Alternative Theatre Research Articles

From Suffragette to Diversity of Voices in Feminist Drama: Pam Gems’s Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi

Feminist hareketin kendi içerisindeki farklı görüşlere ilişkin tartışmaları ele almak için uygun bir tür olan feminist drama kadın hareketine paralel bir şekilde gelişmiştir. Britanya’da birinci dalga drama örneklerine, esasen kadınların oy kullanma hakkı kazanmasına yönelik bir çaba olan Süfrajet (Suffragette) hareket tarafından desteklenen Actress’s Franchise League gibi Süfrajet tiyatro grupları için yazılan kadınlar ile ilgili oyunlarda rastlanmaktadır. Bu oyunlar farkındalık yaratmak için yazılmış oyunlardır. Süfrajet tiyatronun gelişiminden sonra, Britanya’da 1968 Parlamento Kararı ile sansürün kaldırılması İngiltere’de feminist tiyatronun gelişimi açısından hem bir dönüm noktası hem de ikinci adım olarak değerlendirilebilir; zira bu karar feminist oyun yazarlarına önceleri yasak kabul edilen birçok konuyu ele alma olanağı sağlamıştır. Dolayısıyla, birinci dalga, diğer bir deyişle, Süfrajet tiyatronun aksine, savaş sonrası ikinci dalga feminist tiyatro kadın sorunlarını daha geniş bir ölçekte ele alma özelliği taşımaktadır. Bu dönemde, farklı yaklaşımlar benimseyen kadın oyun yazarlarının neredeyse tümü kadın sorunları ile ilgili kaygılarını sahnede ifade etme olanağı bulmuş ve bu yazarların çoğu daha küçük ölçekli alternatif tiyatrolarca ve kadın birliklerince desteklenmiştir. Bu bilgiler ışığında, bu çalışmanın amacı, savaş sonrası İngiliz feminist tiyatrosunda görülen çok sesliliği veya çeşitliliği Pam Gems’in Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi (1976) başlıklı oyunu üzerinde ayrıntılı bir inceleme yapmak suretiyle incelemek ve örneklendirmektir.

Models of Alternative Theater in the Classroom

Research Article| October 01 2018 Models of Alternative Theater in the Classroom Shulamith Lev-Aladgem Shulamith Lev-Aladgem Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, PhD, is an associate professor of theater studies and former chair of the Theatre Arts Department at Tel Aviv University. She is a community-based theater practitioner and researcher, as well as a trained actress who uses her acting experience in her research and teaching. Lev-Aladgem’s main interests incorporate play theory, performance studies, and cultural studies and their relation to community-based theater, political theater, alternative theater, educational drama, drama therapy, and feminist theater. Her research on these subjects has been published in numerous leading periodicals in the United States, Europe, and Israel. She has published two books: Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power (2010) and Standing Front Stage: Resistance, Celebration and Subversion in Community-Based Theatre (2010), published in Hebrew. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Aesthetic Education (2018) 52 (3): 72–86. https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.52.3.0072 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Shulamith Lev-Aladgem; Models of Alternative Theater in the Classroom. Journal of Aesthetic Education 1 January 2018; 52 (3): 72–86. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.52.3.0072 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Aesthetic Education Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Decolonising Theatre: Subverting the Western Dramaturgical Frame in Zimbabwean Theatre and Performance

ABSTRACTThe official cultural policy of the colonial state in Zimbabwe was premised on the anglicisation of cultural production with a slavish adherence to the Western dramatic canon. Although this policy was resisted by cultural producers, the resistance was not mainstreamed in any meaningful way as a broad-based policy to be pursued. With independence from Great Britain on 18 April 1980, cultural producers took it upon themselves to mainstream this resistance to the Western canon through a process of decolonising Zimbabwean theatre to create what I have called alternative Zimbabwean theatre. In this article, I want to make sense of this creative process by deploying two sociological concepts: keying and fabrication. I appropriate these two concepts through the lens of decolonial theory, which is an analytical approach that both celebrates and destabilises the colonial and Eurocentric episteme to reconstruct new epistemic systems and forms. With a particular focus on two plays I argue that George Mujajati subverts the Western dramaturgical frame, acting methods and approaches through a process of “keying” and “fabrication.” Sometimes the Western dramaturgical frame is deconstructed by using aspects of it alongside an indigenous theatrical matrix.

Palimpsests of Violence: Urban Dispossession and Political Theatre in Istanbul

Palimpsests of Violence:Urban Dispossession and Political Theatre in Istanbul Emine Fişek (bio) What is the relationship between theatre and politics in contemporary Turkey? The answer to this question is linked to the proliferation of so-called alternative theatres in Istanbul in the twenty-first century. Designating theatre ventures that exist outside the publicly funded state and municipal theatre circuits, the phrase "alternative theater" is one way in which artists, critics, and audiences have referenced the proliferation of theatrical activity that has characterized the new millennium. Of course, a broader historical lens reminds us that experimental theatre companies had already emerged in Turkish metropoles in the 1960s; but the sheer political, aesthetic, and institutional variety of twenty-first-century alternative theatre is better traced to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Istanbul-based ventures like Bilsak Tiyatro, Kumpanya, 5. Sokak Oyuncuları, and Şahika Tekand's Stüdyo Oyuncuları sought to create autonomous spaces for theatrical expression, research, and pedagogy. This search has only accelerated in the twenty-first century, with new spaces like GalataPerform, Kumbaracı50, DOT, Moda Sahnesi, İkinciKat, MekanArtı, and Şermola Performans (among many others) vying for public visibility. Alternative theatre is not a monolithic whole, yet one trend that has characterized the domain's emergent work is a concern with the politics of both collective and individual memory as well as the complexities of national identity in twentieth-century Turkey. If Turkish theatre has witnessed a shifting terrain in the new millennium, however, so has Turkish politics. The ascendancy and rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has challenged the Kemalist [End Page 349] state project that had previously defined Republican history, with its emphasis on Turkish nation-statehood and secular modernization. Campaigning on a neoliberal brand of Islamic social conservatism, part of what the AKP has introduced into Turkish political life is a historiographic tendency in which an array of past political grievances are brought together to rewrite Kemalist memory politics. While drawing attention to the "multiplicity of alternative memories" that have emerged in the wake of this shift, Onur Bakıner nonetheless signals the arrival of "a new state-sanctioned historiography," where conservative-nationalist readings of the past have resulted in selective reckonings as well as further silencings.1 Two trends in particular are important to note: first, the emergence of a depoliticized memory of the country's successive military coups that obscures the history of human rights violations, and second, a discourse of neo-Ottomanism that both imagines a Muslim-Turkish imperial past and engages in facile celebrations of Ottoman multiculturalism. How did alternative theatre respond to this shifting terrain? How did playwrights and theatre artists negotiate the possibilities as well as the limitations of conducting political theatre in the new millennium? In this essay, I focus on Ahmet Sami Özbudak's play İz (The Stain), which was directed by Yeşim Özsoy at the alternative theatre venue GalataPerform in Istanbul in 2013, to formulate some preliminary answers to these questions. İz was created by Özbudak in 2010, in the context of the Yeni Metin, Yeni Tiyatro (New Text, New Theatre) writing workshops that Özsoy had been organizing at GalataPerform since 2006. Since then, the play has had a smooth run, and the company celebrated their hundredth performance in June 2016. Meanwhile, Özbudak has published a novelized version of the narrative that also includes the playtext, and negotiations are in process for a film adaptation. The play, in other words, has grown beyond its seemingly medium-specific identity, despite a tight dramaturgical structure and pronounced use of theatrical space and media. What is the play's enduring appeal? İz tells three concurrent stories, each of which is anchored around a specific moment in modern Turkish history. The first story is set in 1955 and centers on Rum (Anatolian Greek) sisters Eleni and Markiz, who are tending to their mother, an elderly woman who has not exited her bedroom in a number of months. As they [End Page 350] discuss their mother's condition, the political tension that underlies their everyday existence culminates in the events of September 6–7, during which Istanbul's Greek community was systematically attacked by Turkish mobs...

Post-punk and alternative cabaret: Avant-garde, counterculture and revolution

Abstract Ask anyone to define the term ‘post-punk’ and they are likely to tell you it was a music genre that followed punk. Others will talk of its political voice, its rejection of commercial practices, its use of bricolage and its seriousness. Few will mention other post-punk forms, like alternative cabaret (alt-cab), which had similar cultural objectives that were inspired by the first wave of punk. Punk poetry, for example, straddled post-punk and alt-cab, and was more popular than stand-up comedy during the early years of the circuit. Like their counterparts in the post-punk music scene, many early alternative comedians and cabarettists were bricoleurs who rejected and/or deconstructed traditional entertainment styles, and experimented with form and content. This article discusses the structural similarities between the post-punk fields of music and entertainment, and how alt-comedians and cabarettists fused art, alternative theatre and politics to create new styles and comedy-aesthetic discourses. This article draws from a Bourdieusian paradigm, which is augmented by Wollen’s ‘The two avant-gardes’ and De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. To illustrate my argument, I will use case study and autoethnography.

Miraculous Lithuania: the national open-air mysteries in Lithuania between the wars

In the wake of the wave of disappointment with the patriotic repertoire of the new-established State Theatrewhich seemed not to respond to the desire of the celebrating nation, an alternative theatre – theatre of national mass open-air mysteries, mostly organized by the Christian youth organization – came to life in Lithuania in the 1920-ies and gained in popularity. These celebratory performances were devoted to the synthesis of Christian and national ideologies; their main subject was the rebirth of Lithuania as a God’s miracle. This miraculous Lithuania was supposed to become a real experience, i.e. the masses participating in these performances were supposed to be like a continuation of the sacred, blessed-by-God Lithuania represented in the mass hero (chorus) of the plays. However, this turned out to be an utopic project. Miraculuos Lithuania was too inconvincible, too artificial, at a too big distance from the real Lithuania to become a model for the living present. That was one of the main reasons why the national open-air mysteries turned into the lifeless pathetics in the end of the1920-ies and started to vanish in the beginning of the 1930-ies.

Ornament in the Kitchen Garden: The Pea as Motif for Goldsmithing in the France of Louis XIII

Between 1615 and 1640, Parisian goldsmiths were known throughout Europe for a decorative motif called the cosse de pois (peapod). This design for ornament was based on the representation of the garden pea (pisum sativum), a common staple of the French diet and one of the oldest cultivated crops on the planet. Trained to carve designs into metal, goldsmiths who were unable to join the Parisian guild turned to printmaking as an alternative theatre for the exercise of their craft. The goldsmiths found in the pea a rich medium for exploring analogies between artistic and organic means of generating bodies. Following the devastation of the French Wars of Religion of the late sixteenth century, the pea as the ornament of gold jewellery offered the image of a fecund, regenerative body, a panacea to infertility and an antidote to the parasitic excesses of the nobility

존 맥그라스 연극의 정치성 : 7:84 스코틀랜드 극단과 The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil을 중심으로

McGrath worked as a political dramatist, director and the head of the 7:84 Scotland. He toured throughout Scotland for working-class audiences. He initially worked on TV programs and film productions, then founded the 7:84 Scotland which performed socialist theatre. Furthermore, he wrote The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil which is a painful history of Scotland’s oppressed ancestry. McGrath’s play is an unprecedented work in British history.BR McGrath performed a new form of political theatre with the interaction between the text and the elements of the performance. McGrath discovered the subversive power of working-class’s culture in his audience. His audience was able to recognize the history of Scotland that was once forgotten. McGrath grafts entertainment elements of the working class onto Scotland’s tragic history, thereby creating a new form of political theatre. McGrath’s work can be regarded as British oppositional and alternative theatre. Through The Cheviot, a new type of audience can be created. Theatre thus became a much more effective way to deliver social democratic messages than mass media such as television or film.BR

National representations, national theatres: Aubrey Menen and the experimental theatre company

This article discusses the Indian-Irish playwright and critic Aubrey Menen’s involvement with London’s theatre scene in the 1930s. Aubrey Menen became heavily involved in student drama activities whilst a philosophy student at University College London. He co-founded the London Student Players as well as the Experimental Theatre Company, a group on London’s theatre fringe which sought to produce plays that were of the moment, politically current, pushing the boundaries of theatrical staging in alternative performance spaces. At the age of 21, Menen also became the dramatic critic for the monthly magazine, The Bookman. Menen used his column to offer a sharp critical dissection of the state of British theatre and to lay out a plan for a theatre that can call itself truly ‘national’ and how this might be achieved financially, artistically and practically. This essay highlights the wider context of Menen’s own pronouncements in The Bookman, exploring these as part of his engagement with London’s alternative theatre scene in the 1930s. It argues that Menen’s ideas were a timely intervention into crucial debates how the nation should be represented in drama and how drama could reach an audience beyond the middle classes, preoccupations that are still hotly debated today.

Preface: The Spaces Between

Preface: The Spaces Between María Delgado It is impossible to consider Argentine theatre without folding in some discussion of film. Any discussion of 21st century Argentine cinema similarly touches theatrical motifs and prisms. It’s not simply about actors—like María Villar, Pilar Gamboa, Esteban Lamothe, Julian Tello, and Esteban Bigliardi, among many others—whose performative ethos has been shaped by both. Dramatists like Walter Jakob and Santiago Loza also work in film, as an actor and director, respectively. These kinds of crossovers are just the tip of the fertile exchange that characterises Buenos Aires’ creative arts culture. The essays featured in this collection point to wider currents and exchanges. Romina Paula and Lola Arias work as performers, writers, and directors across both stage and screen cultures. Alejo Moguillansky works as a writer, director, and editor in cinema, but theatre spills into his films through plotting, performance, and intertextuality, disrupting their surface realism in playful, impish ways. The boundaries between these art forms, as the spatial configurations of Buenos Aires indicate, are hugely porous. Part of this has to do with the city’s lithe and improvisational theatre culture. Productions shift from venue to venue. A production may “take a break” when actors are filming, or play one or two days a week or play late in the evening—it’s not unusual to be heading to a performance at 11:30 p.m. Buenos Aires lives and breathes theatre—from the proscenium arch venues of central Corrientes to the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires’ (CTBA) cluster of theaters to the plethora of fringe theatres that can be found in the Abasto. For a decade the Abasto was home both to Buenos Aires’ independent film festival, the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine (BAFICI), and the city’s alternative theaters, and BAFICI’s origins can be linked to Buenos Aires’s biennial international theatre festival, the Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires (FIBA). [End Page 3] Both alternative theatre and the New Argentine cinema are built on a culture of thrift, of making do and improvising with the means you have at your disposal. All the works discussed in this volume are lean and focused—nothing superfluous, nothing wasted—and they are often marked by an approach to artistic creation that may be branded around the writer/director but is effectively realised in the rehearsal room or on location through group creation. Minefield (2016) and El loro y el cisne (2013) both show this process at work. This strategy also spills over into the multifarious roles that the artists featured in this collection occupy: directors work as producers or editors on the films of their contemporaries; actors direct and directors act; and groups of actors—ensembles of sorts—feature across the works of Romina Paula and Matías Piñeiro. The essays in this collection handle a range of productions (across both film and theatre) that articulate the intersections between history, memory, and fiction that have been so prevalent in Argentina’s creative arts over the past decade. The stages are varied. In La forma exacta de las islas (2012), the Falkland Islands/Malvinas are the theater for a quest narrative where the road movie and travelogue meld together. Lola Arias’s Minefield also returns to the Falklands/Malvinas, only the islands are here a space of memory and recollection, a place that is conjured through props and photographs, newspaper cuttings and pop songs. Communities are created through performance—whether it’s the Argentine and British veterans in Minefield or the family forged through film in Moguillansky’s El loro y el cisne. Community—what it means, how to forge, and sustain it—is key to the works covered in the volume. Community, of course, was central to the oldest documented theatrical cultures of Western Europe. Theatre’s origins lie at the interface of democracy and performance. A way for a community to debate the key issues of the time—issues of governance, ethics, and responsibility, of history, memory, and representation. As with the ancient Greek theatre of Dionysus, the stages discussed in this issue offer the space to debate the foundations on which post-dictatorship Argentina has been...

From Self-Effacement to Confrontation: The Emergence of Queer Theatre in Istanbul

Over the past ten years, the number of alternative theatres run by young artists in Istanbul has increased significantly. Political theatre has become an important part of this new cultural milieu. This article explores the emergence of queer theatre as part of this trend, especially in the last five years. It also examines the developments that gave rise to this theatre and elaborates on the topic by analysing two plays Cadinin Bohcasi (Sack of the Witch) and 80lerde Lubunya Olmak (Being a Transsexual in the 80s).

Must Art Have a ‘Place’? Questioning the Power of the Digital Art-Scape

Must Art Have a ‘Place’? Questioning the Power of the Digital Art-Scape

Setting the Stage for Suffrage

Setting the Stage for Suffrage

Subversion of socialist realist theatre and the rise of post-realist theatre in Zimbabwe, 1980–1996

This article takes a theatre historiography approach by scrutinising key developments in Zimbabwean theatre between 1980 and 1996. While theatre historiography often deals with critiquing source materials, theatre reconstruction and theatre iconography, in this article my emphasis is on historical periodisation, with a particular interest in intellectual and artistic change. At independence in 1980, the Ministry of Education and Culture sought to decolonise theatre by challenging the dominance of Western illusionistic theatre through sponsoring, advocating and creating an alternative theatre characterised by speech, mime, song and dance, with a socialist ideological leaning. However, from 1991 the cultural context of Zimbabwe shifted from socialism to neo-liberal policies. The officially admired socialist realist aesthetic began to decline, giving way to a new modernist theatre. This article accounts for the decline of socialist realist theatre through the lens of one of the elements of Willmar Sauter's theatrical events theory – cultural context. I argue that the new Zimbabwean cultural context that obtained after the adoption of the IMF/World Bank-backed Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) reversed the socialist gains of the first ten years after independence and affected socialist revolutionary theatre by altering the taste of the audience and reducing spending on social services like theatre.

Tourism flows and the demand for regional and city theatres in Austria

This paper investigates the impact of tourism flows on demand for large regional and city theatres in Austria over the period from 1972 to 2011 (39 years). The results are obtained by applying an aggregated theatre demand function for both residents and tourists. The elasticity of theatre attendance in response to tourism is estimated along with other standard demand variables such as ticket price and income. The quality factors and theatre-specific effects are also included. The tourism flows variables are derived using detailed data set on tourist arrivals and their overnight counts, and they are also split between domestic and foreign tourists. To measure the impact of tourism flows on theatre demand, three alternative theatre markets specifications are considered. The total elasticity of attendance per capita in response to tourism is estimated between 15 and 20 %, indicating that increasing the number of arrivals by two tourists per resident in the relevant market would generate an increase in theatre attendance by 581–680 thousand visitors per year. The role of tourism flows is found to be particularly important for attendance at opera, operetta and musicals as opposed to attendance at drama performances. The analysis also reveals that foreign, non-German tourists have a positive impact on theatre attendance, whereas domestic tourists do not contribute significantly to higher demand for Austrian theatres.

Liz Gorrie and the Kaleidoscope Alternative

The alternative theatre movement in Victoria tends to be associated with the tenure of Don Shipley at the Belfry Theatre (1975-80), but it was arguably by Liz Gorrie and the Kaleidoscope Theatre Company, a Theatre for Young Audiences, that the alternative theatre movement was first brought to the provincial capital. Starting in 1974 and during its first two decades under Gorrie’s artistic directorship, Kaleidoscope was as politically and aesthetically radical in its objectives and practices as such better-known 1970s companies as Tarragon, Tamahnous, Passe Muraille, and Toronto Free Theatre. Kaleidoscope not only created work that bears comparison with that of contemporary alternative theatre for adults, but thanks to the purity of Liz Gorrie’s theatrical vision, and her deep respect for young audiences, it developed a style of TYA that “changed the face of children’s theatre in Canada and around the world” (McLauchlin “Interview”). Recognizing Kaleidoscope’s contribution to the alternative theatre movement in this country will require a look at the many ways in which the company earned its alternative credentials—even while addressing audiences made up of children. Jennifer Wise and Lauren Jerke look first at the company’s genesis as a progressive alternative to the city’s mainstream regional theatre, then consider its indigenous and collectively created material, its Grotowskian and Brechtian objectives, its anti-illusionistic Asian aesthetic, and its use of masks, puppets, transformation, and abstraction. As Wise and Jerke show, Kaleidoscope in the 1970s and 1980s utilized a virtual encyclopedia of alternative theatre techniques, earning a national and international reputation within five years of its founding and, the authors argue, meriting a permanent place in the history of the alternative theatre movement in Canada.

The politics of theatre and performance training in Zimbabwe 1980–1996

This article is a contextual analysis of the socio-political and ideological conditions of theatre production in Zimbabwe between 1980 and 1996. In this article I discuss the construction of theatre identities, in what I have chosen to call alternative Zimbabwean theatre, at the level of theatre training. In the field of Zimbabwean alternative theatre, a white-dominated theatre organisation, the National Theatre Organisation (NTO), and a black-dominated theatre organisation, Zimbabwe Association of Community based Theatre (ZACT), fought ideological and aesthetic wars and competed with each other for occupying the dominant position. These two organisations competed to host theatre festivals, to train theatre artists, to express their views in the media and consecrate their agents. They competed on the right to define national theatre. It was a cultural struggle to assume the power and right to tell others what national theatre ought to be and to enforce national theatrical conventions. It invariably became a power struggle between two theatrical conventions – the NTO theatrical convention with a strong bourgeois illusionistic theatre orientation and the ZACT theatrical convention with a strong performatic orientation. Since both NTO and ZACT trained the same artists, the article argues that theatre makers used their own agency to choose what they wanted from the workshop materials and created theatre that was an admixture of dramatic theatre and African performative modes.

The Professionalization of a Stage Naturalist, the Making of a Mythmaker: The Theatre Criticism of Urjo Kareda at the University of Toronto’s Varsity Newspaper

The theatre criticism of Urjo Kareda in the Toronto Star offers favoured primary source material for theatre historians evaluating the so-called “alternative theatre” movement in Toronto in the early 1970s. Indeed, it has been argued that theatre activity during these years constitutes a “movement” largely because of Kareda’s engaging writing at the time, which popularly labeled it as “movement” even as it emerged. However, Kareda’s equally engaging writing in the campus weekly newspaper the Varsity in the mid-1960s, while he was a student at the University of Toronto, has been left unexplored. This essay argues that Kareda’s themes, styles, and opinions in that student publication reveal much about the development of his early views on theatre practices and aesthetics in the years prior to the emergence of the alternative theatres, most notably his unwavering preference for neo-Aristotelian stage naturalism and psychological realism, and a dynamic emphasis on Toronto’s theatre ecology. In doing so, it offers connections between undergraduate cultural production and career-minded journalistic theatre writing. And it challenges scholars to rethink the professional researcher’s undervaluation of extra-professional theatre criticism.

Gay Sweatshop, Alternative Theatre, and Strategies for New Writing

Gay Sweatshop spent twenty-two years producing plays as Britain's first openly gay professional theatre company. Their alternative and political work primarily took the form of author-driven new writing, though experiments with performer-driven work intrigued the company from its earliest cabarets to its late phase of queer solo work under Lois Weaver. In this article, Sara Freeman pinpoints Sweatshop's tenth anniversary new play festival in 1985 as the moment when the company committed to new writing as a strategy for gaining greater legitimacy as a theatre group and as a central mode to encourage gay and lesbian voices and representation. She argues that while this had been the default mode of much 1970s political theatre including Sweatshop's, as it played out in the 1980s, a new writing strategy represented a move toward institutional stability as the locus of theatrical radicalism shifted aesthetics. In this analysis, the celebration of company anniversaries and the creation of festival events provided occasions for the company to experience the success or failure of its policies. Freeman is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Puget Sound. She is the co-editor of Public Theatres and Theatre Publics (2012) and International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker (2008). Her recent publications appear in Modern British Playwriting: the 1980s. Readings in Performance and Ecology, and the forthcoming volume The British Theatre Company from Fringe to Mainstream: Volume II 1980–1994.

Between Body and Spirit: An Interview with Leszek Bzdyl

Barbara Świąder interviews Leszek Bzdyl, the artistic director of Dada von Bzdülöw Theatre, a dance theatre company that operates on the borderline of artforms. Bzdyl describes his evolution as a dancer, how he started the company with Katarzyna Chmielewska, how Dada’s plays are developed, and his artistic influences, including Jerzy Grotowski. He also assesses the contemporary Polish dance and alternative theatre scenes.