The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader has been the key introductory text to all types of performance for over fifteen years. Extracts from over fifty practitioners, critics and theorists from the fields of dance, drama, music, theatre and live art form an essential sourcebook for students, researchers and practitioners. This carefully revised third edition offers focus on contributions from the world of music, and also privileges the voices of practitioners themselves ahead of more theoretical writing. A bestseller since its original publication in 1996, this new edition has been expanded to include contributions from: Bobby Baker; Joseph Beuys; Rustom Bharucha; Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker; Hanns Eisler; Karen Finley; Philip Glass; Guillermo Gómez-Peña; Matthew Goulish; Martha Graham; Wassily Kandinsky; Jacques Lecoq; Hans-Thies Lehmann; George Maciunas; Ariane Mnouchkine; Meredith Monk; Lloyd Newson; Carolee Schneemann; Gertrude Stein; Bill Viola. Each extract is fully supplemented by a contextual summary, a biography of the writer, and suggestions for further reading. The volume’s alphabetical structure invites the reader to compare and cross-reference major writings on all types of performance outside of the constraints and simplifications of genre, encouraging cross-disciplinary understandings. All who engage with live, innovative performance, and the interplay of radical ideas, will find this collection invaluable.

The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader combines extracts from over 70 international practitioners, companies, collectives and makers from the fields of Dance, Theatre, Music, Live and Performance Art, and Activism to form an essential sourcebook for students, researchers and practitioners. This is the follow-on text from The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, which has been the key introductory text to all kinds of performance for over 20 years since it was first published in 1996. Contributions from new and emerging practitioners are placed alongside those of long-established individual artists and companies, representing the work of this century’s leading practitioners through the voices of over 140 individuals. The contributors in this volume reflect the diverse and eclectic culture of practices that now make up the expanded field of performance, and their stories, reflections and working processes collectively offer a snapshot of contemporary artistic concerns. Many of the pieces have been specially commissioned for this edition and comprise a range of written forms – scholarly, academic, creative, interviews, diary entries, autobiographical, polemical and visual. Ideal for university students and instructors, this volume’s structure and global span invites readers to compare and cross-reference significant approaches outside of the constraints and simplifications of genre, encouraging cross-disciplinary understandings. For those who engage with new, live and innovative approaches to performance and the interplay of radical ideas, The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader is invaluable.

Signs of Performance provides the beginning student with working examples of theatrical analysis. Its range covers the whole of twentieth century theatre, from Stanislavski to Brecht and Samuel Beckett to Robert Wilson. Colin Counsell takes an historical look at theatre as a cultural practice, clearly tracing connections between: * Key practitioners' ideas about performance * The theatrical practices prompted by those ideas * The resulting signs which emerge in performance * The meanings and political consequences of those signs It provides an understandable theoretical framework for the study of theatre as a an signifying practice, and offers vivid explanations in clear, direct language. It opens up this fascinating field to a broad audience.

Molly Abel Travis unites reader theory with an analysis of historical conditions and various cultural contexts in this discussion of the reading and reception of twentieth-century literature in the United States. Travis moves beyond such provisional conclusions as "the text produces the reader" or "the reader produces the text" and considers the ways twentieth-century readers and texts attempt to constitute and appropriate each other at particular cultural moments and according to specific psychosocial exigencies. She uses the overarching concept of the reader in and out of the text both to differentiate the reader implied by the text from the actual reader and to discuss such in-and-out movements that occur in the process of reading as the alternation between immersion and interactivity and between role playing and unmasking. Unlike most reader theorists, Travis is concerned with the agency of the reader. Her conception of agency in reading is informed by performance, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories. This agency involves compulsive, reiterative performance in which readers attempt to find themselves by going outside the self--engaging in literary role playing in the hope of finally and fully identifying the self through self-differentiation. Furthermore, readers never escape a social context; they are both constructed and actively constructing in that they read as part of interpretive communities and are involved in collaborative creativity or what Kendall Walton calls "collective imagining."

Community Performance: A Reader is the first book to provide comprehensive teaching materials for this significant part of the theatre studies curriculum. It brings together core writings and critical approaches to community performance work, presenting practices in the UK, USA, Australia and beyond. Offering a comprehensive anthology of key writings in the vibrant field of community performance, spanning dance, theatre and visual practices, this Reader uniquely combines classic writings from major theorists and practitioners such as Augusto Boal, Paolo Freire, Dwight Conquergood and Jan Cohen Cruz, with newly commissioned essays that bring the anthology right up to date with current practice. This book can be used as a stand-alone text, or together with its companion volume, Community Performance: An Introduction, to offer an accessible and classroom-friendly introduction to the field of community performance.

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

The Performance Studies Reader is a lively and much-needed anthology of critical writings on the burgeoning discipline of performance studies. It provides an overview of the full range of performance theory for undergraduates at all levels, and beginning graduate students in performance studies, theatre, performing arts and cultural studies. The collection is designed as a companion to Richard Schechner's popular Performance Studies: an Introduction (Routledge, 2002), but is also ideal as a stand-alone text. Henry Bial collects together key critical pieces from the field, referred to as 'suggested readings' in Performance Studies: an Introduction. He also broadens the discussion with additional selections. The structure and themes of the Reader closely follow those of Schechner's companion textbook. The articles in each section focus particularly on three primary areas in performance studies, theatre, anthropology and sociology/cultural studies.