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How does theatre shape the body and perceptions of it? How do bodies on stage challenge audience assumptions about material evidence and the truth?
Theory for Theatre Studies: Bodies responds to these questions by examining how theatre participates in and informs theories of the body in performance, race, queer, disability, trans, gender, and new media studies.
Throughout the 20th century, theories of the body have shifted from understanding the body as irrefutable material evidence of race, sex, and gender, to a social construction constituted in language. In the same period, theatre has struggled with representing ideas through live bodies while calling into question assumptions about the body.
This volume demonstrates how theatre contributes to understanding the historical, contemporary and burgeoning theories of the body. It explores how theories of the body inform debates about labor conditions and spatial configurations. Theatre allows performers to shift an audience's understandings of the shape of the bodies on stage, possibly producing a reflexive dynamic for consideration of bodies offstage as well. In addition, casting choices in the theatre, most recently and popularly in
Hamilton, question how certain bodies are "cast" in social, historical, and philosophical roles. Through an analysis of contemporary case studies, including
The Balcony, Angels in America, and
Father Comes Home from the Wars, this volume examines how the theatre
theorizes bodies. Online resources are also available to accompany this book.
List of contents
Series Preface
Acknowledgements
Bodies: An Introduction
Section One: Historical Approaches to Theatre Theory
Section Two: Extended Case Studies
Section Three: Porous Bodies: New Interpretations
References
Further Reading
Index
About the author
Soyica Diggs Colbert is the Idol Family Professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts at Georgetown University. She is also an Associate Director at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. Colbert is the author of
Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics, and
The African American Theatrical Body. Colbert co-edited
Race and Performance After Repetition and
The Psychic Hold of Slavery. Most recently, she served as a Creative Content Producer for The Public Theatre's audio play,
shadow/land.
Summary
How does theatre shape the body and perceptions of it? How do bodies on stage challenge audience assumptions about material evidence and the truth? Theory for Theatre Studies: Bodies responds to these questions by examining how theatre participates in and informs theories of the body in performance, race, queer, disability, trans, gender, and new media studies.
Throughout the 20th century, theories of the body have shifted from understanding the body as irrefutable material evidence of race, sex, and gender, to a social construction constituted in language. In the same period, theatre has struggled with representing ideas through live bodies while calling into question assumptions about the body.
This volume demonstrates how theatre contributes to understanding the historical, contemporary and burgeoning theories of the body. It explores how theories of the body inform debates about labor conditions and spatial configurations. Theatre allows performers to shift an audience’s understandings of the shape of the bodies on stage, possibly producing a reflexive dynamic for consideration of bodies offstage as well. In addition, casting choices in the theatre, most recently and popularly in Hamilton, question how certain bodies are “cast” in social, historical, and philosophical roles. Through an analysis of contemporary case studies, including The Balcony, Angels in America, and Father Comes Home from the Wars, this volume examines how the theatre theorizes bodies. Online resources are also available to accompany this book.
Foreword
Examining how theatre shapes our understanding of bodies, Theory for Theatre Studies: Bodies considers how the presentation of bodies on stage informs ideas about identity in social, cultural, and legal contexts.
Additional text
Soyica Diggs Colbert’s extraordinary new book Theory for Theatre Studies: Bodies is a comprehensive and complex consideration of the discontinuities of material and discursive theatrical histories from Medieval Drama to the contemporary period, which challenges scholars and artists to reconsider how embodied meaning is created by and through performance on stage. This game-changing text deftly argues that bodies carry meaning into every theatrical text and event and thus directly impact how shifting understandings of race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality and ability become inseparable facets through which modalities of power, economics and privilege are realized on and off stage.
Colbert connects both theatrical and critical theoretical discourses of the acting body in Theory for Theatre Studies: Bodies as she translates new possibilities of imagining, seeing and reading the body. This book unhinges notions of classical texts and is poised to become a 'must read' book for any artist, scholar and/or theater enthusiast who believes that equitable and inclusive theater is not only obtainable in the 21st century, but necessary for manifesting anti-racist futures.
