Performing Adaptations: Conversations and Essays on the Theory and Practice of Adaptation brings together scholars and artists from across North America and the United Kingdom to contribute to the growing discourse on adaptation in the arts. An ideal text for students of theatre, drama, and performance studies, this volume offers a ground-breaking set of essays, interviews, and artistic reflections that assess adaptation from the perspective of live performance, an aspect of the field that has been under-explored until now. The diverse authors and interview subjects in this anthology take a variety of approaches to both creating and analyzing adaptations, demonstrating the form’s suitability for testing and speaking back to dominant models of creation, production, and analysis. Featuring articles by pioneering adaptation scholar Linda Hutcheon and critically acclaimed writer and critic George Elliott Clarke, Performing Adaptations advances the field of adaptation studies in new and exciting ways. The authors in Performing Adaptations do not comprise a comprehensive view of adaptation studies, but represent a collection of “gutsy” voices that use adaptation to test, and speak back to dominant models of creation, production, and analysis. Some of these perspectives include a group of artists from the African Diaspora, Europe, and Canada (the AfriCan Theatre Ensemble); the voice of Chinese-Canadian playwright, Marjorie Chan; the innovative storytelling of Beth Watkins, and her adaptation of letters written by transgendered student activist, Jesse Carr; the views of vanguard Canadian queer filmmaker, John Greyson; and African-Canadian poet, novelist, and critic, George Elliott Clarke. Their adaptation of sources to other genres, mediums, and cultural contexts represent the act of a radical, dialogical reading, writ large.

Contemporary theatrical productions as diverse in form as experimental performance, new writing, West End drama, musicals and live art demonstrate a recurring fascination with adapting existing works by other artists, writers, filmmakers and stage practitioners. Featuring seventeen interviews with internationally-renowned theatre and performance artists, Theatre and Adaptation provides an exceptionally rich study of the variety of work developed in recent years. First-hand accounts illuminate a diverse range of approaches to stage adaptation, ranging from playwriting to directing, Javanese puppetry to British children's theatre, and feminist performance to Japanese Noh. The transition of an existing source to the stage is not a smooth one: this collection examines the practices and the complex set of negotiations each work of transition and appropriation involves. Including interviews with Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Handspring Puppet Company, Katie Mitchell, Rimini Protokoll, Elevator Repair Service, Simon Stephens, Ong Keng Sen and Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the volume reveals performance's enduring desire to return, rewrite and repeat.

Why are so many theatre productions adaptations of one kind or another? Why do contemporary practitioners turn so frequently to non-dramatic texts for inspiration? This study explores the fascination of novels, short stories, children's books and autobiographies for theatre makers and examines what 'becomes' of literary texts when these are filtered into contemporary practice that includes physical theatre, multimedia performance, puppetry, immersive and site-specific performance and live art. In Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre, Frances Babbage offers a series of fresh critical perspectives on the theory of adaptation in theatre-making, focusing on meditations of prose literature within contemporary performance. Individual chapters explore the significance and impact of books as physical objects within productions; the relationship between the dramatic adaptation and literary edition; storytelling on the page and in performance; literary space and theatrical space; and prose fiction reframed as 'found text' in contemporary theatre and live art. Case studies are drawn from internationally acclaimed companies including Complicite, Elevator Repair Service, Kneehigh, Forced Entertainment, Gob Squad, Teatro Kismet and Stan's Cafe. Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre is a compelling and provocative resource for anyone interested in the potential and the challenges of using prose literature as material for new theatrical performance.

Why are so many theatre productions adaptations of one kind or another? Why do contemporary practitioners turn so frequently to non-dramatic texts for inspiration? This study explores the fascination of novels, short stories, children's books and autobiographies for theatre makers and examines what 'becomes' of literary texts when these are filtered into contemporary practice that includes physical theatre, multimedia performance, puppetry, immersive and site-specific performance and live art. In Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre, Frances Babbage offers a series of fresh critical perspectives on the theory of adaptation in theatre-making, focusing on meditations of prose literature within contemporary performance. Individual chapters explore the significance and impact of books as physical objects within productions; the relationship between the dramatic adaptation and literary edition; storytelling on the page and in performance; literary space and theatrical space; and prose fiction reframed as 'found text' in contemporary theatre and live art. Case studies are drawn from internationally acclaimed companies including Complicite, Elevator Repair Service, Kneehigh, Forced Entertainment, Gob Squad, Teatro Kismet and Stan's Cafe. Adaptation in Contemporary Theatre is a compelling and provocative resource for anyone interested in the potential and the challenges of using prose literature as material for new theatrical performance.

Internet heterogeneity is driving a new challenge in application development: adaptive software. Together with the increased Internet capacity and new access technologies, network congestion and the use of older technologies, wireless access, and peer-to-peer networking are increasing the heterogeneity of the Internet. Applications should provide gracefully degraded levels of service when network conditions are poor, and enhanced services when network conditions exceed expectations. Existing adaptive technologies, which are primarily end-to-end or proxy-based and often focus on a single deficient link, can perform poorly in heterogeneous networks. Instead, heterogeneous networks frequently require multiple, coordinated, and distributed remedial actions. Conductor: Distributed Adaptation for Heterogeneous Networks describes a new approach to graceful degradation in the face of network heterogeneity - distributed adaptation - in which adaptive code is deployed at multiple points within a network. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated by conductor, a middleware framework that enables distributed adaptation of connection-oriented, application-level protocols. By adapting protocols, conductor provides application-transparent adaptation, supporting both existing applications and applications designed with adaptation in mind. Conductor: Distributed Adaptation for Heterogeneous Networks introduces new techniques that enable distributed adaptation, making it automatic, reliable, and secure. In particular, we introduce the notion of semantic segmentation, which maintains exactly-once delivery of the semantic elements of a data stream while allowing the stream to be arbitrarily adapted in transit. We also introduce a secure architecture for automatic adaptor selection, protecting user data from unauthorized adaptation. These techniques are described both in the context of conductor and in the broader context of distributed systems. Finally, this book presents empirical evidence from several case studies indicating that distributed adaptation can allow applications to degrade gracefully in heterogeneous networks, providing a higher quality of service to users than other adaptive techniques. Further, experimental results indicate that the proposed techniques can be employed without excessive cost. Thus, distributed adaptation is both practical and beneficial. Conductor: Distributed Adaptation for Heterogeneous Networks is designed to meet the needs of a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners in industry and graduate-level students in computer science.

Drawing on Cormac McCarthy's recently opened archive, as well as interviews with several of his collaborators, this book presents the first comprehensive overview of McCarthy's writing for film and theater, as well as film adaptations of his novels.