The Intercultural Performance Handbook opens up a new world of technique for performers. The first ever full-length, fully illustrated manual for practitioners, it provides: *a guide to the physical, vocal and improvisational dynamics drawn from world performance styles *a new vocabulary with which to interpret plays from around the globe *games to use for exploring rhythm, movement, balance, tension and gesture, breathwork, stylisation and the use of the voice *a practical approach to creating vibrant theatrical work. Studies on intercultural performance are usually written by scholars and reasearchers. John Martin explains the definition and development of intercultural performance studies from the perspective of an experienced practitioner. He provides exercises, practical advice and a clear training process for the inquiring actor or director. This book is a process of discovery, carefully written so as to develop understanding and move towards empowerment for the adventurous theatre-maker.

What can performers in the West learn from the technical performance traditions of Africa and Asia? The Intercultural Performance Handbook opens up a new world of technique for performers. The first ever full-length, fully illustrated manual for practitioners, it provides: A guide to the physical, vocal and improvisational dynamics of non-Western performance A new vocabulary with which to interpret plays from around the globe. Games to use for exploring rhythm, movement, balance, tension and gesture, breathwork, stylisation, and the use of the voice A practical, hands-on approach to creating vibrant theatrical work Studies on intercultural performance are usually written by scholars and researchers. John Martin explains the definition and development of intercultural performance from the perspective of an experienced practitioner. He provides exercises, practical advice, and a clear training process for the inquiring actor or director. The book is a process of discovery, carefully written so as to develop understanding and move towards empowerment for the adventurous theatre-maker.

Table of contents

Views on intercultural exchanges within theatre practice from contributors including: Peter Brook, Clive Barker, Jacques Lecoq and Rustom Bharucha.

This book is the first edited collection to respond to an undeniable resurgence of critical activity around the controversial theoretical term ‘interculturalism’ in theatre and performance studies. Long one of the field’s most vigorously debated concepts, intercultural performance has typically referred to the hybrid mixture of performance forms from different cultures (typically divided along an East-West or North-South axis) and its related practices frequently charged with appropriation, exploitation or ill-founded universalism. New critical approaches since the late 2000s and early 2010s instead reveal a plethora of localized, grassroots, diasporic and historical approaches to the theory and practice of intercultural performance which make available novel critical and political possibilities for performance practitioners and scholars. This collection consolidates and pushes forward reflection on these recent shifts by offering case studies from Asia, Africa, Australasia, Latin America, North America, and Western Europe which debate the possibilities and limitations of this theoretical turn towards a ‘new’ interculturalism.

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance explores ground-breaking new directions and critical discourse in the field of intercultural theatre and performance while surveying key debates concerning interculturalism as an aesthetic and ethical series of encounters in theatre and performance from the 1960s onwards. The handbook's global coverage challenges understandings of intercultural theatre and performance that continue to prioritise case studies emerging primarily from the West and executed by elite artists. By building on a growing field of scholarship on intercultural theatre and performance that examines minoritarian and grassroots work, the volume offers an alternative and multi-vocal view of what interculturalism might offer as a theoretical keyword to the future of theatre and performance studies, while also contributing an energized reassessment of the vociferous debates that have long accompanied its critical and practical usage in a performance context. By exploring anew what happens when interculturalism and performance intersect as embodied practice, The Methuen Drama Handbook of Interculturalism and Performance offers new perspectives on a seminal theoretical concept still as useful as it is controversial. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including a fully annotated bibliography, this is the essential scholarly handbook for anyone working in intercultural theatre and performance, and performance studies.

This is the first in-depth examination of contemporary intercultural performance by women around the world. Contemporary feminist performance is explored in the contexts of current intercultural practices, theories and debates. Holledge and Tompkins provide ways of thinking about and analysing contemporary performance and representations of the performing, female, culturally-marked body. The book includes discussions of: * ritual performance by women from Central Australia and Korea * the cultural exchange of A Doll's House and Antigone * plays from Algeria, South Africa and Ghana * the work of the Takarazuka revue company * the market forces that govern the distribution of women and women's performance. This is an essential read for anyone studying or interested in women's performance.