The Spectator and the Spectacle

The Spectator and the Spectacle by Dennis Kennedy

Spectators and audiences are everywhere in contemporary culture. However, even in conventional performance, whether in the theatre, in film or television, or at a sporting event, it is difficult to discuss spectators with any authority, since each of us experiences and understands the display in different ways and all methods of analyzing spectators are flawed or unreliable. This book provides instead a series of investigations into specific types of performance activity, and how they relate to their audiences. Specific topics discussed include the relationship of audiences to the rise of the director, the avant-garde, tourism, gambling, the effect of cinema on live performance and sport, including crowd violence. Spectatorship is an area of increasing importance in the field of theatre and performance studies, and this engaging study is a valuable contribution to the development of thinking about audiences and spectators.

Review of the hardback: 'Kennedy engages the reader in a series of well-observed, clear-eyed, clear-minded, and finely wrought conversations that are thematically linked, yet also discrete about historically specific audiences and the inevitable failure of efforts to control or contain them in theory or practice' Modern Drama
'It is a very refreshing way of putting theoretical "big talk" into concrete perspective … contain[s] some excellent studies on the corporeality and phenomenology of visuality … The idea of various "modes of spectating" promises an intriguing concept …' Theatre Research International

Kennedy, Dennis: - Dennis Kennedy's books include The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance, Foreign Shakespeare, and Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre. Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance is due late 2009 (edited with Yong Li Lan). He has twice been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the USA, twice won the Freedley Award for theatre history, received the Chancellor's Distinguished Research Award at the University of Pittsburgh, the Berkeley Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, and was elected to the Royal Irish Academy and Academia Europaea. His own plays have been performed in New York, London, and many other places, and he has frequently worked as a dramaturg and director in professional theatres.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781107403604
ISBN 10	110740360X
Title	The Spectator and the Spectacle
Author	Dennis Kennedy
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	2011-10-27
Number of pages	260
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.