• The book demonstrates how a vernacular British performance form emerged as a hybrid of forms from Afro-American and minstrel, as well as French mime and Italian commedia dell’arte roots. • Theatre history is an essential part of theatre and drama courses across the UK and would be recommended reading. • There is no comparable book which makes critical analysis of British pierrot troupes and concert parties in existence – the only ones that do exist on the specific topic are written as reminiscence and anecdote.

This volume is the first authoritative historical textbook to look at the origins, development and evolution of seaside pierrot troupes and concert parties and their popular performance heritage. It will provide, for the first time, a definition of the pierrot troupe and its evolution from the roots of European popular traditions such as the commedia dell’arte and minstrelsy, to links between music hall and contemporary popular culture. Tony Lidington will explore how pierrot troupes grew from a single idea into a major international cultural industry and how it boosted morale and national identity during the two World Wars, before sublimating into contemporary pop music and comedy. Tony’s continuing practice as research provides an experiential framework for the historical and ethnographic analysis of the form. This book will be of vital interest to students, researchers, and performers of outdoor (al fresco) arts, clowning and comedy, minstrelsy, vernacular music-making and music hall.

This edited collection of essays details a wide-ranging selection of some of the most sensationally successful theatre productions of the long Victorian era, the real "blockbusters" of the age. Ranging from the world of operetta and music hall to spectacular drama and sensational melodrama, the productions included provide the reader with definitive proof that the phenomenon of the "smash hit" show is not restricted to modern Broadway. This is a world that encompassed the ground-breaking stage technology of Ben Hur, the wide political impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin and the sheer creative originality of L'Enfant Prodigue. Supporting the "star" system, productions featured some of the greatest names of the period - Sir Henry Irving, Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson, James O'Neill and Dion Boucicault. This was the very dawning of a new media age, which saw many of the productions transfer to the new world of silent cinema for the very first time

This book provides a fascinating and concise history of devised theatre practice. As both a founding member of Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theater Company and a Professor, Telory Arendell begins this journey with a brief history of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and Living Newspapers through Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble and Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre to the racially inflected commentary of Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino and Ariane Mnouchkine’s collaboration with Théâtre de Soleil. This book explores the impact of devised theatre on social practice and analyzes Goat Island’s use of Pina Bausch’s gestural movement, Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed in Giving Voice, Anna Deavere Smith’s devised envelope for Verbatim Theatre, The Tectonic Theatre Project’s moment work, Teya Sepinuck’s Theatre of Witness, Pig Iron’s use of Lecoq mime to build complex physical theatre scripts, and The Riot Group’s musical arrangement of collaborative devised text. Included are a foreword by Allen J. Kuharski and three devised plays by Theatre of Witness, Pig Iron, and The Riot Group. Replete with interviews from the initial Pig Iron collaborators on subjects of writing, directing, choreographing, teaching, and developing a pedagogical platform that supports devised theatre.

Mothering Performance is a combination of scholarly essays and creative responses which focus on maternal performance and its applications from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. This collection extends the concept and action of ‘performance’ and connects it to the idea of ‘mothering’ as activity. Mothering, as a form of doing, is a site of never-ending political and personal production; it is situated in a specific place, and it is undertaken by specific bodies, marked by experience and context. The authors explore the potential of a maternal sensibility to move us towards maternal action that is explicitly political, ethical, and in relation to our others. Presented in three sections, Exchange, Practice, and Solidarity, the book includes international contributions from scholars and artists covering topics including ecology, migration, race, class, history, incarceration, mental health, domestic violence, intergenerational exchange, childcare, and peacebuilding. The collection gathers diverse maternal performance practices and methodologies which address aesthetics, dramaturgy, activism, pregnancy, everyday mothering, and menopause. The book is a great read for artists, maternal health and care professionals, and scholars. Researchers with an interest in feminist performance and motherhood, within the disciplines of performance studies, maternal studies, and women’s studies, and all those who wish to gain a deeper understanding of maternal experience, will find much of interest. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Funded by University of South Wales

A Sourcebook of Performance Labor presents the views and experiences of collaborators in other artists’ works. This book reorients well-known works of contemporary performance and social practice around the workers who have shaped, enacted, and supported them. It emerges from perspectives on maintenance, care, affective labor, and the knowledges created and preserved through gesture and intersubjectivity. This compilation of interviews is filled with the voices of collaborators in notable works attributed to established contemporary artists, including Francis Alÿs, Tania Bruguera, Suzanne Lacy, Ernesto Pujol, Asad Raza, Dread Scott, and Tino Sehgal. In the spirit of the artworks under discussion, this book reinvests in the possibilities for art as a collective effort to explore new ways of finding ourselves in others and others in ourselves. The Sourcebook collection is a contribution for further theorizing a largely unaddressed perspective in contemporary art. This collection will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance studies and art history.

This book covers playwright Martin Crimp’s recent work showing how it captures the nuances in our interpersonal contemporary experience. Examining the bold and exciting body of writing by Crimp, the book delves into his depiction of intersections between narratives, as well as between private and public, through an honest look at power structures and shifts, marriages and relationships, sexuality, and desire. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in Drama, Theatre and Performance, English Literature, and Opera Studies.