About the Book
Dictionnaire de la performance et du théâtre contemporain - The Routledge Dictionary of Performance and Contemporary Theatre by Patrice Pavis is a comprehensive guide for anyone active in the field of art, especially for people who work in theatre - from enthusiastic amateurs to dedicated professionals, from students and scholars to the media workers. With about two hundred entries and numerous cross-references, The Routledge Dictionary of Performance and Contemporary Theatre provides definitions, advice, and support in all the fields of theatre art - from Aerial Art, Affect and Anthropology Theatre, to World Theatre, and Zapping. In an insightful, occasionally also instructive and fun way, the famous author Patrice Pavis shares his deep knowledge about theatre, and creates an invaluable guide for anyone who creates drama, performance, or events. Whether immersive, intercultural, or community theatre, theatre for tourists, or any other type - this representative work represents an essential reference tool for every theoretician or practitioner in the field of contemporary theatre.
The author of The Routledge Dictionary of Performance and Contemporary Theatre fulfils his task to the full: he has created a guidebook for better understanding and evaluation of the works in our times - not only of texts and directing but of staging and performances of all kinds.
Nebojša Bradić
Patrice Pavis is a scholar of an exceptional intellectual curiosity, a theatrologist who, following the spirit of the times, has worked in various theoretical and methodological frameworks: from the semiology of theatre, to research of theatre interculturality, to the last phase in which he has focused to theoretical positioning of performing studies in the French culture.
The curiosity and non-dogmatism of his work is evident not only in the fact that he never slaved to one theory or method, but also in the fact that he has often debated with other concepts (post-dramatic paradigm or some concepts in the field of performing studies), but also with his own earlier ones (contemporary directing of classical works, for example). His books have been translated and wielded considerable influence over the development of theatre studies all over the world, while his attachment to Korean culture especially stands out.
Ivan Medenica
Like any other dictionary/glossary, Pavis’s one is also not read like a piece fiction or like other studies in theatrology - chronologically, page by page. Alphabetical order, namely, asks for a special logic in reading, and, above all, searching; it asks a reader to search, to follow associations and make links between entries - topics, based on an internal logic of certain themes. And yet, The Routledge Dictionary of Performance and Contemporary Theatre can be read in the other way, like a work of fiction, cover to cover, because it slowly introduces us into the words that are, on the one hand, familiar to us, but on the other, completely different, and new. Once again, theatre, even the contemporary one, is presented as a - miracle.
Aleksandar Milosavljević
The Author
PATRICE PAVIS is the professor of theatre studies at University of Kent in Canterbury. His field of studies are performative events, semiology, and interculturality in theatre.
He has suggested verbo-corps theory regarding the translation of dramatic works. The theory suggests a culture-specific union between language and gesture used subconsciously by every writer. Pavis suggested that the translator needed to be able to comprehend the union in the original and reconstruct it in the translation.
He has published the following works: Problèmes de sémiologie théâtrale (1976), Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre (1982), Voix et images de la scène: vers une sémiologie de la réception (1985), Marivaux à l'épreuve de la scène (1986), Dictionnaire du Théâtre (1987), Le théâtre au croisement des cultures (1990), The Intercultural Performance Reader (1996), L'analyse des spectacles: théâtre, mime, danse, danse-théâtre, cinéma (2005), La mise en scène contemporaine: origines, tendances, perspectives (2007), Dictionnaire de la performance et du théâtre contemporain (2014).