This fascinating book brings together for the first time everything you never knew about the world of opera. Fun, engaging and entertaining, it is a collection of facts, figures and miscellany which captures the sublimity and silliness of opera. From opera etiquette to the role of goats in opera, bible characters to favourite foods of the leading sopranos, no opera fan (whether serious or armchair) anywhere will fail to be educated and entertained. The book includes a foreword by Lesley Garrett, one of opera's favourite sopranos.

The V&A's greatest treasures from the Toshiba Gallery of Japanese Art shine in this newly updated overview of Japanese art from the last four centuries. These superb holdings, acquired over a period of 150 years, started with the international exhibitions of the second half of the nineteenth century and have grown to include exciting contemporary work by leading artists. The result is an unrivalled collection of Japan's achievements in art and design, with a particular emphasis on ceramics, lacquer, textiles, prints and metalwork.

School music education in Australia was described as being in crisis in the 2005 Federal Government Report. Many children have little or no access to quality music teaching. A few, mostly private, schools are centres of musical excellence, but the majority offer little but popular music. Meanwhile, children are ‘educating’ themselves through their iPod, internet, and mobile phone. Few are learning to play an instrument or to sing properly. Instead the majority are merely passive consumers who, when they mature and leave behind the teenage hyperbole surrounding pop music, will have no conception of music as a profound art.

It begins with a miracle. On a rainy day in Alice Springs in 2039 a fish falls like manna from heaven to bless the reunion of a father with his long lost son. Perhaps it's a sign that the pattern of betrayal and abandonment that began on another rainy day in London in 1959 will come to an end. Who'll stop the rain? Andrew Bovell's award-winning play is powerful storytelling in which the voices of our past echo into our future.

In the summer of 1939 in a small Moscow theatre a company of actors begins rehearsals of a new play to commemorate Stalin’s sixtieth birthday. It’s a tough gig, because for Soviet artists working towards the Radiant Future the old showbiz maxim ‘the show must go on’ is an order you can’t refuse. Another opening, another show trial! Realism is a comedy of nerves, a backstage farce set in a pressure cooker. It’s about the spirit that makes art live and the forces that want to crush it.

An extraordinary blend of performance, humour, sound, video installation and baroque song, Holiday is theatre at its most inspirational. In a moment of relaxation and quiet reflection, two men unwittingly engage. Spontaneous, unaffected and thrillingly real, innocent discussion becomes an exploration of private fantasy, hidden anxiety, personal mythology and the most inexplicable behaviour.

Somewhere in a busy city, a Man wakes to discover he has forgotten his life. He has no memory of the past and no clear sense of the present. He is concussed. Or so he is told by a doctor—who may also be his partner. Now there are flashes of something. Hunger, mourning, sexual appetite... Bob Dylan? But why isn’t he in hospital? And what of the voices, the Blackberry, the brothers? The hammer?

Simon Reynolds is the author of Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture; Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock; The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellions and Rock and Roll; Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 and most recently, Bring the Noise: Twenty Years of Hip Hop and Hip Rock.

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This pioneering book offers an insider’s analysis of the development of Palestinian art from the 19th century to the present day. Kamal Boullata’s diverse selection of pre-1948 paintings through contemporary media works highlights the political concerns of Palestinian artists and their unique contributions to modern Arab culture. Work by artists who continued to live in their homeland is examined alongside that of artists of the Palestinian diaspora, including art world luminary Mona Hatoum. Particular attention is paid to the role of women artists, revealing how strategies of resistance have been employed against the dominant artistic expression. With a preface by John Berger.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the work of twelve artists whose photographic practice has been central to the development of contemporary Australian art. Lavishly illustrated chapters trace the development of their work from the 1980s to the present, drawing out their key themes, while simultaneously providing insight into the changing conceptions and uses of photography by artists. The 12 photographers included are: Pat Brassington, Brenda L. Croft, Destiny Deacon, Simryn Gill, Bill Henson, Rosemary Laing, Tracey Moffatt , Debra Phillips. Jacky Redgate, Julie Rrap, David Stephenson and Anne Zahalka.

HOW DO ACTORS FUSE THOUGHT, EMOTION and ACTION WITHIN THEIR CREATIVE PROCESS? Essential Acting is an inspired and reliable toolbox for actors and teachers in the classroom, the rehearsal room and the workshop. RADA’s Brigid Panet has distilled 50 years of acting, directing and actor training into a unique recipe which brilliantly combines the teachings of Stanislavski and Laban into an invaluable practical resource. These exercises are built around the need for simple, achievable techniques that can be applied by actors, teachers and directors to answer the myriad requirements of actor training. The goal is to produce a continuous level of achievement, addressing: How to rehearse, How to work with a text, How to audition for drama school, How to access the truth of feelings and actions. Essential Acting will be a must-have purchase for anyone looking for a comprehensive study guide to the necessary work of the actor.

Australia has a rich & diverse heritage in patchwork quilts. It covers convicts, Governor's wives, Gold Rush immigrants, wealthy shop owners, WW2 Australian prisoners of war, rabbit trappers, artist's wives, and Mum, who made all her children's clothes & never threw anything away. This book not only reflects the quilts found in this country but also the social history of countless ordniary people, histories which otherwise would never have been written, reflecting the life in this country over 2 centuries. Stunning photos, show the rich quality of design & workmanship.

NOW IN PAPERBACK. Dan takes us to the buildings he believes have changed the world, revealing how in truly great buildings function, material and purpose connect to all other parts of life - showing how architecture is the richest and most complex of man's artistic endeavours. Do his chosen buildings live up to expectation, or does he find disappointment and lost ideals?Architecture is an art, a science and a craft. But buildings also have to fulfil a function, cater for human use, withstand the forces of nature and be built to a budget.Dan considers all these aspects as he looks at places, some well known, many less so, as varied as the Catherine Palace in St Petersburg, the Minaret of Jam in Afghanistan, the Hanging Temple in Shanxi in China, Astana in Kazakhstan, Brasilia, Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, the Lupanare Brothels in Pompeii and the building of an igloo, man's earliest exercise in the creation of shelter, in Greenland.

The allure of mobile, portable architecture is worldwide and centuries old. From the desert tents of the Bedouin to the silvery capsules of the Airstream trailer, mobile architecture has inspired designers with its singular characteristics of lightness, transcience and practicality. This book explores the ever-growing range of possibilities of portable, demountable structures. From serious Refuge Wear to the playful Furnicycle & the practical Kunsthallen, More Mobile shows the methods & finished work of the most exciting contemporary designers working in this field—presented with detailed drawings & text.

In the years around 1960, a rapid process of deindustrialisation profoundly changed New York City. At the same time, massive highway construction, urban housing renewal & the growth of the fiinancial sector altered the city’s landscape. Focusing on works by Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg & Donald Judd (all artist living amid the changes & filling their art with old street signs & other discarded objects), art historian Joshua Shannon shows how New York art engaged with this transformation of the city.

An increased public & academic interest in drawing & sketching, both traditional & digital, has allowed drawing research to emerge recently as a discipline in its own right. In light of this development, this book presents a collection of essays by leading artis and drawing researchers that reveal a provocative agenda for the field, analyzing the latest work on creativity, education and thinking from a variety of perspectives. Contributors include Richard Talbot, Angela Eames, Anna Ursyn, Howard Riley and Deanna Petherbridge.

Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est? This occult-sounding question was set under Giorgio de Chirico’s 1911 self-portrait as melancholic: And what should I love, if not the enigma? The birth of the ‘pittura metafisica’, which would be inconceivable with the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche, was consolidated with this inspirational & emblematic picture. Filled with beautiful colour plates, this volume retraces the foundations of this artistic revolution and de Chirico’s history as a painter.

This book focuses on the visual & material culture of St Petersburg & Moscow at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In roughly chronological order the book highlights the essential social & political developments of this turbulent era—which painting, poetry, music & dance both refracted and affected. From Tolstoy to Akhmatova, Chaliapin to Nijinsky, Diaghilev to Stanislavsky, Vrubel to Kandinsky, the book carries 650 illustrations, 400 in colour.

A typeface becomes a star, one that supposedly has no character, that is neutral, almost laissez-faire, and so ubiquitous as to be virtually invisible. An anachronism. These are the qualities that have ensured a career and enduring popularity for Helvetica. Half a century after its birth it is possible to see exactly how much Helvetica really was a child of its time—its success rooted in the political pragmatism of Europe after World War 2, and in the glorification of its origins, which did not refer to its creator, but rather to a nation and its legend of a neutrality that was adopted as a recommendation and an argument in favor of the typeface. Is Helvetica anonymous and neutral, does it lack character? As shown in documents published in this volume for the first time, Max Miedinger & Eduard Hoffmann had the vision & determination to create a typeface whose composure and normality are more refreshing now than ever before and whose letterforms are of a pleasingly willful beauty. Helvetica, as an aesthetic constant, mastered the quantum leap in 1957 from metal type to the digital age of word processing.

We all have a stake in the past and in its tangible preservation, and we trust professionals to preserve our cultural heritage for the future. However, restoration in all its forms is entangled in many contemporary theoretical debates and problems. This book is the first concerted effort to examine together the linked philosophies of the different arts of preserving and uncovering the past: the restoration of buildings, conservation of works of art, and editing of literary works to retrieve their original or intended texts. By investigating a series of recent crises in each of these areas, Securing the Past shows how their underlying justifications relate closely to one another. Paul Eggert shows how they have been philosophically undermined by postmodern theories and charts another, richer way forward to a new future for the past.