Annie Holt identifies the roots of contemporary Euro-American practices of costume design, in which costumes are an integrated part of the dramaturgy rather than a reflection of an individual performer’s taste or status. She argues that in the period 1820–1920, as part of the larger project of modernism across the artistic and cultural field, the functions of "clothing" and "costume" diverged. Onstage apparel took on a more specific semiotic task, acting as a fresh channel for the flow of information between the performer, the literary text, and the spectator. Modernizing Costume Design traces how five kinds of artists – directors, performers, writers, couturiers, and painters – made key contributions to this new model of costume design. Holt shows that by 1920, costume design shifted in status from craft to art.

No study of modern theater is complete without a thorough understanding of the enormous influence of visionary genius Edward Gordon Craig. Born in England in 1872, Craig went on to become famous world-wide as an actor, manager, director, playwright, designer, and most importantly an author and theorist, whose books were translated into German, Russian, Japanese, Dutch, Hungarian, and Danish. Although an essential parallel to the European avant-garde, Craig was often read as "exceptional" and highly innovative in his native Britain, thus, The Mask not only appears as Craig's main cosmopolitan project but also at times functions as a surrogate stage for his experiments in theater practice. The book has a comprehensive chronology, extensive notes and a bibliography making it an essential text for undergraduates, postgraduates, actors, theatre professionals, designers, directors, researchers and writers in the fields of theatre studies (especially theater set and lighting) and theater history.

Edward Gordon Craig's ideas regarding set and lighting have had an enormous impact on the development of the theatre we know today. In this new and updated edition of his well-known study of Edward Gordon Craig, Professor Christopher Innes shows how Craig's stage work and theoretical writings were crucial to the development of modern theatre. This book contains extensive documentation and re-evaluates his significance as an artist, actor, director and writer. Craig is placed in historical context, and his productions are reconstituted from unpublished prompt-books, sketches, journals and correspondence. Most of the designs and photographs, and many of Craig's writings cited, are not available elsewhere in print. Readers will gain insight into a key period of theatrical history, the life of one of its most fascinating individuals, the nature of stage performance, and into revolutionary ideas that are still challenging today.

Illuminates the historical and aesthetic relationship of print to avant-garde performance

This collection of articles by both German literature specialists and German theater experts grew out of the Comparative Drama Conference held annually between February and March from 1977 to 1999 in Gainesville, Florida. At the center of the contributors' work is the productive tension between the literary and the performance aspects of German drama and theater. At the same time, the reception is truly American, since the German playwrights, directors, theorists, and dramatists discussed have gone through creative filters in the researching, performing, and teaching of German drama and theater on various campuses across the United States during the last third of the twentieth century.

Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism provides a new account of modernist literature's emergence in Britain. British writers played a central role in the dissemination of Russian literature and culture during the early twentieth century, and their writing was transformed by the encounter. This study restores the thick history of that moment, by analyzing networks of dissemination and reception to recover the role of neglected as well as canonical figures, and institutions as well as individuals. The dominant account of British modernism privileges a Francophile genealogy, but the turn-of-the century debate about the future of British writing was a triangular debate, a debate not only between French and English models, but between French, English, and Russian models. Francophile modernists associated Russian literature, especially the Tolstoyan novel, with an uncritical immersion in 'life' at the expense of a mastery of style, and while individual works might be admired, Russian literature as a whole was represented as a dangerous model for British writing. This supposed danger was closely bound up with the politics of the period, and this book investigates how Russian culture was deployed in the close relationships between writers, editors, and politicians who made up the early twentieth-century intellectual class—the British intelligentsia. Russomania argues that the most significant impact of Russian culture is not to be found in stylistic borrowings between canonical authors, but in the shaping of the major intellectual questions of the period: the relation between language and action, writer and audience, and the work of art and lived experience. The resulting account brings an occluded genealogy of early modernism to the fore, with a different arrangement of protagonists, different critical values, and stronger lines of connection to the realist experiments of the Victorian past, and the anti-formalism and revived romanticism of the 1930s and 1940s future.

Exploring the experiences of early to mid-twentieth century British theatre-makers in Russia, this book imagines how these travellers interpreted Russian realism, symbolism, constructivism, agitprop, pageantry, dance or cinema. With some searching for an alternative to the corporate West End, some for experimental techniques and others still for methods that might politically inspire their audiences, did these journeys make any differences to their practice? And how did distinctly Russian techniques affect British theatre history? Migrating Modernist Performance seeks to answer these questions, reimagining the experiences and creative output of a range of, often under-researched, practitioners. What emerges is a dynamic collection of performances that bridge geographical, aesthetic, chronological and political divides.

Eynat-Confino goes beyond the usual consideration of Craig's purported theories of the actor, scenery, and the scene painter to get at the heart of Craig's idea of theater. She draws not only on the research of contemporary Craig scholars but on material hitherto unavailable?his writings and daybooks and the writings of friends. She ties Craig's encounter with Isadora Duncan to a decisive modification in his notion of movement. To have an instrument more controllable than the actor, he invented the über-­marionette, a giant puppet. Craig also invented the ?Scene,” a kinetic stage, the ?screens” that brought him worldwide fame were simply an adaptation of this concept. Eynat-Confino argues that a scenario Craig wrote in 1905, here published for the first time, reveals a theosophical system like that of Blake, a system that was the main force motivating Craig's artistic quest. In her final chapter, she carefully examines the psychological, aesthetic, and circumstantial factors that kept Craig from completing his work to bring ?friendliness?humor?love?ease?peace” to the world.