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Featured Database: Digital Theatre+
Watch the video for an introduction to Digital Theatre+.
About the Resource: Digital Theatre+ provides access to a wide range of video content, including high-quality theatrical productions, training videos and teaching resources. Students can access work from many theatre companies including the Royal Shakespeare Company, BroadwayHD, L.A. Theatre Works and much more. The platform provides new ways for students to engage with dramatic texts, poetry, and performance.
Additional Resources:
- Digital Theatre+ This link opens in a new window Provides online access to a digital streaming video collection of unique films of current, leading British theatre productions, musicals, and operas. Includes behind-the-scenes documentaries as well as teaching and learning resources to facilitate a deeper understanding of the productions and texts. Learning resources include a detailed introduction, plot summary, character biographies, a relationship map, language analysis, scene study, performance background and historical context for each play. Updates vary.
- Performing Arts Database This link opens in a new window Performing Arts Database locates citations for writings spanning the disciplines of theatre, dance, and music. These writings chiefly originate in subject-specific trade journals, magazines, and more established scholarly journals. Some full-text is included. Content is international in scope with the majority of the original content having been produced in the United States and Europe. Date coverage: Generally 1990s - present.
- Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online delivers more than 67,000 titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. It includes documentaries, films, demonstrations, and other content types. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- OntheBoards.TV This link opens in a new window OntheBoards.tv is a collection of videos of full-length performances by artists working in dance, theater, music and other forms. Performance are filmed in Seattle, Portland, Austin, and New York. The aim of OntheBoards is to "introduce audiences to artistic innovators who are defining the future of dance, theater and music."
- Music & Performing Arts (Audio & Video Collections) This link opens in a new window Music & Performing Arts' collections stream American Song, Classical, Contemporary World, Jazz, Popular, and Smithsonian's Global Sound. Search results include lnks to the full text of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online (1997-2001), with additional audio examples.
The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched by
What is unique and essential about theater? What separates it from other arts? Do we need "theater" in some fundamental way? The art of theater, as Paul Woodruff says in this elegant and unique book, is as necessary - and as powerful - as language itself. Defining theater broadly, including sporting events and social rituals, he treats traditional theater as only one possibility in an art that - at its most powerful - can change lives and (as some peoples believe) bring a divine presence to earth. The Necessity of Theater analyzes the unique power of theater by separating it into the twin arts of watching and being watched, practiced together in harmony by watchers and the watched. Whereas performers practice the art of being watched - making their actions worth watching, and paying attention to action, choice, plot, character, mimesis, and the sacredness of performance space - audiences practice the art of watching: paying close attention. A good audience is emotionally engaged as spectators; their engagement takes a form of empathy that can lead to a special kind of human wisdom. As Plato implied, theater cannot teach us transcendent truths, but it can teach us about ourselves. Characteristically thoughtful, probing, and original, Paul Woodruff makes the case for theater as a unique form of expression connected to our most human instincts. The Necessity of Theater should appeal to anyone seriously interested or involved in theater or performance more broadly.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2008
Aesthetics and Ideology in Contemporary Literature and Drama by
The conviction that the development and promotion of the arts, humanities and culture through the study of literature and the aesthetic are the fundamental constituents of any progress in society is at the heart of this volume. The essays gathered here explore the role of the imagination and aesthetic awareness in an age when the corporatization of knowledge is in the process of transforming literary studies, and political commitment is in danger of disappearing behind a supposedly post-ideological late-capitalist consensus. The main focus of the volume is the mutual implication of aesthetics and ideology and the status and value of different types of art within the political arena. Challenging issues in contemporary aesthetics are examined within the wider framework of current debates on the disappearance of the real, the crisis in representation, and the use of new media. The wide range of examples collected here, stretching from experimental poetry in post-war Germany, political commitment in twentieth-century French theatre, and countercultural Rumanian theatre under Ceausescu, to Neo-Victorian fiction, Verbatim theatre in the UK, and political theatre for the masses in Estonia, vouchsafe unique insights into the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and the practical consequences thereof. As such, the volume opens up a space for a meaningful engagement with authentic forms of art from inside and outside the Anglosphere, and, ultimately, uses these examples as a platform from which to imagine some form of aesthethics, representing an ideal union of aesthetics and ideology. This concept, first coined by the French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, will prove to be relevant both within the parameters of the examples discussed here, but also beyond, for the contributors to this volume are unanimous in refusing to believe that aesthetics and ideology can exist one without the other, and in recognizing the centrality of ethics in any discussion of these notions.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2015
Staging Philosophy : Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy by
The fifteen original essays in Staging Philosophy make useful connections between the discipline of philosophy and the fields of theater and performance and use these insights to develop new theories about theater. Each of the contributors--leading scholars in the fields of performance and philosophy--breaks new ground, presents new arguments, and offers new theories that will pave the way for future scholarship. Staging Philosophy raises issues of critical importance by providing case studies of various philosophical movements and schools of thought, including aesthetics, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, deconstruction, critical realism, and cognitive science. The essays, which are organized into three sections--history and method, presence, and reception--take up fundamental issues such as spectatorship, empathy, ethics, theater as literature, and the essence of live performance. While some essays challenge assertions made by critics and historians of theater and performance, others analyze the assumptions of manifestos that prescribe how practitioners should go about creating texts and performances. The first book to bridge the disciplines of theater and philosophy, Staging Philosophy will provoke, stimulate, engage, and ultimately bring theater to the foreground of intellectual inquiry while it inspires further philosophical investigation into theater and performance. David Krasner is Associate Professor of Theater Studies, African American Studies, and English at Yale University. His books include A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1920 and Renaissance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910. He is co-editor of the series Theater: Theory/Text/Performance. David Z. Saltz is Professor of Theatre Studies and Head of the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia. He is coeditor of Theater Journal and is the principal investigator of the innovative Virtual Vaudeville project at the University of Georgia.
Location: Mugar Stacks PN1590.S6 S73 2006 and OnlinePublication Date: 2006
Diversifying Greek Tragedy on the Contemporary US Stage by
In its long history of performance and reception, Greek drama has been interpreted and adapted in ever-changing ways to share in the preoccupations and tensions of particular historical moments. Diversifying Greek Tragedy on the Contemporary US Stage explores this tradition by investigating a cross section of theatrical productions that have reimagined Greek tragedy in order to address social and political concerns in the US. Studying performance and its role in creating social, historical, and cultural identities, this volume draws on cutting-edge research to move discussion away from the interpretation of dramatic texts in isolation from their performance contexts and towards an analysis of the dynamic experience of live theatre. The study focuses particularly on the ability of engaged performances to pose critical challenges to the long-standing stereotypes and political policies that have contributed to the misrepresentation and marginalization of underrepresented communities. However, in the process it also uncovers the ways in which such performances can inadvertently reinforce the very stereotypes they aim to challenge, demonstrating that ancient drama can be a powerful, yet dangerous tool in the search for justice. justice.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2018
