Peta Tait

Charting a history of theatrical resistance to environmental exploitation, this study places drama and theatrical performance staged in Australia within the context of international scholarship to address major concerns about changing ecological systems. Exploring the staging of calamities ranging from droughts and floods to forest fires and rising seas, it examines a strikingly diverse body of work that reflects the entanglement of socio-economic and natural forces leading to ecological damage and climate change. Weather phenomena become protagonists in plays by Jack Davis, Andrea James, Louis Nowra and Hannie Rayson, while mutant creatures manifest climate threats in Jill Orr's work, and performances by the Australian Indigenous Marrugeku and Bangarra Dance Theatre invite grief for immense losses. Featuring First Nations performance and the profound knowledge of biodiverse multispecies habitats it presents, this study challenges the ways in which socio-ecological disaster is called 'natural' and positioned outside human responsibility.

Forms of Emotion analyses how drama, theatre and contemporary performance present emotion and its human and nonhuman diversity. This book explores the emotions, emotional feelings, mood, and affect, which make up a spectrum of ‘emotion’, to illuminate theatrical knowledge and practice and reflect the distinctions and debates in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and other disciplines. This study asserts that specific forms of emotion are intentionally unified in drama, theatre, and performance to convey meaning, counteract separation and subversively champion emotional freedom. The book progressively shows that the dramatic and theatrical representation of the nonhuman reveals how human dominance is offset by emotional connection with birds, animals, and the natural environment. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers interested in the emotions and affect in dramatic literature, theatre studies, performance studies, psychology, and philosophy as well as artists working with emotionally expressive performance.

Forms of Emotion analyses how drama, theatre and contemporary performance present emotion and its human and nonhuman diversity. This book explores the emotions, emotional feelings, mood, and affect, which make up a spectrum of ‘emotion’, to illuminate theatrical knowledge and practice and reflect the distinctions and debates in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and other disciplines. This study asserts that specific forms of emotion are intentionally unified in drama, theatre, and performance to convey meaning, counteract separation and subversively champion emotional freedom. The book progressively shows that the dramatic and theatrical representation of the nonhuman reveals how human dominance is offset by emotional connection with birds, animals, and the natural environment. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers interested in the emotions and affect in dramatic literature, theatre studies, performance studies, psychology, and philosophy as well as artists working with emotionally expressive performance.

Theory for Theatre Studies: Emotion explores how emotion is communicated in drama, theatre, and contemporary performance and therefore in society. From Aristotle and Shakespeare to Stanislavski, Brecht and Caryl Churchill, theatre reveals and, informs but also warns about the emotions. The term ‘emotion’ encompasses the emotions, emotional feelings, affect and mood, and the book explores how these concepts are embodied and experienced within theatrical practice and explained in theory. Since emotion is artistically staged, its composition and impact can be described and analysed in relation to interdisciplinary approaches. Readers are encouraged to consider how emotion is dramatically, aurally, and visually developed to create innovative performance. Case studies include: Medea, Twelfth Night, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and performances by Mabou Mines, Robert Lepage, Rimini Protokoll, Anna Deavere Smith, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Marina Abramovic, and The Wooster Group. By way of these detailed case studies, readers will appreciate new methodologies and approaches for their own exploration of ‘emotion’ as a performance component.Online resources to accompany this book are available at https://www.bloomsbury.com/theory-for-theatre-studies-emotion-9781350030848/.

Theory for Theatre Studies: Emotion explores how emotion is communicated in drama, theatre, and contemporary performance and therefore in society. From Aristotle and Shakespeare to Stanislavski, Brecht and Caryl Churchill, theatre reveals and, informs but also warns about the emotions. The term ‘emotion’ encompasses the emotions, emotional feelings, affect and mood, and the book explores how these concepts are embodied and experienced within theatrical practice and explained in theory. Since emotion is artistically staged, its composition and impact can be described and analysed in relation to interdisciplinary approaches. Readers are encouraged to consider how emotion is dramatically, aurally, and visually developed to create innovative performance. Case studies include: Medea, Twelfth Night, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and performances by Mabou Mines, Robert Lepage, Rimini Protokoll, Anna Deavere Smith, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Marina Abramovic, and The Wooster Group. By way of these detailed case studies, readers will appreciate new methodologies and approaches for their own exploration of ‘emotion’ as a performance component.Online resources to accompany this book are available at https://www.bloomsbury.com/theory-for-theatre-studies-emotion-9781350030848/.

In Performing Emotions, Peta Tait's central argument is that performing emotions in realism is also performing gender identity. Emotions are phenomena that are performable by bodies, which have cultural identities. In turn, these create cultural spaces of emotions. This study integrates scholarship on realist drama, theatre and approaches to acting, with interdisciplinary theories of emotion, phenomenology and gender theory. With chapters devoted to masculinity and femininity specifically, as well as to emotions generally, it investigates social beliefs about emotions through Chekhov's four major plays in translation, and English language commentaries on Constantin Stanislavski's direction (of the play's first productions) and his approaches to acting, and Olga Knipper's acting of the central women characters. Emotions exists as social relationships; they are imagined and embodied as gendered. Tait demonstrates how theatrical emotions are predicated on social performances and vice versa. In Chekhov's plays, which came to dominate a twentieth century theatre of emotions, characters interpret their emotions intertextually in relation to other theatrical and fictional narratives of emotions. Tait here interrogates these plays as sustained explorations of the inherent theatricality of characters expressing emotions from their phenomenological awareness. A theatrical language of gendered interiority is produced in the acting of emotions in Stanislavski's early realistic theatre. Alternatively, remapping the performances of emotional bodies can destabilise the culturally constructed boundary separating an inner, private self and an outer, social self in culturally produced geographies of emotions. As Tait shows, emotions can be performed as indivisible spatialities. Performing Emotions integrates theories of theatre, gender identity and emotion to investigate how sexual difference impacts on the representations of emotions. The book develops an accumulative analysis of the meanings of emotions in twentieth century realist drama, theatre and acting.

Throughout the 19th century, animals were integrated into staged scenarios of confrontation, ranging from lion acts in small cages to large-scale re-enactments of war. Initially presenting a handful of exotic animals, travelling menageries grew to contain multiple species in their thousands. These 19th-century menageries entrenched beliefs about the human right to exploit nature through war-like practices against other animal species. Animal shows became a stimulus for antisocial behaviour as locals taunted animals, caused fights, and even turned into violent mobs. Human societal problems were difficult to separate from issues of cruelty to animals.Apart from reflecting human capacity for fighting and aggression, and the belief in human dominance over nature, these animal performances also echoed cultural fascination with conflict, war and colonial expansion, as the grand spectacles of imperial power reinforced state authority and enhanced public displays of nationhood and nationalistic evocations of colonial empires. Fighting Nature is an insightful analysis of the historical legacy of 19th-century colonialism, war, animal acquisition and transportation. This legacy of entrenched beliefs about the human right to exploit other animal species is yet to be defeated.'When does fighting end and theatre begin? In this fascinating study, Peta Tait – one of the most prominent authors in the Performance/Animal Studies intersection – explores animal acts with a particular focus on confrontation. The sites of the human–animal encounter range from theatres, circus, and war re-enactments investigating how the development of certain human fighting practices run in parallel with certain types of public exhibits of wild animals. Tait’s account is historical, looking at animal acts – from touring menageries to theatrical performances – from the 1820s to the 1910s.'Lourdes Orozco, Lecturer in Theatre Studies, University of Leeds

This pioneering study is one of the major publications in the increasingly popular and largely undocumented area of circus studies.Through photographs and illustrations, Peta Tait presents an extraordinary survey of 140 years of trapeze acts and the socially changing ideas of muscular action in relation to our understanding of gender and sexuality. She questions how spectators see and enjoy aerial actions, and what cultural identities are presented by bodies in fast, physical aerial movement.Adeptly locating aerial performance within the wider cultural history of bodies and their identities, Circus Bodies explores this subject through a range of films such as Trapeze (1956) and Wings of Desire (1987) and Tait also examines live performances including:* the first trapeze performers: Léotard and the Hanlon Brothers* female celebrities; Azella, Sanyeah, black French aerialist LaLa, the infamous Leona Dare, and the female human cannonballs* twentieth-century gender benders; Barbette and Luisita Leers* the Codonas, Concellos, Gaonas, Vazquez and Pages troupes* imaginative aerial acts in Cirque de Soleil and Circus Oz productions.This book will prove an invaluable resource for all students and scholars interested in this fascinating field.

This pioneering study is one of the major publications in the increasingly popular and largely undocumented area of circus studies.Through photographs and illustrations, Peta Tait presents an extraordinary survey of 140 years of trapeze acts and the socially changing ideas of muscular action in relation to our understanding of gender and sexuality. She questions how spectators see and enjoy aerial actions, and what cultural identities are presented by bodies in fast, physical aerial movement.Adeptly locating aerial performance within the wider cultural history of bodies and their identities, Circus Bodies explores this subject through a range of films such as Trapeze (1956) and Wings of Desire (1987) and Tait also examines live performances including:* the first trapeze performers: Léotard and the Hanlon Brothers* female celebrities; Azella, Sanyeah, black French aerialist LaLa, the infamous Leona Dare, and the female human cannonballs* twentieth-century gender benders; Barbette and Luisita Leers* the Codonas, Concellos, Gaonas, Vazquez and Pages troupes* imaginative aerial acts in Cirque de Soleil and Circus Oz productions.This book will prove an invaluable resource for all students and scholars interested in this fascinating field.

In Performing Emotions, Peta Tait's central argument is that performing emotions in realism is also performing gender identity. Emotions are phenomena that are performable by bodies, which have cultural identities. In turn, these create cultural spaces of emotions. This study integrates scholarship on realist drama, theatre and approaches to acting, with interdisciplinary theories of emotion, phenomenology and gender theory. With chapters devoted to masculinity and femininity specifically, as well as to emotions generally, it investigates social beliefs about emotions through Chekhov's four major plays in translation, and English language commentaries on Constantin Stanislavski's direction (of the play's first productions) and his approaches to acting, and Olga Knipper's acting of the central women characters. Emotions exists as social relationships; they are imagined and embodied as gendered. Tait demonstrates how theatrical emotions are predicated on social performances and vice versa. In Chekhov's plays, which came to dominate a twentieth century theatre of emotions, characters interpret their emotions intertextually in relation to other theatrical and fictional narratives of emotions. Tait here interrogates these plays as sustained explorations of the inherent theatricality of characters expressing emotions from their phenomenological awareness. A theatrical language of gendered interiority is produced in the acting of emotions in Stanislavski's early realistic theatre. Alternatively, remapping the performances of emotional bodies can destabilise the culturally constructed boundary separating an inner, private self and an outer, social self in culturally produced geographies of emotions. As Tait shows, emotions can be performed as indivisible spatialities. Performing Emotions integrates theories of theatre, gender identity and emotion to investigate how sexual difference impacts on the representations of emotions. The book develops an accumulative analysis of the meanings of emotions in twentieth century realist drama, theatre and acting.