Theater and Performance

Glances at Dramatic Dialogue by Ruby Cohn

I Want To Be Ready by Danielle Goldman

Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea by Suk-Young Kim

Theater Historiography edited by Henry Carl Bial and Scott Magelssen

Glances at Dramatic Dialogue

Ruby Cohn

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Glances at Dramatic Dialogue is a valentine to Ruby Cohn's favorite playwrights and productions of the past five decades. Written primarily for theater aficionados, and containing a minimum of footnotes and other scholarly apparatus, the book engages with Shakespeare's dialogues, Restoration comedy, and the language of Oscar Wilde, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Lee Breuer, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

Ruby Cohn is one of the most highly regarded theater scholars and critics writing today, and is considered by many to be the leading expert on the work of Samuel Beckett. Her books include Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut; Currents in Contemporary Drama; Dialogue in American Drama; Modern Shakespeare Offshoots; Just Play: The Theater of Samuel Beckett; New American Dramatists; From Desire to Godot; and Anglo-American Interplay in Recent Drama. Ms. Cohn is also Emerita Professor of Comparative Drama at UC Davis .

I Want To Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom

Danielle Goldman

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

I Want To Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom explores everything from the hey-days of the Palladium dance club in the 1940s and '50s, when the allure of the mambo at least temporarily integrated an otherwise segregated society, to recent avant-garde experiments in improvised dance that make use of imaging and other digital technology, and Goldman provides a rich cultural history of improvised dance in America. Paying particular attention to the racial and gender dynamics that have influenced the evolution and reception of improvised dance, Goldman also provides a robust new conceptual frame for exploring the practice of improvisation. Most scholars and critics of improvised dance celebrate the freedom it enables, while leaving the concept of freedom itself unexamined to mean, in Goldman's phrase, "something good with vaguely political implications." Drawing on philosophy, jazz studies, critical race theory, and gender studies, Goldman develops a rigorous theory of improvisation, by redefining it as an engaged response to an ever-shifting array of social, historical, and formal constraints.

Danielle Goldman is a winner of the Deena Burton Memorial Award for Outstanding Dissertation Research, and the 2005 Gertrude Lippincott Award. She is also a professional dancer in New York City.

Fall 2009
300 pages

Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea

Suk-Young Kim

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

This book offers a fascinating glimpse into the largely unknown country of North Korea. No other nation stages massive scale parades and collective performances better than this country does. It is at its best when it glorifies the revolutionary history and state leaders through state rituals involving thousands of performers. Amid a series of intense political and economic crises and international conflicts, North Korea has been staging an unfliching display of patriotism, the massive scale of which exhausts even those who merely watch. Why is North Korea so obsessed with theatrical representation of the idealized self image while its political, economic, and sociocultural reality presents such a stark contrast?

Illusive Utopia explores how state-sponsored propaganda performances shape everyday practice in a country where the performing arts are not only a means of entertainment, but a forceful institution used to regulate, educate, and mobilize people. The first English-language study of visual culture and performing arts as they relate to the formation of North Korean national identity is based on research in little-examined archives and interviews with North Koreans.

Illusive Utopia looks at sixty years of propaganda performances, including theater, film and other visual media and how they have intersected with everyday practices such as education, the mobilization of labor, the gendering of social interactions, the organization of national space, tourism, and transnational human rights. Suk-Young Kim's comparisons of the North Korean government's attempts to legitimatize the communist state to similar programs enacted by the USSR and PRC make Illusive Utopia a work of broader transnational significance, and the book's innovative approach, putting staging and performing as central organizing principles of the North Korean state, further broaden its appeal.

Suk-Young Kim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Dramatic Art the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a PhD in interdisciplinary theater and drama from Northwestern University and second PhD in Slavic Languages and Literature from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her book Long Road Home: A Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor, co-authored with Kim Yong, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2009.

Spring 2010
400 pages

Theater Historiography: Critical Questions

Henry Carl Bial, Scott Magelssen

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Theater Historiography: Critical Questions looks at the new, vibrant work in theater historiography that has been conducted in recent decades. It offers graduate and upper-division undergraduate students a collection of short, original pieces by scholars conducting dynamic and interesting new work in theater historiography from a wide range of research areas. Each of these scholars has established a national or international reputation, and is poised to contribute to the field for many years to come:
Wendy Arons, Carnegie Mellon University
Sarah Bay-Cheng, University at Buffalo
Jonathan Chambers, Bowling Green State University
Leigh Clemons, Louisiana State University
Claire Conceison, Tufts University
John Fletcher, Louisiana State University
Branislav Jakovjlevic, Stanford University
Odai Johnson, University of Washington
Suk-Young Kim, University of California-Santa Barbara
Jill Lane, New York University
Mechele Leon, University of Kansas
Ellen Mackay, University of Indiana
Erin Mee, Swarthmore College
Heather Nathans, University of Maryland
James Peck, Muhlenberg College
Nicholas Ridout, Queen Mary University of London
Judith Sebesta, University of Missouri (with Jessica Sternfeld, Rhode Island College and Danielle Robinson, York University)
Robert Shimko, University of Houston
Alan Sikes, Hunter College
Margaret Werry, University of Minnesota
E.J. Westlake, University of Michigan
Patricia Ybarra, Brown University
Harvey Young, Northwestern University

Henry Bial is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Theatre and Film at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Michigan, 2005) and editor of The Performance Studies Reader (Routledge, 2004.)

Scott Magelssen is Assistant Professor in Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University. He is author of Living History Museums: Undoing History Through Performance (Scarecrow, 2007) and editor of Querying Difference in Theatre History (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007.)

Fall 2010