Books on the topic 'First Physical Theatre Company'

Both drama and theatre were developing rapidly in Shakespeare’s early years. ‘Theatre in Shakespeare’s time’ explains how Shakespeare followed in the footsteps of the first great wave of stage writers known as the University Wits—John Lyly, Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Robert Greene—learning from them and collaborating with them. It describes the London theatrical scene, the playing spaces, and the actors of the time before outlining Shakespeare’s early career, the narrative poems that kept him afloat financially, and introducing the Lord Chamberlain’s, and later King’s Men, the acting company that formed in 1594.

This chapter examines the vocal and sonorous dramaturgy of a series of performances by the Italian experimental theatre company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, fromSanta Sofia(1986) to the cycleTragedia Endogonidia(2002–2004). The company aimed to create a new language calledGeneralissima, to satisfy the need for a re-foundation of theanti-logosof the word. Thus it experimented with the conflict that exists between voice and body and between the spoken word and action. The voice constitutes a terrain for experimentation, an adequate domain for the theatre to be regenerated, using the body to the side of technological manipulation of the voice. The aim is to allow the story to be told by sound, by the materiality of the voice, of the text and of the senseless utterances, together with the tactile sensations created by the physical characteristics of the environment.

In spite of the very important role of women in the development of Irish theatre through the twentieth century, their contribution has continued to be marginalized, with ‘women’s drama’ set off against an implicit male norm. This was still obvious in the Abbey Theatre’s centenary programme, in which no play by a woman featured on the theatre’s main stage. The work of Charabanc Theatre Company, a women’s collective, and the highly successful plays of Marie Jones emerging from that company can be contrasted with the male-dominated Field Day in terms of a disparity of critical attention. Marina Carr, the Irish woman playwright best known internationally, in spite of the strong gender concerns of her plays, has been reluctant to identify herself as ‘feminist’ because of its associations. It has only been in the twenty-first century that the work of women playwrights and directors has been accepted as part of mainstream theatre .

Despite growing interest in Asian Shakespeare performances, the intercultural strategy of Asian Shakespeare has largely been discussed from a scenographic perspective due to its powerful visual representations that transcend cultural boundaries. This chapter aims to correct the overemphasis on visual representation in critical assessment of Japanese Shakespeare performances by discussing, first, the presence of language in Yukio Ninagawa’s Shakespeare productions, and, second, the characteristic use of dramatic texts in productions by the Ku Na’uka Theatre Company, Mansai Nomura, and the Shakespeare for Children Company, which each demonstrate bold and unique modes of engagement with the text. The chapter finally discusses whether or not there is a uniquely Japanese theatrical response to the text and, if so, what cultural factors lie behind it.

Born in Philadelphia in 1905, Catherine Littlefield first learns dancing from her mother, Caroline (called Mommie), who was an expert pianist, and from a local dancing master, C. Ellwood Carpenter. As a teenager, Catherine becomes a Ziegfeld dancer and takes lessons from Luigi Albertieri in New York. She returns home in 1925 to help Mommie teach at the Littlefield School (among her students is Zelda Fitzgerald) and stage dances for women’s musical clubs and opera companies. William Goldman hires Catherine to produce routines in commercial theaters throughout Philadelphia and becomes her boyfriend. Catherine, Mommie, and Catherine’s sister, Dorothie, travel to Paris so the sisters can study ballet with Lubov Egorova. They become friendly with George Balanchine in Paris and help him establish his first American school and company when he comes to the United States in 1933. Catherine marries wealthy Philadelphia attorney Philip Leidy and founds her Philadelphia Ballet Company in 1935. She choreographs—and her company presents—the first full-length, full-scale production of Sleeping Beauty in the United States as well as popular ballet Americana works such as Barn Dance and Terminal. Her company’s European tour in 1937 is the first ever by an American classical ballet troupe. Catherine loses some of her protégées to the newly formed Ballet Theatre and disbands her company after the United States enters World War II; she then choreographs Broadway musicals, Sonja Henie’s Hollywood Ice Revues, and Jimmy Durante’s NBC television show before dying in 1951 at age forty-six.

Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow argues that Sokolow’s choreography circulated American modernism among Jewish and communist channels of the international Left from the 1930s to the 1960s in the United States, Mexico, and Israel. Integrating archival materials, interviews, and theories from dance, Jewish, and gender studies, this book illuminates Sokolow’s choreography for social change alongside her teaching of Martha Graham’s technique. Tracing dances with her companies Dance Unit, La Paloma Azul, Lyric Theatre, and Anna Sokolow Dance Company, along with presenters and companies including the Negro Cultural Committee, the New York State Committee for the Communist Party, Nuevo Grupo Mexicano de Clásicas y Modernas, and Inbal Dance Theater, this book highlights Sokolow’s work among developments in ethnic definitions, diaspora, and nationalism in the United States, Mexico, and Israel. Critical reception documented Sokolow’s career from a leading proletarian choreographer to one of modernist alienation, and reflected the assimilation of her generation of Jews, children of Eastern European immigrants, from the marginalized working class to the American middle-class mainstream. Equally affected by the Holocaust and the Second Red Scare, Sokolow’s choreography evidences her political–aesthetic statements that resonate as clearly in today’s political climate as they did then. Sokolow’s kinesthetic imprints circulated American corporeality through modern dance training, as her students in New York, Mexico City, and Tel Aviv fit their bodies into Graham’s codified shapes. Honest Bodies details how cultural ideologies circulate internationally through choreography and dancers’ physicalities and how American modernism influenced and was influenced by this circulation’s physical residue.

Frank Fay, with his brother William Fay, were primarily responsible for the development of what became known as the Abbey style of acting, Frank drawing upon his study of the French actor Coquelin and the director André Antoine, William with his experience of acting in fit-up touring companies. This style, conditioned by the limited playing resources available to them, centred on fine speech, teamwork, and restraint. In a later period, after the Fays had left in 1908, the tradition of ensemble playing in a permanent company allowed for the development of fine individual character acting represented by Sara Allgood, F. J. McCormick, and Barry Fitzgerald. The actor-manager Anew McMaster, with his large romantic style, helped to shape the tradition of the otherwise modernist Gate Theatre. Irish acting in the first half of the twentieth century was thus a hybrid compound of many different elements.

Musicals celebrate physical abilities—singing and dancing—that seem to represent aspects of the universally human but are denied in significant measure to many with disabilities. Yet musicals’ insistence on incorporating the marginalized into communities has yielded important instances of disabled individuals figuring in musicals’ plots; moreover, musicals have often enough become part of the lives of disabled populations. This essay first considers a handful of shows that deal directly with disability, includingPorgy and Bess, The Music Man, The Who’s Tommy, Wicked, andNext to Normal. It then discusses a number of revelatory instances of musical performance figuring in lives of the deaf and hearing impaired, focusing particularly on the recent Broadway revival ofBig Riveras reconfigured by Deaf West Theatre, with its transformative integration of an expressive choreography based on signing into an existing musical.

This chapter charts the affective power and significance that Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) objects have held from the seventeenth century to the present, because of their physical form and their location and assemblage with other objects on the Australian coast. The chapter explores how objects and people not only operate in relation to each other, but also in particular spaces and in specific historical contexts. Thus, the emotional and social power of these objects has created varied narratives over time that situate first the VOC, then the Dutch nation, as a global power, demonstrate the frailty of human capacity, celebrate the ambition and achievement of individual discoverers, and allow a new vision of Australia and its communities to emerge.

This study investigates determinants of socio-environmental practices, (mandatory and voluntary), as evidenced in southern Brazil’s electric energy distribution companies. It seeks to understand this phenomenon with interdisciplinary protection through theoretical constructs of Social Responsibility, Environmental Management, Evidence, Legitimacy, Reputation, and Institutional. This integration contributes to understanding the reasons why companies undertake and evidence their socio- -environmental practices to external audiences. The literature suggests that socio-environmental practices are explained by various reasons, such as: enforced by legal impositions and/or voluntariness, to strengthen legitimacy, maintain and develop a reputation, and by isomorphism of the competitive operating environment. Given the above, the objective of this work is to investigate factors that determine the disclosure of socio-environmental practices in electricity distribution companies in the south of Brazil. In the methodological aspects, a qualitative approach was used, with descriptive and exploratory objectives. As a research strategy, a multichannel study was applied through two electricity distribution companies in the south of the country, CELESC Distribuição S.A. (Centrais Elétricas de Santa Catarina) and COPEL Distribuição S.A. (Companhia Paranaense de Energia). Data collection took place in two stages, the first one with a search on documentary, physical and virtual basis, and the second stage using a semi-structured interview with professionals from the Social and Environmental Responsibility area of each of the companies surveyed. The information collected was related to the period of 2014, 2015, and 2016. The results showed that the Annual Reports, service stations, and participation in external events constitute the primary means and channels of evidence of socio-environmental practices. There was a greater tendency to develop social practices. However, there are programs focused on climate change, conscious consumption and electricity saving, social inclusion, recovery of citizenship, and people’s quality of life. The COPEL company presented a tendency to evidence voluntary practices with more intensity, also showing consistency and maintenance of the programs during the studied period. Regarding corporate and sustainability policies, it was noted that companies adopt very similar strategies. It is concluded that the age, size, and corporate reputation of companies are the main determinants of socio-environmental practices, highlighting the presence of mimetic isomorphism characterized by the use of the same types of means and channels of evidence and by the symmetry of practices and policies developed by companies CELESC and COPEL.