Gao Xingjian is a Chinese émigré and later French naturalized novelist, playwright, critic, painter, photographer, film director, and translator who in 2000 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity." He is also a noted translator, screenwriter, stage director, and a celebrated painter.
Traditional Chinese opera, or Xiqu, is a form of musical theatre in China with roots going back to the early periods in China. It is an amalgamation of various art forms that existed in ancient China, and evolved gradually over more than a thousand years, reaching its mature form in the 13th century, during the Song dynasty (960–1279). Early forms of Chinese theater are simple, but over time various art forms such as music, song and dance, martial arts, acrobatics, costume and make-up art, as well as literary art forms were incorporated to form traditional Chinese opera. Performers had to practice for many years to gain an understanding of the roles. Exaggerated features and colors made it easier for the audience to identify the roles portrayed.
Experimental theatre, inspired largely by Wagner's concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, began in Western theatre in the late 19th century with Alfred Jarry and his Ubu plays as a rejection of both the age in particular and, in general, the dominant ways of writing and producing plays. The term has shifted over time as the mainstream theatre world has adopted many forms that were once considered radical.
Káťa Kabanová is an opera in three acts, with music by Leoš Janáček to a libretto by the composer based on The Storm, a play by Alexander Ostrovsky, translated by Vincenc Červinka. The opera was also largely inspired by Janáček's love for Kamila Stösslová. Although he was 67 when it was premiered, Káťa Kabanová is a clear response to Janáček's feelings for Kamila, and the work is dedicated to her. The first performance was at the National Theatre Brno on 23 November 1921.
Robert Malcolm Ward "Bob" Dixon is a Professor of Linguistics in the College of Arts, Society, and Education and The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Queensland. He is also Deputy Director of The Language and Culture Research Centre at JCU. Doctor of Letters, he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters Honoris Causa by JCU in 2018. Fellow of British Academy; Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America, he is one of three living linguists to be specifically mentioned in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics by Peter Matthews (2014).
Sergei Mikhailovich Tretyakov was a Soviet Russian constructivist writer, playwright, poet, and special correspondent for Pravda.
Theatre of China has a long and complex history. Traditional Chinese theatre, generally in the form of Chinese opera, is musical in nature. Chinese theatre can trace its origin back a few millennia to ancient China, but the Chinese opera started to develop in the 12th century. Western forms like the spoken drama, western-style opera, and ballet did not arrive in China until the 20th century.
The Decision, frequently translated as The Measures Taken, is a Lehrstück and agitprop cantata by the twentieth-century German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Created in collaboration with composer Hanns Eisler and director Slatan Dudow, it consists of eight sections in prose and unrhymed, free verse, with six major songs. A note to the text by all three collaborators describes it as an "attempt to use a didactic piece to make familiar an attitude of positive intervention."
The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent is a Lehrstück by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, written in collaboration with Slatan Dudow and Elisabeth Hauptmann. Under the title Lehrstück it was first performed, with music by Paul Hindemith, as part of the Baden-Baden festival on 28 July 1929, at the Stadthalle, Baden-Baden, directed by Brecht, designed by Heinz Porep.
Habib Tanvir was one of the most popular Indian Urdu, Hindi playwrights, a theatre director, poet and actor. He was the writer of plays such as, Agra Bazar (1954) and Charandas Chor (1975). A pioneer in Urdu and Hindi theatre, he was most known for his work with Chhattisgarhi tribals, at the Naya Theatre, a theatre company he founded in 1959 in Bhopal. He went on to include indigenous performance forms such as nacha, to create not only a new theatrical language, but also milestones such as Charandas Chor, Gaon ka Naam Sasural, Mor Naam Damad and Kamdeo ka Apna Basant Ritu ka Sapna.
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. It is the oldest form of drama, though live theatre has now been joined by modern recorded forms. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. Places, normally buildings, where performances regularly take place are also called "theatres", as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον, itself from θεάομαι.
The Other Shore is a play by the Chinese writer Gao Xingjian. It was first published into English in 1997 and translated again in 1999.
Shanta Kalidas Gandhi was an Indian theatre director, dancer and playwright who was closely associated with IPTA, the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India. She studied with Indira Gandhi at a residential school in the early 1930s, and remained close to the prime minister in later life. She received many government awards and sinecures under the Indira Gandhi administration, including the Padma Shri (1984) and being made chairperson of the National School of Drama (1982–84).
Beijing People's Art Theatre (北京人民艺术剧院/北京人民藝術劇院) is a theatre company that was founded in June 1952 by drama master Cao Yu. Since its founding, the company has produced nearly 300 dramas of different styles, from classic Chinese themes to adaptations of Molière. The company is based in the Capital Theatre in Beijing.
Tale of the Pipa is a Chinese nanxi play written by the playwright Gao Ming during the late Yuan dynasty. There are French, German, English translations of the play, and an English novelization-translation.
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama is a 2010 book edited and introduced by Xiaomei Chen and published by the Columbia University Press.
Colin Patrick Mackerras is an Australian sinologist, Emeritus Professor at Griffith University, and specialist in Chinese culture. He has published on Chinese drama, national minorities of China, Australian-Chinese relations and images of China in the West.
The Bus Stop is a Chinese absurdist play written in 1981 by Gao Xingjian. Though originally completed in 1981, a second draft wasn't completed until 1982, and the play was not performed on stage until 1983. The play premiered at the Beijing People's Art Theatre and was directed by Lin Zhaohua, the Deputy Director of the People's Art Theatre. Though appreciated by many audiences, the original run was shut down by the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign after only 13 performances. Now banned from performance in mainland China, The Bus Stop remains an influential text in Chinese absurdist drama.
Andrew Radford is a British linguist known for his work in syntax and child language acquisition. His first important contribution to the field was a 1977 book on Italian syntax. He achieved international recognition in 1981 for his book Transformational Syntax, which sold over 30,000 copies and was the standard introduction to Chomsky's Government and Binding Theory for many years; and this was followed by an introduction to transformational grammar in 1988, which sold over 70,000. He has since published several books on syntax within the framework of generative grammar and the Minimalist Program of Noam Chomsky, a number of which have appeared in the series Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.
Peter Michael Boenisch is a German theatre researcher. Since 2019, he had been Professor for Dramaturgy at Aarhus University (Denmark). In 2019, he was elected into the Academia Europaea.
