Theory for Theatre Studies: Emotion

by Peta Tait, Kim Solga (Editor), Susan Bennett (Editor)

Overview

Theory for Theatre Studies: Emotion explores how emotion is communicated in drama, theatre, and contemporary performance and therefore in society. From Aristotle and Shakespeare to Stanislavski, Brecht and Caryl Churchill, theatre reveals and, informs but also warns about the emotions. The term 'emotion' encompasses the emotions, emotional feelings, affect and mood, and the book explores how these concepts are embodied and experienced within theatrical practice and explained in theory. Since emotion is artistically staged, its composition and impact can be described and analysed in relation to interdisciplinary approaches. Readers are encouraged to consider how emotion is dramatically, aurally, and visually developed to create innovative performance.

Case studies include: Medea, Twelfth Night, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Ibsen's A Doll's House, and performances by Mabou Mines, Robert Lepage, Rimini Protokoll, Anna Deavere Smith, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Marina Abramovic, and The Wooster Group. By way of these detailed case studies, readers will appreciate new methodologies and approaches for their own exploration of 'emotion' as a performance component.

Online resources to accompany this book are available at https://www.bloomsbury.com/theory-for-theatre-studies-emotion-9781350030848/.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350030855
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/14/2021
Series:	Theory for Theatre Studies
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Peta Tait is professor of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University, Melbourbane, Australia. She is an academic scholar and playwright with an extensive background in theatre, dramatic literature, performance theory and creative arts practice. She researches in the interdisciplinary humanities fields of emotions, body theory and gender identity. Professor Tait has authored four scholarly books, and edited and co-edited three further books, with sixty other publications including articles in Theatre Jourbanal, Modern Drama and Performance Research.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Series Preface
Introduction: Approach and Concepts
The Emotions
Emotional Feelings
Affect and its Theory
Mood
Cultural Complexities and Empathy
Section one: Legacies and Case Studies
Aristotle on tragic pity and Euripides' Medea
Shakespeare's comic lovers: Performing the Passions
The actor's paradox: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century staging
Stanislavski's Emotion Memory and realist theatre
Controversial psychologies in Method Acting
Brecht's separations: theatre for a scientific age
Brecht's political emotions: The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Emotional practice from Forum Theatre to Rasaboxes

Section two: Affect and Case Studies
Emotional feeling to affect in A Doll's House
Affect and technology: live art and spectacle
Real identities and political affect
Empathy enabled: Empathy Museum to Back to Back
Suffering in Jane Harrison's Stolen
Feeling sound and images: Robert Lepages's Needles and Opium and 887

Section three: Mood and Case Studies
Mysterious aesthetic
Audience expectations and The Lion King
Ambience from Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio
Music functions and Rimini Protokoll's Brain Projects00
Economic mood dis/orders: Alladeen to Dear Evan Hansen
Immoral objects and The Wooster Group
Share economies and Marina Abramovic
Collaborative eco-moods
Anticipation
Conclusion: Intensity
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

Tait leads us through a history of emotions in performance, introducing the key ideas and figures in classical, modern and contemporary theatre and showing how the emotions work in a stunning array of case studies spanning the classics, modern drama, commercial musicals and contemporary performance. Erudite and informative, the focus on emotion, feeling, affect and mood in this book is timely and precisely detailed in the many references to scholarly and artistic perspectives. The concluding observations on the nature of intensity are highly relevant and helpful to understanding theatre in our time. Tait's deep knowledge of theories of emotion in western theatre and performance is unmatched among scholars in the field.” —Peter Eckersall, Professor of Theatre and Performance, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA

From the Publisher