This stimulating compilation of essays and images reveals an essential and valuable component of Czech contributions to the world of modern theatre heretofore largely unseen outside the country itself. Featuring the craft of twenty-seven of the best stage and costume designers of the twentieth century, Joe Brandesky supplies ample evidence of their consistently high quality and dynamic creativity, survival skills for a people whose national identity had been dismantled during many years of occupation and repression.
Essays by Vera Ptackova, Dennis Christilles, Delbert Unruh, and, Marie...

New laws enacted in the wake of Hitler s ascent to power removed all Jews from their professional workplaces and banned Jewish artists from any collaboration with their fellow citizens. In the summer of 1933, Goebbels s Prussian Theatre Commission approved an all-Jewish theatre as part of the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden, the Cultural Association of German Jewry. This network of Jewish cultural leagues and theatre ensembles across Germany coexisted with Nazi policies against Jews until the Gestapo dissolved the theatre in 1941. Revealing the complex interplay between history and human lives...

Throughout the nineteenth century, people heard more music in the theatreaccompanying popular dramas such as "Frankenstein," "Oliver Twist," "Uncle Tom s Cabin," "Lady Audley s Secret," "The Corsican Brothers," "The Three Musketeers," as well as historical romances by Shakespeare and Schillerthan they did in almost any other area of their lives. But unlike film music, theatrical music has received very little attention from scholars and so it has been largely lost to us. In this groundbreaking study, Michael V. Pisani goes in search of these abandoned sounds.
Mining old manuscripts and...

What does it mean to perform whiteness in the postcolonial era? To answer this question crucial for understanding the changing meanings of race in the twenty-first century Megan Lewis examines the ways that members of South Africa s Afrikaner minority have performed themselves into, around, and out of power from the colonial period to the postcolony. The nation s first European settlers and in the twentieth century the architects of apartheid, since 1994 Afrikaners have been citizens of a multicultural, multilingual democracy. How have they enacted their whiteness in the past, and how...