This account, analysis and critical evaluation of the work of Appia demonstrates how his far-sighted imagination also embraced the fundamental reform of scenic design, the use of theatrical space, and a greatly expanded conception of the nature and possibilities of theatrical art.

Adolphe Appia swept away the foundations of traditional theatre and set the agenda for the development of theatrical practice this century. In Adolphe Appia: Texts on Theatre, Richard Beacham brings together for the first time selections from all his major writings. The publication of these essays, many of which have long been unavailable in English, represents a significant addition to our understanding of the development of theatrical art. It will be an invaluable sourcebook for theatre students and welcomed as an important contribution to the literature of the modern stage.

The touch and movement senses have a large place in the modern arts. This is widely discussed and celebrated, often enough as if it represents a breakthrough in a primarily visual age. This book turns to history to show just how significant movement and the sense of movement were to pioneers of modernism at the turn of the 20th century. It makes this history vivid through a picture of movement in the lives of an extraordinary generation of Russian artists, writers, theatre people and dancers bridging the last years of the tsars and the Revolution. Readers will gain a new perspective on the relation between art and life in the period 1890-1920 in great innovators like the poets Mayakovsky and Andrei Bely, the theatre director Meyerhold, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the young men and women in Russia inspired by her lead, and esoteric figures like Gurdjieff. Movement, and the turn to the body as a source of natural knowledge, was at the centre of idealistic creativity and hopes for a new age, for a 'new man', and this was true both for those who looked forward to the technology of the future and those who looked back to the harmony of Ancient Greece. The book weaves history and analysis into a colourful, thoughtful affirmation of movement in the expressive life.

How technologies, from the mechanical to the computational, have transformed artistic performance practices.

This book offers a sustained and deeply experiential pragmatic study of performance environments, here defined at unstable, emerging, and multisensational atmospheres, open to interactions and travels in augmented virtualities. Birringer’s writings challenge common assumptions about embodiment and the digital, exploring and refining artistic research into physical movement behavior, gesture, sensing perception, cognition, and trans-sensory hallucination. If landscapes are autobiographical, and atmospheres prompt us to enter blurred lines of a "forest knowledge," where light, shade, and darkness entangle us in foraging mediations of contaminated diversity, then such sensitization to elemental environments requires a focus on processual interaction. Provocative chapters probe various types of performance scenarios and immersive architectures of the real and the virtual. They break new ground in analyzing an extended choreographic – the building of hypersensorial scenographies that include a range of materialities as well as bodily and metabodily presences. Foregrounding his notion of kinetic atmospheres, the author intimates a technosomatic theory of dance, performance, and ritual processes, while engaging in a vivid cross-cultural dialogue with some of the leading digital and theatrical artists worldwide. This poetic meditation will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, performing arts as well as media arts practitioners, composers, programmers, and designers.

German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage considers the powerfully stylized, anti-realistic styles of acting on the German Expressionist stage from 1916 to 1921. It relates this striking departure from the dominant European acting tradition of realism to the specific cultural crises that enveloped the German nation during the course of its involvement in World War I. This book describes three distinct Expressionist acting styles, all of which in their own ways attempted to show how symbolic stage performance could be a powerful rhetorical resource for a culture struggling to come to terms with the crises of historical change. The examination of Expressionist script and actor memoirs allows for an unprecedented focus on description and analysis of acting itself.

Mary Wigman, Germany’s premier dancer between the two world wars, envisioned the performer in the thrall of ecstatic and demonic forces. Widely hailed as an innovator of dance modernism, she never acknowledged her complex relationship with National Socialism. In Ecstasy and the Demon, Susan Manning advances a sociological explanation for the collaboration between German modern dancers and National Socialism. She models methods for dance studies that contextualize choreography in relation to changing sociopolitical conditions, bringing dance scholarship into conversation with intellectual trends across the humanities. The introduction to this second edition brings Manning’s groundbreaking work to bear on dance studies today and reconsiders Wigman’s career from the perspective of queer theory and globalization, further illuminating the interplay of dance and politics in the twentieth century. Susan Manning is professor of English, theater, and performance studies at Northwestern University.