{"title":"Herbert Blau","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"to-all-appearances-book-herbert-blau-9780415013659","title":"To All Appearances","description":"This is a book in which ideology and performance shadow each other, in a theoretical inquiry which ranges widely across historical periods and cultures. The author's concerns - which include the social meaning of illusion and the cultural manifestation of power - take the reader from Eleanora Duse to Laurie Anderson; from the puppet theatre of Kleist to Kantor's theatre of the dead; and from the Kutiyattam temple dancers in Kerala to Womanhouse in Los Angeles. This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics of theatre and cultural studies.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49540993417489,"sku":"GOR002757112","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51514205667601,"sku":"GOR013197587","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0415013658.jpg?v=1750942502"},{"product_id":"impossible-theater-a-manifesto-rare-book-herbert-blau-1673285473nlh","title":"Impossible Theater a Manifesto","description":"1965. First Edition Thus. 309 pages. Paperback book with pictorial cover. Contains black and white illustrations. Well bound and clean pages, with mild tanning to text block edges. Previous owner's in","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50039275651345,"sku":"1673285473NLH","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1673285473NLH_1.jpg?v=1722375428"},{"product_id":"dubious-spectacle-book-herbert-blau-9780816638130","title":"Dubious Spectacle","description":"Spanning a quarter of a century, the essays in this book rehearse, in the movement of memory and cross-reflection, an extensive career in theater. The work of Herbert Blau-his directing, writing, and criticism-has been a determining force during this period as theater encounters theory.  Blau’s struggle to bring a critical intelligence to the American stage goes back half a century, to the quiescent postwar years (which he has eloquently described in The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto). His innovations in performance began with early productions of now-canonical plays that were hardly known at that time (works by Brecht, Beckett, Genet, Pinter, Duerrenmatt, and others). His experience is as distinctive as his versatile habits of mind and conceptual urgency of style.  If the impossible takes a little time (as the title of one essay states), Blau’s struggle now continues in a theoretical vein. Performance-and his own compelling writing- has moved across other genres and disciplines into fashion, politics, sexuality, and theory. His diversity of thought is demonstrated here in commentaries about the newer modes of performance (including conceptual and body art), various American playwrights, Renaissance drama, new music and theater, voice, the senses and the baroque, and the photographic image. As the essays reflect upon each other, a kind of cultural history, with inflections of autobiography, develops-which is what readers of Blau’s previous books have come to expect.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50369075118353,"sku":"CIN0816638136G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0816638136.jpg?v=1764845010"},{"product_id":"to-all-appearances-book-herbert-blau-9781032978703","title":"To All Appearances","description":"First published in 1992, To All Appearances is a book in which ideology and performance shadow each other, in a theoretical inquiry which ranges widely across historical periods and cultures. The author’s concerns—which include the social meaning of illusion and the cultural manifestation of power—take the reader from Jacobean drama to the pageantry of Robert Wilson; from Eleanora Duse to Laurie Anderson; from the puppet theater of Kleist to Kantor’s theater of the dead; and from the Kutiyattam temple dancers in Kerala to Womanhouse in Los Angeles.  A brilliant, uncontainable, and chastening look at the rhetoric of critical theory in relation to performance and ideological practice, this is undoubtedly a book for the twenty-first century. It returns us, through all appearances, to the unavoidable question in art, in politics, in the society of the spectacle: what, after all, is the future of illusion?","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51202044494097,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51202044985617,"sku":"NGR9781032978703","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1032978708.jpg?v=1751237557"},{"product_id":"nothing-in-itself-book-herbert-blau-9780253213334","title":"Nothing in Itself","description":"The author suggests that fashion today has anticipated and redefined, in the dazzle on the runway, or even in the ready-to-wear, the terms in which it is critiqued, while sometimes giving the impression that it is inseparable from critique. There is little to be said of fashion that is not somehow visible in fashion. The book looks at clothes with a fastidious eye to style, new looks, and old looks. Meanwhile, if the theatricality of fashion is belabored in cultural studies, there are other issues - recurring in history and, like the rise and fall of the hemline, approaching the metaphysical - that come with dress in its fascination-effect. As Blau sees it, this will inevitably return us to the validities, artful vanities, and deceits of appearance. No more than appearance, \"nothing in itself,\" that fashion has substance, complex and elusive substance, is the thematic of this book, which puts another complexion on the subject, the look, and the look that incites the look, in high style, street style, classical elegance or fetishistic chic, from farthingale and corset to drop-dead glamour, power suits, waifishness, and grunge.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51436736020753,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51436736217361,"sku":"GOR005939753","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0253213339.jpg?v=1750813189"},{"product_id":"sails-of-the-herring-fleet-book-herbert-blau-9780472030019","title":"Sails of the Herring Fleet","description":"Sails of the Herring Fleet traces esteemed director and theorist Herbert Blau's encounters with the work of Samuel Beckett. Blau directed Beckett's plays when they were still virtually unknown, and for more than four decades has remained one of the leading interpreters of his work. In addition to now-classic essays, the collection includes early program notes and two remarkable interviews -- one from Blau's experience directing Waiting for Godot at San Quentin prison, and one from his last visit with Beckett, just before the playwright's death. Herbert Blau is Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities, University of Washington.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52796929147153,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52796929310993,"sku":"GOR007769018","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780472030019.jpg?v=1764148827"},{"product_id":"to-all-appearances-book-herbert-blau-9781032978741","title":"To All Appearances","description":"First published in 1992, To All Appearances is a book in which ideology and performance shadow each other, in a theoretical inquiry which ranges widely across historical periods and cultures. 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It returns us, through all appearances, to the unavoidable question in art, in politics, in the society of the spectacle: what, after all, is the future of illusion?","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53291914920209,"sku":"NGR9781032978741","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53490754093329,"sku":"NIN9781032978741","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53521527111953,"sku":"NLS9781032978741","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781032978741.jpg?v=1774087130"},{"product_id":"take-up-the-bodies-book-herbert-blau-9780252009457","title":"Take Up the Bodies","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53484221071633,"sku":"GOR014942943","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780252009457.jpg?v=1777623781"},{"product_id":"programming-theater-history-book-herbert-blau-9780415516693","title":"Programming Theater History","description":"‘One of the great stories of the American theater..., the Workshop not only built an international reputation with its daring choice of plays and nontraditional productions, it also helped launch a movement of regional, or resident, companies that would change forever how Americans thought about and consumed theater.’ – Elin Diamond, from the Introduction  Herbert Blau founded, with Jules Irving, the legendary Actor's Workshop of San Francisco, in 1952, starting with ten people in a loft above a judo academy. Over the course of the next 13 years and its hundred or so productions, it introduced American audiences to plays by Brecht, Beckett, Pinter, Genet, Arden, Fornes, and various unknown others.  Most of the productions were accompanied by a stunningly concise and often provocative programme note by Blau. These documents now comprise, within their compelling perspective, a critique of the modern theatre. They vividly reveal what these now canonical works could mean, first time round, and in the context of 1950s and 60s American culture, in the shadow of the Cold War.  Programming Theater History curates these notes, with a selection of the Workshop's incrementally artful, alluring programme covers, Blau's recollections, and evocative production photographs, into a narrative of indispensable artefacts and observations. The result is an inspiring testimony by a giant of American performance theory and practice, and a unique reflection of what it is to create theatre history in the present.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53676499861777,"sku":"NLS9780415516693","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780415516693.jpg?v=1781569740"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-herbert-blau.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}