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Journal articles on the topic 'Contemporary American theater'
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1
Krasner, David, Lisa M. Anderson, Nadine George-Graves, et al. "African American Theatre." Theatre Survey 47, no. 2 (2006): 191–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557406000159.
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David Krasner: In surveying contemporary London theatre, New York Times critic Ben Brantley reported that the Tricycle Theatre hadinaugurated a season of African-American plays with the commandingly titled but obscure Walk Hard, Talk Loud, a play by Abram Hill from the early1940's. Abram who? The name meant nothing to me, but Abram Hill (1910–1986) was a founder and director of the American Negro Theater in New York (1940–1951) and a playwright, it seems, of considerable verve.3That Abram Hill and the American Negro Theatre—the most important black theatre company during the mid-twentieth century—has flown below the radar is indicative of how much work still needs to be accomplished.
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ChoSookHee and 김시우. "Multicultural Voices in the Contemporary American Theater." Journal of Foreign Studies ll, no. 43 (2018): 259–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.15755/jfs.2018..43.259.
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Friedman, Edward H. "The Quixotic Template in Contemporary American Theater." Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura 30, no. 2 (2015): 2–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cnf.2015.0017.
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SENGUPTA, ASHIS. "Staging Diaspora: South Asian American Theater Today." Journal of American Studies 46, no. 4 (2012): 831–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875812000011.
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This essay attempts to show how contemporary South Asian American theater deals with a wide range of South Asian American experience and in so doing has created a “new aesthetic” within American theater. The South Asian American experience is a diaspora experience, but in the contemporary wider sense of the term. The plays under study are about the old and new home, about people assimilating into the mainstream or navigating between two cultures or even negotiating a transnational identity. They deal with contested ideas of nation, nationality and allegiance, and also explore the South Asian female body in the new culture. Central to my study are the works of emerging South Asian American playwrights. I have carefully chosen a full-length play by each of them, two only in the case of short plays, and paired them under separate rubrics in such a way as to argue how they represent the diverse yet connected, changing yet pervasive, historical, cultural and psychological tropes of the South Asian American diaspora. The essay, however, does not claim that the body of work chosen for the current essay – or the rubrics, for that matter – fully expresses “South Asian America” or its theater.
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Tabares, Vivian Martínez. "Muros (o la socialización amorosa) y ¡¡¡Guan Melón!!! ¡¡¡Tu Melón!!! Mujeres en la escena latinoamericana decolonial." ouvirOUver 13, no. 1 (2017): 40. http://dx.doi.org/10.14393/ouv20-v13n1a2017-3.
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Este artigo discute a cena teatral latino americana contemporânea com deliberada vocação política. Destacando as significativas obras criadas por mulheres que constroem o discurso decolonial.
 
 ABSTRACT 
 This article discussed the contemporary Latin American theater scene with a deliberate political vocation. Highlighting the significant works created by women who construct the decolonial discourse.
 
 Keywords: Contemporary latin american scene; women's dramaturgy; Group El Ciervo Encantado;
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Lippert, Leopold. "Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater by Jacqueline O’Connor." Comparative Drama 49, no. 1 (2015): 98–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2015.0002.
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Tanner-Kennedy, Dana. "America’s Postsecular Stages." Theater 50, no. 2 (2020): 5–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/01610775-8154777.
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Dana Tanner-Kennedy stakes a claim for an unacknowledged category of contemporary American theater: postsecular theater. She argues that religious belief becomes a matter of choice in a postsecular era that struggles between post-truth reality and transcendental belief. Through in-depth readings of contemporary plays and performances—such as Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, Stew’s Passing Strange, and the Wooster Group’s Early Shaker Spirituals—Tanner-Kennedy suggests that these works rescript existing religious values and counter the historic secularity of the American dramatic canon since modernism. She advocates for a renewed emphasis on “religious literacy” in education so that academics and critics may better understand these works and their successors.
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Katrib, Ruba. "Representation and identity: Reflections on presenting contemporary art in an American museum." Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World 15, no. 1-2 (2021): 199–214. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jciaw_00048_1.
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This text is a curatorial reflection upon the process of organizing the exhibition Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011, which took place at MoMA PS1 in 2019. The text questions the possibilities and limits of decolonial curating in an American museum and analyses the reception of Iraqi contemporary art in a Western context.
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Bixler, Jacqueline E., and Amalia Gladhart. "The Leper in Blue. Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater." Hispania 84, no. 4 (2001): 806. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3657852.
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Magnarelli, Sharon, and Amalia Gladhart. "The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater." Hispanic Review 71, no. 2 (2003): 284. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3247199.
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Carpenter, Victoria, and Amalia Gladhart. "The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater." Modern Language Review 97, no. 4 (2002): 1012. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3738700.
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Szuster, Magdalena. "“Alchemy and smoke in a bottle” – contemporary improvisational theater in Poland and the United States." Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica 40, no. 2 (2018): 107–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/1505-9057.40.05.
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The article is an attempt to capture improvisational theater as a modern dynamic phenomenon through analyzing its features, definitions and traits in order to characterize the genre and to systematize the current state of knowledge on the subject matter. By comparing and contrasting various aspects and notions of impro(v) in Poland and the United States, the study not only looks at the theater of improvisation through the prism of the “relocation” of the form from its original grounds and implementing it in within a different tradition, but also shows the experimental flexibility of the genre within different cultural traditions and structures. Based largely on interviews with Polish and American improvisers alike, this article is an in-medias-res case study of the contemporary improvised theater in Poland and the USA.
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Lampe, Eelka. "Disruptions in Representation: Anne Bogart's Creative Encounter with East Asian Performance Traditions." Theatre Research International 22, no. 2 (1997): 105–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883300020514.
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The avant-garde theatre director Anne Bogart has made her name in the U.S. theatre community through her deconstructions of modern classics such as the musical South Pacific (1984), Cinderella/Cendrillon (1988) after Massenet's opera, Büchner's Danton's Death (1986), Gorki's Summerfolk (1989), William Inge's Picnic (1992), as well as through her idiosyncratic and original dance/theatre ‘compositions’ developed collabortively with her company, the Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI). Prominent among such compositions have been 1951 (1986) on art and politics during the McCarthy era, No Plays, No Poetry (1988) on Brecht's theoretical writings, American Vaudeville (1991), and The Medium (1993) on the writings of the Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan. Bogart has been acclaimed for her astute directing of the work by contemporary playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, Charles Mee Jr. and Eduardo Machado.
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Komporaly, Jozefina. "Translating Hungarian Drama for the British and the American Stage." Hungarian Cultural Studies 14 (July 16, 2021): 164–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2021.434.
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Reflecting on my experience of translating contemporary Hungarian theater into English, this paper examines the fluidity of dramatic texts in their original and in translation, and charts collaborations between playwrights, translators and theater-makers. Mindful of the responsibility when working from a “minor” to a “major” language, the paper signals the discrepancy between the indigenous and foreign ‘recognition circuit’ and observes that translations from lesser-known languages are predominantly marked by a supply-driven agenda. Through case studies from the work of Transylvanian-Hungarian playwright András Visky, the paper argues that considerations regarding such key tenets of live theater as “speakability” and “performability” have to be addressed in parallel with correspondences in meaning, rhythm and spirit. The paper also points out that register and the status of certain lexical choices differ in various languages. Nuancing the trajectory of Visky’s plays in English translation, this paper makes a case for translations created with and for their originals, in full knowledge of the source and receiving cultures, and with a view to their potential in performance. The paper posits the need for multiple options encoded in the translation journey, including hypothetical concepts for future mise-en-scène, and situates the translator as a key participant in the performance making process.
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Saal, Ilka. "‘Let's Hurt Someone’: Violence and Cultural Memory in the Plays of Neil LaBute." New Theatre Quarterly 24, no. 4 (2008): 322–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x0800047x.
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In this essay Ilka Saal examines one of the most perplexing aspects of Neil LaBute's work: his deployment of excessive and gratuitous violence. She insists that such deployment of violence has little to do with a humanist critique of the propensity for evil in all of us, nor with the playwright's biography (as suggested by a number of critics), but instead functions as a satirical interrogation of the mythological significance attributed to violence in American culture. The casual cruelties of LaBute's ordinary mid-Americans point up the central and ‘ordinary’ role that violence has played in the nation's history and self-understanding. Focusing on the example of the one-act play a gaggle of saints and drawing on the theories of Jan Assmann and Richard Slotkin, she shows in what ways LaBute uses violence to interrogate the country's cultural memory and to alert us to the general lethargy that has settled over the nation with regard to the historical violence it systematically exerted against its Others. Ilka Saal received her PhD in Literature from Duke University, North Carolina and is now working as Associate Professor of English at the University of Richmond, Virginia, where she teaches modern and contemporary American literature and culture. She is the author of New Deal Theater: the Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Dramatizing the Disease: Representations of AIDS on the US American Stage (Tectum, 1997), and co author of Passionate Politics: the Cultural Work of American Melodrama from the Early Republic to the Present (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008).
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Hassan Al Ghareeb, Sanaa’ Lazim. "Man’s Politics Towards God: A Study in American and Iraqi Theatre Represented by Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes; Perestroika and Ali Abdul Nabi Azzaidi’s Ya Rab/Oh!God." Advances in Language and Literary Studies 9, no. 4 (2018): 13. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.9n.4p.13.
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Contemporary Theater is greatly influenced by the changes happening politically and socially all over the world. Man no longer looks for being part of a society or defining himself according to certain standards of tradition; he/she no longer search for their identity or feel suffocated by the new technology, his main concern in contemporary age is to redefine the identity away from politics and the judgmental eye of the society he is living in. Man is calling for resurrections of the god he admitted killing during the past millennium. A new perception of that god has been defined and this seems to be interesting in a world ruled by fighting sectors of extremists who are classified into two categories those who are against the rule of that god and those who are with. This paper examines the perception of that god in two different societies by two authors through studying their plays to explain how this theme is pictured by the two. The first is the American controversial playwright Tony Kushner who’s Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes; Perestroika raised epic questions in this matter, the other playwright is the Iraqi dramatist Ali Abdul Nabi Azzaidi who’s play Ya Rab/Oh!God introduced a new trend in the Iraqi theater. The paper adopts a socio-political school of criticism to achieve its goals.
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Hernández, Paola. "Staging Words, Performing Worlds: Intertextuality and Nation in Contemporary Latin American Theater de Gail Bulman." Revista Iberoamericana 74, no. 224 (2008): 821–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/reviberoamer.2008.5264.
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Magnarelli, Sharon. "Staging Words, Performing Worlds: Intertextuality and Nation in Contemporary Latin American Theater (review)." Latin American Theatre Review 41, no. 2 (2008): 168–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ltr.2008.0008.
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Mundim, Isabella Santos. "História, utopia e contranarrativa da nação em Angels in America." Aletria: Revista de Estudos de Literatura 19, no. 1 (2009): 169–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.17851/2317-2096.19.1.169-179.
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Resumo: Este artigo visa analisar Angels in America, a Gay Fantasia on National Themes, do dramaturgo norte-americano Tony Kushner. Kushner, neste que é seu trabalho de maior impacto, retoma eventos e figuras da história recente de seu país, com foco na crise que a epidemia de AIDS desencadeia, o descaso do governo Reagan em relação às minorias que a epidemia vitima e a consequente devastação que acomete a comunidade gay da época. Nessa perspectiva, o trabalho de Kushner supera o mero registro e aponta para acontecimentos e pessoas ausentes do relato dominante. Para além da versão oficial, emerge aí uma contranarrativa da nação, comprometida com a construção de uma memória dos Estados Unidos a partir do viés da margem e da exclusão.Palavras-chave: Tony Kushner; dramaturgia norte-americana contemporânea; contranarrativa da nação.Abstract: This article analyses Angels in America, a gay fantasia on national themes, by the American dramatist Tony Kushner. In what many believe to be his major work, Kushner weaves the lives of fictional and historical characters into a web of social, political, and sexual revelations, focusing on the discovery of AIDS, the disregard with which politicians marginalized its early spread and the impact of the disease on the gay community. As it is, Kushner’s work rethinks the recent past and portrays alternatives absent from the dominant reports. Moving beyond the official version of events, Angels in America is thus a counter-narrative, one where the master narrative implodes on itself, one where new stories arise out of the ashes of that explosion.Keywords: Tony Kushner; contemporary American theater; national narrative and counter-narrative.
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Padyan, Yu Yu. "PERFORMANCE AS A CONTEMPORARY ART PHENOMENON." Arts education and science 1, no. 1 (2021): 148–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.36871/hon.202101017.
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The end of the XIXth — beginning of the XXth centuries is a special period in the history of world art culture, characterized by the emergence of such trends as modernism, post-impressionism, avant-gardism, abstractionism, cubism, surrealism and many others. The motto of XXth-century art was "Art into Life". Often new trends became a response to the demand of the mass consumer. One of them was the art of performance. Appearing as a rejection of traditional practices of painting, sculpture and theater, performance organically incorporated wellknown and new approaches and technologies that caused an alternative way of working with space and time. It should be noted that historiography focuses on materials that explore the origins of performance and installation on a global scale. The most significant are the works by American, Western European and Polish authors. At the same time, the historiographic review showed a lack of a large scientific heritage of Russian artists in the field of performance: the process of forming modern art criticism, which would reflect the later history of performance than the first half of the XXth century, is still out of the researchers' sight.
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Burt, Ramsay. "The Specter of Interdisciplinarity." Dance Research Journal 41, no. 1 (2009): 3–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0149767700000504.
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Theater dance is an interdisciplinary form, and some of the most interesting advances in progressive and experimental dance work in recent years have been interdisciplinary in nature. Where Anglo-American dance scholarship is concerned, however, a “theoretical turn” that has led some dance scholars to develop interdisciplinary methodologies has proved highly controversial. Interdisciplinarity is in danger of becoming a specter haunting dance scholarship.Dance has not been alone in finding this transition difficult. As art historian and cultural theorist Mieke Bal has recently noted, one challenge facing the academy today is to find “a theoretical link between linguistic, visual and aural domains that blend so consistently in contemporary culture but remain so insistently separated as fields of study in the academy” (Bal 1999a, 10). Where dance is concerned, corporeality needs to be added to Bal's list of domains. This essay explores some of the reasons underlying resistance among Anglo-American dance scholars to the use of interdisciplinary methodologies. By doing so it aims to give an account of the public space in which recent examples of theater dance from Europe and the United States map out complex webs of relationships between corporeal, linguistic, visual, and aural levels of signification.
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Hossein Oroskhan, Muhammad, and Bahee Hadaegh. "THE THEATER OF A LIBERAL IRONIST: THE AMERICAN WEST AND THE FEMALE SELF IN SHEPARD’S A LIE OF MIND." Folia linguistica et litteraria XII, no. 35 (2021): 27–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.31902/fll.35.2021.2.
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The formation and the establishment of the United States firmly adheres to two beliefs of the American dream and the American west. Though the American dream was part of American culture from its beginning, the other one became the driving force of American culture in the second part of the twentieth century when Sam Shepard began his career as a playwright. During this time, American theater emerged into a main arena for the presentation of the American west. Nevertheless, Shepard attempted to avoid playing with the duality of reality and illusion in his presentation of the American west when he put forward his characters to face and experience the world to then discover their selves. At the pinnacle of his success, he wrote A Lie of the Mind, a play that is filled with heroines who would leave the violent world of men to change their destinies. As such, Shepard endeavored to free their selves and flow them to experience a new world. Likewise, Shepard’s contemporary American philosopher, Richard Rorty, believed in the importance of self and the necessity of its redescription to create his ideal society. However, hopeless to find a philosophy model, he lends to literature to find his liberal ironist. On this account, the following study is not only to provide Sam Shepard as a liberal ironist in Rorty’s term but also to reveal certain puzzling features in Shepard’s A Lie of Mind, not least of which is the reason why his female characters blow the world of the American west to search for a new world.
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O'Leary, James. "Oklahoma!, “Lousy Publicity,” and the Politics of Formal Integration in the American Musical Theater." Journal of Musicology 31, no. 1 (2014): 139–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2014.31.1.139.
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The achievements of Rodger and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) are well known: since the musical opened, critics have proclaimed it a new version of the genre, distinguished by its “integrated” form, in which all aspects of the production—score, script, costume, set, and choreography—are interrelated and inseparable. Although today many scholars acknowledge that Oklahoma! was not the first musical to implement the concept of integration, the musical is often considered revolutionary. Building on the work of Tim Carter, I use the correspondence and press materials in the Theatre Guild Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University to situate the idea of integration into two intimately related discourses: contemporary notions of aesthetic prestige and World War II-era politics. By comparing the advertising of Oklahoma! to the Guild’s publicity for its previous musical productions (especially Porgy and Bess, which was labeled integrated in 1935), I demonstrate that press releases from the show’s creative team strategically deployed rhetoric and vocabulary that variously depicted the show as both highbrow and lowbrow, while distancing it from middlebrow entertainment. I then describe how the aesthetic register implied by this tiered rhetoric carried political overtones, connotations that are lost to us today because the word “integration” has become reified as a purely formal concept.
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Hensley, Michelle. "It's Just a Play (and That's Enough)." Theatre Survey 57, no. 3 (2016): 415–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557416000429.
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Ten Thousand Things Theater performs plays for as many different kinds of audience as we can. We are a strictly professional theatre company that works with the best actors in the Twin Cities (our home for the past twenty-three years), performing Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, Brecht, American musicals, and contemporary plays, taking each production to seven or eight correctional facilities (men's, women's, and juvenile), nine or ten low-income centers (homeless shelters, adult-education centers, housing projects, detox centers, immigrant centers, Indian reservations, rural areas), as well as doing twelve to sixteen shows for the paying general public. That's it—taking a play directly to extremely diverse audiences in order to engage with as many different kinds of people as possible. We do not work with individual marginalized communities over stretches of time to create theatre pieces, nor do we integrate community members as actors or writers or designers in the process. This is of course very valuable work, and such work may indeed change people's lives—it's just not what we do. We have never set out to try to change anyone's life. We never will begin with that intention. We simply try to tell stories as well as we possibly can, engaging with each audience as deeply and strongly as possible.
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Killebrew, Zachary. "“A Poor, Washed Out, Pale Creature”: Passing, Dracula, and the Jazz Age Vampire." MELUS 44, no. 3 (2019): 112–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlz023.
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Abstract Although critics have repeatedly referenced the stagey or cinematic elements that characterize Passing’s (1929) narrative structure and occasionally observed its gothic aesthetics, thus far no critic has attempted to contextualize Nella Larsen’s novel within the American stage and film culture of the early twentieth century or the concurrent revitalization of America’s interest in the Gothic in film and theater. Situated primarily in New York and helmed by many of the same individuals, the Harlem and Gothic Renaissances of the interwar years cooperated to reframe racial and aesthetic discourses, as Harlem art absorbed and reimagined gothic art, culture, and slang and imbued Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and its successors with covert racial commentary. This essay studies Nella Larsen’s Passing within this context, paying special attention to the influence of American racial discourse on Horace Liveright’s 1927 stage version of Dracula and its mutually influential relationship with black theater, art, and discourse. Melding contemporary archetypes of the Jazz Age vamp and gothic vampire to construct its liminal heroine, Clare Kendry, as a gothic figure in the vamp/vampire paradigm, Passing repurposes gothic elements to challenge racial binaries and to destabilize the racist status quo. This study suggests the significant extent to which Harlem Renaissance authors not only adapted the Gothic within their own literature but also reinvented and redefined it in the popular discourses of the twentieth century.
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Riccio, Thomas. "Shadows in the Sun: Context, Process, and Performance in Ethiopia." New Theatre Quarterly 28, no. 3 (2012): 272–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x12000450.
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Andegna (The First) was developed and performed during the fall and winter of 2009–10 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This article examines the complex social, political, and cultural contexts that informed the training, workshops, and process of creating an ensemble and performance in a time of national transformation. Urbanization and the crossing currents of Africa, Islam, Christian Orthodoxy, capitalism, the West, and technology prompted the re-conceptualization of performance, its function, and expression. In this article Thomas Riccio highlights the methodologies of reinventing an indigenous performance that is respectful of local traditions yet contemporary and accessible. He discusses how performance provides a forum for revealing social, political, and cultural trauma, and itself becomes an act of affirmation – an assertion of protest and healing that makes visible, immediate, and tactile the histories and unresolved issues haunting modern Ethiopia. Thomas Riccio, is Professor of Performance and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, having previously been Professor of Theatre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Artistic Director of Chicago's Organic Theater Company, Resident Director and Dramaturg, the Cleveland Play House, Assistant Literary Director at the American Repertory Theatre, Visiting Professor at the University of Dar es Salaam and the Korean National University for the Arts, and Artistic Director of Tuma Theatre, an Alaska Native performance group. He has worked extensively in the area of indigenous performance, ritual, and shamanism, conducting workshops, research, and devising numerous performances in Africa, Russia, Siberia, Korea, China, Vietnam, and Alaska. He was declared a ‘Cultural Hero’ of the Sakha Republic in central Siberia.
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Duckett, Bob. "Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater, 1930‐20102012137James Fisher. Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater, 1930‐2010. Lanham, MD and Plymouth: Scarecrow Press 2011. , ISBN: 978 0 8108 5532 8 (hardback); 978 0 8108 7950 8 (e‐book) £110/$169 2 vols. Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts." Reference Reviews 26, no. 3 (2012): 47–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09504121211211505.
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Dharwadker, Vinay. "Emotion in Motion: The Nāṭyashāstra, Darwin, and Affect Theory". Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 130, № 5 (2015): 1381–404. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2015.130.5.1381.
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A work of classical Indian theory and practice, Bharata's Nāṭyashāstra offers a comprehensive account of emotion and of the production, communication, and reception of representations of it in dance, music, poetry, and theater. This essay examines remarkable points of convergence and divergence between the third-century Sanskrit text and three influential modern Euro-American accounts: Charles Darwin's mapping of involuntary expressions of emotion in human beings and animals, William James's aggregation of emotions in the stream of consciousness, and Sylvan Tomkins's atlas of primary affects that links neurobiology and cybernetics. My comparative analysis highlights the Nāṭyashāstra's contributions to our understanding of the connections of emotion to cognition, consciousness, and causality; of the combinatorial constitution of emotions; and of treatments of emotion in contemporary affect theory and performance theory. The essay concludes with an exploration of Bharata's and Aristotle's models of mimesis and of their mutual differences regarding the representation of emotion in the verbal and performing arts.
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Shimakawa, Karen. "(Un)Doing the Missionary Position: Gender Asymmetry in Contemporary Asian American Women's Writing. Phillipa KafkaAbout Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater. Dorinne Kondo." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25, no. 1 (1999): 269–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/495431.
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Mitra, Royona. "Talking Politics of Contact Improvisation with Steve Paxton." Dance Research Journal 50, no. 3 (2018): 6–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0149767718000335.
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In the autumn of 2015, on the back of the publication of my monograph Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (Mitra 2015), I was settling into my Brunel University London-sponsored sabbatical to kick-start my postdoctoral research project, then titled “Historicizing and Mapping British Physical Theatre.” At that stage, this new field of study, methodology, and tone of enquiry felt significantly different from the decolonial spirit of my book, which examines the works of the British-Bangladeshi dance artist Akram Khan at the intersections of postcoloniality, race, gender, sexuality, mobility, interculturalism, and globalization, arguing for his choreographic choices as discerning political acts that decenter the whiteness of contemporary western dance from his position within this center. With this new project I was keen, instead, to investigate the development of “British physical theatre” as an interdisciplinary genre that emerged interstitially between and through its “double legacy in both avant-garde theatre and dance” (Sánchez-Colberg 2007, 21) with a particular emphasis on what the import of the choreographic vocabulary of partnering would have brought to these experiments. Very conscious that the now ubiquitous aesthetic of partnering in contemporary Euro-American theater dance derived its roots from the somatic explorations of contact improvisation, I was intrigued to examine how the genre of British physical theatre would have engaged with choreographic touch from its somatic beginnings in contact improvisation to its politicized and aestheticized manifestation in partnering. I was also conscious, of course, of the role that Steve Paxton, the artist whose name has become synonymous with contact improvisation's inception and development in 1970s United States, had to play in teaching contact improvisation in the dance program at Dartington College of Arts in the United Kingdom (UK) in the 1970s and 1980s. Driven by a need to examine the potential relationship between Dartington's 1970s movement experiments with Paxton and contact improvisation, and the emergence of partnering as a key aesthetic within British contemporary dance, specifically its manifestation in physical theatre, I wanted to interview Paxton himself. Needless to say, I was of course fully aware of the difficulty in making such an important research opportunity materialize. However, within months, the remarkable generosity of our dance studies network, in this instance embodied by Professors Susan Foster and Ann Cooper Albright, and the dance artist Lisa Nelson, led me to the inbox of Steve Paxton himself in November 2015. Paxton was instantly responsive to my e-mail communications, and deeply invested and committed to sharing his experiences and insights with me. We arranged our Skype interview for early 2016, agreeing that this would give me enough time to research existing interviews with Paxton, in print and on video, to ensure that I could delineate my own questions for him in productive ways. The more I researched, the more a feature of the extensive archive of interviews with Paxton revealed itself: the predominant absence of bodies and perspectives of color from the early days of contact improvisation's experiments. This absence, in turn, became more and more present in my thinking.
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Lacko, Ivan. "FeArt and Dance-xiety in Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Pursuit of Happiness: Artificiality, Authenticity and Fun as the Building Stones of a Hopeful Performative." Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 7, no. 1 (2019): 123–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2019-0009.
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Abstract Pursuit of Happinessis a 2017 co-production of the American group Nature Theater of Oklahoma and the Slovenia-based, multinational En-Knap dance company. The genre-defying production provocatively misleads the audience through the textual as well as performative aspects of the piece. From slapstick scenes, through dynamic dance movements, all the way to philosophically challenging perceptions about the nature of our reality, the play balances on the edge of timid expressions of existentialist angst, Baudrillardian overload of simulacra, and an attempt to address a mechanical reproduction of art (and life) reminiscent of Walter Benjamin.This contribution endeavours to present an analysis of Pursuit of Happiness as an explosive contemporary piece that portrays a disintegrating world, where fear and anxiety engulf people’s lives as suddenly as the play’s formal structure breaks and changes. Following Jill Dolan’s ruminations about “hopeful performatives”, the paper seeks to plot out a set of such performatives and narratives in the selected play, and to show how they function in the liminal combination of dance and drama, movement and performance, art and life, and how these narratives can become part of what Elliot Leffler and Michael Mellas call divergent dramaturgy.
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Manzor, Lillian. "Staging Words, Performing Worlds: Intertextuality and Nation in Contemporary Latin American Theater. By Gail A. Bulman. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Pp. 276 + illus. $55 Hb." Theatre Research International 34, no. 2 (2009): 209–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s030788330900460x.
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Curseen, Allison S. "Black Girlish Departure and the “Semiotics of Theater” in Harriet Jacobs's Narrative; or, Lulu & Ellen: Four Opening Acts." Theatre Survey 60, no. 1 (2018): 91–121. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557418000510.
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Harriet Jacobs'sIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girlwas edited and introduced to its antebellum reading public in 1861 by the white abolitionist Lydia Marie Child. Nearly a century and a half later, another Lydia once again brings Jacobs's story to the public attention asHarriet Jacobs, a stage play by critically acclaimed African American playwright Lydia R. Diamond. Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre commissioned and debuted the play in 2008 as part of its youth program. Regarded as Diamond's best work, the play ends with Jacobs, recently liberated from her hiding space of seven years, declaring to the audience, “But it was above Grandmother's shed, in the cold and dark, in the heat and solitude, that I found my voice.” This aspirational claim to an unshackled black girl voice reverberates a twenty-first-century renewal of black women artists, scholars, and activists committed to recovering, proclaiming, and celebrating black girls. With subsequent back-to-back productions in 2010 by the Underground Railway Theater and Kansas City Repertory Theatre (KCRep), the play heralds the millennial energy of both the 2013 #blackgirlmagic social-media campaign and the 2014 formation of black girlhood studies (BGS), an academic field that prioritizes “a rigorous commitment to locating the voices of black girls,” and elucidating the “local” intersections of race, gender, and other areas in which “black girls’ agency comes into view.” It is precisely this energetic recovery of a black girl voice on the contemporary stage—a Harriet for the new millennial—that makesHarriet Jacobsso attractive. Describing her vision for the KCRep production, director Jessica Thebus stated: “Our task as I see it, today, is to tell the story with the clarity and energy of Harriet Jacobs's voice with her humor, with her intellect, and consciousness.” And promoting Wayne State's 2017 production, Dale Dorlin writes:For director Billicia Charnelle Hines, Harriet Jacobs is not a slave play, but a prime example of a heroine's journey. “This is an adventure story,” says Hines, “about a heroine who, no matter what, was determined to be free. That's someone I look up to. … I want people to think of her as a hero.”Hines's focus on the hero and adventure genre echoes the comments of Hallie Gordon, director of the original Steppenwolf production, which located the play within another genre of Western subject formation, the bildungsroman; for Gordon, “Harriet Jacobsis about the strength of this one girl who turns into a woman in front of our very eyes.” Critic Nancy Churnin, lauding the play's accessible rendering of a young female who finds in dismal confinement not only freedom but her voice, titled her 2016 review of the Dallas-based African American Repertory Theater's production, “A Slave Tale with Echoes of Anne Frank.” Resonant with Diamond's own desire for “Harriet Jacobs … to exist, theatrically, alongside Anne Frank and Joan of Arc,” Churnin's title presumably refers toThe Diary of Anne Frank,Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's 1955 stage adaptation of Anne Frank'sDiary of a Young Girl(first performed at the Cort Theatre on Broadway). Still, considering that Jacobs lived well before Frank, the comparison is curious. Reflected in that curiousness is something of the irony of lauding a portrait of historical black girlhood that obscures the minor complexities of a “slave tale” or “slave play.” The comparison effectively fits the black girl into a role of heroic girl power shaped by a history of white girlhood, in which the slave girl, coming too early, can be imagined only anachronistically at best.
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Versényi, Adam. "Ritual Meets the Postmodern: Contemporary Mexican Theatre." New Theatre Quarterly 8, no. 31 (1992): 221–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00006849.
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Adam Versényi here considers responses to the call for a new kind of Latin American theatre, combining anthropological awareness of the area's history and culture with the technical abilities and thematic sophistication of western theatre, through an analysis of two plays which suggests both the benefits and pitfalls of such an approach. These are Nahui Ollin, a shadow-puppet play dramatizing episodes from Nahuatl cosmogeny, and Los enemigos, a contemporary adaptation of the unique Mayan script, the Rabinal Achí. Adam Versényi has written widely on the theatre of Latin America, including a study of recent developments in liberation theology and liberation theatre, and for NTQ two articles on earlier periods – in NTQ16 (1988), on the theatricality of pre-Columbian performance rituals, and in NTQ19 (1989) on the adaptation of Aztec rituals by the mendicant friars who came in the wake of Cortés – this piece being selected as the ‘Younger Scholar's Prizewinning Article’ of the year by the American Society for Theatre Research.
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Rainey, Sue. "Illustration “Urgently Required”: The Picturesque Palestine Project, 1878–83." Prospects 30 (October 2005): 181–260. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0361233300002039.
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In the early 1880s, the book Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt brought to the American and British marketplace the most comprehensive visual survey of the Holy Land that had yet appeared. It came at a time when Protestant Christians in both countries felt the need was “urgent” for “accurate” illustrations of these regions that could serve to explain and “defend” the Scriptures against science and the new biblical criticism. To obtain such images, the publishing firms of D. Appleton in New York City and James S. Virtue in London sent the artists John Douglas Woodward and Harry Fenn on extended sketching trips in 1878 and 1879. Published serially from 1881 to 1883, Picturesque Palestine's nine hundred pages and six hundred black-and-white images would constitute the most conspicuous response to the contemporary appeals for illustrations of the Holy Land (Figure 1).At the same time, it would present these Eastern Mediterranean regions so significant to the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam through the lens of the picturesque — employing familiar aesthetic conventions long popular in British and American view books. In this approach, the artist or traveler searches for elements in the landscape that conform to preset ideas of what constitutes a picture — in this case, those distinguished by pleasing variety, irregularity of form, rough texture, and contrasts of light and dark. Thus, the book is a prime, and quite late, example of the “visualisation of the travel experience,” in which scenic tourism replaced the opportunity to meet and converse with others as the primary appeal of travel. Its comprehensive visual survey is also akin to the displays at the world's fairs so popular in this period that presented various regions and peoples as spectacle or theater.
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Elliott, M. A. "The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre; Stages of Life: Transcultural Performance and Identity in U.S. Latina Theater; Legacy of Rage: Jewish Masculinity, Violence, and Culture; Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture." American Literature 75, no. 2 (2003): 450–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-75-2-450.
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Alshetawi, Mahmoud F. "Combating 9/11 Negative Images of Arabs in American Culture: A Study of Yussef El Guindi’s Drama." Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies 7, no. 3 (2020): 177. http://dx.doi.org/10.29333/ejecs/458.
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This study intends to examine the dramatic endeavours of Arab American playwrights to make their voices heard through drama, performance, and theatre in light of transnationalism and diaspora theory. The study argues that Arab American dramatists and theatre groups attempt to counter the hegemonic polemics against Arabs and Muslims, which have madly become characteristic of contemporary American literature and media following 9/11. In this context, this study examines Yussef El Guindi, an Egyptian-American, and his work. El Guindi has devoted most of his plays to fight the stereotypes that are persistently attributed to Arabs and Muslims, and his drama presents issues relating to identity formation and what this formation means to be Arab American. A scrutiny of these plays shows that El Guindi has dealt with an assortment of topics and issues all relating to the stereotypes of Arab Americans and the Middle East. These issues include racial profiling and surveillance, stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims in the cinema and theatre, and acculturation and clash of cultures.
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Donahue, William. "The Impossibility of the Wenderoman: History, Retrospective, and Conciliation." Konturen 4 (May 13, 2013): 167. http://dx.doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.4.0.3191.
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“The Impossibility of the Wenderoman” argues against the conventional conception of the Wenderoman (and of thematically related films and plays) that views it essentially as a kind of cultural document of the German “Wende.” Placing the question within the larger problematic of historical fiction and political literature, this paper notes first that the very genre is itself an impossibility insofar as its boundaries are ever-expanding. The quintessential contribution of the genre, this paper argues, is twofold: retrospective and “conciliatory.” It is the first insofar as we are willing to look beyond literature and film that focuses principally on the Wende per se, and instead take Unification as a juncture from which truly to look back (taking advantage of the new temporal perspective given us by “the turn”), and thus reevaluate Cold War conventions, specifically those governing German-German and German-American cultural relations that often went unquestioned in the postwar period. In other words, the Wenderoman dimension I elaborate (drawing especially on Kempowski’s Letzte Gruesse) may contribute to a more profound understanding of the period it “closes” than the one it ostensibly celebrates and inaugurates. Secondly, the Wenderoman functions as a prominent vehicle of cultural memory, preserving various moments of a Marxist-inspired social agenda for future generations. Agamben’s notion of “the contemporary” as well as foundational concepts of “cultural memory” are useful here. The discussion features well-known films (Good Bye, Lenin! and Das Leben der Anderen), theater (Brussig’s Leben bis Maenner), as well as several novels. Whether this process of cultural “sifting” will remain purely elegiac, or serve as a resource for imagining alternative social possibilities in the future is of course impossible to know—both because it is far too general of a hypothesis, and still far too early to tell.
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Jesenko, Primož. "Balbina’s “theatre in the round”." Maska 31, no. 181 (2016): 160–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/maska.31.181-182.160_7.
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With an overview of the life and work of Balbina Battelino Baranovič (1921–2015), the article emphasises her role in the Slovenian theatre scene. She founded theatres, researched contemporary theatrical practices, and, thanks to a strong connection to French and American theatre, broadened the horizons of the Slovenian and Yugoslav theatre of the time, while enabling actors to flourish under contemporary approaches. The founder of the Experimental Theatre, she also introduced theatre in the round to the Slovenian artistic space.
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Hill, Errol, Genevieve Fabre, and Melvin Dixon. "Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre." Black American Literature Forum 20, no. 4 (1986): 459. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2904444.
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Bratić, Vesna. "Is there drama in contemporary America? : is there postmodernism in American drama?: Shepard vs. Mamet - whose America is (more) real?" Acta Neophilologica 48, no. 1-2 (2015): 19–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/an.48.1-2.19-37.
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Judged by the literary research conducted over the last decades of the previous and the first decade of this century, not only was drama an illegitimate offspring in the American literature but was also treated as a weak premature-born child in the postmodernist thought in general. A stage cohabitation of the postmodern experiment and a realist frame in the contemporary theatre is well illustrated by the two popular contemporary playwrights: Sam Shepard and David Mamet. By their creative opus, not only in the fields of drama and theatre, but also in other literary genres (poetry, essay) as well as in film, through a variety of different characters and situations, these two authors reveal a rich variety of the many possible variations of American social (con)text. The society will be read in their plays as a unique cultural text outside which, as Derrida said, there is nothing. America, its myths and contemporary cultural industry, its class, racial and gender conflicts and the two authors established a mutual set of influences. The playwrights borrow raw materials from the treasury of mass culture (or should it, to be true to the new consumer culture, be more appropriate to say a warehouse) break it down and re-assemble fragments into collages that articulate the contemporary issues in more condensed, more intense and more effective ways. Mamet and Shepard borrow from the contemporary culture only to pay it back with interest: they endow the cultural (con)text with a richer content, impregnated with meaning.
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Foster, David William, and Severino Joao Albuquerque. "Violent Acts: A Study of Contemporary Latin American Theatre." South Atlantic Review 56, no. 4 (1991): 132. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3200542.
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Santiago-Reyes, Angel. "Violent Acts: A Study of Contemporary Latin American Theatre." Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 23, no. 45 (1997): 212. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4530904.
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Sullivan, Courtney. "From screen to stage: Mutantes’s sex-positive influence on King Kong Théorie." Contemporary French Civilization: Volume 46, Issue 1 46, no. 1 (2021): 49–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/cfc.2021.3.
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In order to rectify important gaps in scholarship, this article examines how Virginie Despentes’s documentary Mutantes: Féminisme Porno Punk (2009), her autobiographical essay King Kong Théorie (2006), and its theatrical adaptation play off one another to advance the argument that Despentes’s transnational feminism has its roots in the sex-positive movement that began in the United States in the early 1980s.1 At the heart of her work, this feminism influences King Kong Théorie and much of her fiction.2 Despentes, inspired by the sex-positive movement that began in the United States in the early 1980s, interviewed its American pioneers in 2005 for her documentary, Mutantes. These interviews articulate a sex-positive feminism that strives to destigmatize sex work by promoting it as a legitimate, lucrative, and often enjoyable way to earn a living. It resoundingly refutes the notion of the sex worker as victim. Mutantes also focuses on the performances by European postporn collectives trying to find non-binary ways to express sexuality and desire. This “pro-sexe” stance would shape both Despentes’s feminist manifesto King Kong Théorie one year later and her fiction, for she evokes it in brief references to sex workers in her Vernon Subutex trilogy. In a nod to the campy personalities and performers in Mutantes, Vanessa Larré’s production of King Kong Théorie (2018), that she adapted to the theater with Valérie de Dietrich, also aims to educate and challenge. With provocative and jocular scenes and shots, Mutantes and Larré’s play knock viewers and theatergoers off kilter to make them reflect on the ways gender-based and heteronormative binaries stifle both men and women in patriarchal societies. While some of the performances, images, and non-binary sex toys in Mutantes may be upsetting to viewers, that is exactly the point: to defy gender and sexual norms to open up new possibilities for individuals shut out by the binary. Both the documentary and the play tackle taboo subjects with ludic humor in a way that stimulates reflection on the part of the audience in a disarming, unthreatening manner. This paper uncovers the way the camp sensibilities in Mutantes rub off on the play’s adaptation since both capture the humor, joviality, playfulness, and oftentimes self-deprecation of the sex-positive American feminists that worked their way into Despentes’s writing. Mutantes and the play also concretely underscore the ways Despentes’s works are shaping contemporary feminist writers such as Chloé Delaume and Gabrielle Deydier and artists and actors such as Larré and Dietrich.
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Boyle, Catherine M. "From Resistance to Revelation: the Contemporary Theatre in Chile." New Theatre Quarterly 4, no. 15 (1988): 209–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x0000275x.
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Largely as a result of the experimentation and stability of the university theatres founded in the early 'forties, Chilean theatre is among the best-established in Latin America. But how far has its survival since 1973 depended on the regime's sense of the theatre's relative impotence to effect change? Little is known about Chilean theatre in Britain, few plays have been translated, and with rare exceptions those that have found their way here have been limited to ‘solidarity’ audiences. In this article. Catherine M. Boyle, who teaches in the Department of Modern Languages of the University of Strathclyde, considers the various kinds and qualities of theatre that have been produced in Chile since 1973, and draws some conclusions about the nature of freedom of expression and its repression.
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Biers, Katherine. "Practices of Enchantment: The Theatre of Zora Neale Hurston." TDR/The Drama Review 59, no. 4 (2015): 67–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/dram_a_00497.
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Contemporary critical work in the field of new materialism, whose practitioners take seriously the concept of nonhuman agency, has largely neglected the genres of theatre and performance. African American author and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston’s folk revues of the 1930s offer an opportunity to examine the intersections between contemporary new materialist theory and the stage, revealing that black Atlantic performance practices have long explored concepts of nonhuman agency in the service of a cultural and racial politics.
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Aqil, Mammadova Gunay. "American English in Teaching English as a Second Language." International Journal of English Language Studies 3, no. 2 (2021): 52–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.32996/ijels.2021.3.2.7.
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With the lapse of time the two nations- Americans and British always blamed each other for “ruining” English. In this article we aim to trace historical “real culprit” and try to break stereotypes about American English status in teaching English as a second language. In comparison with Great Britain the USA has very short and contemporary history; nevertheless, in today’s world American English exceeds British and other variants of English in so many ways, as well as in the choices of language learners. American English differs from other variants of the English language by 4 specific features: Inclusiveness, Flexibility, Innovativeness and Conservativeness. Notwithstanding, British disapprove of Americans taking so many liberties with their common tongue, linguistic researcher Daniela Popescu in her research mentions the fields of activities in which American words penetrated into British English. She classifies those words under 2 categories: everyday vocabulary (480 terms) and functional varieties (313 terms). In the case of functional varieties, the American influence is present in the areas of computing (10 %), journalism (15 %), broadcasting (24%), advertising and sales (5 %), politics and economics (24%), and travelling and transport (22%). Further on, the words and phrases in the broadcasting area have been grouped as belonging to two areas: film, TV, radio and theatre (83%), and music (17%). The purpose of the research paper is to create safe and reliable image of American English in the field of teaching English as a second language. Americans are accused in “ruining” English and for that reason learners are not apt to learn American English. The combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is used while collecting the data. The study concluded that the real culprits are British who started out to ruin English mainly in in the age of Shakespeare and consequently, Americans inherited this ruin from the British as a result of colonization. Luckily, in the Victorian Age British saved their language from the ruins. The paper discusses how prejudices about American English effect the choices of English learners.
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Özmen, Özlem. "Identity and Gender Politics in Contemporary Shakespearean Rewriting." European Judaism 51, no. 2 (2018): 196–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ej.2017.510226.
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Julia Pascal’s The Yiddish Queen Lear, a dramatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, merges racial identity politics with gender politics as the play both traces the history of the Yiddish theatre and offers a feminist criticism of Shakespeare’s text. The use of Lear as a source text for a play about Jews illustrates that contemporary Jewish engagements with Shakespeare are more varied than reinterpretations of The Merchant of Venice. Identity politics are employed in Pascal’s manifestation of the problematic relationship between Lear and his daughters in the form of a conflict between the play’s protagonist Esther, who struggles to preserve the tradition of the Yiddish theatre, and her daughters who prefer the American cabaret. Gender politics are also portrayed with Pascal’s use of a strong woman protagonist, which contributes to the feminist criticism of Lear as well as subverting the stereotypical representation of the domestic Jewish female figure in other dramatic texts.
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Özmen, Özlem. "Identity and Gender Politics in Contemporary Shakespearean Rewriting." European Judaism 51, no. 2 (2018): 196–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ej.2018.510226.
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Abstract Julia Pascal’s The Yiddish Queen Lear, a dramatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, merges racial identity politics with gender politics as the play both traces the history of the Yiddish theatre and offers a feminist criticism of Shakespeare’s text. The use of Lear as a source text for a play about Jews illustrates that contemporary Jewish engagements with Shakespeare are more varied than reinterpretations of The Merchant of Venice. Identity politics are employed in Pascal’s manifestation of the problematic relationship between Lear and his daughters in the form of a conflict between the play’s protagonist Esther, who struggles to preserve the tradition of the Yiddish theatre, and her daughters who prefer the American cabaret. Gender politics are also portrayed with Pascal’s use of a strong woman protagonist, which contributes to the feminist criticism of Lear as well as subverting the stereotypical representation of the domestic Jewish female figure in other dramatic texts.
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Kryvosheieva, O. V. "Imagination as one of the key elements in the formation of a future actor psychotechnics." Problems of Interaction Between Arts, Pedagogy and the Theory and Practice of Education 56, no. 56 (2020): 299–311. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum1-56.19.
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Background. One of the most important questions in the acting profession is how to educate the psychophysical apparatus of the actor, what it consists of, what exercises will be useful and will be able to develop the necessary psychophysical qualities. Therefore, the theatrical teachers often turn to the sciences, which study the human, to be able to rely not only on the personal experience and on theoretical works of famous theatrical figures. Therefore, K. Stanislavsky creating theory of art turned to experimental psychology, the theory of conditioned reflexes by I. Pavlov. K. Stanislavsky sought to substantiate scientifically his system, to analyze creativity based on “brain physiology”, to study objectively higher nervous (mental) activity. One of the basic elements of the actor’s psychophysics is imagination, which remains by far one of the least studied. Moreover, the first studies of the “imagination” in such science as neuroscience began only in the second half of the XX century. Today, it is important to pay attention to the discoveries that take place in the related sciences in order to be able to understand deeper how a particular exercise affects the psychophysics of a future actor. There is a small amount of contemporary work devoted to the theoretical substantiation of the development of the psychophysical qualities of the actor. Among them the writings by famous theater educators Uta Hagen (“Play as Life”) and Ivana Chubbuk (“Chubbuk’s Actor Technique”) are, which consider the concept “imagination” in relation to other elements of actor psychotechnics, as one of the tools and ways of creating the role. The American actor and a teacher Gavin Levy has created an interesting book “275 Acting Games: Connected” presenting various exercises connected with developing of imagination. Professor of Acting at the University of California Bella Merlin in her work “Acting: Theory and Practice” proposes to develop imagination through a variety of games and improvisation also. Attempts to comprehensive study of actor training, the impact of exercise on the imagination and psychophysics of the actor as a whole are described in the works of M. Alexandrovskaya, S. Gippius, N. Rozhdestvenskaya, V. Petrov, and L. Gracheva, whose experimental results was used in this study, The objective of this paper is to consider the concept of “imagination” in the complex and interaction with other elements of actor psychophysics, using the latest scientific discoveries about human. A complex methodology was used in the work: analysis and synthesis methods that allow to explore a category such as “imagination”, separately and in conjunction with the elements of actor psychophysics; methods of systematization and generalization – to determine the key theoretical provisions of the study in the context of understanding the pedagogical experience of modern domestic and foreign theater schools; method of historical and cultural analysis – in the course of consideration of works on the theory of theater. Results. The concept of “imagination” in acting training is used quite often, but there is no specific answer to the question – whether imagination trains or not. Professor of Russian State Institute of Performing Arts Larissa Gracheva conducted an experiment to help answer this question. Students were asked to recall and relive in their imagination the acute emotional situation that was in the life of each participant in the experiment. A total of 30 student actors and 20 economics and theater students were involved. This experiment affirms the influence of special acting exercises on developing the imagination, because 95 % of participant-actors demonstrated body physical reactions. This concept is considered the paper in conjunction with other elements of actor psychotechnics, such as “visions” (after K. Stanislavskiy), affective and emotional memory, reaching truthful expressiveness on stage and muscular freedom. The chain of interaction between these elements is proposed and their interdependence is justified. The experiment answered the question of how imagination is dependent on “visions” and affective memory, what kind of exercises the future actors can train their imagination. Links has been established between imagination and muscular freedom. Recent discoveries of neuroscience have been used to answer the question of what is going on with the brain, when human being imagines something. Overall, the paper summarizes the current state of knowledge of the selected topic by discussing the findings presented in recent research papers that create an understanding of the theme for the reader. Conclusions. Training of “awakening the imagination” is a complex psychophysical process that can be developed only in combination with other elements of actor psychotechnics. Such complex approach will allow the actor to shape a completely harmonious personality. Imagination is based on visions that form and emerge from each person’s long-term memory. For each actor, these internal images will be unique. This proves that the use of imagination (substitution effect and affective memory) is quite personal and unique process. This approach causes an impression of truth of drama action and induces a strong emotional response. In turn, emotional reaction is first a muscular reaction of the body. Therefore, in acting training it is important to make exercises so as to harmoniously develop the psyche and physics of the actor using in plastic exercises imagination and vice versa, the physics reactions for the developing of imagery thinking.