In this text, Robin Nelson articulates a rationale for the inclusion of practice as research within the academy, and outlines an approach to conceiving and supporting such projects that is likely t...

Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances by Robin Nelson

This thesis proposes that an ensemble or community is perpetually shifting and changing, operating in the between of the subjectivities ‘I’ and ‘We’. It argues that the established ensemble does not assume a static entity, and that the notion of a fixed state of the community may not be as straightforward as often assumed.
Positioned within a Practice as Research methodology, this thesis weaves together examples from a longitudinal study of an ensemble, within a closed and, subsequently, open laboratory, with the investigation into the degrees of participation between the ensemble members. This thesis entwines discourses of the ensemble and specific task-based practices, to investigate the individual movement towards, within and alongside the co-appearing of ensembles. This understanding of the collective ensemble is framed by the philosophy of ontology surrounding community as articulated by Jean-Luc Nancy (2000). This embodied practice, reveals new ways of articulating a phenomenology of ensemble practice, understood as a continuous state of fluidity between individual and collective states of being. The thesis traces the emergence of an ensemble in a closed laboratory environment, placing the practice in dialogue with specific contemporary performance collectives, followed by an account of the laboratory in varying open environments. The research is presented both as a written thesis and as an online platform, which the reader is invited to explore alongside each other. These interactions establish the context, methodology, documentation and critical analysis of the Practice as Research investigation. The online platforms can be accessed by following the URLs in the footnotes. A complementary USB memory stick provides the option to watch highlights of the tasks and ensemble, offering a visual and auditory impression of the process. This longitudinal study of an emerging performance ensemble aimed to demonstrate the between state of the individual and the collective as continually taking place. The formation of the ensemble supported participation and interaction, which revealed important implications such as the non-fixed entity of contemporary performance ensembles and the language of becoming when discussing ensembles and community.

An investigation into the relationship between the individual and the collective in emerging performance ensembles

Hamlet is a characteristic intellectual more inclined to lecture actors about their craft than listen to them, and is a precursor of Enlightenment figures like Diderot and Lessing. This book is a quest for the voice of early professional actors, drawing on English, French and other European sources to distinguish the methods of professionals from the theories of intellectual amateurs. David Wiles challenges the orthodoxy that all serious discussion of acting began with Stanislavski, and outlines the comprehensive but fluid classical system of acting which was for some three hundred years its predecessor. He reveals premodern acting as a branch of rhetoric, which took from antiquity a vocabulary for conversations about the relationship of mind and body, inside and outside, voice and movement. Wiles demonstrates that Roman rhetoric provided the bones of both a resilient theatrical system and a physical art that retains its relevance for the post-Stanislavskian performer.

The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

Dystopian Performatives: Negative Affect/Emotion in the Work of Sarah Kane seeks to combine three areas of theoretical inquiry to understand the way that affect/emotion operates on an audience in the theatre: affect/emotion science, performance theory, and utopianism. Utilizing Sarah Kane’s body of work as a case study, this dissertation connects each of her plays to a distinct basic emotion in order to bracket the vast interconnections between affect/emotion science and the theatre: disgust within Blasted, anger within Phaedra’s Love, fear within Cleansed, memory within Crave, and sadness within 4.48 Psychosis. Specifically, Dystopian Performatives investigates the negatively valenced experiences that occur in the theatre as a kind of dystopian practice that seeks to critique the present and promote action to adjust the future. The dystopian performative theory demonstrates the way in which experiential and viscerally impactful moments in the theatre potentially create change within an audience that directly attacks social and cultural issues relevant to the content of Kane’s plays. The experience of affect/emotion, I argue, performatively “does,” or acts, on the body of the audience in a way that has a meaningful impact on cognition, behavior, ideology, and morality.

Dystopian Performatives: Negative Affect/Emotion in the Work of Sarah Kane

This presentation will examine the links between Translation Studies and the new discipline of Adaptation Studies, which has grown enormously in recent years, particularly in universities in the Anglo-Saxon world. We will propose that there should be greater contact between the areas, and, more particularly, that Translation Studies has a great deal to offer Adaptation Studies. Terminology in the area of Adaptation is a major problem, with a large number of terms such as recontextualization, tradaptation, spinoff, reduction, simplification, condensation, abridgement, special version, reworking, offshoot, transformation, remediation, and re-vision. Here I shall use the distinctions made by Julie Sanders in Adaptation and Appropriation (Sanders 2006: 26 passim), in which she emphasizes that an “adaptation” will usually contain omissions, rewritings, maybe additions, but will still be recognized as the work of the original author, where the original point of enunciation remains. This is similar to Dryden’s classic definition of “paraphrase” (see, for example, Bassnett-McGuire 1980:60). Julie Sanders’ definition of “appropriation” is similar to Dryden’s definition of “imitation” (see, for example, Bassnett-McGuire 1980:60).: the original point of enunciation may now have changed, and although certain characteristics of the original may remain, the new text will be more that of the adapter or rewriter.

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Translation Studies and Adaptation Studies

Theatre-Making explores modes of authorship in contemporary theatre seeking to transcend the heritage of binaries from the Twentieth century such as text-based vs. devised theatre, East vs. West, theatre vs. performance - with reference to genealogies though which these categories have been constructed in the English-speaking world.

Theatre-Making : Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century

PART I: Redefinitions of Ensemble 11 MICHAEL BOYD (Royal Shakespeare Company): A 'Contingent Community' in a Free Market Economy 12 GABOR TOMPA (Hungarian Theatre of Cluj): Between the East and the West Today 13 HERMANN WUNDRICH (The Berliner Ensemble): How the Berliner Ensemble Changes With Time 14 YURI BUTUSOV (guest director Satirikon Theatre): Directing as an Art of Composition 15 MAX STAFFORD-CLARK (Out of Joint): A Tried and Tested Ensemble Methodology 16 ELIZABETH LECOMPTE (The Wooster Group): 'A Group of People Around a Place' 17 LYN GARDNER (The Guardian Newspaper): On Regional Theatre-Making PART 2: Working Processes 21 ANTON ADASSINSKY and ELENA YAROVAYA (Derevo): Beyond Words 22 EMMA RICE (Kneehigh Theatre): From a Community to the West End 23 JOANNA HOLDEN (freelance actor, Northern Stage, Kneehigh, Cirque du Soleil): On Being an Ensemble Actor in the UK 24 IAN MORGAN (Song of the Goat): An Actor's Journey Between Wales and Wroclaw 25 DAN ROTHENBERG (Pig Iron): 'Comic Figures Repurposed' 26 ADRIANO SHAPLIN (The Riot Group): Ensemble as a Musical 'Intersubjective Unit' 27 HANNA SLATTNE (Tinderbox Theatre): Working together in Northern Ireland 28 ALEXANDER KELLY (Third Angel) and CHRIS THORPE (Unlimited Theatre): On Writing and Performance in an Ensemble PART III: Ensemble and the Audience 31 MIKE ALFREDS (ex-Shared Experience, Method and Madness): Sharing the Experience of Imagination 32 GREG ALLEN (The Neo-Futurists): An Interactive Ensemble 33 PHELIM MCDERMOTT (Improbable): 'Safe Emergencies' 34 PETER ECKERSALL (Not Yet It's Difficult): The Dramaturgy of Long-Term Cross-Cultural Collaboration 35 KATARINA PEJOVIC and BORIS BAKAL (Shadow Casters): Ensemble as a Tool of Civic Engagement 36 DAVID BAUWENS, ALEXANDER DEVRIENDT, JOERI SMET (Ontroerend Goed): On Courting the Audience 37 RICHARD JORDAN (Richard Jordan Productions): Towards a Global Ensemble

The Contemporary Ensemble : Interviews with Theatre-Makers

The world of theatre criticism is rapidly changing in its form, function and modes of operation in the twenty-first century 

The dominance of the internet has led to a growing trend of selfappointed theatre critics and bloggers who are changing the focus and purpose of the discussion around live performance Even though the blogosphere has garnered suspicion and hostility from some mainstream newspaper critics, it has also provided significant intellectual and ideological challenges to the increasingly conservative profile of the professional critic

This book features 16 commissioned contributions from scholars, arts journalists and bloggers, as well as a small selection of innovative critical practice Authors from Australia, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Russia, the UK and the US share their perspectives on relevant historical, theoretical and political contexts influencing the development of the discipline, as well as specific aspects of the contemporary practices and genres of theatre criticism

The book features an introductory essay by its editor, Duska Radosavljevic

Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes

Written in 1981, immediately after the death of Yugoslavia's leader Josip Broz Tito, Slobodan Snajder's play Hrvatski Faust (The Croatian Faust) – dealing with the historical event of a production of Goethe's Faust in Nazi Croatia in 1942 – heralded a new age of drama in Yugoslavia, which aimed to challenge and re-examine the darker side of Yugoslav communism. Thematically the play focuses on the relationship between theatre and power and the ways in which the same work of art can be used for different political ends. The analysis of Snajder's play in this paper is therefore contextualised on two levels: historically and sociopolitically as a play that deals with the role of art and literature in a particular repressive context, and in terms of metatheatre as a kind of fiction that can empower the reader to ‘co-create meaning’. Snajder's play, which went on to become a modern classic – receiving a couple of significant German productions in the late 1980s and early 1990s – was also a milestone in a long-l...

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The Alchemy of Power and Freedom – A Contextualisation of Slobodan Šnajder’s Hrvatski Faust (The Croatian Faust)

Between 2002–5 I carried the professional title of a Dramaturg in the UK. Although I was hired in response to a thus-entitled job advert, I was only one of possibly three or four fully integrated i...

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Duška Radosavljevic

Papers

Theatre-Making : Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century

The Contemporary Ensemble : Interviews with Theatre-Makers

Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes

The Alchemy of Power and Freedom – A Contextualisation of Slobodan Šnajder’s Hrvatski Faust (The Croatian Faust)

The Need to Keep Moving