Off Book: Devised Performance and Higher Education

Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, Nicola Hyland and James McKinnon, Intellect Books, 2024

In the theatre world, ‘off book’ signifies a deadline in the creative process: the date by which performers are to have memorised their lines and will no longer be allowed to carry their play script – the ‘book’ – on stage. As such, Off Book makes a strangely appropriate title for a book about devised performance in higher education. In its usual context, ‘off book’ captures the tension between ephemeral, live performance and durable, author-ized literature: in one sense, the book – the written play – is the essential core, the seed that gives the performance life and meaning. Yet the opposite could be equally true: an ‘on book’ performance would not really be a play at all, and an actor reciting lines out of a script in hand is not really acting. A play is only realised in, or through, a performance. We cannot really learn, or play, our part until we can put the book down and enter the stage without it.

Devised performance might be described as ‘theatre without the book.’ Yet devisors also often use books – books like this one, practical guidebooks and how-to manuals, as well as a myriad of literature outside the discipline mined for inspiration. This is particularly manifest when devising in the context of higher education - a milieu, like theatre, wherein books traditionally signify authority, status, and meaning. So, to the extent that theatres and campuses are places where one expects everything to be done ‘by the book,’ devising on campuses is rebellious, even sacrilegious. But on the other hand, both the theatre and the university are expected to challenge tradition, defy expectations, and conduct experiments.

The book is presented in four sections reflecting the range of roles devising plays in higher education. The first section, Devising Pedagogy: Teaching Transferable Tools, examines how and why practitioners, educators, and programs conceptualise and plan for devising with adult learners in a range of higher education contexts. The second, Devising Friction: Ensembles, Individuals, and the Institution, shifts the discussion to the classroom, where abstract, pedagogical rubber meets the road of concrete reality. The third, Devising (by) Degrees, Practice-led postgraduate devising projects features contributions by emerging scholar-practitioners who engage with devising as both an object and method of creative scholarship. Finally, the chapters in Devising Bridges: University-Community Engagement explore how devising connects higher education institutions with the public they are intended to serve — particularly in populations and communities that are marginalised within, or even explicitly excluded from participating in, higher education, such as children and people with intellectual disabilities.

A valuable and unique resource for drama educators in universities, university students in education, drama, and arts managements, graduate students conducting research, theatre historians, practicing devised theatre artists.

About the Editor/s: Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, Nicola Hyland and James McKinnon

Screening the Posthuman

Missy Molloy, Oxford University Press, 2023

From AI to climate change, recent technological, ecological, and cultural transformations have unsettled established assumptions about the relationship between the human and the more-than-human world. Screening the Posthuman addresses a heterogenous body of twenty-first century films that turn to the figure of the "posthuman" as a means of exploring this development.

Through close analyses of films as diverse as Kûki ningyô [Air Doll] (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda 2009), Testrol és lélekrol [On Body and Soul] (dir. Ildiko Enyedi 2017) and Nomadland (dir. Chloé Zhao 2020), this wide-ranging volume shows that, while often identified as the remit of science fiction, the posthuman on screen crosses filmic genres, national contexts, and industrial settings. In the process, posthuman cinema emphasizes humanity's entanglement in broader biological, technological, and social worlds and exposes new models of subjectivity, community, and desire.

In advancing these arguments, Screening the Posthuman draws on scholarship associated with critical posthumanist theory—an ongoing project unified by a decentering of the "human". As the first systematic, full-length application of this body of scholarship to cinema, Screening the Posthuman advocates for a rigorous posthumanist critique that avoids both humanist nostalgia and transhumanist fantasy in its attention to the excitements and anxieties of posthuman experience.

About the Author/s: Missy Molloy, Pansy Duncan, and Claire Henry

The Festival Cities of Edinburgh and Adelaide

Sarah Thomasson, Springer, 2022

The Festival Cities of Edinburgh and Adelaide examines how these cities’ world-famous arts events have shaped and been shaped by their long-term interaction with their urban environments. While the Edinburgh International Festival and Adelaide Festival are long-established, prestigious events that champion artistic excellence, they are also accompanied by the two largest open-access fringe festivals in the world. It is this simultaneous staging of multiple events within Edinburgh’s Summer Festivals and Adelaide’s Mad March that generates the visibility and festive atmosphere popularly associated with both places. Drawing on perspectives from theatre studies and cultural geography, this book interrogates how the Festival City, as a place myth, has developed in the very different local contexts of Edinburgh and Adelaide, and how it is challenged by groups competing for the right to use and define public space. Each chapter examines a recent performative event in which festival debates and controversies spilled out beyond the festival space to activate the public sphere by intersecting with broader concerns and audiences. This book forges an interdisciplinary, comparative framework for festival studies to interrogate how festivals are embedded in the social and political fabric of cities and to assess the cultural impact of the festivalisation phenomenon.

About the Author: Sarah Thomasson

Audivisual Tourism Promotion: A Critical Overview

Diego Bonelli and Alfio Leotta, Palgrave, 2022

This book deploys the concept of ‘audiovisual tourism promotion’ to account for the promotional functions performed by a vast array of diverse media texts including tourism films, feature films, digital videos conceived for online circulation, video games and TV commercials. From this point of view, this volume fills a major gap in the literature by providing the first comprehensive critical overview of audiovisual tourism promotion as a distinct media field. In this book, the study of audiovisual tourism promotion is characterised by an interdisciplinary approach which combines film studies, media studies, human geography, sociology, tourism studies, history, postcolonial and gender studies. This book will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars from different disciplines.

About the Editor/s: Diego Bonelli and Alfio Leotta

Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics

Susan Ballard, Routledge, 2021

This book examines how contemporary artists have engaged with histories of nature, geology, and extinction within the context of the changing planet. Susan Ballard describes how artists challenge the categories of animal, mineral, and vegetable—turning to a multispecies order of relations that opens up a new vision of what it means to live within the Anthropocene. Considering the work of a broad range of artists including Francisco de Goya, J. M. W. Turner, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Yhonnie Scarce, Joyce Campbell, Lisa Reihana, Katie Paterson, Taryn Simon, Susan Norrie, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, Ken + Julia Yonetani, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, Angela Tiatia, and Hito Steyerl and with a particular focus on artists from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, this book reveals the emergence of a planetary aesthetics that challenges fixed concepts of nature in the Anthropocene.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, narrative nonfiction, digital and media art, and the environmental humanities.

About the Author: Susan Ballard

Aotearoa New Zealand in the Global Theatre Marketplace: Travelling Theatre

James Wenley, Routledge, 2020

Aotearoa New Zealand in the Global Theatre Marketplace offers a case study of how the theatre of Aotearoa has toured, represented and marketed itself on the global stage. How has New Zealand work attempted to stand out, differentiate itself, and get seen by audiences internationally?

This book examines the journeys of a dynamic range of culturally and theatrically innovative works created by Aotearoa New Zealand theatre makers that have toured and been performed across time, place and theatrical space: from Moana Oceania to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, from a Māori Shakespeare adaptation to an immersive zombie theatre experience.

Drawing on postcolonialism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and globality to understand how Aotearoa New Zealand has imagined and conceived of itself through drama, the author investigates how these representations might be read and received by audiences around the world, variously reinforcing and complicating conceptions of New Zealand national identity. Developing concepts of theatrical mobility, portability and the market, this study engages with the whole theatrical enterprise as a play travels from concept and scripting through to funding, marketing, performance and the critical response by reviewers and commentators.

This book will be of global interest to academics, producers and theatre artists as a significant resource for the theory and practice of theatre touring and cross-cultural performance and reception.

About the Author: James Wenley

Early Modern Women's Complain: Gender, Form, and Politics

Sarah Ross and Rosalind Smith, Palgrave, 2020

This collection examines early modern women’s contribution to the culturally central mode of complaint. Complaint has largely been understood as male-authored, yet, as this collection shows, early modern women used complaint across a surprising variety of forms from the early-Tudor period to the late-seventeenth century. They were some of the mode’s first writers, most influential patrons, and most innovative contributors. Together, these new essays illuminate early modern women’s participation in one of the most powerful rhetorical modes in the English Renaissance, one which gave voice to political, religious and erotic protest and loss across a diverse range of texts.

This volume interrogates new texts (closet drama, song, manuscript-based religious and political lyrics), new authors (Dorothy Shirley, Scots satirical writers, Hester Pulter, Mary Rowlandson), and new versions of complaint (biblical, satirical, legal, and vernacular). Its essays pay specific attention to politics, form, and transmission from complaint’s first circulation up to recent digital representations of its texts. Bringing together an international group of experts in early modern women’s writing and in complaint literature more broadly, this collection explores women’s role in the formation of the mode and in doing so reconfigures our understanding of complaint in Renaissance culture and thought.

About the Editor: Sarah Ross

Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel

Adam Grener, The Ohio State University Press, 2020

In Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel, Adam Grener advances a new approach to evaluating realism in fiction by arguing that nineteenth-century literary realism shifted attention to the historical and social dimensions of probability in the period’s literature. In an era in which probability was increasingly defined by statistical concepts of aggregation and abstraction, the realist writers discussed here turned to chance and improbability to address representational problems of contingency, difference, and scale.

Contemporary thinking about probability came to recognize the variability and even randomness of the world while also discovering how patterns and order reemerge at scale. Reading chance as a tension between randomness and order, Grener shows how novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy resist the demands of probabilistic representation and develop strategies for capturing cultural particularity and historical transformation. These authors served their visions of realism by tactically embracing improbability in the form of coincidences, fatalism, supernaturalism, and luck. Understanding this strategy helps us to appreciate how realist novels work to historicize the social worlds and experiences they represent and asks us to rethink the very foundation of realism.

About the Author: Adam Grener

The Cinema of John Milius

Alfio Leotta, Lexington, 2019

This book is devoted to the critical study of the cinema of John Milius, filling a major gap in the literature by combining the examination of the artistic, historical and cultural significance of Milius’ work, with an in-depth analysis of his films. Although most contemporary film-viewers have forgotten him, John Milius has been one of the most influential and controversial film-makers in the history of American cinema. Along with the likes of George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, Milius was a central figure of the so called ‘New Hollywood’. Milius, who gained an Academy Award nomination as screenwriter for Apocalypse Now (1979), reached the apex of his directorial career in the 1980s with films such as Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Red Dawn (1984). More recently, he was involved in a series of innovative projects such as the creation of the HBO series Rome (2005-2007) and the invention of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

About the Author: Alfio Leotta

Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination

Geoffrey Batchen, Power Publications, 2019

An engaging and provocative account of photography's first commercial applications in England and their global implications. This book addresses a persistent gap in the study of photography's history, moving beyond an appreciation of single breakthrough works to consider the photographic image's newfound reproducibility and capacity for circulation through newsprint and other media in the nineteenth century.

About the author: Geoffrey Batchen

The Bed-Making Competition

Anna Jackson, Seizure Press, 2018

From teenage rebellion to the most painful of goodbyes, The Bed-making Competition chronicles the coming of age of Hillary and Bridgid. Told over five sections, each separated by years and kilometres, we follow the sisters as they manage abandonment, motherhood, illness and the ineffable connections of the families that we are born into and those that we create.

About the Author: Anna Jackson

Made in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand: Studies in Popular Music

Shelley Brunt and Geoff Stahl, Routledge, 2018

Made in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of twentieth-century popular music of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. The volume consists of chapters by leading scholars of Australian and Aotearoan/New Zealand music, and covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Each chapter provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance to Australian or Aotearoan/New Zealand popular music. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music in these countries, followed by chapters that are organized into thematic sections: Place-Making and Music-Making; Rethinking the Musical Event; Musical Transformations: Decline and Renewal; and Global Sounds, Local Identity.

About the Editor: Geoff Stahl

ReFocus: The Films of Susanne Bier

Missy Molloy, Mimi Nielsen and Meryl Shriver-Rice, Edinburgh University Press, 2018

A dynamic, scholarly engagement with Susanne Bier’s work

The award-winning Danish director Susanne Bier has become increasingly known for her generic innovations and industrial fluidity, moving confidently between cinema and television at a time where the scarcity of women directors has become a subject of major critical and popular attention. Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier is a dynamic, scholarly engagement with Bier’s work, and a timely consideration of her impressive authorial achievements. Featuring essays from both recognised and up-and-coming scholars in Scandinavian, transnational and feminist film and media studies, this book also includes an original interview with Bier, addressing some of the provocative readings of her films advanced by the volume’s contributors.

Key features

• The first volume to examine Susanne Bier’s entire oeuvre

• Includes original research from prestigious scholars in Scandinavian, transnational and feminist film and media studies

• Written in engaging, accessible prose enlivened by detailed case studies

• Engages with critical issues in Danish cinema related to screenwriting, collaboration, authorship, gender, identity, ethics, genre, practitioner’s agency and reception

• Features an original interview with Susanne Bier

About the Editor: Missy Molloy

Floating Islanders: Pasifika Theatre in Aotearoa

David O’Donnell and Lisa Warrington, Otago University Press, 2018

This book celebrates 30 years of Pasifika theatre in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Pacific Underground, Pacific Theatre, The Laughing Samoans, The Conch, The Naked Samoans, Kila Kokonut Krew – the distinctive style and themes of Pasifika theatre have been developed by many individuals and theatre companies in New Zealand. Authors Lisa Warrington and David O’Donnell have interviewed over 30 theatre practitioners to tell the story of Pasifika theatre in Aotearoa from 1984 to 2015. This lively book showcases playwrights, directors and performers whose heritage lies in Samoa, Niue, Fiji, Tonga, Tokelau and the Cook Islands.

About the Author: David O’Donnell

Codename Intelligentsia: The Life and Times of the Honourable Ivor Montagu, Filmmaker, Communist, Spy

Russell Campbell, The History Press, 2018

He was the son of a hereditary peer, one of the wealthiest men in Britain. His childhood was privileged; at Cambridge, he flourished. At the age of 21, he founded The Film Society, and became a pioneering standard-bearer for film as art. He was a collaborator of Alfred Hitchcock, rescuing The Lodger and later producing his ground-breaking British thrillers The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent and Sabotage. He directed comedies from stories by H.G. Wells, worked in Hollywood with Eisenstein, and made documentaries in Spain during the Civil War. He lobbied for Trotsky to be granted asylum in the UK, and became a leading propagandist for the anti-fascist and Communist cause. Under the nose of MI5, who kept him under constant surveillance, he became a secret agent of the Comintern and a Soviet spy. He was a man of high intelligence and moral concern, yet he was blind to the atrocities of the Stalin regime. This is the remarkable story of Ivor Montagu, and of the burgeoning cinematic culture and left-wing politics of Britain between the wars. It is a story of restless energy, generosity of spirit, creative achievement and intellectual corruption.

About the Author: Russell Campbell

Winter Eyes

Harry Ricketts, Victoria University Press, 2018

There’ll be time, we say; there’ll be time
to rewrite our part in the pantomime
to embrace the promise of the approaching rhyme

Poetry as comfort, poetry as confrontation. In Winter Eyes Harry Ricketts reaches into past and future, with other writers and artists – from Kipling to Dylan, Austen to Frame – in the crosscurrents. These are poems of friendship, of love’s stranglehold, of the streets and buildings where history played out. Elegiac and bittersweet, Winter Eyes is Harry Ricketts’ best yet.

About the Author: Harry Ricketts

Romantic Literature and the Colonised World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations

Nikki Hessell, Palgrave, 2018

This book considers indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts in the British colonies. It argues that these translations uncover a latent discourse around colonisation in the original English texts. Focusing on poems by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Felicia Hemans, and Robert Burns, and on Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, it provides the first scholarly insight into the reception of major Romantic authors in indigenous languages, and makes a major contribution to the study of global Romanticism and its colonial heritage. The book demonstrates the ways in which colonial controversies around prayer, song, hospitality, naming, mapping, architecture, and medicine are drawn out by translators to make connections between Romantic literature, its preoccupations, and debates in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial worlds.

About the Author: Nikki Hessell