Este libro es el primero en examinar lo radicalmente nuevo y desafiante Teatro Pánico, un grupo de obras compuestas por Arrabal entre 1957 y 1966, en el apogeo del movimiento avant-garde. ENGLISH VERSION This book is the first to examine closely the radically new and challenging Panic Theatre, a group of plays composed by Arrabal between 1957 and 1966, at the zenith of the avant-garde movement. El presente libro estudia el Teatro Pánico de Fernando Arrabal, un conjunto de textos concebidos durante los primeros años del autor en París, entre 1957 y 1966. Escritas en el momento de mayor auge de la vanguardia, las obras vehiculan una teatralidad radicalmente innovadora cuya piedra angular la constituye el lenguaje ceremonial. La ceremonia pánica que subyace a toda esa dramaturgia es objeto de un profundo análisis a la luz de Le Panique, texto programático del propio Arrabal en que el autor identifica los tres conceptos que desencadenan la creación artística: memoria, azar y confusión. El estudio se detiene en los procesos por los que la memoria determina que las obras abandonen la mímesis, y el azar articula los materiales recuperados de la memoria en tramas y estructuras hilvanadas con gran precisión. Asimismo se incide en cómo los sujetos, objetos, marcos espacio-temporales y palabras se ven sometidos a un proceso de confusión que genera una forma teatral absolutamente innovadora. El concepto de lo pánico, situado en el epicentro de esta experimentación formal, dota de coherencia y unicidad teórica a este aparentementeheterogéneo grupo de obras. Diego Santos Sánchez es Alexander von Humboldt Fellow en la Humboldt-Universität en Berlin. ENGLISH VERSION The Panic Theatre is a set of plays conceived by Fernando Arrabal between1957 and 1966, the author's first years in Paris. Composed at the zenith of the avant-garde movement, they convey a radically new and challenging theatricality whose cornerstone is their ceremonial shape. The plays' underlying panic ceremony is thoroughly studied in light of Arrabal's programmatic text Le Panique, that singles out three key concepts responsible for artistic creation: memory, chance and confusion. This study shows how memory determines the plays' departure from mimesis and how chance articulates the materials recalled from memory into precisely arranged plots. Furthermore, subjects, objects, spatial-temporal frames and words are subject to confusion, inan attempt to create an utterly innovative form of theatre. This group of seemingly heterogeneous plays is given theoretical coherence and consistency by placing the idea of panic at the centre of a great formal experimentation. Diego Santos Sánchez is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin.

This book provides key critical tools to significantly broaden the readers’ perception of theatre and performance history: in line with posthuman thought, each chapter engages Actor-Network Theory and similar theories to reveal a comprehensive range of human and non-human agents whose collaborations impact theatre productions but are often overlooked. The volume also greatly expands the information available in English on the networks created by several Argentine artists. Through a transnational, transatlantic perspective, case studies refer to the lives, theatre companies, staged productions, and visual artworks of a number of artists who left Buenos Aires during the 1960s due to a mix of personal and political reasons. By establishing themselves in the French capital, queer playwright Copi and directors Jorge Lavelli, Alfredo Arias, and Jérôme Savary, among others, became part of the larger group of intellectuals known as “the Argentines of Paris” and dominated the Parisian theatre scene between the 1980s and 90s. Focusing on these Argentine artists and their nomadic peripeteias, the study thus offers a detailed description of the complexity of agencies and assemblages inextricably involved in theatre productions, including larger historical events, everyday objects, sexual orientation, microbes, and even those agents at work well before a production is conceived.

Theatre has always been subject to a wide range of social, political, moral, and doctrinal controls, with authorities and social groups imposing constraints on scripts, venues, staging, acting, and reception. Focusing on a range of countries and political regimes, this book examines the many forms that theatre censorship has taken in the 20th century and continues to take in the 21st, arguing that it remains a live issue in the contemporary world. The book re-examines assumptions about prohibition and state control, and offers a more complex reading of theatre censorship as a continuum ranging from the unconscious self-censorship built into social structures and discursive practices, through bureaucratic regulation or unofficial influence, up to detention and physical violence. An international team of contributors offers an illuminating set of case studies informed by both new archival research and the first-hand experience of playwrights and directors, covering theatre censorship in areas such as Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Poland, East Germany, Nepal, Zimbabwe, the USA, Ireland, and Britain. Focusing on right-wing dictatorships, post-colonial regimes, communist systems and Western democracies, the essays analyze methods and discourses of censorship, identify the multiple agents involved, examine the responses of theatremakers, and show how each example reveals important features of its political and cultural contexts. Expanding understanding of the nature and effects of censorship, this volume affirms the power of theatre to challenge authorized discourses and makes a timely contribution to debates about freedom of expression through performance.

Spanish Horror Film is the first in-depth exploration of the genre in Spain from the 'horror boom' of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the most recent production in the current renaissance of Spanish genre cinema, through a study of its production, circulation, regulation and consumption. The examination of this rich cinematic tradition is firmly located in relation to broader historical and cultural shifts in recent Spanish history and as an important part of the European horror film tradition and the global culture of psychotronia.

This book looks at Cuban and Argentine theater of the late 1960s and early 1970s to see how the idea of spectacle as violence was used to comment on and question the social and political violence that was unfolding offstage.

Conflicting Identities and Multiple Masculinities takes as its focus the construction of masculinity in Western Europe from the early Middle Ages until the fifteenth century, crossing from pre-Christian Scandinavia across western Christendom. The essays consult a broad and representative cross section of sources including the work of theological, scholastic, and monastic writers, sagas, hagiography and memoirs, material culture, chronicles, exampla and vernacular literature, sumptuary legislation, and the records of ecclesiastical courts. The studies address questions of what constituted male identity, and male sexuality. How was masculinity constructed in different social groups? How did the secular and ecclesiastical ideals of masculinity reinforce each other or diverge? These essays address the topic of medieval men and, through a variety of theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary approaches, significantly extend our understanding of how, in the Middle Ages, masculinity and identity were conflicted and multifarious.

The transition to democracy that followed the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 was once hailed as a model of political transformation. But since the 2008 financial crisis it has come under intense scrutiny. Today, a growing divide exists between advocates of the Transition and those who see it as the source of Spain’s current socio-political bankruptcy. This book revisits the crucial period from 1962 to 1992, exposing the networks of art, media and power that drove the Transition and continue to underpin Spanish politics in the present. Drawing on rare archival materials and over three hundred interviews with politicians, artists, journalists and ordinary Spaniards, including former prime minister Felipe Gonzalez (1982–96), Following Franco unlocks the complex and often contradictory narratives surrounding the foundation of contemporary Spain.