Showing papers in "Theatre Research International in 2006"

Towards an Expanded Dramaturgical Practice: A Report on ‘The Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project’

Abstract: This essay is a report on the Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project (Dramaturgies), a forum for the investigation of issues in professional dramaturgical practice in Australia. It reviews the textual orientation of historical theatre practice in Australia before describing a series of events aiming to promote a wider and more culturally interactive understanding of dramaturgy. New forms of dramaturgy arising in response to the post-dramatic turn in theatre are discussed as a basis for exploring an expanded dramaturgical practice. Proposals for a politics of dramaturgy that revive theatre as a forum for social critique conclude the essay. While specific to one set of theatre interventions, it is intended that the proposals discussed herein have wider applications.

Art as Part of Everyday Life: Understanding Applied Theatre Practices through the Aesthetics of John Dewey and Hans Georg Gadamer

Abstract: In the period between 2000 and 2004, the Norwegian Research Council funded a research project on ‘cultural-aesthetic practice and welfare’. This project includes two independent studies about theatre and young people. In her dissertation Rikke Gürgens investigates the theatre experience of exceptional and extraordinary people who produce their own theatre. Bjørn Rasmussen conducted an action research project, which established a ‘reflection room’ for teenagers at risk in high schools by means of drama and theatre practice. In both studies, the notion of art as an important part of everyday life became important. The theatre experience had strong implications both socially and aesthetically. In this article we discuss the link and the difference between the aesthetic and the social dimension from the perspectives of John Dewey and Hans-Georg Gadamer. In different ways we believe these philosophers provide a bridge between an autonomous view of art and a present cultural aesthetic that emphasizes the social perspective to a greater degree.

Theatre in the Arab World: A Difficult Birth

Abstract: The present paper aims at illuminating the space that theatrical art occupies in the dynamics of rewriting and rethinking colonial historiography. My main thesis is that Arabic theatrical practices are construed within a liminal space that is thoroughly hybrid. It is a third space that is located between Self and Other, East and West, as well as tradition and modernity. These negotiations are informed by the postcolonial Arab condition of hybridity, a condition that is itself situated across diasporas and diaglossia. The result of this rewriting process is the production of a new kind of performance tradition that is irreducibly different. Western theatre was represented to the nineteenth-century Arabs with a strong aura of authority. The early reception of Shakespeare and Moliere had been conditioned by the general shock of encounter with the Western Other since the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt – when Western plays were performed to an Arab audience for the first time. A whole apparatus of translation and theatrical reproduction of Western theatrical canons flourished in the Middle East, bringing about a difficult birth of what can now be called ‘Arab Theatre’, rather than a theatre written in Arabic language. However, The hybrid nature of Arab theatre soon emerged as a result of cultural negotiations that are not simply supplements which reproduce a palimpsest, rather they transform the conditions of the original texts, only to emerge as new and different kinds of performative agency. It is a postcolonial theatre that is located at the crossroads and a continuum of intersections, encounters, and negotiations; the outcome is a complex palimpsest that underlines the powers of impurity rather than a logocentric quest for the pure.

From Imperial Concubine to Model Maoist: The Photographic Metamorphosis of Mei Lanfang

Abstract: This article traces the transnational career of the celebrated Beijing opera female impersonator Mei Lanfang (1894–1961) through photographic documentation of the performer. A wide spectrum of Mei's photos is analysed, which captures him both onstage and offstage. The timeline of these photos ranges from those produced during the Republican period (1911–49) to those produced in the People's Republic of China (PRC) (1949–) and includes media coverage from the US (1920s) and the USSR (1930s). This article raises questions about how nationalism, transnationalism and female impersonator's gender identity are represented in ever-transforming modes.

Resisting the Revolution: Heiner Müller's Hamlet/Machine at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin, March 1990

Abstract: Heiner Muller directed Shakespeare's Hamlet together with his own The Hamletmachine as Hamlet/Machine in March 1990 at the Deutsches Theater, East Berlin. This article investigates the production's conception, its rehearsal and its execution against the backdrop of the fall of the Wall. Midler, a playwright whose dramaturgies actively resist reductive interpretation, sought to put Hamlet/Machine beyond the reach of an allegorical reading. Strategies in acting, staging and design were adopted to frustrate the ease with which Hamlet could have merely illustrated the historical changes taking place outside the theatre. On the other hand, Muller was also making theatre for his fellow GDR citizens and had to take account of their experiences, too. His political theatre relied on the combination of contradictory signs in performance that would activate the audience, forcing a confrontation with the material on stage on its own terms. Such an aspiration was, almost inevitably, revealed as utopian but was in Muller's view the only way for the theatre to challenge its immediate historical context.

Rasa, ‘Rasaesthetics’ and Dramatic Theory as Performance Packaging

Abstract: In an attempt to distinguish themselves from the increasing proliferation of like projects, some theories, training programmes, productions, sub-disciplines and the like project a kinship with already authoritative voices. This artificial association characterizes the inevitably ‘intercultural’ product not simply as another element in the postmodern mix, but as a truth validated by tradition and transcending the limits of cultural fads. Richard Schechner's self-styled ‘rasaesthetics’ seeks to associate itself with the rasa concept of classical Sanskrit theory. But rasa and ‘rasaesthetics’ have little in common, and Schechner's attempt to project their kinship requires misunderstandings of theatre in India and in the West. Ultimately, ‘rasaesthetics’ is an example of a tendency in dramatic theory not to try to explain phenomena but to try to legitimize practices.

An Australian Idol of Modernist Consumerism: Minnie Tittell Brune and the Gallery Girls

Abstract: The Australian career of the young American actor Minnie Tittell Brune exemplifies the complex cultural and economic forces operating on the institution of live theatre at the beginning of the twentieth century. Brune focalizes the contemporary processes which reconstituted the international institution of mass entertainment out of the traditional cultural practices of theatre. The theatrical star is seen as both engaging with and resisting the commodification of her labour power; image and talent resulting from her ambiguous industrial role as magnetic 'star' and as managerial commodity. However, the iconic and affective power of the actor evokes strong attachment from significant sections of the newly heterosocial popular audience, in particular from the gallery girls, the young female audience who idolized Brune as a performative personality enacting social self-realization and glamorous transformation. Through reading Brume's repertoire, her social persona as 'star' and her 'emotional' performative style, it is demonstrated how artistic retro-glamour, religious evangelicalism and discourses of sexuality and femininity serve to manage theatre's move into the mass-entertainment age.

Consuming the Canon: Theatre, Commodification and Social Mobility in Late Nineteenth-Century German Theatre

Abstract: Max Reinhardt's theatre is an intriguing example of the social function of commodification in the late nineteenth century; while critics praised him as the leading figure of a renewed theatre, they also blamed him for a merely decorative style. Notwithstanding the fact that economic success was a substantial precondition of Reinhardt's theatre, Reinhardt's style was highly eclectic and determined by a visual or pictorial order rather than by literary concepts. But this theatre not only followed an aesthetic programme, it also answered to a major change in German society: the process of urbanization which produced a new community of urban dwellers which had to be integrated in the role models of society. The paradoxical reception of Reinhardt thus is not only a matter of taste but rather the hallmark of bourgeois theatre in a period of transition, rearticulating the cultural legacy by commodifying it for a new audience.

Pragmatic Dramaturgy: Text as Context as Text

Abstract: This essay attempts to theorize the decades-long practice of German and other dramaturgs, a practice that is rarely acknowledged by theatre research. It maintains that the dramaturgical interpretation of the specific play in the process of preparing it for stage realization is subject to ‘applied dramaturgy’. Dramaturgy in this sense is predominantly ‘circumstantial’ rather than play-oriented, accounting mainly for the contextual performance conditions, either extra-textual, extra-theatrical or both. Through concrete and partly personal examples drawn largely from the field of production dramaturgy, the article suggests that extrinsic parameters such as the management of the theatre; the definition of the theatrical institution; its implied spectators; the reality conventions within which it operates; its human artistic, technical, spatial and financial resources; its marketing methods; and so on might be no less important to academic play and performance analysis than they are for practical theatre purposes.

Cut and Paste: The Nature of Dramaturgical Development in the Theatre

Abstract: This practice-based paper looks at the nature of dramaturgical development in the theatre, and at the role of the dramaturg. It has two objectives: to examine the meaning of key terms such as ‘play text’, ‘dramaturgy’ and ‘development’, and to look at how, and according to what values, dramaturgical interventions into particular play texts are best structured. The differences between production, generative dramaturgy and adaptive dramaturgy are detailed, and the analysis of play texts using simple categories such as plot, character and language is briefly explored. The conclusions clarify some of the predicates of dramaturgical development as they impact on the theatre-making process today and identify some of the fundamental problems and challenges thereby associated with the role of the dramaturg.

Jacobin Revolutionary Theatre and the Early Circus: Astley's Dublin Amphitheatre in the 1790s

Abstract: This essay examines the politics of the disturbances and riots that rocked Philip Astley's Dublin Amphitheatre, the site of Ireland's first circus, during the 1790s. Astley received the first legal recognition for his circus from a colonial administration in Ireland because of the loyalism of his entertainments and, throughout the 1790s, his Dublin Amphitheatre worked to mobilize the Irish masses in the interest of the crown and the empire. But, as this essay shows, these loyalist entertainments were also repeatedly disrupted by the counter-theatre of the Jacobin-inspired group, the United Irishmen, who used this site to rally support not only for the Irish nationalist revolution but also for the broader democratic revolution then being staged all around the Atlantic rim.

Peter Sellars's Merchant of Venice : A Retrospective Critique of Process

Abstract: This article offers a dramaturg's perspective on the day-to-day rehearsal activities of the director Peter Sellars as he prepared his highly controversial production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 1994. Because Sellars had conceptualized his production well before his arrival in Chicago, and because he was inaccessible prior to the first rehearsal, the usual pre-production collaboration could not take place. On one level the article is about the dramaturg being thrust into the thick of an unusual process and finding his role(s) along the way: as enquiring interlocutor asking questions to clarify the proceedings for self and for the audience, another as documenter. Sellars readily agreed that any other person's perceptions of his process are different from his own. My purpose here is to offer a dramaturg's-eye view of the working methods of one of contemporary theatre's most iconoclastic and innovative directors, along with some critical reflections on the process.

Antigone Remembers: Dramaturgical Analysis and Oedipus Tyrannos

Abstract: Dramaturgical analysis brings together theoretical issues of hermeneutics, text analysis and performance theory with practical, creative work in the theatre. It is a complex, heterogeneous activity connecting research and practice and is designed to reflect on, as well as to develop and enhance, creative work in the theatre. The aim of dramaturgical analysis, as it is examined here, is to open up new dimensions for productions of classical texts, by trying to illuminate these texts from new and innovative perspectives and laying the basis for integrative scenic images that can later be developed for the actual stage interpretation of this text. This article addresses some of the issues concerning dramaturgical analysis by examining the process that led up to a production of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos where the author worked with the Swedish director Leif Stinnerbom, the artistic director of the small and highly respected Vastana Theatre located in the Swedish province of Varmland. The Oedipus Tyrannos production analysed here was performed at the Odense municipal theatre in Denmark in 1999, where Stinnerbom was invited as a guest director.

The ‘Deaf Ear’ of Classicism: Searching for the Female Voice in French Tragédie Lyrique

Abstract: This article considers the paradoxical manifestations of rejection or suspicion concerning the voice and the feminine at the very moment of the creation of tragedie lyrique at the end of the seventeenth century in France. It examines the relationship between these elements and asks what they have in common that may be perceived as threatening. What is at stake is not only the period's capacity to experiment with pleasure through the elaboration of rules, but also, beyond this delimited historical perspective, the appreciation of the element of danger that is inherent in the experience of any artistic performance, and the roles played by the voice and the feminine in such an experience.

‘Quite a Profound Day’: The Public Performance of Memory by Military Witnesses at the Bloody Sunday Tribunal

Abstract: This article examines elements of performance in the giving of evidence by military witnesses to the Saville Tribunal's Inquiry into the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ – the day in 1972 when thirteen civilians were shot dead by British Army paratroops during a banned civil rights protest in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland. The performative nature of testimony represented an unstable element in this tribunal's attempt to reconstruct the past, raising a number of provoking questions concerning the nature and process of the legal pursuit of truth, in particular the ways in which the performative aspects of proceedings – grounded in the evocation of the past through the enacted memory of witnesses – function. Through tracing and analysing the process of memory recall in the testimonial performance of particular military witnesses to the tribunal, watched by the author, the essay considers the affective impact of courtroom testimony and the effect of this on the legal context in which testimony is given.

The Mess Behind the Veil: Assimilating Ping Chong

Abstract: While there are Chinese-American dimensions to Ping Chong's theatre, the frequent application of the label ‘Asian-American’ to Chong reflects a problematic tendency to see certain artists as ‘ethnic’. ‘Postmodern’ and ‘multimedia’ are the two other labels that stick to, and have often distorted, his work. My overview of Ping Chong's oeuvre, and its critical reception, homes in on selected Chong pieces and on particular critical habits. While there are many continuities and discontinuities within a career spanning fifty pieces and three decades, I suggest that Chong oscillates, both visually and thematically, between surface and depth, like the Barthesian ‘outsider within’ who partly inhabits/partly mythologizes the culture(s) they encounter, and who is always changing. There is a need for greater recognition of the distinctiveness of Chong's authorial signature, the multiplicity of his influences, and the ways in which his work challenges the narratives and categories used to study performance.

Shakespeare and Kolbenheyer: Regional Theatre During the Third Reich – a Case Study

Abstract: The importance of regional theatre in the grand scheme of theatre history has long been neglected; this even holds true for an area of research which has aroused more historical interest than any other – Nazi Germany. Addressing this desideratum the article investigates the history of a typical provincial theatre – the Stadtische Buhnen in the Westphalian city of Munster – with a special emphasis on the repertoire. The author examines how far the regime was able to implement its demand for a specifically political theatre and relates his findings to other German playhouses. The article argues that the failure of the Nazi administration to turn the Munster playhouse into a propaganda stage does not mean that regional theatres did not fulfil their role for the regime. They did so in other, less obvious ways.