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Theater of the Void: Plasticity, Hauntology, and Nuclear Blast (Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought)
by Teresa KovacsTheater of the Void explores contemporary German theater in the aftermath of the technology of the atomic bomb. Informed by threats of total annihilation—whether through nuclear technology or, more recently, global warming—German-language theater since the late 1970s encounters the void not as empty space or nothingness but as the possibility of radical transformation. Theater of the Void investigates theatrical forms that transform fundamental categories of time, space, and causality in light of the ontological and epistemological shifts of the nuclear age. Teresa Kovacs focuses on four directors and playwrights whose works offer insights into the theater of the void: Heiner Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, Christoph Schlingensief, and René Pollesch. Kovacs shows that contemporary German theater has not turned away from the sciences after Hiroshima and Nagasaki but has remained entangled with scientific thinking about quantum physics, biology, and the environment. Investigating these entanglements, Theater of the Void finds in the works of these German theater-makers a grammar of the void that speaks to the possibilities of a transformed theater in the Anthropocene.
Theaters of Anatomy: Students, Teachers, and Traditions of Dissection in Renaissance Venice
by Cynthia KlestinecOf enduring historical and contemporary interest, the anatomy theater is where students of the human body learn to isolate structures in decaying remains, scrutinize their parts, and assess their importance. Taking a new look at the history of anatomy, Cynthia Klestinec places public dissections alongside private ones to show how the anatomical theater was both a space of philosophical learning, which contributed to a deeper scientific analysis of the body, and a place where students learned to behave, not with ghoulish curiosity, but rather in a civil manner toward their teachers, their peers, and the corpse. Klestinec argues that the drama of public dissection in the Renaissance (which on occasion included musical accompaniment) served as a ploy to attract students to anatomical study by way of anatomy’s philosophical dimensions rather than its empirical offerings. While these venues have been the focus of much scholarship, the private traditions of anatomy comprise a neglected and crucial element of anatomical inquiry. Klestinec shows that in public anatomies, amid an increasingly diverse audience—including students and professors, fishmongers and shoemakers—anatomists emphasized the conceptual framework of natural philosophy, whereas private lessons afforded novel visual experiences where students learned about dissection, observed anatomical particulars, considered surgical interventions, and eventually speculated on the mechanical properties of physiological functions. Theaters of Anatomy focuses on the post-Vesalian era, the often-overlooked period in the history of anatomy after the famed Andreas Vesalius left the University of Padua. Drawing on the letters and testimony of Padua's medical students, Klestinec charts a new history of anatomy in the Renaissance, one that characterizes the role of the anatomy theater and reconsiders the pedagogical debates and educational structure behind human dissection.
Theaters of Error: Problems Of Performance In German And French Enlightenment Theater (Palgrave Studies In Theatre And Performance History Ser.)
by Pascale LaFountainThis book offers provocative readings of canonical Enlightenment dramas that reflect and shape the period’s changing understanding of error. With striking interdisciplinary connections to theater treatises as well as works from the philosophical, legal, and medical discourses, it tracks the relocation of error from the moral to the physical realm, a movement that begins with Lessing and continues through the turn of the nineteenth century.Featuring detailed analyses of Lessing’s Miß Sara Sampson, Diderot’s Le Fils naturel, Schiller’s Die Räuber, and Kleist’s Die Familie Schroffenstein alongside rich close readings of diverse primary sources, ranging from previously untranslated acting treatises by Sainte-Albine and Engel to texts from the German Archiv des Criminalrechts, this study introduces the reader to new Enlightenment sources and compellingly concludes that ultimately it is no longer evil, but rather bodily irregularities and mistakes in reading the body that become the driving principle of Enlightenment drama.
Theaters of Justice: Judging, Staging, and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht, and Delbo
by Yasco HorsmanWhat role do legal trials have in collective processes of coming to terms with a history of mass violence? How does the theatrical structure of a criminal trial facilitate and limit national processes of healing and learning from the past? This study begins with the widely publicized, historic trials of three Nazi war criminals, Eichmann, Barbie, and Priebke, whose explicit goal was not only to punish, but also to establish an officially sanctioned version of the past. The Truth and Reconciliation commissions in South America and South Africa added a therapeutic goal, acting on the belief that a trial can help bring about a moment of closure. Horsman challenges this belief by reading works that reflect on the relations among pedagogy, therapy, and legal trials. Philosopher Hannah Arendt, poet Charlotte Delbo, and dramaturg Bertolt Brecht all produced responses to historic trials that reopened the cases those trials sought to close, bringing to center stage aspects that had escaped the confines of their legal frameworks.
Theaters of Pardoning (Corpus Juris: The Humanities in Politics and Law)
by Bernadette MeylerFrom Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump's claims that as president he could pardon himself to the posthumous royal pardon of Alan Turing, the power of the pardon has a powerful hold on the political and cultural imagination. In Theaters of Pardoning, Bernadette Meyler traces the roots of contemporary understandings of pardoning to tragicomic "theaters of pardoning" in the drama and politics of seventeenth-century England. Shifts in how pardoning was represented on the stage and discussed in political tracts and in Parliament reflected the transition from a more monarchical and judgment-focused form of the concept to an increasingly parliamentary and legislative vision of sovereignty.Meyler shows that on the English stage, individual pardons of revenge subtly transformed into more sweeping pardons of revolution, from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, where a series of final pardons interrupts what might otherwise have been a cycle of revenge, to later works like John Ford's The Laws of Candy and Philip Massinger's The Bondman, in which the exercise of mercy prevents the overturn of the state itself. In the political arena, the pardon as a right of kingship evolved into a legal concept, culminating in the idea of a general amnesty, the "Act of Oblivion," for actions taken during the English Civil War. Reconceiving pardoning as law-giving effectively displaced sovereignty from king to legislature, a shift that continues to attract suspicion about the exercise of pardoning. Only by breaking the connection between pardoning and sovereignty that was cemented in seventeenth-century England, Meyler concludes, can we reinvigorate the pardon as a democratic practice.
Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars
by Heidi CraigFocusing on the production and reception of drama during the theatre closures of 1642 to 1660, Heidi Craig shows how the 'death' of contemporary theatre in fact gave birth to English Renaissance drama as a critical field. While the prohibition on playing in many respects killed the English stage, drama thrived in print, with stationers publishing unprecedented numbers of previously unprinted professional plays, vaunting playbooks' ties to the receding theatrical past. Marketed in terms of novelty and nostalgia, plays unprinted before 1642 gained new life. Stationers also anatomized the whole corpus of English drama, printing the first anthologies and comprehensive catalogues of drama. Craig captures this crucial turning-point in English theatre history with chapters on royalist nostalgia, clandestine theatrical revivals, dramatic compendia, and the mysteriously small number of Shakespeare editions issued during the period, as well as a new incisive reading of Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King.
Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth (Methuen Drama Handbooks Ser.)
by Claire CochraneThis collection of essays explores how historians of theatre apply ethical thinking to the attempt to truthfully represent their subject - whether that be the life of a well-known performer, or the little known history of colonial theatre in India - by exploring the process by which such histories are written, and the challenges they raise.
Theatre Responds to Social Trauma: Chasing the Demons (Routledge Series in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Theatre and Performance)
by Ellen W. KaplanThis book is a collection of chapters by playwrights, directors, devisers, scholars, and educators whose praxis involves representing, theorizing, and performing social trauma.Chapters explore how psychic catastrophes and ruptures are often embedded in social systems of oppression and forged in zones of conflict within and across national borders. Through multiple lenses and diverse approaches, the authors examine the connections between collective trauma, social identity, and personal struggle. We look at the generational transmission of trauma, socially induced pathologies, and societal re-inscriptions of trauma, from mass incarceration to war-induced psychoses, from gendered violence through racist practices. Collective trauma may shape, protect, and preserve group identity, promoting a sense of cohesion and meaning, even as it shakes individuals through pain. Engaging with communities under significant stress through artistic practice offers a path towards reconstructing the meaning(s) of social trauma, making sense of the past, understanding the present, and re-visioning the future.The chapters combine theoretical and practical work, exploring the conceptual foundations and the artists’ processes as they interrogate the intersections of personal grief and communal mourning, through drama, poetry, and embodied performance.
Theatre Translation Theory and Performance in Contemporary Japan: Native Voices Foreign Bodies
by Beverley CurranWhat motivates a Japanese translator and theatre company to translate and perform a play about racial discrimination in the American South? What happens to a 'gay' play when it is staged in a country where the performance of gender is a theatrical tradition? What are the politics of First Nations or Aboriginal theatre in Japanese translation and 'colour blind' casting? Is a Canadian nô drama that tells a story of the Japanese diaspora a performance in cultural appropriation or dramatic innovation? In looking for answers to these questions, Theatre Translation Theory and Performance in Contemporary Japan extends discussions of theatre translation through a selective investigation of six Western plays, translated and staged in Japan since the 1960s, with marginalized tongues and bodies at their core. The study begins with an examination of James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie, followed by explorations of Michel Marc Bouchard's Les feluettes ou La repetition d'un drame romantique, Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Roger Bennett's Up the Ladder, and Daphne Marlatt's The Gull: The Steveston t Noh Project. Native Voices, Foreign Bodies locates theatre translation theory and practice in Japan in the post-war Showa and Heisei eras and provokes reconsideration of Western notions about the complex interaction of tongues and bodies in translation and theatre when they travel and are reconstituted under different cultural conditions.
Theatre Translation in Performance (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies #29)
by Silvia Bigliazzi Peter Kofler Paola AmbrosiThis volume focuses on the highly debated topic of theatrical translation, one brought on by a renewed interest in the idea of performance and translation as a cooperative effort on the part of the translator, the director, and the actors. Exploring the role and function of the translator as co-subject of the performance, it addresses current issues concerning the role of the translator for the stage, as opposed to the one for the editorial market, within a multifarious cultural context. The current debate has shown a growing tendency to downplay and challenge the notion of translational accuracy in favor of a recreational and post-dramatic attitude, underlying the role of the director and playwright instead. This book discusses the delicate balance between translating and directing from an intercultural, semiotic, aesthetic, and interlingual perspective, taking a critical stance on approaches that belittle translation for the theatre or equate it to an editorial practice focused on literality. Chapters emphasize the idea of dramatic translation as a particular and extremely challenging type of performance, while consistently exploring its various textual, intertextual, intertranslational, contextual, cultural, and intercultural facets. The notion of performance is applied to textual interpretation as performance, interlingual versus intersemiotic performance, and (inter)cultural performance in the adaptation of translated texts for the stage, providing a wide-ranging discussion from an international group of contributors, directors, and translators.
Theatre Translation: A Practice as Research Model (Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting)
by Angela Tiziana TarantiniThis book examines the effects of translation on theatrical performance. The author adapts and applies Kershaw et al.’s Practice as Research model to an empirical investigation analysing the effects of translation on the rhythm and gesture of a playtext in performance, using the contemporary plays Convincing Ground and The Gully by Australian playwright David Mence which have been translated into Italian. The book is divided into two parts: a theoretical exegesis encompassing Translation Studies, Performance Studies and Gesture Studies, and a practical investigation comprising of a workshop where excerpts of the plays are explored by two groups of actors. The chapters are accompanied by short clips of the performance workshop hosted on SpringerLink. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Translation Studies (and Theatre Translation more specifically), Theatre and Performance, and Gesture Studies.
Theatre and Archival Memory: Irish Drama and Marginalised Histories 1951-1977
by Barry HoulihanThis book presents new insights into the production and reception of Irish drama, its internationalisation and political influences, within a pivotal period of Irish cultural and social change. From the 1950s onwards, Irish theatre engaged audiences within new theatrical forms at venues from the Pike Theatre, the Project Arts Centre, and the Gate Theatre, as well as at Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey. Drawing on newly released and digitised archival records, this book argues for an inclusive historiography reflective of the formative impacts upon modern Irish theatre as recorded within marginalised performance histories. This study examines these works' experimental dramaturgical impacts in terms of production, reception, and archival legacies. The book, framed by the device of ‘archival memory’, serves as a means for scholars and theatre-makers to inter-contextualise existing historiography and to challenge canon formation. It also presents a new social history of Irish theatre told from the fringes of history and reanimated through archival memory.
Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England, 1650-1737: From Leviathan to Licensing Act
by Catie GillFramed by the publication of Leviathan and the 1713 Licensing Act, this collection provides analysis of both canonical and non-canonical texts within the scope of an eighty-year period of theatre history, allowing for definition and assessment that uncouples Restoration drama from eighteenth-century drama. Individual essays demonstrate the significant contrasts between the theatre of different decades and the context of performance, paying special attention to the literary innovation and socio-political changes that contributed to the evolution of drama. Exploring the developments in both tragedy and comedy, and in literary production, specific topics include the playwright's relationship to the monarch, women writers' connection to the audience, the changing market for plays, and the rise of the bourgeoisie. This collection also examines aspects of gender and class through the exploration of women's impact on performance and production, masculinity and libertinism, master/servant relationships, and dramatic representations of the coffee house. Accompanied by a list of Spanish-English plays and a chronology of monarch's reigns and significant changes in theatre history, From Leviathan to Licensing Act is a valuable tool for scholars of Restoration and eighteenth-century performance, providing groundwork for future research and investigation.
Theatre and Event
by Adrian KearTheatre and Event: Staging the European Century, examines how, in these first decades of the twenty-first century, contemporary European theatre-makers have sought to consider the disastrous events of the twentieth century as the 'unfinished business' of the contemporary. Kear argues that by thinking through the logic of the event, and the theatre event especially, contemporary performance practice enables an affective interrogation of 'the event' of the European century. Examining the work of leading theatre companies, Theatre and Event: Staging the European Century offers detailed expositions and engaged analyses of key works by Needcompany (Belgium), Jaunais Rigas Teatris (Latvia), Societas Raffaello Sanzio (Italy), National Theatre Wales (UK), and Studios Kabako (France/Democratic Republic of the Congo). This book offers an original conception of the theatre event as an event which exists in relation to, and performatively historicises, other 'events', requiring a critical and creative practice of spectatorship to animate its political affects. "
Theatre and National Identity in Colonial India: Formation Of A Community Through Cultural Practice
by Sharmistha SahaThis book critically engages with the study of theatre and performance in colonial India, and relates it with colonial (and postcolonial) discussions on experience, freedom, institution-building, modernity, nation/subject not only as concepts but also as philosophical queries. It opens up with the discourse around ‘Indian theatre’ that was started by the orientalists in the late 18th century, and which continued till much later. The study specifically focuses on the two major urban centres of colonial India: Bombay and Calcutta of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It discusses different cultural practices in colonial India, including the initiation of ‘Indian theatre’ practices, which resulted in many forms of colonial-native ‘theatre’ by the 19th century; the challenges to this dominant discourse from the ‘swadeshi jatra’ (national jatra/theatre) in Bengal, which drew upon earlier folk and religious traditions and was used as a tool by the nationalist movement; and the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) that functioned from Bombay around the 1940s, which focused on the creation of one national subject – that of the ‘Indian’. The author contextualizes the relevance of the concept of ‘Indian theatre’ in today’s political atmosphere. She also critically analyses the post-Independence Drama Seminar organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in 1956 and its relevance to the subsequent organization of ‘Indian theatre’. Many theatre personalities who emerged as faces of smaller theatre committees were part of the seminar which envisioned a national cultural body. This book is an important contribution to the field and is of interest to researchers and students of cultural studies, especially Theatre and Performance Studies, and South Asian Studies.
Theatre and Performance in Contemporary Scotland
by Trish ReidThis textbook offers a detailed and expansive account of theatre and performance in contemporary Scotland. It considers the underlying historical and cultural developments that have enabled the recent renaissance in Scottish theatre and the emergence of playwrights of international standing, such as David Greig, Zinnie Harris, David Harrower and Rona Munro as well as companies of significant international note. Some prominence is given to the National Theatre of Scotland, which was established in 2004 in the aftermath of Scottish devolution, and which has become a key organization in the creating and dissemination – nationally and internationally – of Scottish theatre and performance. The book aims to capture the diversity and eclecticism of Scotland’s contemporary performance culture by examining work across a spectrum from children’s theatre, community theatre, mainstream theatre for adult audiences and live and performance art.
Theatre and Performing Arts Collections
by Lee AshHere is an exciting book that provides detailed descriptions of dozens of the most important and unique collections of “theatricana” in the United States and Canada. In Theatre and Performing Arts Collections, distinguished theatre specialists, librarians, and curators describe the unique possessions of the best and largest collections in theatre and performing arts. Each chapter provides detailed descriptions of the collections, as well as important notes about their history--information that is not available in any other source!
Theatre and Residual Culture: J.M. Synge and Pre-Christian Ireland
by Christopher CollinsThis book considers the cultural residue from pre-Christian Ireland in Synge’s plays and performances. By dramatising a residual culture in front of a predominantly modern and political Irish Catholic middle class audience, the book argues that Synge attempted to offer an alternative understanding of what it meant to be “modern” at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book draws extensively on Synge’s archive to demonstrate how pre-Christian residual culture informed not just how he wrote and staged pre-Christian beliefs, but also how he thought about an older, almost forgotten culture that Catholic Ireland desperately wanted to forget. Each of Synge’s plays is considered in an individual chapter, and they identify how Synge’s dramaturgy was informed by pre-Christian beliefs of animism, pantheism, folklore, superstition and magical ritual.
Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare'S England
by Holger Schott SymeHolger Syme presents a radically new explanation for the theatre's importance in Shakespeare's time. He portrays early modern England as a culture of mediation, dominated by transactions in which one person stood in for another, giving voice to absent speakers or bringing past events to life. No art form related more immediately to this culture than the theatre. Arguing against the influential view that the period underwent a crisis of representation, Syme draws upon extensive archival research in the fields of law, demonology, historiography and science to trace a pervasive conviction that testimony and report, delivered by properly authorised figures, provided access to truth. Through detailed close readings of plays by Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare – in particular Volpone, Richard II and The Winter's Tale – and analyses of criminal trial procedures, the book constructs a revisionist account of the nature of representation on the early modern stage.
Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare's England: A Culture of Mediation
by Holger Schott SymeHolger Syme presents a radically new explanation for the theatre's importance in Shakespeare's time. He portrays early modern England as a culture of mediation, dominated by transactions in which one person stood in for another, giving voice to absent speakers or bringing past events to life. No art form related more immediately to this culture than the theatre. Arguing against the influential view that the period underwent a crisis of representation, Syme draws upon extensive archival research in the fields of law, demonology, historiography and science to trace a pervasive conviction that testimony and report, delivered by properly authorised figures, provided access to truth. Through detailed close readings of plays by Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare - in particular Volpone, Richard II and The Winter's Tale - and analyses of criminal trial procedures, the book constructs a revisionist account of the nature of representation on the early modern stage.
Theatre and War
by Jeanne ColleranHow has the media since the First Gulf War altered political analysis and how has this alteration has in turn affected socially-critical art? Colleran examines more than forty plays, many written in direct response to the 1991 war in Iraq as well as to the 9/11 attacks and the retaliatory actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Theatre for Shakespeare
by Alfred HarbageHere is a book to hearten playgoers, stimulate young actors, lead theatrical executives to reconsider methods of management, and encourage benefactors to open their wallets. In this new book (containing the Alexander Lectures for 1954-55), Mr. Harbage, distinguished critic and scholar, advocates a movement to give Shakespeare back to the audiences. He complains that, in greater or less degree, Shakespearean audiences are in constant danger of being bored, or more precisely of being "reverently unreceptive," of being gratified that they have come to the play and gratified that they then may go. In his opinion there is no theatre in the world today that can present Shakespeare with full adequacy. Mr. Harbage feels that Shakespearean production is at present lacking in a sense of direction, and needs some form of exemplary leadership. Counsels of perfection are required. There should be at least one company to set a standard, one not dependent upon immediate financial success, and one committed only to realizing artistic ideals worthy of the plays. The wholesome tendency to return to the original methods of production for guidance would be more effectual if a distinction were made between what is still applicable in those original methods and what is not. The author's argument is provocative and amusing throughout; it begins with detailed complaints and ends with detailed remedies. A generous amount of information about Elizabethan precedents and traditions is included. Alfred Harbage has published numerous books which have become cornerstones in Shakespearean scholarship: Annals of English Drama, 975-1700; Shakespeare's Audience; As They Liked It; and Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions. He has prepared new editions of The Tempest and As You Like it, is General Editor of the American Pelican Shakespeare, had published articles in learned journals, and has held editorial and advisory posts.
Theatre of the Unimpressed
by Jordan TannahillA lot of plays are bad. And one bad play, it seems, can turn us off theater for good. So, what can we learn from the bad play? Jordan Tannahill, after talking to theater heavy-hitters from Australia to Berlin, offers a roadmap for a renewed theater, one that is less insular, less insulting, with better infrastructure. In reconsidering dramaturgy, programming strategies, and alternative models for producing, he aims to turn theater from an obligation to a destination.Jordan Tannahill is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. His production of Sheila Heti's All Our Happy Days Are Stupid will be performed in New York in 2015.
Theatre of the Unimpressed
by Jordan TannahillHow dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it. Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he'd become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendence that kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between? A lot of plays are dull. And one dull play, it seems, can turn us off theatre for good. Playwright and theatre director Jordan Tannahill takes in the spectrum of English-language drama - from the flashiest of Broadway spectacles to productions mounted in scrappy storefront theatres - to consider where lifeless plays come from and why they persist. Having travelled the globe talking to theatre artists, critics, passionate patrons and the theatrically disillusioned, Tannahill addresses what he considers the culture of 'risk aversion' paralyzing the form. Theatre of the Unimpressed is Tannahill's wry and revelatory personal reckoning with the discipline he's dedicated his life to, and a roadmap for a vital twenty-first-century theatre - one that apprehends the value of 'liveness' in our mediated age and the necessity for artistic risk and its attendant failures. In considering dramaturgy, programming and alternative models for producing, Tannahill aims to turn theatre from an obligation to a destination. '[Tannahill is] the poster child of a new generation of (theatre? film? dance?) artists for whom "interdisciplinary" is not a buzzword, but a way of life.'- J. Kelly Nestruck, The Globe and Mail 'Jordan is one of the most talented and exciting playwrights in the country, and he will be a force to be reckoned with for years to come.'- Nicolas Billon, Governor General's Award-winning playwright (Fault Lines)
Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett's Later Drama (Routledge Library Editions: Beckett #5)
by Anna McMullanThis book, first published in 1993, is the first full-length analysis of Samuel Beckett’s later drama in the context of contemporary critical and performance theory. It employs a close, textual examination of the later plays as a springboard for exploring ideas around authority, gender and the ideology of performance. Recent work in the world of critical theory has suggested new ways of looking at performance practice. McMullan argues that, while contemporary theory can deepen our understanding of Beckett’s dramatic practice, his drama places performance in the context of a metaphysical history and a metatheatrical tradition, thereby confronting and provoking some of the central debates in performance studies’ engagement with critical theory.