The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre

## Explores modernism’s complex relationship with contemporary theatre * Includes consideration of canonical as well as lesser-known theatre artists * Offers an expansive range of case studies, featuring examples of theatre from around the world * Connects modernist studies with theatre and performance studies * Methodologically varied, including historiography, performance analysis, textual analysis, and practice as research * Includes essays by leading theatre scholars, modernist specialists, and theatre practitioners, providing an eclectic mix of essay formats and approaches, including creative contributions This volume highlights modernism as an impulse that can be carried forward to the present, re-embodied and re-encountered in theatrical performance. It demonstrates how modernist impulses spark contemporary theatre in dynamic ways, continuing the modernist imperative to ‘make it new’ and to engage meaningfully with the complicated situation of living in the contemporary world. A diverse set of contributions from scholars and theatre practitioners examines the legacy of modernism on the world stage in acts of remembrance, restaging, transmission and slippage. It investigates both well-known and less familiar aspects of modernist theatre history, engaging topics such as the revival of the first Black American musical, feminist and disability-led reinterpretations of canonical modernist plays, the use of modernist-inspired performance practice in contemporary university arts education and the continually contested meaning and importance of the avant-garde. Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements (anti-)capitalsism: a manifesto Introduction: Sensing Modernism in Theatre Part I: Remembrance and Reconfiguration 1. Introduction: Playing with the Past, Attending to the ‘Lost’ 2. ‘The Right to Revolution’: Ernst Toller’s Legacy on the British Stage 3. Legacy, Embodiment, Activism: Pageant of Agitating Women 4. Modernist Nostalgia and Contemporary Irish Dance 5. Reaching Out in Both Directions: Suffrage Theatre in the Twenty-First Century 6. Shuffle Along (1921) and the Challenges of Black Modernist Performance on the Contemporary Stage 7. ‘Who Was This Woman?’ A Conversation about Remembering Modernist Figures through the Body 8. An Ode to Black Women Modernists Part II: Restaging Drama 9. Introduction: Acts of Translation, Reimagining and Creative Destruction 10. Restaging Futurism and Joan Brossa: Provocation or Observation with a Glass of Champagne or a Cup of Tea 11. Marguerite Duras’s Theatre and the Boundaries of Modernism 12. The (Dead) Centre Cannot Hold: Ontological Insecurity in Chekhov’s First Play 13. En-Staging Nora: Unruly Modernisms in Theodoros Terzopoulos’s Nora 14. After and Against Strindberg: A Conversation about Missing Julie 15. ‘A Voice She Did Not Recognise At First’: Touretteshero’s Neurodiverse Presentation of Samuel Beckett’s Not I 16. Pushing the Boundaries: Staging Western Modern(ist) Drama in Contemporary China Part III: Transmission 17. Introduction: (Im)material Legacies, Living Traditions 18. The Theatre of Tadashi Suzuki at the Crossroads of Modernism 19. Stanislavski on Skype 20. Raising Her Voice: Presenting the Lives and Writings of Virginia Woolf and Dame Ethel Smyth for a Contemporary Theatre Audience 21. Embodied Knowledge: A Brechtian Approach to Making Theatre with Young People 22. Appropriation, Abstraction and Appraisal: Modernist Legacies of Contemporary Dance 23. Shaw and the Early-Twentieth-Century British Regional Repertory Movement 24. ‘Aquí no estamos en el teatro’: Impossible Plays, Queer Ghosts and Haunted Practices Part IV: Slippages 25. Introduction: How Movements Might Move 26. Ages of Arousal 27. ‘Make the New Legible through Experimentation’: A Conversation on the (Ongoing) Avant-Garde 28. Brecht as Slippage: Interrobang’s Dialogues with Modernist Theatre Machines 29. ‘What Could Be the Theatre of Contemporary Life?’ A Conversation about the Work of Studio Oyuncuları, Istanbul 30. ‘How Do We Make a Room in the Theatre?’ A Conversation about Design for Pan Pan Theatre, Dublin 31. Samuel Beckett and Border Thinking 32. The Writing on the Wall Isn’t There to Be Read: Unworking the Theatrical in the Figures of Adrienne Kennedy Afterword Event Scores (after fluxus) Notes on Contributors Index