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Showing papers in "New Theatre Quarterly in 2009"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Fischer-Lichte as discussed by the authors argues that, since the beginning of the twentieth century, in different parts of the world, modern theatre was invented by way of interweaving cultures in performance.
Abstract: In this article Erika Fischer-Lichte argues that, since the beginning of the twentieth century, in different parts of the world, modern theatre was invented by way of interweaving cultures in performance. Different examples from the early twentieth century and the 1990s show how theatre acted as a laboratory for testing and experiencing the potential of cultural diversity. An innovative performance aesthetics enabled the exploration of the emergence, stabilization, and destabilization of cultural identity, merging aesthetics with politics. Erika Fischer-Lichte is Professor of Theatre Studies at the Freie Universitat in Berlin. She has published widely in the fields of the theory and history of the theatre, and is the author of numerous books, including, in English, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (2005) and The Transformative Power of Performance: a New Aesthetics (2008). In 2008 she established a new research programme, ‘Interweaving Cultures in Performance’, at the Freie Universitat. This paper was given as a keynote lecture at the fourteenth Performance Studies International conference, ‘Interregnum: In Between States’, in Copenhagen, 20–24 August 2008.

44 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, Young questions whether the form is appropriate to the discovery of such "truth" about more private issues, and finds that two recent works in the genre, Aalst and Taking Care of Baby, have effected a more complex and reflexive intervention by emphasizing the process of writing or reporting, thereby drawing attention to the methods of construction in documentary theatre and to the problematic issues inherent in those methods.
Abstract: The coinings of ‘verbatim theatre’ and the ‘testimony play’ have added new factors to any consideration of documentary drama. It is a form that has been proliferating recently, whether in enacted judgements of public policy – privatization of the railways in David Hare's The Permanent Way, the invasion of Iraq in Called to Account at the Tricycle – or in exploring the ‘truth’ about more private issues. In the following article, Stuart Young questions whether the form is appropriate to the discovery of such ‘truth’, but finds that two recent works in the genre, Aalst and Taking Care of Baby, have effected a more complex and reflexive intervention by emphasizing the process of writing or reporting, thereby drawing attention to the methods of construction in documentary theatre and to the problematic issues inherent in those methods. Stuart Young is Associate Professor and Co-ordinator of the Theatre Studies programme at the University of Otago. He has published on Chekhov in performance abroad and rewritings of the plays, New Zealand drama, and gay and queer theatre, and also translates Russian and French drama. He is currently working on a documentary theatre project on family violence in New Zealand.

22 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Smith as discussed by the authors examines the proposal of Simon Persighetti of Wrights & Sites for actors to behave "as signposts" and argues for the wider application of the proposal to the making of site-based theatre and performance.
Abstract: In this paper Phil Smith examines the proposal of Simon Persighetti of Wrights & Sites for actors to behave ‘as signposts’. It describes the circumstances from which the proposal arose, a particular moment in the work of site-specific artists/performers Wrights & Sites, and argues for the wider application of the proposal to the making of site-based theatre and performance. The paper describes four main features of the proposal for ‘actors as signposts’ – pointing to specificity, movement from anti-character to collective subject, performance as trajectory, and the restoration of corporeality – illustrating these with reference to the work of Punchdrunk, Francis Alys, and geographer Michael Zinganel, among others. Phil Smith is a Senior Research Associate at the School of Art and Media, University of Plymouth and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Exeter and Dartington College of Arts. Author and co-deviser of over a hundred plays or performances for companies including St Petersburg State Comedy Theatre, Tams Theater (Munich), and New Perspectives (Nottingham), he is company dramaturg for TNT (Munich) and a core member of Wrights & Sites. His solo walking-based performances include The Crab Walks and Crab Steps Aside (texts published by Intellect, 2009).

11 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Zojer as discussed by the authors examines how its numerous English translators have tried to overcome the difficulties the play presents, illustrating from a cross-section of versions examples of its resistance to easy translation, whether "faithful" or colloquial.
Abstract: Arthur Schnitzler's cycle of sexual permutations in fin de siecle Vienna has always been prone to problems of translation – not least of its title, properly in German Reigen, but often miscalled La Ronde, after Max Ophuls's film version of 1950. But its problems for translators also derive from the cultural specificity of its time and place, and in this article Heidi Zojer first examines how its numerous English translators have tried to overcome the difficulties the play presents, illustrating from a cross-section of versions examples of its resistance to easy translation, whether ‘faithful’ or colloquial. She concludes that freer adaptations such as David Hare's The Blue Room (1998) have in fact been truer to the spirit of Schnitzler's play – while perhaps truest of all has been Carlo Gebler's complete rewriting, in Ten Rounds (1999), which ‘translated’ the play to contemporary Belfast during the years of the peace process. Heidi Zojer was awarded her D. Phil. from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, in 1999. From 2000 to 2002 she was Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and since then has been teaching at University College Dublin.

7 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that all female roles in Shakespeare's plays were played by boys, i.e., young males with unbroken voices, by analyzing the demands made by the plays and concluding that Shakespeare would have been highly unlikely to waste the resources of his company by calling upon adult males to play parts that make use of the talents of his boys.
Abstract: Recent performances of female roles in Shakespeare's plays by adult males help to perpetuate the myth that this was the practice of Shakespeare's time. This article attempts to reinforce the view that all female roles were played by boys – i.e., young males with unbroken voices – by analyzing the demands made by the plays. Shakespeare regularly had available to him up to four boy actors, perhaps more. Yet some plays have as few as two female roles, and few have more than four. The conclusion is that Shakespeare would have been highly unlikely to waste the resources of his company by calling upon adult males to play parts that make use of the talents of his boys. Stanley Wells is Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham. A former editor of Shakespeare Survey and director of the Shakespeare Institute, he is author of numerous books on Shakespeare, general editor of the Penguin and Oxford editions of Shakespeare, and co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare.

5 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Aleks Sierz as discussed by the authors, a Contributing Editor of NTQ, is a critic of Tribune and author of the seminal study In-Yer-Face Theatre (Faber, 2001).
Abstract: Philip Ridley is one of the most imaginative and sensational playwrights working in Britain today. Born in 1964, he began by studying painting at St Martin's School of Art in London and wrote the highly acclaimed screenplay for The Krays (1990). He made his theatre debut at the Bush Theatre in 1991 with The Pitchfork Disney. Since then, other plays have included The Fastest Clock in the Universe (Hampstead, 1992), Ghost from a Perfect Place (Hampstead, 1994), Vincent River (Hampstead, 2000; Trafalgar Studios, 2007), and the highly controversial Mercury Fur (Paines Plough/Plymouth, 2005). This was followed by Leaves of Glass (Soho, 2007) and Piranah Heights (Soho, 2008). He's also written five plays for young people and many books for children, as well as directing two films from his own screenplays, The Reflecting Skin (1990) and The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995). Ridley continues to divide opinion: depending on your point of view, he's either Britain's sickest playwright or a singular, prolific, and amazingly visionary genius. What follows is an edited transcript of Aleks Sierz talking to Philip Ridley in one of the ‘Theatre Conversations’ series at Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, University of London, on 25 October 2007. Aleks Sierz, a Contributing Editor of NTQ, is theatre critic of Tribune and author of the seminal study In-Yer-Face Theatre (Faber, 2001).

5 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, Jung-Soon Shim indicates how Han Tae-Sook transforms Lady Macbeth's subconscious into an interculturally emotional space in which the Christian concept of guilt and the Korean ethos of Han intersect.
Abstract: In this article, Jung-Soon Shim indicates how Han Tae-Sook transforms Lady Macbeth's subconscious into an interculturally emotional space in which the Christian concept of guilt and the Korean ethos of Han intersect In this way, the director conducts an intercultural dialogue, negotiating the Western world view in Shakespeare's Macbeth together with the traditional Confucian-shamanistic world view to be found in Korea Jung-Soon Shim is Professor of English at Soongsil University in Seoul, currently President of the Korean Theatre Studies Association (KTSA), and a founding member and President of the Korean Association of Women in Theatre (KAWT) Her numerous books include Twenty-First Century Korean Women Theatre Directors (2004)

4 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Adebayo and Valerie Mason-John as discussed by the authors are two distinctive voices in contemporary writing and performance - representing Afro-Queer diasporic heritage through the specific experience of being black, British and lesbian.
Abstract: Mojisola Adebayo and Valerie Mason-John are two distinctive voices in contemporary writing and performance - representing Afro-Queer diasporic heritage through the specific experience of being black, British and lesbian. Creating continuities from contorted or erased histories (personal, social and cultural) their drama demonstrates both Afro-centric and European theatrical influences, which in Mason-John’s case, is further consolidated in her polemic, poetry and prose. Like Britain’s most innovative and prominent contemporary black woman dramatist, debbie tucker green, they reach beyond local or national identity politics, to represent universal themes and to centralise black women’s experiences. With subject-matter that includes royal families, the care system, racial cross-dressing and global ecology, Adebayo and Mason-John have individually forged a unique aesthetic and perspective in work which links environmental degradation with social disenfranchisement and travels to the heart of whiteness along black-affirming imaginative routes.

4 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Kimberly Jannarone as discussed by the authors argues that Caesar Antichrist falls into the unusual category of "a piece of theatre not intended for the stage" which is not a closet drama since, in Jarry's scrupulous care for its published form, he created his own 'theatre of the book', anticipating the later modernist use of collage while also demonstrating in words and pictures his "pataphysical" interest in the dialectics of opposites.
Abstract: The familiarity bred by the notoriety in its own times of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi has been accompanied by neglect for his other work, especially that which seems of peripheral interest to the theatre practitioner. In this article, Kimberly Jannarone argues that his earlier Caesar Antichrist falls into the unusual category of ‘a piece of theatre not intended for the stage’ – apparently unstageable, yet not a closet drama since, in Jarry's scrupulous care for its published form, he created his own ‘theatre of the book’, anticipating the later modernist use of collage while also demonstrating in words and pictures his ‘pataphysical’ interest in the dialectics of opposites. Kimberly Jannarone received her MFA and DFA from the Yale School of Drama, and is currently teaching in the Department of Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She wrote on ‘Puppetry and Pataphysics: Populism and the Ubu Cycle’, in NTQ67 (2001).

4 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the relationship between the fiction of the performance and the reality of the performed issues in one drama based on this technique, concerned with the divisive issue of citizenship rights in Nigeria.
Abstract: A defining characteristic of ‘Theatre for Development’ is its ‘unfinished’ quality, whereby plays or scenarios remain more or less ongoing dialogues. In the following article, Samuel Ayedime Kafewo discusses the relationship between the fiction of the performance and the reality of the performed issues in one drama based on this technique, concerned with the divisive issue of citizenship rights in Nigeria. What is the role of processing and intervention in encouraging new attitudes towards the citizenship issues tackled in the project? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the methodologies adopted? And what was the overall impact of the project, ‘Citizenship, Participation, and Accountability’, as undertaken by the Theatre for Development Centre and the Nigerian Popular Theatre Alliance in 2001–2002 in Kaduna State, north-western Nigeria? Samuel Ayedime Kafewo is an active member of the Zaria Popular Theatre/Theatre for Development movement. He is Reader in the Department of Theatre and Performing Arts, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, and has published extensively in both local and international journals.

3 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Theatre and Liberty: Eighteenth-Century Play Production on the Three-Sided Stage by Mark Howell-Meri as discussed by the authors is an example of a playhouse based on ad-quadratum geometry.
Abstract: Against the received wisdom, Mark Howell-Meri argues here for a continuing tradition between Elizabethan and Restoration (or ‘long eighteenth-century’) playhouses. He bases his argument in part on measurements which suggest the common use of traditional building methods and relationships between measurements and spaces based on ad-quadratum geometry, as shared by theatre builders across the centuries; but also on his own experience as a performance-practitioner specializing in an historiographical approach to making sense of eighteenth-century plays for today's audiences in surviving (or reconstructed) eighteenth-century spaces. He was the first director to restore a three-sided stage front to the Georgian Theatre (now Theatre Royal) in Richmond, Yorkshire, in 1987 with his hit production of Garrick's Miss in her Teens (1747), and other research productions have included Robert Dodsley's The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737), Colman the Younger's Inkle and Yarico (1787), Inchbald's The Midnight Hour (1787), again at the Georgian Theatre in Richmond, and Lillo's The London Merchant (1731). He is now completing his doctoral thesis, ‘Theatre and Liberty: Eighteenth-Century Play Production on the Three-Sided Stage’.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Senelick as mentioned in this paper traced the history of the role during the nineteenth century, and focused on its performance by Mikhail Chekhov in Stanislavsky's first post-Revolutionary production at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1921.
Abstract: Comedy, argues Laurence Senelick, is the form most indigenous to the Russian stage; so while its great players may still vie to make Hamlet their own, it is the comic figure of Khlestakov in Gogol's Government Inspector (Revizor) who most fully absorbs and enacts the concerns of the times in which the role is recreated. Here, while tracing the history of the role during the nineteenth century, Laurence Senelick is chiefly concerned with its performance by Mikhail Chekhov in Stanislavsky's first post-Revolutionary production at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1921. Stanislavsky's earlier revival in 1908 had placed Khlestakov amidst a ‘community of fools’; now – reflecting the view of Gogol's anti-hero given by Dmitry Merezhkovsky in his influential essay of 1906, ‘Gogol and the Devil’ – Chekhov accomplished the challenging task of embodying a nullity, an ‘empty vessel’, the odd one out in a ‘normal’ society which he manages briefly to plunge into delirium. Laurence Senelick is Distinguished Professor at Tufts University, and has published widely in the fields of Russian theatre, the history of popular entertainments, sex and gender and performance, and theatre iconography. His most recent works include A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (Scarecrow Press, 2007), The Complete Plays of Anton Chekhov as translator and editor (Norton, 2005), and The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre (Routledge, 2000).

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Nye as discussed by the authors explored the mime component of the ballet-pantomime in order to compare and contrast it with modern mime, especially Etienne Decroux's principles and practices.
Abstract: Histories of mime largely overlook one of the most remarkable theatrical phenomena of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century: the ballet-pantomime. In contrast, it is widely discussed in dance history circles, as if there were a tacit understanding that only one half of this hyphenated art mattered: the ballet rather than the pantomime. This article explores the mime component of the ballet-pantomime in order to compare and contrast it with modern mime, especially Etienne Decroux's principles and practices. Through the works of Noverre particularly (since Decroux declares himself an admirer), but with reference also to other famous and less famous eighteenth-century choreographers and dancers, Edward Nye discusses five aspects of mime: use of the body, mime and dance, mime and language, objective and subjective mime, and pedagogy. He finds differences as well as similarities between modern and eighteenth-century mime, but overall argues that there is no reason to exclude the ballet-pantomime from histories of mime. Edward Nye is Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in French. He has published on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects in French literature and the arts, notably Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France (OUP, 2000), and on the literary aesthetics of sports writing, in A Bicyclette (Les Belles Lettres, 2000), and of dance, in Danse et litterature; sur quel pied danser? (ed., Rodopi, 2003).

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Cardboard Citizens as mentioned in this paper is the UK's only homeless people's professional theatre company, for which Boal has directed more than twenty productions, including two in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company, played in a disused warehouse off the Old Kent Road, and Timon of Athens, which toured Stratford and the Belfast Festival.
Abstract: Augusto Boal died on 2 May 2009 at the age of seventy-eight. The following tribute is by Adrian Jackson, who knew Boal not only as translator into English of five of his books and collaborator on many of his workshops, but as a leading practitioner deploying Boal's techniques, notably as founder in 1991 and Artistic Director of Cardboard Citizens, the UK's only homeless people's professional theatre company, for whom he has directed more than twenty productions, including two in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company – Pericles, played in a disused warehouse off the Old Kent Road, and Timon of Athens, which toured Stratford and the Belfast Festival. The company's most recent production was Mincemeat, a Second World War epic based on the story of the Man Who Never Was.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Jatinder Verma and his company Tara Arts as mentioned in this paper have discussed issues to do with multiculturalism, engaging Verma in an in-depth discussion of this problematic and increasingly contested area and leading him to outline the artistic pursuits of his company.
Abstract: Jatinder Verma founded Tara Arts in 1977 as a British-Asian company, the first of its kind in Britain. Its use of ‘Binglish’, a term coined by Verma to define the English of speakers belonging to the diaspora of the Indian subcontinent, is an integral part of Tara's identity, as he discussed in his commentary in NTQ52 (1997). This new interview, conducted in July 2008 and February 2009, focuses on issues to do with multiculturalism, engaging Verma in an in-depth discussion of this problematic and increasingly contested area and leading him to outline the artistic pursuits of his company. Special attention is given to the working processes of the Journey to the West trilogy (2002) and to the aesthetic principles driving it, which extend to other productions he has directed for Tara Arts, not least to his more recent transpositions of Ibsen and Shakespeare. A complete chronology of productions can be found on the Tara Arts webpage, www.tara-arts.com. The first part of this interview was published in Maria Shevtsova's Sociology of Theatre and Performance (Verona: QuiEdit, 2009), p. 359–71. She is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The English versions of Fuente Ovejuna, Don Perlimplín, and Blood Wedding have been preserved in the Theatre Workshop archive at Littlewood's former base, the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and in the following article Gwynne Edwards compares these translations with the original Spanish plays, considers the changes which were introduced in the process of adaptation, and assesses the merits of each.
Abstract: In 1936 Joan Littlewood staged Lope de Vega's seventeenth-century play, Fuente Ovejuna (The Sheep Well); in 1945 Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden; and in 1958 Fernando de Rojas's sixteenth-century La Celestina. There were also plans to produce Lorca's Blood Wedding in 1948. The English versions of Fuente Ovejuna, Don Perlimplín, and Blood Wedding have been preserved in the Theatre Workshop archive at Littlewood's former base, the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and in the following article Gwynne Edwards compares these translations with the original Spanish plays, considers the changes which were introduced in the process of adaptation, and assesses the merits of each. Gwynne Edwards is a specialist in Spanish theatre. Eleven of his translations of the plays of Lorca, as well as translations of seventeenth-century Spanish and modern Latin American plays, have been published by Methuen, and many have been given professional productions. He has recently completed the libretto of an opera on the last days of Dylan Thomas.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Anatoli Vassiliev as discussed by the authors discusses the unique situation of theatre activity in Russia in the early decades of the twentieth century, where the studio, or laboratory, was integral to the very life of the theatre as a specific, collaborative, and ensemble practice and a comprehensive artistic institution.
Abstract: Anatoli Vassiliev must be ranked with the most prominent of the internationally acclaimed directors of the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first; and history will surely place him among the great director-researcher-pedagogues of the Russian and world theatre, starting with Stanislavsky and including Meyerhold and Vakhtangov. In this conversation, Vassiliev discusses the unique situation of theatre activity in Russia in the early decades of the twentieth century, where the studio, or laboratory, was integral to the very life of the theatre as a specific, collaborative, and ensemble practice and a comprehensive artistic institution. He situates the School of Dramatic Art, which he founded in 1987, in this context, extending the latter's reach to Maria Knebel and Andrey Popov, who were his teachers on the directing course at GITIS in Moscow (State Institute of Theatre Art, now known as the Russian Academy of Theatre Art). He graduated from GITIS in 1973. Vassa Zheleznova , referred to in this interview, was the acme of Vassiliev's explorations of psychological realism, after which he developed forms of what he calls ‘play structures’ (or ‘ludic structures’). Actors working in these structures project externally in clearly articulated ways rather than go inwards, towards and within emotional states of being, as is typical of psychological-realist performance in the Russian tradition. Vassiliev's reversal of established performance modes led to his current preoccupation with ‘verbal structures’, which are underpinned by his understanding of words as ideas oriented to symbolic and metaphysical sense rather than to psycho-emotional interpretation. The spatial and luminary dimensions of play, together with movement, music, and song that is formal, operatic, rather than in any other kind of vein, defines such later works as Mozart and Salieri (2000) and Onegin's Journey (2003). They have won him great acclaim in Russia and abroad for their innovative approach outside the parameters not only of realism but also of a range of other familiar aesthetic configurations. Vassiliev has directed productions in various countries in Europe, and has also conducted prolonged research workshops as well as working demonstrations there. In this conversation, which took place in June 2009, Vassiliev refers to several underlying principles of his work and reflects upon the importance to him of Grotowski, his last mentor.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Nicola Baylis as mentioned in this paper examines the prevailing misunderstandings that surround corporeal mime, briefly addressing its historical context, and moving on to discuss contemporary applications of Decroux's training system.
Abstract: Corporeal mime and the work of Etienne Decroux are well known in the world of physical theatre, remaining inspirational to those who have studied and explored this complex art form. In the following article Nicola Baylis examines the prevailing misunderstandings that surround corporeal mime, briefly addressing its historical context, and moving on to discuss contemporary applications of Decroux's training system. With the increasing advent of innovative theatre produced by a new wave of actors trained in corporeal mime, she focuses on the current work of artists in Naples, and concludes with reflections on corporeal mime's relevance to present-day experimental performance and on the potential future role of the form within modern theatre. Nicola Baylis is an actor, director, and teacher who has trained in corporeal mime and commedia dell'arte. Before moving to Naples, she worked as a Lecturer in Drama on degree programmes at Bournemouth and Poole College, in conjunction with Bournemouth University. She is currently working on an adaptation of Macbeth which will be performed in London in the autumn.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Controversy, then, becomes a marketing device rather than a way of challenging the status quo as discussed by the authors, and controversy is used as a marketing tool rather than as a way to challenge the status- quo.
Abstract: As The Power of Yes , the third play by David Hare to document recent history, opens at London's National Theatre, J. Chris Westgate examines in this article Hare's Stuff Happens in a regional production in the United States, at Seattle's A Contemporary Theater in 2007. He tracks the emphasis placed on controversy during the advertising and marketing of the play, which stands in direct contrast to the response to the play, which was received with self-satisfaction rather than increased insight in this highly liberal city. From this contrast, he discusses the way that this production of Hare's play – and the play itself – fails to produce controversy because it never holds those actually attending US productions as accountable for the Iraq War. Controversy, then, becomes a marketing device rather than a way of challenging the status quo. J. Chris Westgate is Assistant Professor in English and Comparative Literature at California State University, Fullerton. He has recently edited an anthology of essays entitled Brecht, Broadway, and United States Theatre and has published articles in Modern Drama, Theatre Journal , and The Eugene O'Neill Review .

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Mihaylova as discussed by the authors examines strategies adopted by female and feminist journalists in Britain and the US to counter women's inequitable status in art journalism and playwriting and its implications for theatre scholarship.
Abstract: By the 1990s, the feminist contention that gender norms inform the production and reception of art had become widely accepted in academia. Many theatre journalists, however, continued to insist on the possibility of writing about performance from an apolitical, gender-neutral position. This article examines the gendered history of this insistence from the early 1700s to the present, its effects on the production and reception of plays by women, and its implications for theatre scholarship. Focusing on Carolee Schneemann's critique of a masculine bias in art criticism in her performance Interior Scroll and the Guerrilla Girls' actions against gender discrimination in the art world, this article examines strategies adopted by female and feminist journalists in Britain and the US to counter women's inequitable status in art journalism and playwriting. By engaging with the gendered binaries mind–body and text–performance, Schneemann and the Guerrilla Girls help clarify how reviewing practices have informed critical thinking about femininity and performance. In doing so, these artists anticipate poststructuralist feminist critiques of visibility and the performing body. Stefka Mihaylova holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from Northwestern University. Her research focuses on performance theory, especially gender and racial aspects of spectatorship in contemporary American and British feminist and radical theatre and performance art.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Seth Baumrin's present research focuses on Grotowski in the context of Poland and the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (PZPR, Polish United Party of Workers) during the years 1956 to 1989 as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Seth Baumrin's present research focuses on Grotowski in the context of Poland and the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (PZPR, Polish United Party of Workers) during the years 1956 to 1989. For this he has consulted archives in Poland, notably in Wroclaw, and has conducted more than eighty interviews with people close to Grotowski and to the PZPR, as well as with Grotowski scholars. This research was integral to his participation in events in Poland during the Year of Grotowski, including the major theatre festival in Wroclaw, ‘The World as a Place of Truth’, organized and supported by the Grotowski Institute, directed by Jaroslaw Fret. What follows is a snapshot of his personal view of our present conceptions and misconceptions of Grotowski – and of how we relate to him. Seth Baumrin is an Assistant Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. His numerous theatre and opera productions include Milhaud's Medee, Lorca's As Five Years Pass and Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Double examines variety through its exemplification in the work of one performer, Teddy Brown, a virtuoso xylophone player whose career coincided with the heyday of the variety stage between and just after the two world wars as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: British variety theatre has been largely ignored by theatre historians, in spite of its huge popularity in the early twentieth century. Here, Oliver Double examines variety through its exemplification in the work of one performer, Teddy Brown, a virtuoso xylophone player whose career coincided with the heyday of the variety stage between and just after the two world wars. The key historical and stylistic aspects of the form typified by Brown's success included the development of a stage persona, novelty, skill, participation, a distinctive musical style, and the ability to exploit the complex relationship between variety and the other types of popular entertainment of the time, notably cinema, revue, and radio. Former comedian Oliver Double is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, and is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997) and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (Methuen, 2005). His stand-up comedy DVD Saint Pancreas is available from the University of Kent website.


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Sogo bo, primarily an animal masquerade, can be distinguished from Western theatre through its use of a fluid space with shifting boundaries between spectator and performer as discussed by the authors, which can be found in structural elements such as its repetitive nature and the use of nonrealistic performance objects and motions.
Abstract: The Sogo bo, primarily an animal masquerade, can be distinguished from Western theatre through its use of a fluid space with shifting boundaries between spectator and performer. An oral tradition dictates the characterization, scenario, and content. The resemblance to ritual can be found in structural elements such as its repetitive nature and the use of non-realistic performance objects and motions. As in ritual, there is a clear sense of order, an evocative presentational style, and a strong collective dimension. The functional resemblance lies in the complex metaphorical expression through which relationships and values are symbolized, objectified, and embodied in a highly artistic way. Marie Kruger is an associate professor and the Chair of the Department of Drama at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, where puppetry is offered as a performance and research option. Her research is focused on masquerades in Africa and the various contemporary applications of puppetry in sub-Saharan Africa.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Bentley, Brustein, and Kauffmann as discussed by the authors argued that the primary goal of the theatre is to provide the audience with an emotional catharsis achieved by realistically identifying with the dramatic protagonist.
Abstract: In 1946, Eric Bentley published The Playwright as Thinker, a revolutionary study of modern drama that helped to create the intellectual climate in which serious American theatre would thrive in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1964 Robert Brustein published an equally influential study of modern drama entitled The Theatre of Revolt. And in 1966, Stanley Kauffmann began a brief, combative stint as first-string theatre critic for the New York Times. Kauffmann's short-lived tenure at the Times dramatized the enormous gap that had arisen between mainstream taste and the alternative vision of the theatre that he shared with Bentley and Brustein. Collectively, these three critics championed the European modern dramatists, like Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, and Genet, whose plays were rarely if ever performed on Broadway. They also embraced the early work of performance groups such as Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theater when they were either ignored or deplored by most mainstream reviewers. Above all, they challenged the time-honoured idea that the primary goal of the theatre is to provide the audience with an emotional catharsis achieved by realistically identifying with the dramatic protagonist. By contrast, Bentley, Brustein, and Kauffmann championed a theatre that emphasized poetic stylization, intellectual seriousness, and social engagement. The discussion which follows, held on 27 October 2007 at the Philoctetes Center, New York, examines the legacy of these leading American theatre critics of the past fifty years. Bert Cardullo, who transcribed and edited the discussion, was Stanley Kauffmann's student at the Yale School of Drama and is the author, editor, or translator of many books, among them Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1889–1950, What Is Dramaturgy?, and American Drama/Critics: Writings and Readings.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, French actor, playwright, and director Max Linder was probably the most popular male film star of his time, and his success as an innovative writer-actor of variety and revue continued until the outbreak of the First World War, and only after success in the cinema did his playlets, integrating filmed and live action, further enhance his fame in variety venues across Europe.
Abstract: By 1909 the French actor, playwright, and director Max Linder was probably the most popular male film star of his time, and his success as an innovative writer-actor of variety and revue continued until the outbreak of the First World War. But this followed five years of frustration in stage-ornament roles on the professional, ‘legitimate’ stage, and only after success in the cinema did his playlets, integrating filmed and live action, further enhance his fame in variety venues across Europe. After the war, and Linder's stints in Hollywood, his long descent into bouts of manic depression tragically began. But his theatrical spirit survives in the cine-stage works of the Prague theatre, Laterna Magika, and Frank Bren also discusses here his possible influence on the work of Erwin Piscator, and more surely on the spectacular Paris music-hall production, Jour de fete a l'Olympia, created by and starring Jacques Tati in 1961. This was plainly modelled on Linder's cinema-theatre creations of 1910–1914, with Tati and Pierre Etaix the outstanding successors to Max in French film comedy. Australian actor-author Frank Bren is currently writing a biography of Pierre Etaix, whose classic film comedies of the sixties are now being restored for international re-release – two of them paying discreet homage to Max Linder. Bren has written or co-written histories of Polish and Chinese cinema and theatre as well as articles for diverse international periodicals.

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TL;DR: In this paper, Carla Pollastrelli charts the main stages leading to Grotowski's settlement in Pontedera in Italy and the creation of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowska and Thomas Richards.
Abstract: In this testimony, Carla Pollastrelli charts the main stages leading to Grotowski's settlement in Pontedera in Italy and to the creation of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski. As the Year of Grotowski, supported by UNESCO, draws to a close, her words provide a fitting tribute to a man whose influence has surpassed all geographical boundaries, whether those of his native Poland, adoptive Italy, or place of temporary refuge, the United States. Carla Pollastrelli is the co-director of the Fondazione Pontedera Teatro. Pontedera Teatro. From 1986 to 2000 she was an executive of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski, which in 1996 was renamed the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards. She has edited translations of Grotowski's texts in Polish into Italian since 1978, and is the co-editor with Ludwig Flaszen of Il Teatr Laboratorium di Jerzy Grotowski, 1959–1969: testi e materiali di Jerzy Grotowski e Ludwik Flaszen con uno scritto di Eugenio Barba (Jerzy Grotowski's Laboratory Theatre, 1959–1969: Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwig Flaszen's Texts and Materials and a Text by Eugenio Barba (Fondazione Pontedera Teatro, 2001; second edition, La Casa Usher, 2007) and the collection of Grotowski's texts, Holiday e teatro delle fonti (Holiday and the Theatre of Sources, La Casa Usher, 2006).

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TL;DR: Yoo Kim as mentioned in this paper examines a selection of works by three contemporary South Korean playwrights who, from a post-nationalist perspective, have emerged to contest the contradictory aspects and trajectories of the past ten years of populist nationalism.
Abstract: In October 2007 South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun walked across the inter-Korean border for a summit with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il. Although adhering to the primordialist view of nationhood, this state-led border-crossing also indicates the effects of globalization. As the heavily militarized inter-Korean border is permeated by interaction between ethnic nationalism, the nation's anti-colonialist history, and the transnational forces, the image of border-crossing becomes a metaphor for a contested space of national unification. This article examines a selection of works by three contemporary South Korean playwrights who, from a post-nationalist perspective, have emerged to contest the contradictory aspects and trajectories of the past ten years of populist nationalism. Yoo Kim focuses on the ways these post-nationalist plays employ the motifs of border-crossing and borderland encounter to challenge the romantic and exclusionary narratives of the conventional nationalist theatre. Yoo Kim is an Associate Professor in English at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea. His recent article, ‘Mapping Utopia in the Post-Ideological Era: Lee Yun-taek's The Dummy Bride’, was published in Theatre Research International in 2007.