The Abbey Theatre
The Abbey Theatre is a term that has come to encapsulate the many iterations of the National Theatre of Ireland. Located in Dublin, the Abbey…
The Abbey Theatre is a term that has come to encapsulate the many iterations of the National Theatre of Ireland. Located in Dublin, the Abbey…
Now widely used as a catchall term to describe politically combative or oppositional art, “agitprop” originated from the early Soviet conjunction of propaganda (raising awareness…
This brief preamble will introduce the kinds of material the reader can expect to find in the entries treating drama, theater, and performance, and suggest…
Founded in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg, the Group Theatre was conceived as a company dedicated to staging socially relevant plays,…
The Independent Theatre Movement in Europe was a primary shaping influence on modern dramatic literature and theatrical modernism. These small independent theaters were committed to…
The Workers’ Theatre Movement (WTM) was an international project, largely promoted by the Workers International Relief, to conjoin left militant radical theaters during the period…
The Berezil’ Theater was an innovative theater company founded by director and actor Oleksandr “Les” Kurbas in 1922. Active for just over a decade, the…
The Little Theater Movement comprised a web of amateur theater activities undertaken across much of the United States between 1912 and 1925. Little Theater opposed…
Teatro del Murciélago (Theatre of the Bat) was a group that gave what appears to have been its only public performance at the Teatro Olimpia…
The Federal Theatre Project was a government-subsidized program established in 1935 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide jobs for theater artists during the Great…
Jiyū-gekijō [Free Theater], founded in 1909 by the director Osanai Kaoru (1881–1928) and kabuki actor Ichikawa Sadanji II (1880–1940), was established to produce contemporary realist…
Arab-American Theater is a general term that describes plays and performances by Americans of Arab descent written in Arabic and/or English from the early twentieth…
Modernist theater in Catalonia emerged out of the interplay between thematic and artistic innovation and the representation of sociopolitical issues such as class and cultural…
In response to the growth of shingeki, the actor Sawada Shōjirō developed a form of theater designed to appeal to the urban masses, especially in…
One of the earliest large-scale musical revues to be created and performed by an all-Black cast, Darktown Follies premiered in 1913 at the Lafayette Theatre…
Originally called the Neo Dance Theatre, the New Dance Theatre (NDT) was a modern dance performance group that was based in Toronto from 1949 to…
Expressionism was one of the foremost modernist movements to emerge in Europe in the early years of the twentieth-century. It had a profound effect on…
Dada began in Zurich, Switzerland, in the midst of World War I. Several expatriate artists converged in the city to escape the brutal and seemingly…
In 1919 a young architect named Walter Gropius initiated one of the most modern art schools of the twentieth century in the city of Weimar…
In South Asia, a certain haziness regarding modernism and modernity derives not only from the manner in which they can be elided with each other,…
Historically, modern dance scholarship has followed the contours of the field as defined by John Martin, the revered dance critic for The New York Times,…
Soupault’s publication of Manifeste du Surréalism in 1924. Rising in the wake of the First World War, Surrealism revolted against a world that had become…
Futurism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century as a movement that explicitly conceptualized the process of literary and artistic experimentation as part of…
Prior to World War II, Constructivism attracted little interest from British artists apart from the few involved with Circle in 1937. Circle consisted of a…
(Previously published as 'The Experience of Aboriginality in the Creation of the Radically New' in Ross, S. (ed.) (2014) Modernist World, Abingdon: Routledge.)1