The Music on Stage conferences are a unique engine for interdisciplinary interaction, which is reflected in this compendium of the latest research by international scholars. Scholars and practitioners of operas by Handel, Mozart, Thomas, Chabrier, Korngold and Taktakishvili will find new “readings” from hitherto unexplored contexts and contemporary fine art. Also discussed is operatic lighting and the problematics of traditional lighting schemes apropos recent inventive methodologies. Popular sound development of the late 1960s is highlighted through unique oral transcripts. Other chapters discuss the intermediality of music and social media in the work of Brigitta Muntendorf; the visual transcoding of Wagner’s leitmotif technique; a new theory of Affektenlehre, and the art and politics of the Slovenian conceptual music collective Laibach.

Performance by its very nature embraces many constituents, the theories of which have developed into discreet disciplines as on-going research deepens our understanding and knowledge of each one of them. Concomitantly, there continues to grow a greater interlinking, fusion and blurring of discreet boundaries between traditional genres – features highlighted in the seventeen papers presented here. Topics explored in this volume include: the intermedial performance of the Irrepressibles and electronically controlled sounds on the concert platform; the ways in which the physical body dictates movement and character and how the embodiment of the voice goes beyond character stereotypes; how Romeo Catellucci legitimized the audience’s gaze whilst staging brain-damaged patients; interculturalism in a new operatic work focusing on the current Israeli-Palestinian crisis; interrogating transgenerational depictions of Otherness in the Rocky Horror Show; musical speech in Iannis Xenakis’ reworking of ancient Greek in his Oresteia; genre conflation in terms of unaccompanied monodrama; trans-genre adaptation in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Philip Glass’s “Cocteau trilogy”; and textual and musical comedy in Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, among others.

Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864, is the third volume in a monumental new series-the first collection of kabuki play translations to be published in nearly a quarter of a century. Fifty-one plays, published in four volumes, vividly trace kabuki's changing relations to Japanese society during the premodern era. The fourteen plays translated in Volume 3, Darkness and Desire, 1804-1864, mark an extreme point in the development of kabuki dramaturgy. The plays are remarkable, even within kabuki, for their intense theatricality, gutsy individualism of character, cold-blooded and ferocious violence, realism pushed into fantasy and grotesquery, novelty for its own sake, sexual aggressiveness, and assertion of female will. The plays depict a society in extremis, the end of an era, a time often marked by unmitigated darkness and desire.

The Music on Stage conferences are a unique engine for interdisciplinary interaction, which is reflected in this compendium of the latest research by international scholars. Scholars and practitioners of operas by Handel, Mozart, Thomas, Chabrier, Korngold and Taktakishvili will find new â oereadingsâ from hitherto unexplored contexts and contemporary fine art. Also discussed is operatic lighting and the problematics of traditional lighting schemes apropos recent inventive methodologies. Popular sound development of the late 1960s is highlighted through unique oral transcripts. Other chapters discuss the intermediality of music and social media in the work of Brigitta Muntendorf; the visual transcoding of Wagnerâ (TM)s leitmotif technique; a new theory of Affektenlehre, and the art and politics of the Slovenian conceptual music collective Laibach.

This volume examines the work of directors Jacques Copeau, Theodore Komisarjevsky and Tyrone Guthrie. It explores in detail many of the directors' key productions, including Copeau's staging of Molière's The Tricks of Scapin, Komisarjevsky's signature season of Chekhov plays at the Barnes Theatre and Guthrie's pioneering direction of Shakespeare's plays in North America. This study argues that their work exemplifies the complexity and novelty of the role of theatre directing in the first three-quarters of the 20th century, as Komisarjevsky was in the middle of the genesis of directing in Russia, Copeau launched his directorial career just as the role was gaining definition, and Guthrie was at the vanguard of directing in Britain, at last shaking off the traditions of the actor-manager to formulate the new role of artistic director.

This volume chronicles the lives and artistry of Elia Kazan, Jerome Robbins, and Lloyd Richards. Their commitment to staging new works, which often focused on the experiences of immigrant and working-class families, significantly expanded the scope and possibilities of American theatre across the 20th century. It illuminates too their collaborations with a range of innovative theatre artists, including Lee Strasberg, Clifford Odets, Marlon Brando, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and August Wilson. The Great North American Stage Directors series provides an authoritative account of the art of directing in North America by examining the work oftwenty-four major practitioners from the late 19th century to the present. Each of the eight volumes examines three directors and offers an overview of their practices, theoretical ideas, and contributions to modern theatre. The studies chart the life and work of each director, placing his or her achievement in the context of other important theatre practitioners and broader social history. Written by a team of leading experts, the series presents the genealogy of directing in North America while simultaneously chronicling crucial trends and championing contemporary interpretation.