The Natyasastra is the deep repository of Indian performance studies. It embodies centuries of performance knowledge developed in South Asia on a range of conceptual issues and practical methodologies of the body. The composition of the Natyasastra is attributed to Sage Bharatha, and dates back to between 200 BC and AD 200. Written in Sanskrit, the text contains 6000 verse stanzas integrated in 36 chapters discussing a wide range of issues in theatre arts, including dramatic composition; construction of the playhouse; detailed analysis of the musical scales; body movements; various types of acting; directing; division of stage space; costumes; make-up; properties and musical instruments. As a discourse on performance, the Natyasastra is an extensive documentation of terminologies, concepts and methodologies. This book presents 14 scholarly essays exploring the Natyasastra from the multiple perspectives of Indian performance studies--epistemological, aesthetic, scientific, religious, ethnological and practical.

Inside The Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises is the first full-length volume dedicated to the history, theory, practice, and application of a suite of performer training exercises developed by Richard Schechner and elaborated on by the editors and contributors of this book. This work began in the 1960s with The Performance Group and has continued to evolve. Rasaboxes—a featured set of exercises—is an interdisciplinary approach for training emotional expressivity through the use of breath, body, voice, movement, and sensation. It brings together: the concept of rasa from classical Indian performance theory and practice research on emotion from neuroscience and psychology experimental and experiential performance practices theories of ritual, play, and performance This book combines both practical “how-to” guidance and applications from diverse contexts including undergraduate and graduate actor training, television acting, K-12 education, devising, and drama therapy. The book serves as an introduction to the work as well as an essential resource for experienced practitioners.

The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy is a volume of especially commissioned critical essays, conversations, collaborative, creative and performative writing mapping the key contexts, debates, methods, discourses and practices in this developing field. Firstly, the collection offers new insights on the fundamental question of how thinking happens: where, when, how and by whom philosophy is performed. Secondly, it provides a plurality of new accounts of performance and performativity – as the production of ideas, bodies and knowledges – in the arts and beyond. Comprising texts written by international artists, philosophers and scholars from multiple disciplines, the essays engage with questions of how performance thinks and how thought is performed in a wide range of philosophies and performances, from the ancient to the contemporary. Concepts and practices from diverse geographical regions and cultural traditions are analysed to draw conclusions about how performance operates across art, philosophy and everyday life. The collection both contributes to and critiques the philosophy of music, dance, theatre and performance, exploring the idea of a philosophy from the arts. It is crucial reading material for those interested in the hierarchy of the relationship between philosophy and the arts, advancing debates on philosophical method, and the relation between Performance and Philosophy more broadly.

Launching the landmark Performing Landscapes series, Performing Mountains brings together for the first time Mountain Studies and Performance Studies in order to examine an international selection of dramatic responses to mountain landscapes. Moving between different registers of writing, the book offers a critical assessment of how the cultural turn in landscape studies interacts with the practices of environmental theatre and performance. Conceived in three main parts, it begins by unpicking the layers of disciplinary complexity in both fields, before surveying the rich history and practice of rituals, playtexts and site specific works inspired by mountains. The last section moves to a unique analysis of mountains themselves using key concepts from performance: training, scenography, acting and spectatorship. Threaded throughout is a very personal tale of mountain research, offering a handrail or alternative guide through the book.

The Natyasastra. Ascribed to Bharata Muni. Volume 1 (Chapters I-XXVII).

The field of performance studies embraces performance behaviour of all kinds and in all contexts, from everyday life to high ceremony. This volume investigates a wide range of performance behaviour - dance, ritual, conflict situation, sports, storytelling and display behaviour - in a variety of circumstances and cultures. It considers such issues as the relationship between training and the finished performance; whether performance behaviour is universal or culturally specific; and the relationships between ritual aesthetics, popular entertainment and religion, and sports and theatre and dance. The volume brings together essays from leading anthropologists, artists and performance theorists to provide a definitive introduction to the burgeoning field of performance studies. It will be of value to scholars, teachers and students of anthropology, theatre, folklore, semiotics and performance studies.

In this collection of essays, performance studies scholar and artist Richard Schechner brings his unique perspective to bear upon some of the key themes of society in the 21st century. Schechner connects the avantgarde and terror, the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s/70s and the Occupy movement; self-wounding art, popular culture, and ritual; the Ramlila cycle play of India and the way imagination structures reality; the corporate world and conservative artists. Schechner asks artists to redeploy Nehru's Third World as a movement not of nations but of like-minded culture workers who must propose counter-performances to war, violence, and the globalized corporate empire. With characteristic brio, Schechner urges us to play for keeps. "Playing deeply is a way of finding and embodying new knowledge", he writes. Performed Imaginaries ranges through some of the key moves within Schechner’s oeuvre, and challenges today’s experimental artists, activists, and scholars to generate a new, third world of performance.