This collection of articles is devoted to the relationship between text and performance in contemporary theatre. In this volume, nineteen theatre and drama researchers from the Baltic countries, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Hungary, Russia and China discuss the results of their research into these issues in academic articles and essays. The book mainly focuses on the experience of the Baltics in the creation of theatrical texts, but it also provides a wider insight into the changing processes of world drama and theatre. Three sections of the volume provide numerous examples of the functionality of traditional texts in today’s theatre, as well as introducing the reader to new names in contemporary drama and the different models of practice in theatre companies. This book, with its rich collection of material and detailed analysis of different methods and experiences of contemporary theatre, is recommended for both theatre and drama theoreticians and practitioners.

This volume explores the impact of printing on the European theatre in the period 1480-1880 and shows that the printing press played a major part in the birth of modern theatre.

Theatre-Making explores modes of authorship in contemporary theatre seeking to transcend the heritage of binaries from the Twentieth century such as text-based vs. devised theatre, East vs. West, theatre vs. performance - with reference to genealogies though which these categories have been constructed in the English-speaking world.

Getting acquainted with acting, directing, design and a history of the theatre.

The collection of essays Worlds in Words: Storytelling in Contemporary Theatre takes up the currently widely debated issue of the revival of various techniques of storytelling in contemporary theatre practice and playwriting. This topic is set in a larger context of the crisis of traditional theatrical and dramatic representation in the 20th century and sets the discussion of new storytelling techniques within the framework of cultural and post-colonial studies, as well as the recent theories of performativity. These new performative modes of theatre practice in the recent decades have exerted a strong impact on the mainstream staging techniques as well as on the form and use of texts written for the theatre today. By focusing on the basic relationship between the text, the stage and the audience, the papers collected in this volume trace these fundamental changes taking place nowadays, which testify to the major shifts in the understanding of the very concept of theatre, its place among other arts and media, as well as in culture, especially in the marginalized cultures and diasporas. The authors of the papers collected here undertake a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of storytelling and adopt an interdisciplinary approach which will makes it possible to give account of the diverse cultural and socio-political grounding of the contemporary theatrical and dramatic techniques.

Taking up the work of prominent theater and performance artists, Beyond Text reveals the audacity and beauty of avant-garde performance in print. With extended analyses of the works of Edward Gordon Craig, German expressionist Lothar Schreyer, the Living Theatre, Carolee Schneemann, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, the book shows how live performance and print aesthetically revived one another during a period in which both were supposed to be in a state of terminal cultural decline. While the European and American avant-gardes did indeed dismiss the dramatic author, they also adopted print as a theatrical medium, altering the status, form, and function of text and image in ways that continue to impact both the performing arts and the book arts. Beyond Text participates in the ongoing critical effort to unsettle conventional historical and theoretical accounts of text-performance relations, which have too often been figured in binary, chronological (“from page to stage”), or hierarchical terms. Across five case studies spanning twelve decades, Beyond Text demonstrates that print—as noun and verb—has been integral to the practices of modern and contemporary theater and performance artists.