Theatre Studies
Databases
Digital Theatre+ is the world’s leading educational platform for the performing arts, with unlimited access to over 1000+ full-length productions and educational resources. DT+ collaborate with renowned theatre companies, actors and creatives to capture and curate live performances in stunning quality and bring you insights from behind the scenes, and commission bespoke educational resources to support study at every level.
An online directory of academic, peer-reviewed, open access books. Search by keyword or browse by subject.
Coverage: Full text
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals, covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.
Coverage: Index
Contains abstracts of selected New Zealand serials, including newspapers, about New Zealand and the South Pacific. Subjects covered include general interest material, social research, current affairs, the arts and humanities.
Coverage: Coverage varies (Full text)
Access to archival issues of journals with coverage usually ending three to five years before present. Back issues of over 1500 journals in the arts, humanities, science, and social sciences with links to current issues available in Project Muse.
Naxos Video Library brings you an extensive streaming video library of classical music performances, opera, ballet, live concerts and documentaries. Watch concerts, operas, ballets and music documentaries online. Limited to 5 concurrent users. Please log out after use.
Coverage: Coverage varies (Full text)
Includes over 380 journals from over 70 scholarly publishers covering the fields of literature and criticism, history, visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others.
Coverage: Index
Te Puna Search (WorldCat Discovery) provides a view of New Zealand libraries’ holdings and the holdings of other libraries around the world for both library staff and patrons. Discovery searches over OCLC WorldCat plus other databases.
The collected works of Renaissance writer Ben Jonson. This searchable edition complements and extends on the print edition published by Cambridge University Press in July 2012, edited by David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson, with a wide array of textual and contextual materials.
Coverage: 1785 - 2014
The complete digital edition of the Times (London) is a primary source for researchers of world history, politics, and literature. Contains articles and letters to the editor from famous writers. The entire newspaper has been captured and is searchable, including all articles, advertisements and illustrations/photographs.
Coverage: Index
WorldCat is the world's largest network of library content and services. Search the collections of libraries in your community and thousands more around the world.
Dictionaries
This practical handbook of terms, theories and styles relevant to the study and practice of dramaturgy encompasses textual, performance and production conventions as they have appeared throughout the history of drama and theatre.
Examines the different areas of postmodernist literature and the variety of forms that have been produced.
International and historical in scope, this reference includes nearly 1,500 entries and is divided into three volumes: Plays; Playwrights; and, Actors, Directors and Designers.
This book is intended for undergraduates taking courses in drama, theater or performing arts, providing an informative and accessible guide to the subject.
Reviews current knowledge of the character and operation of theatres in Shakespeare's time, with an explanation of their origins. Coverage includes the practices of Elizabethan actors and script writers: methods of characterisation; gesture, blocking and choreography, including music, dance and fighting; actors' rhetorical interaction with audiences; and use of costumes, stage props, and make-up.
Encyclopedias
This guide offers a wealth of information on the history and present practice of theatre in all parts of the world. It clearly depicts the dynamic interaction of performance traditions from all cultures in present-day theatre.
The Oxford Companion to American Theatre provides an up-to-date guide to the American stage from its beginnings to the present.
This Oxford Companion is based on the celebrated Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, and covers styles and movements, organisations, regions and traditions; it has a particularly strong focus on biographies of actors, playwrights, directors, and designers. New entries cover the people and companies who have come into prominence since the publication of the Encyclopedia.
This encyclopedia views theatre and performance as "human expressions with large cultural significance." These expressions extend beyond traditional theater to include opera, film, dance, radio, and even circuses, rituals, and parades.
This handbook contains a series of activities that are structured around four ready-made frameworks that should enable students and teachers to work towards a play, video, musical event, or exhibition.
Journals
This peer reviewed journal is concerned in the broadest possible way with the phenomenon of performance and with the processes involved in its production and reception.
Dedicated to the performing arts of Asia, focusing upon both traditional and modern theatrical forms. This engaging, intercultural journal offers descriptive and analytical articles, original plays and play translations, book and audiovisual reviews, and reports of current theatrical activities in Asia.
Established in 1982, Australasian Drama Studies (ADS) is the official journal published by the Association. This peer-reviewed journal contains articles, interviews, and production casebooks on world theatre by Australasian and international scholars. Also reviews scholarly books and published play texts.
Provides the Canadian theatre community with in-depth feature articles, manifestos, slideshows, videos, design portfolios, photo essays, and other documents that reflect the challenging forms that theatre takes in the contemporary Canadian arts scene. Peer reviewed.
An international interdisciplinary peer reviewed journal devoted to studies in all areas of drama.
An international peer-reviewed journal encompassing new playwrights and devisors to theatres of movement, image and other forms of physical expression, from new acting methods to music theatre, live art and multi-media production work. Covers physical theatre, opera, dance, design and the increasingly blurred boundaries between the physical and the visual arts.
A major peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of the creative arts, design and digital technologies. Articles cover practical and theoretical aspects of making or using digital media in creative disciplines. Topics include visual arts, interaction design, physical computing and making, computational materials, textile and fashion design, filmmaking and animation, game design, music, dance, drama, architecture and urban design.
The magazine of the Drama Studies department at Victoria University of Wellington.
A multi-disciplinary academic journal which provides a forum for trans-disciplinary discussion across boundaries - disciplinary, geographic, cultural, social or economic. Each issue is organised as a site of encounter around a one word theme. Focusing on New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific, Junctures seeks to address the matters which concern us all as we negotiate the contemporary environment. Double-blind peer reviewed by an international editorial team. Themes include water, oceans, genetics, space, peace, language, movement, body, play, control, Indigenisation.
Peer reviewed journal focussed on dramatic literature. Contains articles from a variety of geo-political points of view, both formal and historical, on the dramatic literature of the past two centuries; and an extensive book review section. University of Toronto Press.
This peer reviewed journal provides an international forum where theatrical scholarship and practice can meet. Contains news, analysis and debate within the field of theatre studies.
PAJ explores innovative work in theatre, performance art, dance, video, writing, technology, sound, and music, bringing together all live arts in thoughtful cultural dialogue. Issues include critical essays, artists’ writings, interviews, plays, drawings, and notations, with extended coverage of performance, festivals, and books. Podcasts, video and audio clips appear on PAJ’s online home.
This peer-reviewed journal has an emphasis on contemporary performance arts within changing cultures and technologies which is reflected in the interdisciplinary vision and international scope of the journal. It combines writings and works for the page in an interplay of analysis, anecdote, polemic and criticism; interweaving the oblique with the conflicting, the pivotal with the resistant, and the eclectic with the indispensable.
Billed as "the magazine of New Zealand plays and playwrights" this yearly publication contains articles, interviews and advice from practitioners, round-ups of theatre in Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland, and a yearly calendar of professional productions of New Zealand plays. Available in print and online.
A refereed journal aimed at those who are interested in applying performance practices to cultural engagement, educational innovation and social change.
A peer-reviewed journal containing articles at the cutting edge of Shakespearean and early modern performance studies and theatre history. Also contains theatre, film and book reviews, providing a record of performance and scholarship in a variety of media throughout the world.
Features peer-reviewed articles on the history, theory and practice of the performing arts, as well as the methodology of theatre research and performance studies in Southern Africa and further afield on the African continent.
With an emphasis on experimental, avant-garde, intercultural, and interdisciplinary performance, TDR covers performance art, theatre, dance, music, visual art, popular entertainments, media, sports, rituals, and the performance in and of politics and everyday life.
Contains scholarly articles and reviews from noted practitioners and scholars. Features social and historical studies, production reviews, and theoretical inquiries that analyze dramatic texts and production. Peer reviewed.
Contains articles on theatre practices in their social, cultural, and historical contexts, their relationship to other media of representation, and to other fields of inquiry. The journal seeks to reflect the evolving diversity of critical idioms prevalent in the scholarship of differing world contexts.
A theatre history journal containing performance-centered and historiographic studies from all points across the historical, cultural, and methodological spectra.
An interdisciplinary journal for innovative research and scholarship that contests the objectification, pathologisation, and exoticisation of transgender lives. It explores the diversity of gender, sex, sexuality, embodiment, and identity in ways that have not been adequately addressed by feminist and queer scholarship. Examines how “transgender” comes into play as a category, a process, a social assemblage, an increasingly intelligible gender identity, an identifiable threat to gender normativity, and a rubric for understanding the variability and contingency of gender across time, space, and cultures. Major topics addressed in the first few issues include the cultural production of trans communities, critical analysis of transgender population studies, transgender biopolitics, radical critiques of political economy, and problems of translating gender concepts and practices across linguistic communities.
Websites
The official database that provides records of productions from the beginning of Broadway theatre to the present.
Stream ballet, opera, contemporary dance, documentaries and theatre on demand. Features the Royal Shakespeare Company, London Symphony Orchestra, the Bolshoi Ballet and more. The Library does not subscribe to this resource, but there's a free trial, and a discounted subscription for students and educators of $45 per year (click on 'Professionals' to see it).
There is also a 'watch for free' selection.
Gives access to Internet resources in theatre and performance studies.
An archive of stage productions in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The project was initiated by Theatre Studies at Otago University in 2004 and is still in active progress.
Theatre New Zealand provides a national link between people who are involved in theatre through theatre societies, schools, youth theatres and other organisations throughout Aotearoa-New Zealand.
The New Zealand Performing Arts Review and Directory provides details of productions, as well as links to reviews and venues.