Showing papers in "Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance in 2010"

Radio drama adaptations: an approach towards an analytical methodology

Abstract: This article establishes a methodology with which radio drama pieces can be analysed. It thereby integrates all features the art form has to offer: voices, music, noises, but also technical features like cutting and mixing contribute to the narrative that is being told. This approach emphasizes the importance of seeing radio drama as an art form in its own right, and not as a literary genre. An analysis of radio drama adapted from literary pieces shows how varied the features with which the same story can be told in the two art forms can be.

Hotel Two Rooms; the practice of adaptation, projection and play in performance

Abstract: Hotel Two Rooms was invited as a performance at the International conference: Cultures of Translation, Adaptation of Film and Performance. The research produced a complex play routes model illustrated in the published article: Hotel Two Rooms; The Practice of Adaptation, Projection and Play in Performance (2010). The project proposed the initial research question ‘How can notions of dark and deep play be used to construct performance material?’ And the subsidiary question ‘How does shifting the contract for participants in an intimate performance inform the principal research question?’ These questions were interrogated through a series of rules based upon Roger Caillois’ (2001) game categories and the results were unpacked using phenomenological approaches to data collection and interpretation based upon Lanigan’s (1988) model of capta, reduction and interpretation, refined by Ladly (2007). Notions of projection (from psychological, artistic, playful positions) and adaptation (mainly exploring transposition as a subjunctive experience) were established to compose material and collect data using Denscombe’s (1998) ‘face to face’ survey about the attitudes and experiences of each player in the hotel room. The research revealed varying attitudes of play from participants’ drawing upon their behavioural responses to intimate performance. Some of the results included: participants willingly confessing their hidden desires; participants proposing submissive roles for themselves and performing to an imagined priest or father figure; participants enthusiastically offering to play dead and subsequently revealing their experience of catharsis. The practice-based enquiry is drawn into conceptual discussion in the journal article which braids adaptation studies with play and psychoanalysis to name a strategy for making entitled ‘conceptual adaptation’. This term opens up the incongruous combination of forms when playing through a host of Julie Sanders’ adaptation terms, particularly version, echo, travesty and pastiche. Such terms formed the basis on which to construct the writing of performance proposals (contracts) for players but also as a way to analyse the types of play offered during the performance.