Performance text by Virginia Baxter. Introduction by Peta Tait.

A woman artist searches for a space in which to create her art work, echoing Virginia Woolf's demand on behalf of women - for a room of her own. An exciting performance text ideal for teaching purposes.

• $10.00 plus $1.50 postage. Order form.
  

East Lynne

Dramatised by T. A. Palmer from the novel by Ellen Wood. Introduction by Katherine Newey and Veronica Kelly.

Ellen Wood's 1861 novel East Lynne and its many stage adaptations provide fascinating material for study of the domestic, the melodramatic and the feminine in popular drama. Lady Isabel's adulterous defection from her dull middle-class marriage renders her an exile from her children and her very identity. Palmer's 1874 dramatisation is the most widely-known version of this famous melodrama, here reproduced with critical introduction and performance history.

• $10.00 plus $1.50 postage. Order form.

Selections from Bartolomeo Galletti's 'Around the World with Ristori' and Australian Reviews of Ristori's Performances.

Translated and introduced by Tony Mitchell.

First English-language publication of the Australian sections of the travel diary of General Galletti, who accompanied the great Italian tragedienne on her world tour. Galletti gives his observations and opinions of life in colonial Australia. Tony Mitchell's Introduction outlines the significance of Ristori to Australian performance, with selections from press reviews and a chronicle of her repertoire in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.

• $10.00 plus $1.50 postage. Order form.

This collection of interviews introduces readers to a variety of contemporary and traditional play techniques practised by women artists around the world, providing insight into many performance techniques, particularly of unpublished non-western theatre-making.

• $15.00 plus $1.50 postage. Order form.

In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism in India

Limited copies of Rustom Bharucha's In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism in India (Oxford, 1998) are available. Bharucha, a well-known theatre director, intercultural theorist, and author of Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics and numerous other books, was a keynote speaker at the 1998 ADSA conference in Hamilton, New Zealand.

In the Name of the Secular analyses how community cultural organisations have intervened in the contemporary struggles against fundamentalism in India. These organisations include the Indian People's Theatre Association, the Progressive Writers' Association, and the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust. Not limited just to India, the book also considers the Third Sector movement in Brazil which offers further interaction and intervention strategies for India. In addition to the assessment of community organisations, In the Name of the Secular also addresses contemporary popular and documentary film. Cinema is, for Bharucha, a highly contested cultural site in India.

This important book contends that the development of a "secular imaginary" can help address the power of the Hindu Right. In the Name of the Secular continues Bharucha's provocative arguments concerning the shifting nature of culture, community, performance, and performativity in India and worldwide.

• Cost: $25.00 AUS plus postage ($3.00 within Australia). Order form.

Chandralekha: Woman/Dance/Resistance

Chandralekha: Woman/Dance/Resistance offers a deeply researched critical perspective on this uniquely radical artist of contemporary India. Moving beyond the biographical genre, the book deals comprehensively with her interventions as a choreographer, graphic designer, writer, cultural activist. It investigates the manner in which Yoga and martial arts provide the foundations for her bold rearticulation of Bharatanatyam. It also explores her close affinities to the women's and ecological movements which have inspired her profound understanding of the body.

Tradition' and 'modernity' meet in the life and work of this activist/performer, whose position as an artist offers one of the most subtle critiques of official and fundamentalist cultural appropriations. The book celebrates the non-conformist questioning spirit of its subject while placing it in the cultural history of post-Independence India as represented in critical issues like the 'invention of tradition', censorship, 'festival culture' and the struggle against fundamentalism. It will be of vital interest not only to dancers and artists, but to feminists, activists and cultural historians.

• Cost: $18.00 (Australian dollars only) plus $7.00 postage & handling. Order form.