Avant-garde Theatre Research Articles

The Absurdity of Denial: Staging the American Way of Death

Death denial is a psychological impulse and a cultural attitude that banishes thoughts about death and disavows the reality of personal mortality. In theatre, death denial can function as an unexamined philosophy and conditioning element unless it is foregrounded and challenged. In this article, Adrian Curtin looks at two examples of American experimental theatre that did just that: a 1975 production of Dino Buzzati's 1953 play Un Caso Clinico (A Clinical Case) and Terminal (1969–1971), a collectively created work by the Open Theatre. Buzzati's play is little known, especially in English-language scholarship. This article pairs an obscure work with a canonical work in order to offer new insight into American experimental theatre of the early 1970s, indicating how both productions contributed to the contemporaneous ‘death awareness’ movement, which opened up matters relating to death and dying. These productions highlighted the illogicality and absurdity of death denial, exposing the delusional basis of this attitude and its potentially damaging effects on the individual and society. Adrian Curtin lectures in the Drama Department at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave, 2014) and multiple essays on theatre sound, musical performance, and modernism. He is the 2015 winner of the Early Career Research Prize, awarded by the Theatre and Performance Research Association.

Celebrating Susan Glaspell and Trifles in Spain

Review of the Exhibition “Susan Glaspell (1876-1948): pionera del teatro experimental. Trifles, los Provincetown Players y el teatro de vanguardia” (“Susan Glaspell (1876-1948): The Pioneer of Experimental Theatre. Trifles, the Provincetown Players and the Avant-garde Theatre”) presented in Madrid, Spain, as a celebration of Trifles centennial. The exhibition took place in the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid from October 18th to December 16th 2016.

What is a Question?

What is a Question? Sarah Bay-Cheng (bio) At the very end of her life, Gertrude Stein is rumored to have asked, “What is the answer?” Receiving no response, she continued, “But what is the question?” Stein’s query (whether accurately reported or not) can be read in two distinct ways. The first, and most salient in a death-bed scene, is as retrospective reflection. One may think of her pondering the answer to life, a version of the often-asked, “What was it all for?” This very question, in fact, constituted the climax of Stein’s final dramatic writing, the opera The Mother of Us All (1945-46) in which the titular character Susan [End Page 40] B. Anthony returns from the dead to consider the consequences of her “long long life” and her impact on American history. Less evident, perhaps, is that Stein’s question also points forward even as it simultaneously thwarts this progression. All questions—even questions about questions—look to the future as the temporal space of a possible answer. Stein’s question, however, suggests a future in which even knowing what to ask is uncertain and must therefore return back to the site of the original query. She locks the seemingly linear act of questioning and answering into a space where the question turns back in on itself perpetually. (That Stein stages her final words as a continuous present will surprise few.) This circular questioning process is essential to the criticism of contemporary performance. The unique temporal properties of performance—whether mediated, live, or on the spectrum between the two—simultaneously invoke the past, the present, and the future. Formulating a critical question about performance is therefore imbricated within peculiar notions of time and action. The salient questions about any given work—What happened before? What is happening now? What happens next?—must be suspended within a current moment that considers all of these simultaneously. Critical questions in performance are therefore intrusions into a process. One has to artificially freeze an event already in motion and interject a framework for analysis. Considering contemporary performance, then, the question is an interruption and a temporal suspension of what is also acknowledged as an ongoing event. This suspension allows both critic and audience to examine a particular moment as a synecdoche of a larger performance work, while also acknowledging that any one moment is inadequate even if it is the only thing available. In his stunning collection, Clockfire, poet Jonathan Ball captures this essential reality of performance criticism rather well: “The play is over. Applaud or jeer. Step out into the street and pick a path. Meanwhile, the play begins again, in your absence. Without you.”1 [End Page 41] Sarah Bay-Cheng SARAH BAY-CHENG is Professor and Chair of Theater and Dance at Bowdoin College. Her research interests include avant-garde literature, theater, and cinema, technology and performance, digital humanities, and contemporary performance. Her publications include Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (2015) and Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater (2004); she also has served as editor for several publications including Mapping Intermediality in Performance (2010) and Poets at Play: An Anthology of Modernist Drama (2010). Other publications include book chapters and articles regarding theater, performance, and digital culture. Her recent research focuses on digital historiography and performance with a book on this topic currently in progress. Notes 1. Jonathan Ball, Clockfire (Toronto, CA: Coach House Books, 2006), 70. Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press

В поисках новых форм коллективности: ансамбль и декламационный хор в русском театре 1910–1920-х годов

В поисках новых форм коллективности: ансамбль и декламационный хор в русском театре 1910–1920-х годов

Understanding ‘Silence’ and ‘Pause’ in Modern Drama : The Use of Silence and Pause in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming

The paper examines the role ‘Silence’ and ‘Pause’ play and signify in Modern drama or simply Avant-garde theater through the analysis of Pinter’s drama The Homecoming. ‘Silence’ and ‘Pause’ in Modern drama are technical directional elements which transforms the fictive dramatic imagery to a mirrored imagery of reality. They may be defined as extensions of conventional language which are used preferentially to better mimic the reality that is being mirrored. ‘Silence’ and ‘Pause’ are non-verbal communicative tools and are sub-textual in manner. The use has become one of the distinguishing elements that represent and characterize the Modern drama in that they no longer remain as simple directions where needed to stop a continuation of action on stage but accentuate and futhermore demand and bring about an engagement from the audience/reader. The use of ‘Silence’ and ‘Pause’ represent for the dramatist an active recognition as to what an actual reality is and what the stage supposedly should reflect. In conclusion the use of the two elements functions in narrowing the perspective that separates the dramatist and the audience/reader regarding what is actually real and as to how reality be it fictional be represented on stage.

Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein ed. by Janet Boyd and Sharon J. Kirsch, Gertrude Stein in Europe: Reconfigurations across Media, Disciplines, and Traditions ed. by Sarah Posman and Laura Luise Schultz

Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein, edited by Janet Boyd and Sharon J. Kirsch. Lexington, 2014. 310 pages. Gertrude Stein in Europe: Reconfigurations across Media, Disciplines, and Traditions, edited by Sarah Posman and Laura Luise Schultz. Bloomsbury, 2015. 294 pages. Happily and in a timely way, Janet Boyd and Sharon J. Kirsch's edited collection Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein accomplishes just what it sets out to do, which is to shift attention away from Stein's life and the spurious allegations surrounding it and back to her writing as work that can be, and demands to be, read for its literary, historical, and linguistic value. A much-needed antidote to a very tired debate surrounding Stein's politics and position in history, Primary Stein assembles critical essays by leading and up-and-coming scholars in Stein studies and modernism that, in the main, locus on individual works in a variety of critical and historical contexts. Arranged such that they trace the arc of Stein's career, the essays address Stein's and Toklas's early publishing efforts (Gabrielle Dean); the influence of Stein's experimental writing upon that of Virginia Woolf (Rachel Blau DuPlessis); the sociosexual context for Patriarchal Poetry (Jody Cardinal); the intersections between Stein's work and Romanticism (Rebecca Ariel Porte and, separately, Sarah Posman); alternative lenses for reading--and teaching--Stein's rhetoric and drama (Kirsch and Linda Voris, respectively); and the relationship of American geography to Stein's prose (Janet Boyd). Included also is a playful new close reading of the often studied Tender Buttons (Neil Schmitz), Adam Frank's introduction of readers to Radio Free Stein, and Steven Gould Axelrod's incisive analysis of Mrs. Reynolds as an anti-Hitler novel. Axelrod's essay is particularly noteworthy in that it reads Stein's wartime politics through one of her works, in a refreshing departure from the widespread allegations about her loyalties that are based on willful elisions of her writing. Taken in aggregate, these essays open new critical avenues for further investigation at the same time that they suggest new ways for teaching Stein's writing in the classroom, a point underscored in the polyvalent meaning of the book's title. Scholarship on Gertrude Stein's work has long been a fraught endeavor, marked by the notion that one must retrace the history of Gertrude Stein as a personage in order to discuss the work in a way that is not naively unaware of her lived history. It is hard to come up with any other major American writer who needs such constant reintroduction or, rather, permission to exist; and this precarity of position has meant that there have been many interruptions in discussions of the work itself. In the wake of two excellent biographies, James R. Mellow's Charmed Circle (1974) and Linda Wagner-Martin's Favored Strangers (1995), attention to Stein frequently has entailed a far greater emphasis on her life story and the famous company she kept at 27 rue de Fleurus. Often when the critical conversation has turned to Stein's writing, it has been freighted with assumptions surrounding her status as a woman--and therefore presumably feminist--artist, or else loaded with judgment of Stem's relationship to her Jewish identity. Part of what might be termed Stein's identity problem is due to the historically male-gendered category of modernist writer, a being traditionally exemplified in the form of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway (on whose style Stein clearly had an influence). Part of Stein's identity problem is also due to scholars' suspicions surrounding her relationship to the Vichy regime during World War II; the fact that she and Alice B. Toklas survived the war has prompted some to suggest she did so by contributing to fascism in Europe. Female and purportedly a "bad" Jew, Stein is still treated by many as tangential to the canon of modernism, even as her linguistic inventiveness and contributions to modernist innovation are as indisputable as they are overlooked. …

John Piper's Modernist Scenography

As one of the pre-eminent British painters of the twentieth century, John Piper secured his legacy with his depictions of swirling seas, grand country houses, and secluded churches. However his contribution to the theatre is less well known. This paper aims to address this lacuna, focusing on his scenographic contribution to two modernist performances: Stephen Spender's Trial of a Judge (1938) and Edith Sitwell's Façade (1942). I aim to present Piper as a vital force in a British avant-garde theatre scene and to reimagine his canon of work as inherently theatrical. This theatrical element unites his diverse oeuvre, from his most abstract geometric collages to his most quintessentially English landscapes. This paper resurrects two often overlooked performances, and sheds new light on the cross-disciplinary nature of British modernist art and the importance of theatrical motifs for a thorough understanding of Piper's work.

War, revolution and design: exploring pedagogy, practice-based research and costume for performance through the Russian avant-garde theatre

This article results from a public Q&A at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London exploring expert perspectives on theatre practice during the Russian Avant-Garde in the context of the museum’s exhibition Russian Avant-Garde Theatre: War, Revolution and Design (2014–15). Fashion historian Amber Jane Butchart posed a series of questions on war, revolution and design to theatre scholar and practitioner Melissa Trimingham, and designer and costume scholar Donatella Barbieri. Their conversation considers the new scenographic spaces of the early avant-garde, with particular emphasis upon costume, the pedagogic impact of this early work and their own practice-based research.

Dubuffet Plays Hide-and-Seek: Lineage, Reflexivity, and Perception in Coucou Bazar

In the criticism devoted to Jean Dubuffet, his mixed-genre spectacle, or “tableau animé” (animated painting), Coucou Bazar, is frequently cited but only rarely discussed in any detail. The exploration of three related issues—Coucou Bazar's debt to avant-garde theater, dance, and set design; its metapictorial features and its generic reflexivity; its sustained exploration of perception and of the potential of the artwork to effect something akin to a phenomenological reduction—addresses this relative critical dearth and demonstrates that this multimedia venture is in many respects the logical extension of much of Dubuffet's earlier work.

Autobiograficzne filmy Terayamy Shujiego na tle japońskiej Nowej Fali. Na pograniczu kina i teatru

Terayama Shūji’s autobiographical fi lms against the background of the Japanese New Wave. On the boundary between cinema and theatre Shuji Terayama (1935-1983) was a Japanese avant-garde poet, novelist, film and theatre director, as well as the founder of the very eccentric Japanese theatrical troupe named Tenjo Sajiki. He is a world-renowned character, regarded as one of the most original and influential figures in Japanese modern art. Although he was considered the originator of a series of scandalous events, he was still supported by a range of important Japanese and Europeans stage directors, art designers, writers and poets who who lavishly praised him for his revolutionary art techniques and his genius capable of invoking in the audience something more than just the mere interpretation of a play. The paper revolves around Terayamas representative film works in which cinema and theatre intertwine with each other. The author depicts Terayamas films within the framework of the Japanese New Wave genre, concentrating not only on their intertextual values, but also on Terayamas autobiographical events - indispensable knowledge that facilitates understanding of his works.

Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-Garde and Postdramatic Theatre by Mladen Ovadija, and: Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity ed. by Gillian Siddall, Ellen Waterman

Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-Garde and Postdramatic Theatre by Mladen Ovadija, and: Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity ed. by Gillian Siddall, Ellen Waterman

Authenticity and Usability, or “Welding the Unweldable”: Meyerhold’s Refraction of Japanese Theatre

Vsevolod Meyerhold’s long-lasting interest in Japanese theatre was well known. But significant issues in the study of his interpretation and use of Japanese theatre—in particular, kabuki—remain uninvestigated and unanswered. This article raises and investigates such issues. It finds that Meyerhold never saw an authentic performance of kabuki and that what was truly decisive in his understanding and interpretation of the Japanese theatre had nothing to do with his actual experience—instead of reading or imagination—of a “kabuki” performance or with the authenticity of the “kabuki” performance he experienced, but had everything to do with his predisposed perception of such a performance as a confirmation and legitimation of his theory and practice. Meyerhold’s “traditionalist” approach to the principles and techniques of what he defined as “truly theatrical eras,” in particular, his approach—“welding the unweldable”—to the Japanese (or the Chinese) theatre, was decidedly practical and pragmatic as it was predicated on, and preconditioned to reinforce and legitimize, his theory and practice. Such an investigation of Meyerhold’s practical refraction of the Japanese (or the Chinese) theatrical tradition necessarily has a significant bearing on our perception of the creativity and originality of Meyerhold’s theory and practice as well as those of the twentieth-century Western avant-garde theatre in its relation to Asian theatre.

Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas: Vaughan Williams and the Early Twentieth-Century Stage by Roger Savage

MUSIC FOR THE STAGE Masques, Mayings and Music-Dramas: Vaughan Williams and Early Twentieth-Century Stage. By Roger Savage. Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng.: Boydell Press, 2014. [ix, 390 p. ISBN 9781843839194. $99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, appendix, index.Ralph Vaughan Williams's reputation rests largely on his large-scale orchestral and choral works, and to a lesser extent on his solo vocal music and songs. His nationalist activities as a polemical essayist and activist on behalf of amateur music making have also attracted notice, focusing a certain amount of attention on church music and folk song arrangements that he composed in fulfilment of this mission. Lost in most discussions, however, has been any real appreciation for his stage music. When it has been noticed at all, it has usually been to dismiss it as dilettantish, work of a man who not a born musician of (as critic Richard Capell famously put it in his Daily Telegraph review of 1936 opera The Poisoned Kiss; quoted in Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams [London: Oxford University Press, 1980], 251). And yet, throughout his long creative life, Vaughan Williams was constantly engaged in theatrical projects. He completed six operas, another six ballets and and was forever contemplating more works in these genres (a number of which were left uncompleted at his death). He wrote well over a dozen scores of incidental music for stage and radio plays, and made major contributions to film music. Admittedly, not all stage music matches quality of orchestral and choral masterpieces, but some of it, notably opera Riders to Sea and score for film Scott of Antarctic, clearly does. And 1930 Job is one outstanding works of interwar period by any composer.Roger Savage's new book is not exactly about Vaughan Williams's stage music. Indeed, in some ways, it is not even-or at least, not always-about Vaughan Williams. Its true subject is turn-of-thetwentieth-century musical stage, aspects of which Savage explores in eight widely-varied essays. Thus, one chapter investigates sudden vogue for Jacobean Masque, both in new and revived forms, and relates it to late-Victorian and Edwardian search for a newly non-naturalistic and ritualistic theater that exercised writers like W. B. Yeats and Arthur Symons. Another explores writings and theories of Reginald Buckley, North Country autodidact and visionary who conceived of an English Bayreuth at Glastonbury and wrote librettos for a massive Arthurian cycle that was partially set to music by Rutland Boughton. A third examines work of avant-garde theater director and polemicist Edward Gordon Craig and his failed collaboration with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes on an English ballet entitled Cupid and Psyche. Vaughan Williams makes important appearances in these chapters-as arranger of one of masques, as an observer and wry commentator on Buckley, and as projected composer of Craig-Diaghilev ballet, respectively-but is not a leading player in them.His role is significantly larger in other essays in collection, however. A piece on 1911 Pageant of London, a mammoth, multiday, open-air production that was itself centerpiece of Festival of Empire marking coronation of George V, includes detailed discussion of suite of folk tunes he arranged for pageant's Merrie England scene. Another, on Gypsophilia, early twentieth-century literary and artistic enthusiasm for fantasized notions of carefree life of traveling people, places special emphasis on Gypsy elements discernible in various Vaughan Williams operatic projects, notably Hugh Drover. A related essay on turn-of-the-century literary cult of vagabond-the essays, travel books, novels and poems extolling the open road that sprang up everywhere before World War I-focuses on composer's song cycle after Robert Louis Stevenson, Songs of Travel, and opera The Pilgrim's Progress that he fashioned from John Bunyan's work of same name. …

‘What I Came to Say’: Raymond Williams, the Sociology of Culture and the Politics of (Performance) Scholarship

This essay seeks to reconsider and appropriate the cultural politics of Raymond Williams for the project of formulating a critique of current ideas about politics and theatre. The residual values of cultural materialism as theorized by Williams, based on a concept of culture as productive, processual and egalitarian, have become less influential under the pressures of post-structuralism and neo-liberalism. The current attraction to Rancière, for example, emphasizes dissensus over consensus and singularity over collectivity. Post-dramatic theatre rejects direct engagement with political discourse altogether. While recognizing that these emerging theoretical ideas continue the historical romance of avant-garde theatre with rupture and dissent, Williams can remind us of still-powerful strategies that are rooted in identifying shared experiences, relating cultural production to its sociopolitical context, and the value of collective struggles.

Kleespies, Ingrid. A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature (review)

SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 342 illuminates Bogatyrev’s theory through concrete examples. Bogatyrev’s lifelong interest in theatre — both avant-garde and folk theatre — was closely tied to his pioneering work in cultural semiotics. Both Veronika Ambros and Eva Šlaisová focus on Bogatyrev’s collaboration with the Czech avant-garde theatre director E. F. Burian. Šlaisová’s essay is particularly informative, and makes the insightful suggestion that Bogatyrev’s work on the transformation of ethnographic facts as they pass from one milieu to another can be understood as a type of intertextuality. The seven essays by Bogatyrev which conclude the book were selected to complement the conference papers, and include his best-known theoretical work from this period. All have been previously published, and most can be found in English translation, as well as in German, Russian and other Slavic languages. Pëtr Bogatyrëv et les débuts du Cercle de Prague contains new and important analyses of Bogatyrev’s ethnographic theory and his sources of inspiration. This book will be of use for specialists in Russian folkloristics interested in Bogatyrev, scholars of Prague School structuralism and semiotics, as well as for those looking for an introduction to Bogatyrev’s ethnographic theory. Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Jessica E. Merrill Stanford University Kleespies, Ingrid. A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2012. x + 242 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $48.00. Itinerancy, Ingrid Kleespies argues in this stimulating monograph, emerged as a central element of the national identity formulated by the Russian literary and intellectual elite over the period from around 1790 to 1880. Fedor Dostoevskii drew attention to it in the momentous speech of 1880 in which he celebrated Russian distinctiveness as he thought it found expression in Pushkin: here the archetypal representative of the nation was depicted as a questing wanderer defined by homelessness, displacement and lack of fixity or purpose. Kleespies develops her thesis through a close reading of several works written during the literary golden age, beginning with the Letters of a Russian Traveller that arose out of Nikolai Karamzin’s journeying in the German lands, Switzerland, France and England in 1789–90 and ending with Dostoevskii’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, published in 1863. Petr Chaadaev’s first ‘Philosophical Letter’ (published in 1836) is a key work for her, inasmuch as it famously articulated the notion that Russians were figuratively nomadic. Even REVIEWS 343 before Chaadaev, though, the heroes of two of Aleksandr Pushkin’s southern poems, ‘The Prisoner of the Caucasus’ and ‘The Gypsies’, ‘driven from Russian society to the outer edges of the empire’, embodied the ‘crisis of rootless or peripatetic entrapment’, as in their search for freedom they crossed borders into ‘uncivilized’ space where they became yet more alone. In his autobiographical travelogue, A Journey to Arzrum (1836), Pushkin himself enacted the dilemma of the wanderer ‘at the border between home and away’ (p. 178). Somewhat to the reader’s surprise, Ivan Goncharov’s novel, Oblomov, and his travelogue, The Frigate Pallas, published in the years 1858–59, also yield rich material for exploration of the theme of Russian nomadism. Goncharov’s sedentary hero, for example, is portrayed by Kleespies as a wayfarer caught between the capital city and the rural heartland where the feudal estate is imagined as an idyllic organic community. Finally, Kleespies treats Aleksandr Herzen’s autobiographical magnum opus, My Past and Thoughts, written over the period 1852–67, as a vehicle used by this political exile not only to demonstrate to posterity his own role as an historical actor but also to enable Russians to think of themselves as a ‘nomadic antithesis’ to the peoples rooted in the dying civilization of the West and as, in that sense, revolutionary (p. 179). Nomadism, then, was a powerful topos in the literature and thought of a nation whose writers sensed that it was excluded from European civilization or confined to its margins. The figure of the nomadic wanderer ‘became a convenient symbol for Russian self-definition because it reflected anxiety on the part of an educated Russian elite over Russia’s perceived alienation from Europe and its seeming...

Cultural critique and avant-garde theatre in post-socialist China: Meng Jinghui’s ‘I love therefore I am’

The literal translation of avant-garde from French is ‘foreguard’. While the front has been diversely defined in various permutations of the movement, the cutting edge of avant-garde theatre in China and many post-socialist countries is largely retrospective and anti-futuristic. This is particularly true for the campus-based fringe theatre of the early 1990s, which is regarded as the highlight of avant-garde theatre in China. An alternative venue spearheaded by young theatre artists, avant-garde fringe theatre is notable for unpacking the cultural and political constructs of the Chinese socialist period as it played out through the artists’ own formative experiences. Directed by Meng Jinghu, I Love XXX chronicles the moral emotions that are central to a generation’s self-identity. The play, which is composed of more than 700 parallel sentences prefixed with ‘I love’, presents a meticulously constructed emotional archive of the generation that was born in the late socialist period and came of age in post-socialist China. Imitating rites of passage and classroom drills, the play effectively illuminates the impact affective education had on an individual’s self-perception. The fact that the play was revived in 2013 – 19 years after its initial appearance – proves its enduring relevance in contemporary China.

‘Supernatural Soliciting’: Pathways from Betrayal to Retribution in Macbeth and Yotsuya Kaidan

Although written two centuries apart and in divergent cultures, the kabuki play Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan and Shakespeare's Macbeth exhibit marked similarities (as well as differences) in plot. Here, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei analyzes some of the ways that these plays reflect (mostly male) anxieties regarding shifting patterns of gender and political power in Jacobean England and Tokugawa Japan. Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is a specialist in Japanese theatre and intercultural performance, and was recently a Research Fellow at the International Research Institute in Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Free University, Berlin. She is the author of Unspeakable Acts: the Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii, 2005) and co-author of Theatre Histories: an Introduction (Routledge, third edition, 2015). She is also a playwright whose latest play, Ghost Light, is a contemporary fusion of Macbeth and Yotsuya Ghost Stories, in which the ghost of a Japanese-American actress returns to wreak vengeance on the husband who betrayed her. The play will be staged as an Equity Showcase in New York in Autumn 2015.

Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s by Iris Smith Fischer (review)

Reviewed by: Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s by Iris Smith Fischer Cindy Rosenthal Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s. By Iris Smith Fischer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. pp. 266. $60.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Iris Smith Fischer’s monograph fills a significant gap in experimental performance history, as it is the first text dedicated exclusively to examining the work of Mabou Mines, one of the most important avant-garde theatre groups in the United States. Although the New York–based company received its first Obie (Off and Off-Off Broadway Theater) Award in recognition of its work in 1974, Mabou Mines came to prominence in the 1980s with groundbreaking productions such as A Prelude to Death in Venice (1980), script and direction by Lee Breuer, and Dead End Kids (1980), conceived and directed by JoAnne Akalaitis. Beginning with a clearly written and insightful introduction, the book is organized chronologically in five chapters, ending with a brief epilogue. Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s also includes a section of excellent production photographs and a useful appendix with a timeline of members’ activities and company achievements, from 1957 to 1980. Writing about a group that “set out to create indescribable performance” (v), Smith Fischer carefully documents the first and lesser-known decade of Mabou Mines’s production history, beginning in 1970, when the company was supported in its first three years by Ellen Stewart, director of La MaMa Experimental Theatre, and then, over a ten-year period, by Joe Papp of the Public Theater. Smith Fischer weaves together accounts of core members’ artistic backgrounds as she tells the story of how Mabou Mines’s multidisciplinary performances came about. In her introduction Smith Fischer states that detailing company members’ biographies is not her intent here. Her focus is on the “coming together” of the multitalented founders, JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow, and the group’s rehearsal processes and productions. Actors Frederick Neumann and Bill Raymond joined the group in 1971; Terry O’Reilly joined in 1973. Smith Fischer also suggests why some members had moved apart or left the group by the end of the 1970s. Smith Fischer argues that Mabou Mines rejected the notion of the actor as an interpretative artist, and instead, performers were seen as “creative agents” (1). This company of individual artists—“Co-Artistic Directors”—sometimes with disparate visions, often struggled with collaboration as they consistently “made new” and often provocative work together. The group ultimately evolved into what Smith Fischer describes as a “company of directors,” with Breuer [End Page 154] acknowledged as the “first” director and Akalaitis as “the second director” with a “sensibility and vocabulary of her own” (120). In the introduction, Smith Fischer situates Mabou Mines’s work in the 1970s within the context of longer, ongoing conversations in theater and performance studies about the avant-garde—or avant-gardes. In Smith Fischer’s analysis, the idea of and adherence to the “Avant Garde as Community” is crucial to an understanding of how Mabou Mines functions: members support each other through their efforts to create and foster a common language and techniques and through sharing responsibility (organizing childcare within the group is but one example). In the first chapter, “Coming Together,” Smith Fischer charts the complex movements of the couples, Breuer and Malaczeck and Glass and Akalaitis, from coast to coast in the United States and throughout Europe, where they encountered English actor David Warrilow. The five determined to make New York City’s downtown arts scene their base. In this section and throughout the volume Smith Fischer clarifies the connections and the distinctions between Mabou Mines and experimental theatre troupes associated with 1960s radicalism— the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, the Performance Group, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Mabou Mines in the 1970s “was not political” (in Akalaitis’s words): “There was no ideal about politics, or what theatre should be, could be, or how we wanted to change it. . . . [The ideal was] excellence, and finding a performing technique that was American—one that was personal, yet very stylized and technical” (35). Working...

Contemporary Mise En Scène: Staging Theatre Today by Patrice Pavis (review)

Reviewed by: Contemporary Mise En Scène: Staging Theatre Today by Patrice Pavis Jeanmarie Higgins CONTEMPORARY MISE EN SCÈNE: STAGING THEATRE TODAY. By Patrice Pavis, translated by Joel Anderson. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013; pp. 384. French theatre semiotician Patrice Pavis reminds us that despite its emergence from the histories of directing and scenography, mise en scène is “an abstract, theoretical notion, not a concrete and empirical one” (4), and it is worth revisiting its legacies in this postdramatic age. The book’s thirteen chapters collectively argue that contemporary mise en scène might be renamed performise, a term that acknowledges the rise in creative agency of performers and audiences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that often eclipsed the traditional powers of metteurs en scène, or theatre directors. The performise, then, is the active creation of the mise en scène made possible by directors and designers, enacted in real time by performers, and read by audiences whose role in the creation of meaning is constitutive. By charting the reemergence of mise en scène as a semiological and phenomenological force post-1990, Pavis reconciles the postmodern tendency toward dismantling texts with audiences’ desire to “read” performance. The implications for this reclamation of mise en scène as a reconstructive practice is potentially game-changing not only for theatre-makers and audiences, but for Pavis’s core readership of writers of dramatic criticism. Early chapters contextualize the shift in agency to performers and audiences by historicizing the role of the director in Western theatre practice. Pavis locates the origin of mise en scène in the late-nineteenthcentury European avant-garde, pointing out that Naturalism and Symbolism, although opposed in their adherence to an aesthetics of materiality, necessitated the production of onstage meaning through a system that stressed the importance of the director. Later chapters chart major shifts in notions of mise en scène from the 1880s to the 1980s. Pavis explains that while the English-speaking theatre embraced the poststructuralist theory of the 1980s and beyond, the French theatre denied it. This led to a French preoccupation with scenography governed by directorial authority, in contrast to the body-centered and time-based performance art that emerged in the United States and United Kingdom. Pavis goes on in later chapters to apply theories of mise en scène to particular theatre productions. Not only does this endeavor expand the scope of mise en scène, freeing the term from the confines of theatre design and production to include the contributions of performers and audiences, the performance analyses that result from Pavis’s project form a valuable archive of avant-garde theatre and performance across a variety of genres and production models over the last fifteen years in France, Germany, Korea, and the United Kingdom. Many of these analyses cover familiar territory: “Tendencies in French scenography,” for example, illuminates how several director/designer teams configure space to foreground the stage languages of the performer. Other chapters address how an actor- and audience-centered dramaturgy destabilizes authorship. “The mise en jeu [setting in motion] of contemporary texts” advocates for “iconoclastic experiments” in the staging of new plays (96), illustrating practices that call faithfulness to the playwright’s text into question. Likewise, “[t]he splendour and the misery of interpreting the classics” is a catalog of insightful performance analyses of classic plays (Racine, Shakespeare) produced from 1989 to 2010 that illustrates that the most faithful interpretations of classics might be those that desacralize the text—most notably Jürgen Gosch’s spare, obstreperous Macbeth, with a mise en scène that externalizes what Pavis calls the (b)anality of the original, the actors performing boring, repetitive tasks and startling scatological acts with equal abandon (234–35). It will come as no surprise to readers of Pavis’s full body of work that here he reclaims the practice and politics of intercultural performance, situating them in their current global moment while identifying lineages and responses to foundational intercultural inquiries. A chapter on the video art of Guillermo Gómez-Peña examines the “reverse anthropology” of Graffiti, the Chicano performance artist’s series of short films that parody ritual...

Alluring Ambiguity: Gender and Cultural Politics in Modern Japanese Performance

In contrast to most studies of cultural nationalism, which tend to focus on literary style, narrative devices, or the static visual arts, in this article Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei analyzes the ways that Japanese actors deploy physical and vocal techniques in portraying gender and ethnic ambiguity. Expanding on her recent work on actor-dancer Itō Michio (1893–1961), she uses the concept of J-centrism (Japancentrism) to demonstrate how modern Japanese performing bodies (in both traditional and contemporary genres) imply political meaning – her title being a riff on Susan Sontag's famous essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’. While not suggesting that the artists under consideration promulgate fascism, Sorgenfrei maintains that the Japanese aesthetic preference for gender and ethnic ambiguity fuels the politics of Japanese cultural nationalism, even when the performers or directors adamantly disavow rightist, nationalistic ideologies. Through a focus on analysis of selected performances by Bando Tamasaburō and theoretical writings by Suzuki Tadashi, Sorgenfrei suggests that the performance of ambiguity by a single actor implies the ‘universality’ and cultural superiority of the Japanese body. Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is a specialist in Japanese theatre and intercultural performance, and was recently a Research Fellow at the International Research Institute in Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Free University, Berlin, where she researched the work of Japanese dancer Itō Michio. She is the author of Unspeakable Acts: the Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii, 2005) and co-author of Theatre Histories: an Introduction (Routledge, third edition 2015).