbart traces the path from Wagner’s introduction of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Bayreuth to Schlingensief’s attempt to charge the idea of the total artwork with new meaning by transposing it to the West African country Burkina Faso. Schlingensief developed Opera Village in collaboration with the world-renowned architect Francis Kéré. This final project of Schlingensief is inspired by and illuminates the diverse themes that informed his artistic practice, including coming to terms with the German past, anti-Semitism, critical race theory, and questions of postcolonial (self-)criticism. From Bayreuth to Burkina Faso introduces the notion of the postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk to disrupt the Eurocentric perspective on art history, exploring how the socio-political force of a postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk could affect processes of transcultural identity construction. It reveals how Schlingensief translocated the Wagnerian concept to Burkina Faso to address German colonial history and engage with it from the perspective of multidirectional memory cultures.

Mysticism in the Theater introduces theater makers to the power and possibility of using historical mystical ideas to influence all aspects of a production. Historical mysticism represents ideas developed by recognized spiritual thinkers in all religions and time periods: individuals who stilled their ego, and perceived the unity of all, hidden within the apparent multiplicity of existence. This unique manner of spiritual inlay allows theatrical presentations to find the height of artistic expression: art at the intersection of our historical moment and the eternal. This study introduces theater makers to the history of mystical inspiration within performance work and develops strategies for inserting mystical ideas into their productions. The book ties this model into theatre’s history, as mystical ideas and quotes have been inserted into productions from Greek theatre through Shakespeare and into the present day. This book explores how teachings and ideas of specific historical mystical thinkers might influence all aspects of contemporary theatrical productions including writing, directing, acting, stagecraft/set design, lighting design, costume design, sound design, and choreography.

This book examines male dan, a male actor who performs female roles in Chinese theatre. Through the rise, fall and tenuous survival of male dan in Chinese history, Guo Chao reflects the transformations in the social zeitgeist in China, especially the politics of gender and sexuality. The breadth of this study reflects a diversified set of sources, ranging from classical to contemporary texts (texts of jingju plays, memoirs, collections of notation books) and other commentaries and critical evaluations of dan actors (in both English and Chinese languages) to video and audio materials, films and personal interviews. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of East Asian/Chinese studies across the fields of theatre, history, culture and literature.

New forms of art, culture and theory have recently emerged through engagements with the realities of the social world and everyday life which are not primarily about representation but rather about participation and narration. These new forms are based on viewer responses and engagement, thus performatively creating open-ended situations rather than autonomous works with closure. Performative theory, drawing mostly on studies of speech acts, proves adequate to describe and analyse these new forms of art and culture and their engagement with the real. Performative Realism scrutinizes a range of contemporary works that experiment with audience participation and processuality within art and culture, as well as it takes issue with theories of performativity and performance. Performative Realism contains contributions from leading Danish scholars working within a broad range of academic fields such as Media Studies, Art History, Theatre Studies and Cultural Studies. The issues addressed covers Scandinavian as well as international installation art, performance art, theatre, photography, movies, literature and role-playing.

Dramaturgy and History provides a practical account of an aspect of dramaturgical practice that is often taken for granted: dramaturgs’ engagements with history and historiography. Dramaturgs play a vital role in amplifying and activating theatre’s unique potential to contribute to the pressing public discourse around the uses and legacies of history.This collection challenges the notion of history as an unassailable or settled set of facts, offering readers a glimpse into the processes and methods of eighteen dramaturgs working in a variety of settings, including professional theatres, universities, museums, and archives. The dramaturgs featured use history to a variety of ends: they reframe classical texts for contemporary audiences; advocate for the production of lesser-known writers and the expansion of the canon; create new works that bring women’s, LGBTQIA+, and Global Majority histories to life; and establish new and necessary archives by/of/for minoritarian artists. Collectively, they examine and animate some of the most urgent questions, concerns, and challenges that dramaturgs encounter in working with history. An essential resource for teachers and students of dramaturgy, the collection offers a concluding hands-on exercise for each chapter to facilitate the reader’s application of the methods discussed in their own practice.

Female solo aerialists of the 1920s and early 1930s were internationally popular performers in the largest live performance mass entertainment of the period in the UK and USA. Yet these aerialists and this period in circus history have been largely forgotten despite the iconic image of ‘the’ female aerialist still flaring in the popular imagination. Kate Holmes uses insights gained as a practitioner to reconstruct in detail the British and American performances and public personae of key stars such as Lillian Leitzel, Luisita Leers, and the Flying Codonas, revealing what is performed and implicit in today’s practice. Using a wealth of original sources, this book considers the forgotten stars whose legacy of the cultural image of the female aerialist echoes. Locating performers within wider cultural histories of sport, glamour, and gender, this book asks important questions about their stardom, including: Why were female aerialists so alluring when their muscularity challenged conservative ideals of femininity and how did they participate in change? What was it about their movements and the spaces they performed in that activated such strong audience responses? This book is vital reading for students and practitioners of aerial performance, circus, gender, popular performance, and performance studies.