The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics is a volume of critical essays, provocations, and interventions on the most important questions faced by today’s writers, critics, audiences, and theatre and performance makers. Featuring texts written by scholars and artists who are diversely situated (geographically, culturally, politically, and institutionally), its multiple perspectives broadly address the question "How can we be political now?" To respond to this question, Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan have created eight galvanising themes as frameworks or rubrics to rethink the critical, creative, and activist perspectives on questions of politics and theatre. Each theme is linked to a set of guiding keywords: Post (post consensus, post-Brexit, post-Fukushima, post-neoliberalism, post-humanism, post-global financial crisis, post-acting, the real) Assembly (assemblage, disappearance, permission, community, citizen, protest, refugee) Gap (who is in and out, what can be seen/heard/funded/allowed) Institution (visibility/darkness, inclusion, rules) Machine (biodata, surveillance economy, mediatisation) Message (performance and conviction, didacticism, propaganda) End (suffering, stasis, collapse, entropy) Re. (reset, rescale, reanimate, reimagine, replay: how to bring complexity back into the public arena, how art can help to do this). These themes were developed in conversation with key thinkers and artists in the field, and the resulting texts engage with artistic works across a range of modes including traditional theatre, contemporary performance, public protest events, activism, and community and participatory theatre. Suitable for academics, performance makers, and students, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics explores questions of how to be political in the early 21st century, by exploring how theatre and performance might provoke, unsettle, reinforce, or productively destabilise the status quo.

One of the first titles in this vibrant and eye-catching new series of short, sharp, shots for theatre students.

This book explores the connection between politics and theatre by looking at the works and lives of Shaw, Brecht, Sartre, and Ionesco, providing a cultural history detailing the changing role of political theatre in twentieth-century Europe.

Augusto Boal's reputation is now moving beyond the realms of theatre and drama therapy, bringing him to the attention of a wider public. Legislative Theatre is the latest and most remarkable stage in his work. 'Legislative Theatre' is an attempt to use Boal's method of 'Forum Theatre' within a political system to create a truer form of democracy. It is an extraordinary experiment in the potential of theatre to affect social change. At the heart of his method of Forum Theatre is the dual meaning of the verb 'to act': to perform and to take action. Forum Theatre invites members of the audience to take the stage and decide the outcome, becoming an integral part of the performance. As a politician in his native Rio de Janeiro, Boal used Forum Theatre to motivate the local populace in generating relevant legislation. In Legislative Theatre Boal creates new, theatrical, and truly revolutionary ways of involving everyone in the democratic process. This book includes: * a full explanation of the genesis and principles of Legislative Theatre * a description of the process in operation in Rio * Boal's essays, speeches and lectures on popular theatre, Paolo Freire, cultural activism, the point of playwrighting, and much else besides.

The first book in the field to explore the links between theories of globalization and surveillance, bipower and biopolitics, performance and theatre, computer arts and politics, "The Politics of New Media Theatre" is an investigation into the political role played by the new media theatre. Gabriella Giannachi explores how new media arts constitute themselves as a radical political movement, and presents an analysis of both the role of virtuality in radical performance and politics in virtual and mixed reality practices. This outstanding new work offers an analysis of leading political, philosophical and artistic texts and artworks, and represents a milestone for anyone interested in new technologies, theatre and politics.

Addresses fundamental questions about the social and political purposes of performance through an investigation of post-war alternative and community theatre. A detailed analysis of oppositional theatre as radical cultural practice.

Is postdramatic theatre political and if so how? How does it relate to Brecht's ideas of political theatre, for example? How can we account for the relationship between aesthetics and politics in new forms of theatre, playwriting, and performance? The chapters in this book discuss crucial aspects of the issues raised by the postdramatic turn in theatre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: the status of the audience and modes of spectatorship in postdramatic theatre; the political claims of postdramatic theatre; postdramatic theatre's ongoing relationship with the dramatic tradition; its dialectical qualities, or its eschewing of the dialectic; questions of representation and the real in theatre; the role of bodies, perception, appearance and theatricality in postdramatic theatre; as well as subjectivity and agency in postdramatic theatre, dance and performance. Offering analyses of a wide range of international performance examples, scholars in this volume engage with Hans-Thies Lehmann's theoretical positions both affirmatively and critically, relating them to other approaches by thinkers ranging from early theorists such as Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin, to contemporary thinkers such as Fischer-Lichte, Rancière and others