The Routledge Performance Archive is a developing resource produced in partnership with Digital Theatre, providing unique access to an unprecedented range of audio-visual material from past and present practitioners of performance. This ground-breaking and constantly growing online collection delivers essential resources direct to the classroom, lecture theatre and library. The video material spans more than fifty years of documented work direct from renowned practitioners and specialists, and ranges across the entire spectrum of theatre topics.
Practitioners
Browse the Archive through our list of practitioners, ranging from legendary figures to contemporary pioneers. Trace connections between individuals and entire movements, via specially commissioned biographies and peer-reviewed cross-referencing. All biographical information and video descriptions come direct from the practitioners themselves, unless otherwise stated.
Subjects
Explore content thematically through our carefully structured taxonomy, and reflect on fascinating new relationships between concept and content. All entries have been taken from Paul Allain’s and Jen Harvie’s Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (Routledge: London, 2006), and are edited by Maggie B. Gale, unless otherwise indicated.
Knebel, Maria
Maria Osipovna Knebel (1898–1985), actor, director, teacher, and author, is arguably the most influential figure in twentieth-century Russian theatre, next to Stanislavsky.
Theatre of the Oppressed
The term ‘theatre of the oppressed’, coined by Augusto Boal after Paolo Freire’s writings on oppression, denotes a way of creating theatre within a particular ideological framework.
Tandon, Rekha
Rekha Tandon is a performer, choreographer and researcher working in Odissi, one of the eight classical dance forms of India. She is the Artistic Director of Dance Routes.
Animals
The behaviour of animals on stage is unpredictable and difficult to control. Yet animals have often been used by groups and artists, exploiting these very qualities of surprise and unpredictability.
Expressionism
The term ‘expressionism’ describes a radical style of visual art that aimed to express emotion non-naturalistically, in violent protest against the perceived bourgeois repression of naturalism.
Holt, Thelma
Thelma Holt has been a key figure in introducing international theatre to Britain (including Yukio Ninagawa) and in encouraging risk-taking and artistic bravery among numerous companies.
Rosenthal, Rachel
A winner of OBIE, Rockefeller, Getty, NEA and CAA awards, among many others, Rachel Rosenthal is an internationally recognised pioneers in the fields of feminist and ecological performance art.
Hunter, Kelly
Kelly Hunter, actor, created Touchstone Shakespeare Theatre, offering Shakespeare to young people with limited access to the Arts.
Text Analysis
The detail contained in the black-and-white print requires a certain forensic analysis to transform the page into flesh-and-blood character.
Body Art
Body art is radical live art that uses the artist’s own body to comment visually, sensually and often viscerally on identity and to enact the body’s social meanings and expressive possibilities.
Environmental Theatre
Environmental theatre aims explicitly to alter the conventional spatial practices of performance and to enhance the performance’s engagement with its space and site of production.
Pearson, Mike / Brith Gof
Mike Pearson is Professor of Performance Studies and Leverhulme Research Fellow, Dept. of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Aberystwyth University. Director: Brith Gof Theatre Company, 1981-97.
Kathakali
Kathakali dance-drama is a distinctive genre of South Asian performance which developed during the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries in the Malayalam speaking coastal region of south-west India.