Jerzy Marian Grotowski was a Polish theatre director and theorist whose innovative approaches to acting, training and theatrical production have significantly influenced theatre today. He is considered one of the most influential theatre practitioners of the 20th century as well as one of the founders of experimental theatre.
Kathakali is a major form of classical Indian dance. It is a "story game" genre of art, but one distinguished by the elaborately colourful make-up and costumes of the traditional male actor-dancers. It is native to the Malayalam-speaking southwestern region of Kerala and is almost entirely practiced and appreciated by Malayali people.
Charles L. Mee is an American playwright, historian and author known for his collage-like style of playwriting, which makes use of radical reconstructions of found texts. He is also a Special Lecturer of theater at Columbia University.
Richard Foreman is an American avant-garde playwright and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.
Elizabeth LeCompte is an American director of experimental theater, dance, and media. A founding member of The Wooster Group, she has directed that ensemble since its emergence in the late 1970s.
Richard Schechner is University Professor Emeritus at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and editor of TDR: The Drama Review.
The Performance Group (TPG) was an experimental theater troupe that Richard Schechner founded in 1967 in New York City. TPG's home base was the Performing Garage in the SoHo district of Lower Manhattan. After 1975, tensions led to Schechner's resignation in 1980. The troupe reinvented itself as The Wooster Group under the leadership of director and theatre artist Elizabeth LeCompte.
Lian Amaris is an American writer, artist, and creative communicator working to connect real world experiences, performance events and the new media landscape. She is Artistic Director of Vector Art Ensemble and has authored five plays and performances that have been professionally produced at such venues as Nuyorican Poets Cafe, HERE Arts Center, The University of Chicago, P.S. 122, the Contemporary Arts Center and The University of Massachusetts. Her work also includes popular memes such as Silicon Valley Ryan Gosling and Things that cannot screen for breast cancer.
Ramlila is any dramatic folk re-enactment of the life of Rama according to the ancient Hindu epic Ramayana or secondary literature based on it such as the Ramcharitmanas. It particularly refers to the thousands of the Hindu god Rama-related dramatic plays and dance events, that are staged during the annual autumn festival of Navaratri in India. After the enactment of the legendary war between good and evil, the Ramlila celebrations climax in the Vijayadashami (Dussehra) night festivities where the giant grotesque effigies of evil such as of the rakshasa (demon) Ravana are burnt, typically with fireworks.
The notion of postdramatic theatre was established by German theatre researcher Hans-Thies Lehmann in his book Postdramatic Theatre, summarising a number of tendencies and stylistic traits occurring in avant-garde theatre since the end of the 1960s. The theatre which Lehmann calls postdramatic is not primarily focused on the drama in itself, but evolves a performative aesthetic in which the text of the performance is put in a special relation to the material situation of the performance and the stage. The postdramatic theatre attempts to mimic the unassembled and unorganized literature that a playwright sketches in the novel.
Michael Stanley Kirby was a professor of drama at New York University. He wrote several groundbreaking books, including Happenings, Futurist Performance and The Art of Time. He was editor of The Drama Review from 1969 to 1986.
John Emigh is Professor Emeritus from the Departments of Theatre, Speech and Dance and of English at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Emigh taught at Brown from 1967 to 2009. Since his retirement, he has mainly been teaching and directing in the Brown/Trinity Rep MFA program.
Brooks Barry McNamara (1937–2009) was an American theater historian, professor, and contributing editor of The Drama Review.
Letty Lou Eisenhauer was an American visual and performance artist known for her free-spirited Fluxus performances during the 1960s. She is now on faculty at the Borough of Manhattan Community College as a counselor, professor, and forensic psychologist.
Bharat Gupt is an Indian classicist, theatre theorist, sitar and surbahar player, musicologist, and newspaper columnist. He is also a retired Professor in English, who taught at the College of Vocational Studies of the University of Delhi. In February 2023 he received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award by the President of India for his contribution to musicology.
The Free Southern Theater (FST) was a community theater group founded in 1963 at Tougaloo College in Madison County, Mississippi, by Gilbert Moses, Denise Nicholas, Doris Derby, and John O’Neal. The company manager was Mary Lovelace, later Chair of the Art Department at U.C. Berkeley. The company disbanded in 1980.
Erin B. Mee is an American theater director.
Linda Walsh Jenkins is an American academic and author, active in the field of theatre studies, particularly with regard to Native American and women's theatre.
Robert Willoughby Corrigan was an American academic and the founding editor of the Carleton Drama Review, which later became TDR: The Drama Review.
John Waldhorn Gassner was a Hungarian-born American theatre historian, critic, educator, and anthologist.
