Authorial Performance Research Articles

Performing—Feeling, Auto-Transformation, and Expression: Tang Shu-wing and His Theatre Studio in Hong Kong

This article presents the multifaceted persona of Tang Shu-wing, an acclaimed director, actor, and drama teacher, and examines his profound connections with the Polish theater tradition, particularly Jerzy Grotowski. The text also discusses Tang Shu-wing’s Shakespearean productions staged in Warsaw and Gdańsk. Marzenna Wiśniewska’s introduction contextualizes the appendix, which contains the edited transcript of a lecture delivered by Tang Shu-wing during the international online conference Contemporary Acting Techniques in Eurasian Theatre, Performance and Audiovisual Art: Intercultural and Intermedia Perspective (2021). In this lecture, the director characterizes the main ideas underlying his actor training and work on performances at the Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio in Hong Kong. An essential part of the presentation is the characterization of Tang Shu-wing’s philosophy of art, including the four stages of an artist’s development and the methodology of authorial performance grounded in pre-verbal expression and body-based minimalist aesthetics.

Christian Sinding’s piano style as a component of European art

Statement of the problem. Christian Sinding is considered “the first after Grieg” at the Norwegian music olympus. He created more than 130 opuses of different genres of music. However, nowadays his works are rarely performed, particularly in Ukraine. Thus, the relevance of the topic of the article is due to the lack of domestic musicology systematic study of Sinding’s piano work as a component of European art. The study of the heritage of the “second star” of Norwegian culture is the overtask of modern musicology – to fill the “white spot” in the study of national piano schools in Western Europe, including Norway, and make the music of this composer recognized and demanded by young performers of the XXI century. The purpose of the article is to represent the individual compositional style of С. Sinding on the basis of his own authorial performance of the analyzed piano pieces. The material for this is the iconic piano works (op. 24, op. 25) of the early and mature periods of creativity, which highlight the style of thinking of the artist. The object of research isthepianostyle of the Norwegian composer Christian Sindingin the prism of European musical culture, the subject – pianominiatures of Sinding. The research methods are based on material that is little known for most of Ukrainian musicians, but belongs to the classical European heritage. Thus, the historical method reveals the dialectic of tradition and innovation in the process of formation of national and individual style in music; genre method – determines the hierarchy of general and specific in the organization of a musical work; stylistic – in addition to the principles of the artist’s thinking indicates the nationally defined features of creativity; performing-interpretive method – reflects the personal feeling of the “sound image” of the piano by the author of the article as the first interpreter of C. Sinding’s music in Ukraine. The results obtained. Generalization of the principles of stylistic thinking of Christian Sinding in the field of his piano work has not received a systematic presentation in existing scientific sources. Therefore, to reveal the relevance of the proposed research topic, we highlight the typical stylistic features and principles of piano work of C. Sinding in terms of its national and stylistic identity. The criterion was the elements of the “national musical language” (according to O. Kozarenko). As for the elements of musical language that affect the sound image of the piano, the work of C. Sinding is characterized by a late romantic paradigm: folklore basis of melody, orchestral richness of piano texture, richness of timbre palette with effects of instrumental sound imitation, complex harmony rhythmic organization, which combines folk dance and instrumental formulas and metric schemes of emphasis (regularity and irregularity). The principles of monotheism and leitmotif are also one of the means of expression of late romanticism as C. Sinding’s worldview paradigm, which certain genre-language tendencies of his piano thinking are concentrated in. Most of the plays have sound effects – imitation of the timbres of folk instruments popular in Norway, including hardingphele, harpsichord, violin. As a result, the levels of stylistic significance of individual elements of the musical language of the artist’s piano works constitute a model of individual compositional style as a reflection of the national mentality of the musical worldview. Prospects for further development of the topic. In the development of the develop edmethodology of analysis of national and musical language C. Sinding will study majorgenres of mature and lateperiods of piano work to sub stantiate the style of thinking of the artist in the paradigms of European culture of Romanticism and modernism of the early twentieth century.

Servants and Allocation of Narrative Space in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel

Narrative struggles in the eighteenth-century English novel can be traced to the allocation of narrative space to a multiplicity of characters. The narrative positioning of the servant comes to embody the anxieties of the author and of the age. As servants are associated with the transmission of stories with varying degrees of reliability, they easily turn into stand-ins for authorial performance, especially in eighteenth-century novels, where the performance of reliability is a crucial aspect of authorial selffashioning. Servants make up a large portion of the reading public in the period and their desire for upward social mobility inevitably finds both narrative and characterological representation. However, as exemplified by the “Pamela controversy,” famously sparked by Samuel Richardson’s novel, open depictions of the possibility of social mobility also engendered unease. This article studies the allocation of narrative space to servants in three novels: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is an epistolary novel narrated by the letters of a servant character. Therefore, the servant character is established as the center of narrative attention; however, it is this very centrality that unsettles her position and turns her into a figure in “service” of the novel’s moral purpose. Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews presents a more convoluted struggle over the claiming of narrative space since Joseph’s ambivalent release from the servant position is continuously challenged by other servants. Finally, servants in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy are situated at the margins of narrative space as parodical embodiments of the desire to rise to the level of narrative and public visibility.

Mapping the interstices: intertextuality, language, and authorial voice in Zapatista poetics

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the Zapatista use of the Word as weapon and as world-making. In particular, we focus on narrative devices and discursive strategies that reveal the locus of enunciation from which the Zapatistas, via Marcos, speak. This Word emerges from, and is situated at, the interstices of Western and Mayan worlds. In the Zapatista stories this is evident through a transmodern use of intertextuality; the critique of “false language” and the eruption of an-other grammar; and a dynamic authorial performance that shifts between Marcos-el Sup as narrator vis-à-vis Marcos as author, spokesperson, and Subcomandante of the EZLN.

Ambiguous Authorities: Vertigo and the Auteur Figure

This article examines authorial performance in the context of DC’s Vertigo line. In the 1990s, Vertigo gained its reputation as an innovative and progressive imprint by promoting the work of British scriptwriters, who were hailed as true author figures, despite the inherently collaborative nature of the mainstream comics industry. In a manner reminiscent of “auteur theory”, writers such as Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis or Grant Morrison developed attractive author personas which they consistently displayed through interviews, letter columns or social media, but also, more importantly, by inserting their avatars within the comics they scripted. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes clear that their work in fact simultaneously asserts and destabilizes writerly authority, in a manner that is consistent with Linda Hutcheon’s view of postmodernity. By multiplying author figures and playfully disseminating authority, Vertigo authors question their own authorial control over the text, asserting instead the crucial role played by the reader.

Performance as Authorship: Sarah Michelle Gellar and Buffy Season 6

scholars have approached the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997- 2003) from a variety of angles, including as a progenitor of the era of serialized quality TV and as a primary example of the showrunneras- auteur model of television production and reception. However, as with much of television (and screen media in general), little scholarly attention has been paid to performance in the series-when, in fact, performance is a vital factor of the show's success. It is my argument that the primary cast of Buffy constitutes a fundamental component of the series' authorship. Specifically, in this article I will argue that Sarah Michelle Gellar's central performance as Buffy Summers does not simply imbue the series with the allure of stardom or provide a focal point of fan attention and scrutiny, but that rather, it authors the role of Buffy in specific ways. This aspect of authorship allows the series' narrative to develop as a dialogue between the writers and performer as coauthors. Thus, the text becomes at once more expansive and more nuanced than any individual author can claim responsibility for.To demonstrate Gellar's authorial performance, I will focus mainly on the series' divisive sixth season (2001-02) and the episode Dead Things (season 6, episode 13) in particular. During this season, the show took a dark, harrowing turn, as most of its main characters dealt with season-long bouts of depression and anger, as well as extreme personal setbacks.1 This did not sit well with many of the show's fans or formerly supportive critics. Season 6 also saw the series jump networks, from The WB to UPN, and brought the departure of Joss Whedon as showrunner. Although it features such highlights and fan favorites as the musical episode Once More, with Feeling (S6E7) and the Dark Willow arc, the season is also notable for the virtual disappearance of main character Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), the seemingly random, overdetermined magic-as-drugs metaphor, and fan-despised episodes such as Doublemeat Palace (S6E12) and As You Were (S6E15). Despite these many problematic components, season 6 retained a viewership comparable to previous, more highly regarded seasons. Furthermore, over time its reputation has benefited from reconsideration, especially in the wake of DVD releases and online streaming that allow viewers to binge watch the season. I contend that although there are several elements that work to make the season stronger than initial reaction would indicate, much of the season's success stems from the series-long commitment that Gellar and the rest of the cast made to fashioning characters who transcended their sometimes laughable, sometimes dire environment.It is not my intention to undermine Joss Whedon's contributions to Buffy, although in making an argument for multiple authorship, I will take up recent challenges to the showrunner- as-auteur model from which Whedon's reputation has benefited. Whedon created both the character and the show, developed its metaphorical structure, wrote and directed several of its most heralded episodes, and by all accounts had some hand in crafting most of its scripts. I also do not wish to diminish the collaborative input of other key authors of Buffy, particularly Marti Noxon, showrunner of seasons 6 and 7. What I do contend, however, is that performance in Buffy is as vital an act of creative authorship as any of its production elements. More specifically, Gellar's performance as Buffy allowed the show to maintain a consistency and a connection with its audience that the writing sometimes seemed willing to abandon, even (or especially) during moments when the narrative took the character to places that Gellar the actor did not always feel comfortable with. Thus, Gellar's performance works in dialogue with production contributions by Whedon, Noxon, and others to exemplify a form of multiple authorship, in which different artistic contributions work in unison toward the creation of a greater whole in the form of an episode, season, or series. …

Performing the Immigrant: The Works of Calixthe Beyala and Fatou Diome

This paper proposes a study of the fictional works of two African women authors in French, Calixthe Beyala and Fatou Diome, and the various ways in which they explore constructions of identity in the transnational individual. Identifying forms are explored in their works in the manipulations of personal appearance, in more “official” representations such as documents and identification papers, and in other individual performances of a certain vision of the “authentic” African immigrant. Special attention will be paid to the figure of the author as a character within each text, and the relation of this particular authorial performance to the writers themselves. This paper seeks to explore several questions, based on three axes of analysis. First, I investigate the performative nature of identity as demonstrated by characters in these works. What aspects of the performance are particular to the migrant or transnational individual? Second, I examine the intersections of migrant identity and gender. How are performativity and gender related? How is the migrant experience embodied in a gendered individual? Finally, I analyze the image of the writer within each work. Who are the author figures in these texts? How do these characters perform an authorial identity? How do these characters perform an authorial identity, and can these two authors be said to represent authors differently? Using selections of their recent work, this paper will demonstrate how performativity intersects with the contemporary migrant fiction in the texts of Beyala and Diome.

The performing wanderer: the travel writing of Vikram Seth

This article explores the significant foundation of Vikram Seth's fictional work in his travel writing. It does so through an exploration of the ways in which his travelogue From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983) is presented as an entertaining authorial performance, and of Seth's – sometimes unwitting – exposure of the limited performativity of his own work: his presentation of the ‘essential contestedness of performance’ [Carlson, Marvin A. [1996] 2004. Performance: A Critical Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge]. In the process, the essay interrogates the success with which Seth attempts various identity-related positions on the journey made in this travelogue, and the disintegrations that accompany his various failures. The essay also looks at how originalities of form and presentation in this early travelogue may have led to the multiple successes of Seth's later writing career as a traveller and writer.

Locating Abdulrazak Gurnah: Margins, Mainstreams, Mobilities

Abdulrazak Gurnah is well known as a contemporary novelist of diaspora and in the present paper I revisit this familiar ground, looking creatively at his multiple locations across texts and genres. By shifting attention from the central reputation of his novels towards a more scattered range of materials, I enable a fresh take on received understandings of the writer's interest in migration and displacement. The intention is to motivate for a restless, migratory aesthetic response to Gurnah. The approach is admittedly quirky, but it has the advantage of being open to the dispersed, mediated forms and locations of Gurnah's authorial performance and personae, arriving at an expanded, mobile assemblage of co-ordinates which begins to suggest how ‘Abdulrazak Gurnah’ is positioned in contemporary cultural discourse.

Is Contemporary Art History?

In the past thirty years, the discipline of art history has experienced a series of professed crises that have greatly expanded not only the sorts of questions scholars bring to their inquiries, but also equally important the types of objects deemed worthy of analysis. Beginning with the ‘new art history’ in the 1980s, a variety of interdisciplinary approaches ranging from semiotics to social history have been marshalled in the name of wresting the work of art out of formalist hermeticism and into larger cultural fields, to consider, as Svetlana Alpers wrote in one of the earliest declarations of this new trend, ‘the work of art as a “piece of history” ’.1 While the academic study of art has regularly regarded the aesthetic object as an index of history (through such signifiers as style, iconology, and authorial performance), the new art history and the subsequent waves of postmodernisms (globalism being...

FROM LIBERTY TO LECHERY: PERFORMANCE, REPUTATION AND THE “MARVELLOUS STORY” OF HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS

Helen Maria Williams gained celebrity status in the 1780s as a heroine of sensibility. She was also a clever polemicist and succeeded in establishing her own brand of political philosophy, exploiting commercial techniques and basing her arguments upon values traditionally considered as “female”. This article explores Williams's rhetorical strategies in her writing, with a particular focus on her Letters Written in France (1790). Williams foregrounds her own authorial performance in this popular text and is concerned throughout with the concept of theatricality. She even casts herself in the role of Liberty—yet by 1798 she was being satirically typecast as Lechery by hostile critics. This article considers Williams's fall from grace and how her public image as a literary darling is transformed into a stereotype of the “petticoat politician”: licentious, intemperate and wild.

The Prefaces of Henry James: Framing the Modern Reader

The first decade of the twentieth century saw Henry James at work selecting and revising his novels and tales for a collection of his work known as the New York Edition. James not only made extensive revisions of his early works; he added eighteen prefaces that provide what many readers believe to be the best commentary on his fiction. John Pearson argues here for a reading of the prefaces within the context of the New York Edition as James's attempt to construct an ideal reader, one attentive to his art and authorial performance. Throughout his discussion of the eighteen prefaces, Pearson examines the strategies that James implements for preparing the reader for the prefaced texts. He argues that James sought to create the modern reader, one who would learn to appreciate and discriminate his literary art through reading the prefaces. By demonstrating that the prefaces frame the novels and tales in aesthetic histories that are authorized and authenticated by the author-historian's personal memory, Pearson accomplishes his analysis of James's use of the frame and how it systematically instructed the reader in the Jamesian aesthetic of fiction. Through close readings of several of the novels and tales including The Awkward Age, What Maisie Knew, The Portrait of a Lady, The Aspern Papers, and The Wings of the Dove, Pearson's comprehensive study examines the various framing strategies at work and considers the broader theoretical implications of reading through the prefaces. Pearson's eclectic theoretical approach, similar to the recent poststructural work of John Carlos Rowe, makes a complex argument accessible to an educated reader untutored in recent poststructural literary theory.