This book is the first substantial account of contemporary theatre’s fixation with the processing and detection of evidence. Since the mid-1990s, across diverse branches of theatrical performance, truth has increasingly been figured in terms of means rather than ends, with procedures for the gathering of information becoming the focus of attention. This overarching turn to the forensic has been obscured by the critical tendency to treat genres discretely. Frieze reconsiders landmark works that have been used to constitute dominant genres, such as Blast Theory’s Desert Rain (virtual theatre), Sarah Kane’sBlasted (in-yer-face/new writing), and Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror (verbatim drama), reading a range of works (by companies such as Troika Ranch, Les Deux Mondes, and Inspector Sands) that defy generic categorization—a factor that has denied these works the scholarly attention they deserve. The book’s contextualization of the forensic turn begins in the late nineteenth-century, when Zola’s manifesto and the playwriting of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov (all of whom had medical training) introduced a naturalistic theatre against which twentieth-century alternative theatre movements would repeatedly rail and react. The forensic turn is in part a revival of naturalism’s diagnostic method and tone. However, while naturalistic playwrights receded from view to the point of invisibility, their characters appearing to act of their own volition, the technical expertise of those seeking after truth is scrutinized in the era of the forensic. This volume frames contemporary theatre’s interrogation of expertise and evidence-gathering by closely articulating performance examples with television’s ceaseless supply of crime-scene investigation and reality shows, and with political and social debates about journalistic procedures and the management of identity data (identity recognition/theft/fraud/leaking).
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Theatre History Studies 2016
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Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory: The Nameless Artist in the Theatre of Memory 1940-1943
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Proper Theatre: The Politics of Form in Contemporary British Performance
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Women on Southern Stages, 1800-1865: Performance, Gender and Identity in a Golden Age of American Theater
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Performance and Participation: Practices, Audiences, Politics
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The Stage Manager’s Toolkit: Templates and Communication Techniques to Guide Your Theatre Production from First Meeting to Final
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The Art of Theatre
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Acting for the Stage
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Secrets of Acting Shakespeare: The Original Approach
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Stage Manager: The Professional Experience—refreshed
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Japanese Robot Culture: Performance, Imagination, and Modernity
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Active Analysis
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Ebrahim Alkazi Directing Art: The Making of a Modern Indian Art World
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Drama Games for Actors: Exploring Self, Character and Text
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Brainball: Teaching Inquiry Theater As a Team Sport
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Between Us: Audiences, Affect and the In-Between
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Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s
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The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance
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The Event of Performance
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Stage Management
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