The Politics of Performance : Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention
01 Jan 1992-
TL;DR: The Politics of Performance as mentioned in this paper addresses fundamental questions about the social and political purposes of performance through an investigation into post-war alternative and community theatre, and proposes a theory of performace as ideological transaction, cultural intervention and community action.
Abstract: The Politics of Performance^ addresses fundamental questions about the social and political purposes of performance through an investigation into post-war alternative and community theatre. It proposes a theory of performace as ideological transaction, cultural intervention and community action, which is used to illuminate the potential social and political effects of radical performance practice. It raises issues about the nature of alternative theatre as a movement and the aesthetics of its styles of production, especially in relation to progressive counter-cultural formations. It analyses in detail the work of key practitioners in socially engaged theatre during four decades, setting each in the context of social, political and cultural history and focusing particularly on how they used that context to enhance the potential efficacy of their productions. The book is thus a detailed analysis of oppositional theatre as radical cultural practice in its various efforts to subvert the status quo. Its purpose is to raise the profile of these approaches to performance by proposing, and demonstrating how they may have had a significant impact on social and political history.
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01 Jan 2005
TL;DR: For instance, the authors focus on the dramatic transformations of worldviews and philosophies encompassed by the still broader term "modernity" (see, e.g., Section 5.2.1).
Abstract: ‘Modernity’ is a relatively new term in literary scholarship on the turn of the twentieth century. Sociologists organise their research around issues of ‘modernisation’ unique to this period: the Taylorisation of industrial production, the professionalisation of science and the organisation of the modern research university, the development of new mediums and media for both mass transportation and mass communication, and the impact on the conceptualisation of a public sphere of women’s and non-whites’ advocacy for an extension of the rights of citizenship to previously excluded populations. Sociologists focus as well on the ‘dramatic transformations of worldviews and philosophies’ encompassed by the still broader term ‘modernity’ (290). By contrast, literary scholars typically have mapped late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history in terms of a neat, clean and emphatically teleological succession of literary movements, charting a ‘progress’ from realism to either naturalism or aestheticism and Decadence and then to Modernism. Rather than entertaining the possibility that these aesthetic modes can exist simultaneously in the same text, or that they were produced and marketed for different audiences throughout this period, the emphasis until quite recently has been placed on literary Modernism’s success in ‘extricat[ing] itself and our epoch from the fin de siecle ’. That is to say, artists and literary critics claiming Modernism to be the aesthetic of modernity first established its position front-and-centre in the cultural landscape by putting other aesthetic paradigms either ‘behind’ it or ‘below’ it (or both).
203 citations
Journal Article•
141 citations
01 Jan 1998
TL;DR: In this article, it is argued that there is insufficient trust between top British managers and those they manage, trust which is essential to the mode of learning implied in the concepts of organizational learning and the learning organization.
Abstract: There is insufficient trust between top British managers and those they manage, trust which is essential to the mode of learning implied in the concepts of organizational learning and the learning organization. Requisite levels of trust will not be created and nurtured without institutional change, at national and organizational level, and a new form of politics which allows `rank-and-file' members of organizations to ensure that their own experience is given voice and taken into account. It is proposed that radical theatre, founded on notions of trust and learning, has the potential for introducing such a conception of politics into organizational life.
116 citations
TL;DR: The authors provide a review of some of the terminologies and definitions of applied theatre, critique the transformative principle argued for by some applied researchers, and extend this to a discussion on the complex relationship between donor agendas and the politics of intention that contribute to the shaping of applied discourse.
Abstract: The paper provides a review of some of the terminologies and definitions of applied theatre, critiques the ‘transformative principle’ argued for by some applied researchers, and extends this to a discussion on the complex relationship between donor agendas and the politics of intention that contribute to the shaping of applied discourse (Taylor 2003, 1). The paper goes on to propose a theatre of ‘little changes’ which eschews big claims of social efficacy, and suggests the need for a discourse which can better articulate an interdependence between the aesthetic imperatives and the possibilities of social engagement.
84 citations
Cites background from "The Politics of Performance : Radic..."
...This interpretation may be viewed as ‘debilitating’, as ‘the movement/sector is cast as an object, always as it were, at the beck and call of the dominant order’ (Kershaw 1992, 251)....
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...The development of the discourse may be read as a response to ‘monetarist and market-led policies’ (Kershaw 1992, 251) and as a way to continue the principles of participation by carefully stripping away overt political allegiances and deliberately re-phrasing ideology in more pragmatic and…...
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...An alternative interpretation is that the changes may have been a strategy for multi-pronged interventions into the socio-political context ‘to infiltrate and influence the dominant order, by attacking it on many fronts’ (Kershaw 1992, 252)....
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...This too is likely to be a fallible reading because the growth in diversity led not only to a fragmentation in practice, but also, as Kershaw argues, an ideological diversity and an increased sense of incoherence (Kershaw 1992, 252)....
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TL;DR: In this paper, it is argued that there is insufficient trust between top British managers and those they manage, trust which is essential to the mode of learning implied in the concepts of organizational learning and the learning organization.
Abstract: There is insufficient trust between top British managers and those they manage, trust which is essential to the mode of learning implied in the concepts of organizational learning and the learning organization. Requisite levels of trust will not be created and nurtured without institutional change, at national and organizational level, and a new form of politics which allows `rank-and-file' members of organizations to ensure that their own experience is given voice and taken into account. It is proposed that radical theatre, founded on notions of trust and learning, has the potential for introducing such a conception of politics into organizational life.
80 citations