Performance Studies

The hilarious memoir from award-winning comedian Bridget Christie. When Bridget Christie walked into her local bookshop, she thought she'd come out with a book (hopefully like you've just done). And maybe a calendar of cute photos of cats (hopefully unlike you've just done). The last thing she thought she'd be leaving with was the need for a new wave of feminism and the start of an incredibly successful career.

Who works in a theater? What is the green room? How do actors know where to stand on stage? Who controls the lights? Go on a guided tour of a theater to find out! Meet an actor and a director, see how the lighting works, hear the orchestra tune up, and watch as cast and crew get ready to perform.

Sherri Shepherd comically chronicles her struggles to keep up with the many roles-professional, wife, mother, daughter, and friend-that women must play in today's world. Sherri urges women to pursue their most important dreams and to never give up, but also let's readers know that it's okay to give themselves "permission slips" when things don't always work out the way they want them to.

A novel about three women at turning points in their lives, and the one night that changes everything.

Ever since he became a Christian at the age of 40, it has been Poirot actor David Suchet's dream to make an audio recording of the Bible. In between filming the final episodes of Poirot, David Suchet spent over 200 hours in the recording studio to create the very first full-length audio version of the NIV Bible spoken by a single British actor. This recording is an excerpt of that Bible.

Read in a single voice with subtle background music, the NIV Listener’s Audio Bible features Max McLean’s skillful, engaging, but never over-dramatized style reading the Gospels. This audio Bible will bring God’s Word to life during your personal and family devotion times, group Bible study, or during your weekday commute.

Back in January 1995 in Los Angeles, California, a Singaporean pornstar named Annabel Chong took cultural rebellion to an extreme, on terms that had never been negotiated before. She was filmed having sex with a long receiving line of men, servicing them 251 times over a ten-hour period to set a new world record: The World’s Biggest Gangbang.

In Hear Ye the Word of the Lord, biblical scholar D. Brent Sandy explores how oral communication shaped the ways that biblical writers received God's message—and even more importantly, how the ancient and modern faithful receive it through hearing.

Generation after generation, women have faced the devastating reality that Hollywood is a system built to keep them out. The films created by that system influence everything from our worldviews to our brain chemistry. When women's voices are excluded from the medium, the impact on society is immense. Actor, screenwriter, and award-winning independent filmmaker Naomi McDougall Jones takes us inside the cutthroat, scandal-laden film industry, where only five percent of top studio films are directed by women and less than 20 percent of leading characters in mainstream films are female.

The Dancers’ Study Guide will help you become a professional performer. This detailed guide looks at what it really means to be a dancer with a strong emphasis on health and nutrition and maintaining your fitness given the high physical demands.It also covers learning to dance, coping with auditions and the psychology and mindset of success. It has everything you need to know about being a successful dancer and performer. This well-researched and insightful book is for anyone interested in dance from its origins to its evolution, stretching, technique, dance vocabulary and ballet basics ...

Movies do more than tell a good story. They are expressions of raw emotion, naked vulnerability, and unbridled rage. They often function in the same way as prayers, communicating our deepest longings and joys to a God who hears each and every one. In this captivating book, Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen brings a critic's unique perspective to how movies function as expressions to God of lament, praise, joy, confession, and more.

Ever since he became a Christian at the age of 40, it has been Poirot actor David Suchet's dream to make an audio recording of the Bible. In between filming the final episodes of Poirot, David Suchet spent over 200 hours in the recording studio to create the very first full-length audio version of the NIV Bible spoken by a single British actor. This recording is an excerpt of that Bible.

When The Flip Wilson Show debuted in 1970, Black faces were still rare on television, Black hosts nonexistent. So how did Clerow “Flip” Wilson go from Jersey City grade-school dropout to national celebrity, heralded on the cover of Time as “TV’s first black superstar”? Flip is a candid, entertaining biography of a consummate comedian who changed the face of American popular culture.

A Thousand Cuts is a candid exploration of one of America's strangest and most quickly vanishing subcultures. It is about the death of physical film in the digital era and about a paranoid, secretive, eccentric, and sometimes obsessive group of film-mad collectors who made movies and their projection a private religion in the time before DVDs and Blu-rays.

Meditating on the labyrinthine nature of sexual identity and the performance of gender, High Heel moves from film to fairytale, from foot binding to feminism, and from the golden ratio to glam rock. Summer Brennan considers this most provocative of fashion accessories as a nexus of desire and struggle, sex and society, violence and self expression, setting out to understand what it means to be a woman by walking a few hundred years in her shoes.

Theatrical gender-bending, also called drag, is a popular form of entertainment and a subject of scholarly study. However, most drag studies do not question the standard words and ideas used to convey this performance genre. Drawing on a rich body of archival and ethnographic research, Meredith Heller illuminates diverse examples of theatrical gender-bending.

In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break stars; fans are not simply passive dupes. Instead, journalists, the public, and celebrities themselves all compete, passionately and expertly, to shape the stories we tell about celebrities and fans. The result: a high-stakes drama as endless as it is unpredictable.

This is an audio summary of Endure, a book about the physiological and psychological factors that impact our performance.

From Benjamin Franklin's newspaper hoax that faked the death of his rival to Abbie Hoffman's attempt to levitate the Pentagon - pranksters, hoaxers, and con artists have caused confusion, disorder, and laughter in Western society for centuries. Profiling the most notorious mischief-makers from the 1600s to the present day, Pranksters explores how "pranks" are part of a long tradition of speaking truth to power and social critique.

The inside story of San Francisco's burgeoning gay history and Hollywood's trials and tribulations. Marc Huestis' showbiz memoir is an entertaining and personal retelling of his coming out in the streets of San Francisco in the early ’70s, his relationship with Harvey Milk, his award-winning early AIDS documentary work, and 20 years of memorable experiences and behind the scenes secrets of screen icons - including Debbie Reynolds, John Waters, Patty Duke, and Tony Curtis - honored at his grand singular extravaganzas at the world-renowned Castro Theater.