Regarded by Augusto Boal as the international icon of his vision, Jana Sanskriti are the leading practitioners of Theatre of the Oppressed and Forum Theatre in India and the East.The group has worked continuously with rural communities in West Bengal since its beginnings in 1985 to reconfigure social and political relationships through theatre, achieving both a solid regional presence and an international reputation.This book combines:a biography of ...

European theatre has been the site of enormous change and struggle since 1960. There have been radical shifts in the nature and understanding of performance, fuelled by increasing cross-cultural and international influence. Theatre has had to fight for its very existence, adapting its methods of operation to survive. European Theatre 1960-1990, first published in 1992, tells that story. The contributors - who in many cases have been theatre practitioners as well as critics - provi...

This book sets out from the question: why have so many western theatre workers come to India and what were they looking for? What is it that seemed to be lacking in western performance and understanding of the nature and function of theatre? Locating Indian theatre as a major site of reappraisal and renewal both in India and in the world of perform

Improvisation is a tool for many things: performance training, rehearsal practice, playwriting, therapeutic interaction and somatic discovery. This book opens up the significance of improvisation across cultures, histories and ways of performing our life, offering key insights into the what, the how and the why of performance.It traces the origins of improvisation and its influences, both as a social and political phenomenon and its position in performance training. Including histo...

Jana Sanskriti is internationally recognised as the most iconic post-Boalian Theatre of the Oppressed operation in the world today.This fully illustrated book by the Bengali company's founder and artistic director Sanjoy Ganguly, edited by Ralph Yarrow, collects and explains their programme of workshop exercises, placing them in the context of their social and activist work. A set of interviews with Ganguly complements these practical sequences, drawing in topics such as the role o...

The notion of the sacred has long informed the work of British dramatists like Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Ralph Yarrow’s Sacred Theatre is the first book to examine the role of the sacred in the practice, process, and performance of drama. While leaving enough room for the personal and experiential, Yarrow draws on concepts from sociology, anthropology, and critical theory as well as analytical readings of plays and performance events to examine how theater interacts with the...

This is Volume 7, Part I of the Contemporary Theatre Review, an International Journal, with this edition focusing on Prescence and pre-expressivity. Covering topics such as Body in Mind: Exploring Pre-Expressivity; Peter Brook and Traditional Thought; Grotowski, Holiness, and the Pre-Expressive; Barba's Concepts of the Pre-Expressive and the Third Organ of the Body of the Theatre and Theories of Consciousness; Pre-Expressivity: Some Thoughts from the Rehearsal Floor.

Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre brings together the first collection of essays in English to focus on Lecoq's school of mime and physical theatre. For four decades, at his school in Paris, Jacques Lecoq trained performers from all over the world and effected a quiet evolution in the theatre.The work of such highly successful Lecoq graduates as Theatre de Complicite (The Winter's Tale with the Royal Shakespeare Company and The Visit, The Street of Crocodiles a...

This handbook not only provides a very wide-ranging introduction and orientation to the world of the Theatre of the Oppressed, but Birgit Fritz also presents concrete and practical assistance for structuring basic workshops in process-oriented theatre work and in developing Forum Theatre plays. Birgit Fritz explores the working principles of emancipatory theatre work and somatic learning in depth. She gives numerous examples of the work and life of theatre groups and reveals fascinating po...