Modern Drama 

About: Modern Drama is an academic journal published by University of Toronto Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Drama & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 0026-7694. Over the lifetime, 2413 publications have been published receiving 7693 citations.

Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified

Abstract: Inherited from surrealist practices in the twenties, as RoseLee Goldberg has shown in her book, Peiformance! artistic performance enjoyed quite a boom in the fifties, especially in the wake of the experiments of Allan Kaprow and John Cage. Conceived as an art-form at the juncture of other signifying practices as varied as dance, music, painting, architecture, and sculpture, performance seems paradoxically to correspond on all counts to the new theatre Performance and Theatricality 171 invoked by Artaud; a theatre of cruelty and violence, of the body and its drives, of displacement and "disruption,'" a non-narrative and non-representational theatre. 1 should like to analyse this experience of a new genre in hopes of revealing its fundamental characteristics as well as the process by which it works. My ultimate objective is to show what practices like these, belonging to the limits of theatre, can tell us about theatricality and its relation to the actor and the stage.

Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment by Tim Etchells (review)

Abstract: son are asked about how they work together and the relation of their work to Wales (79, 83, 87); and the co-founder of Edinburgh's Communicado Theatre Company, Gerry Mulgrew, is asked about the relevance of Scotland to his work (105). On the other hand, the interviewers do not substantially explore the specificities of directing physical theatre with DV8 Physical Theatre artistic director Lloyd Newson, nor of directing movement and/or opera with Second Stride artistic director and sometime Caryl Churchill collaborator Ian Spink, nor of using the linguistic hybrid 'binglish' with Tara Arts director Jatinder Verma. The final methodological question I would have liked to see the authors of this collection address more explicitly is how they selected their interviewees. In many ways, the range of selection is good, encompassing directors from theatre-dense London but also from regional theatres and from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland; directors who do text-based work, but also those who do physical theatre, movement, and devised theatre; and directors representing some range of gender, ethnicity, and abil ity. Alongside the women directors already mentioned, Phyllida Lloyd, Julia Pascal , and Deborah Warner are also interviewed. However, more explicit commentary on methodological approach to selection and interviewing would have further helped to describe the work of these directors and the work of contemporary theatre practice in Britain more generally. As well, more explicit commentary on why directing is the focus of the book would have usefully addressed John Fox 's challenge and contextualized Peter Brook 's rather mystical and mystifying foreword. Of its kind, this is a useful book, both because it brings a particular, broad range of directors to consideration and because, in some respects, it indicates how this kind of book can provide insight into contemporary theatre practice more broadly.