Avant-garde Theatre Research Articles

Coronada y el toro by Francisco Nieva

Reviewed by: Coronada y el toro by Francisco Nieva Casey Kasten (bio) Francisco Nieva, Coronada y el toro, ed. Komla Aggor. Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2020. Pp. 99 + 4 b/w illus. $17.99. Despite his undeniably important role in Spanish theatre, Francisco Nieva remains understudied both in Spain and abroad. An accomplished playwright and set designer, Nieva enjoyed a certain degree of fame from 1976, the year after Francisco Franco's death, until the early 1990s. His staged plays attracted critical attention, and he received prestigious national awards. Today, however, many students of both European theater and Spanish letters are unfamiliar with his contributions. For this reason, Komla Aggor's new critical edition of Coronada y el toro—which premiered in 1982 at Madrid's María Guerrero Theatre—is so important. No stand-alone editions of this play have been issued since the mid-eighties, and the most recent publication of the text, from 2007, appeared in the impressive Obra completa edited by Juan Francisco Peña. The portability of Aggor's edition, complete with its accessible introduction, makes it perfect for classroom assignments or theatre students interested in diving into Nieva's rich and complex universe. In addition to the text of Coronada in Spanish, Aggor provides an English-language introduction and a useful bibliography for any scholar interested in continuing to research Nieva's work. The bulk of Aggor's thematic analysis of the play appears in the 45-page introduction, whereas the direct annotations of Nieva's text focus mainly on language. Four black and white illustrations appear throughout the book: two of Nieva's drawings related to Coronada and two photographs from the 1982 staging. The introduction begins with a look at Spanish theatre history from the 1930s through the late 1990s in order to situate Nieva's career in the broader landscape of Spanish culture. Aggor underscores how uncompromising Nieva was in his writing throughout his career, scripting theater during Francoism and its censorship that remained an imagined escape of unpublishable and unperformable possibilities. The transition to democracy in the mid to late 1970s afforded Nieva a brief moment of fame, before the election of the PSOE (Spain's socialist party) in 1982, which ironically resulted in diminished support for avant-garde theater. Aggor's analysis here is straight-forward, nuanced and informed, providing useful direction to researchers eager to understand Nieva's work in context. The second part of the introduction delves into Nieva's aesthetic universe, examining both his influences and his own manifestoes on style. Aggor's references to the Postismo movement that Nieva was a part of in the 1940s as well [End Page 528] as his own "poética teatral" guide the reader in understanding Nieva's "estética del delito" (aesthetics of crime) and the way he combines verbal and visual dexterity and dynamism. Aggor wisely includes an artistic depiction Nieva produced of his own "teatro furioso" (one of several categories Nieva divides his oeuvre into and the category into which Coronada falls) to underscore how integrated text and image are for Nieva. The third section of the introduction analyzes Coronada y el toro's sources, its 1982 staging, and certain thematic elements of the play. Aggor's clear and illuminating discussion of the conception of time and the popular in Coronada are broadly applicable to much of Nieva's teatro furioso and provide the reader with an essential apparatus to confront the difficult language and often disorienting sense of time and space in Coronada. By far the longest section of the introduction deals with gender in Coronada. Aggor points to the lack of critical engagement with "this play's thematic centrepiece, namely, Coronada's struggle as a woman and her role as the voice of justice" (32). Aggor perceptively identifies how even the scholarship on Coronada has fallen victim to patriarchal concepts so deeply embedded in Spanish society so as not to address head on "Nieva's feminist project" (38). As he sets out to correct this lacuna, Aggor relies on theories of female spectatorship to demonstrate how Nieva's forward-thinking approach empowers female characters to confront deep-seated societal inequities. While Aggor acknowledges...

Performing Agitation : László Moholy-Nagy and the 1924 Special Issue of MA (Today) on Music and Theater

MA [Today] reflects the heterogeneity of theater after World War I and its 1924 special issue is a comprehensive document of the avant-garde ambition to renew mise-en-scène. Although MA was not a theater journal, it regularly published dramatic texts, performance reviews and manifesto-like essays on recent forms of staging. László Moholy-Nagy supported MA and its editor Lajos Kassák from Berlin, where he got involved in staging contemporary plays and operas. This paper addresses the question why the performing arts were especially important for Kassák’s circle and examines the relationship of MA to avant-garde theater movements. It also gives a brief survey of the Musik und Theaternummer with its introduction by Kassák before engaging with the theory and practice of experimental theater in Moholy-Nagy’s oeuvre.

ДЕРЕВЯННЫЙ КОНСТРУКТИВИЗМ: К ПОЭТИКЕ "МОСКОВСКОГО ДНЕВНИКА" ВАЛЬТЕРА БЕНЬЯМИНА

Walter Benjamin’s two strongest aesthetic impressions during his trip to Moscow, the theatrical avant-garde and folk toys, are connected not only by the immediacy of the testimony. His “Moscow Diary” is a complex construction, simultaneously a declaration of love for Moscow and a chronicle of an unfamiliar approach to known phenomena. A man of the constructivist era, Benjamin views the scenography of Meyerhold and Tairov avant-garde theater on a micro level, seeing small wooden structures. Those constructions produce a switch from a mode of protocol observation to a mode of disinterested play, of wondering what is happening. In Benjamin’s text, then, images of fairytale space emerge. Benjamin not only collects toys, but also perceives the constructions of avant-garde theater as a collection, as a way to erase the distinction between model and reality, something that cannot be achieved in the capitalist world. But the search for a job was also perceived by Benjamin as a construction of his destiny, stopping the action of the fairy tale.

Voices of Identities: Vocal Music and De/con/struction of Communities in the Former Habsburg Areas ed. by Daniel Ender and Christoph Flamm

Reviewed by: Voices of Identities: Vocal Music and De/con/struction of Communities in the Former Habsburg Areas ed. by Daniel Ender and Christoph Flamm Georg Burgstaller Voices of Identities: Vocal Music and De/con/struction of Communities in the Former Habsburg Areas. Edited by Daniel Ender and Christoph Flamm. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2018. [viii, 190 p. ISBN 9781527508088 (hardcover), $99.95; ISBN 9781527525870 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographies, maps, screenshots. This slender volume of proceedings from a 2014 conference in Klagenfurt explores the role of vocal music (ranging from traditional song to opera) in relation to the plurality of identities (from individual to supranational identity) in the territories of the former Austrian–Hungarian Empire after 1918, with a particular focus on the Balkan peninsula and relative neglect of the empire's Italian regions and farther outreaches to the east. The editors' unforced conceptualization of identity in the context of such multi-ethnic, multinational, and multicultural complexity acts as an apposite curtain-raiser: individuality is voluntarily (though not always unproblematically) ceded to become subsumed in, as George Herbert Mead put it, the "generalized other" (p. 2). How might the voice, perhaps the most individual human expression, figure in this process of converging around or diverging from the new social models formed within the identity vacuum created by the fall of empire and beyond? Ursula Hemetek's chapter on the role of traditional song and identification in the Balkans—buried towards the end of the volume—might have been an appropriate gambit to unravel the issue, but the collection is elegantly launched, nonetheless, by Gerda Lechleitner's chapter on the Vienna Phonogrammarchiv (initiated in 1899 as a matter of scholarly interest in ethnography and linguistics rather than music) and its spoken-voice recordings, with some discussion of music from Croatian Sprachinseln (language islands) and a brief gloss on how language and music might figure as markers of identity in the case of Burgenland Croats, based on recordings from the first three decades of the twentieth century. (Marko Kölbl offers a discussion emphasizing the tension between retaining and creating musical traditions within that particular ethnic minority in a later chapter.) The essays that follow create a multifarious, somewhat eclectic path through a large variety of musical genres in geographies that could be grouped together as those of today's eastern central Europe (Czech Republic and Poland), aforementioned Croatia, Serbia, and Hungary, as well as a couple of essays on music in Austria, all largely by writers hailing from the countries in question. Bohemia is discussed by way of David Vondráček's essay on the music for jazz revues at Prague's avant-garde theater Osvobozené Divadlo (Liberated Theater; 1926–38), which had become reimagined as a specifically Czech sound of resistance against both Nazism and communism. In a similar vein, Anna G. Piotrowska offers insights into the selfportrayal and stereotyping of urban minorities (in this case Romani people) in Cracow's vaudeville theater during the early twentieth century as well. Three consecutive chapters are devoted to Serbian music: Melita Milin provides an overview of identity issues affecting composers in interwar Yugoslavia, especially their oscillation between actively promoted supranational (Yugoslav) identity on the one hand and national (Serbian) identity on the other. These became musically reified by adherence to a distinct musical culture established in Serbia (1882–1918) as opposed to an embrace of more [End Page 100] progressive tendencies—especially expressionism—in Slovenia and Croatia, even if these were nowhere near akin to Viennese modernism. A historically broadly conceived excursion into the orally transmitted Serbian folk epic, illuminating its eventual nationalist potential during the twentieth century, is followed by Nadežda Mosusova's discussion of the premiere of the opera Ženidba Miloša Obilića (The Marriage of Miloš Obilić) by Serbian composer Petar Konjović (1883–1970) at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb in 1917. A pseudohistorical drama partly based on the Serbian Kosovo epic about the fourteenthcentury knight Miloš Obilić, the opera's perceived Serbian patriotism proved politically sensitive given the hostilities between Austria-Hungary and Serbia before and during World War I, as can be gleaned from its reception in the Croatian...

Hungarian Avant-Garde between East and West: The Exploration of European and Russian Scenic Practices in Ödön Palasovszky’s Stage Productions of the 1920s

Experimental theatres led by Ödön Palasovszky stand out among the attempts to renew the Hungarian theatrical culture of the 1920s. He was the central figure of the creative community that worked under different names, but the performances were a result of a collective effort. Contemplating on the nature and possibilities of theatrical art, young experimenting artists set themselves the goal of creating a reflective art that was aimed at creating a new society. In their search of new ways of expression, they turned to various forms of cabaret, revue, compere-entertainer, choral genres, and simultaneous play based on the principle of montage and eurhythmics, and they used many scenic innovations. In this paper, the author focuses on the parallel between the theatrical practices of Palasovszky and theatrical experiments made in the USSR and Germany in the 1920s. The analysis is based on an example of Palasovszky’s avant-garde direction in the staging of Nikolai Evreinov’s monodrama The Theatre of the Soul , a production Palasovszky carried out together with his company Extraordinary Stage (Rendkívüli Színpad). The play by Evreinov was presented only once, on October 3, 1928, during the Happy End evening. Among other things, the article focuses on the design of the stage which was made partly with the contribution of Eva Zeisel (Striker), a Hungarian artist, who worked in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and later became a world-famous ceramist in America. Since the scenery depicting a living organism was presented on the stage as part of the action, the performance can be considered one of the most original experiments in the life of the Hungarian avant-garde theater.

Kronika życia i twórczości Jana Dormana (1912–1986)

Jan Dorman (b. Dębowa Góra, now Sosnowiec, 1912–d. Będzin, 1986) was a teacher, director, stage designer, author of texts for theatre, founder of the Experimental Child’s Theatre (ETD) in Sosnowiec (1945–1951) and The Children of Zagłębie’s Theatre (TDZ) in Będzin, which has been named after him (1951–1977), lecturer at the Faculty of Puppetry in Wrocław, Branch of the State Academic School of Theatre (PWST) in Krakow, now Stanisław Wyspiański Academy of Theatre Arts (1978–1986), promoter of culture in Będzin. His theatre practice situated itself between children’s theatre, young spectator’s theatre, puppet theatre, avant-garde art theatre and experiments close to the happening. Dorman’s performances were presented at many festivals internationally; the work of TDZ that he directed represented Poland at the International Exhibition of Stage Design in Amiens, France (1969). Dorman wrote and adapted texts for theatre, composed and selected music, designed the sets (along with his son, Jacek), initiated the “Herody” review of folk productions, maintained extensive contacts with Polish and foreign theatre communities, contributed regularly to theatre magazines (including Scena, Teatr Lalek, Teatr), and he published his book Children Playing at Theatre. Throughout his life, Dorman recorded his practice through meticulously produced archival documentation.

The Theatre of Revolution Transforms Spectators into Political Actors: Performance as Political Engagement in the Transnational Counterculture

How can we resist the spectacle? This history explores actors and activists who found tools in avant-garde theatre and the underground press, drawing on the shared bonds of culture to resist the pacifying effects of the spectacle and turn it against itself. From the San Francisco Diggers, the theory and techniques of transforming passive spectators into political life actors were carried to England though the pages of popular reporting on the counterculture. Like a Trojan horse in popular culture, these techniques for activism were smuggled under what appeared to be a passive, voyeuristic gaze upon youth culture. In England, the Diggers and their ideas were embraced and celebrated by OZ Magazine and the burgeoning London hippie scene. This led to the founding of the Hyde Park Diggers and a return to England of a radical participatory call to action and a movement away from passive spectatorship. In the reservoir of English radical folk history and the contemporary innovations of avant-garde performance arts was found a powerful technique for resisting becoming a society of mere spectators.

Art and Politics in Freetown Christiania: a Benjaminian and Brechtian Utopia?

In this paper, which is positioned at the intersection of political sociology and the sociology of art, I discuss the implications of political art at the local level. I show how analyzing an existing example of locally engaged political art would contribute to the comprehension of the relationship between art and politics in contemporary societies. I employ a single case study, Freetown Christiania, in order to reveal the role of local artistic engagement in bringing about political outcomes, and in particular, relative autonomy at the local level. Though this study is solely focused on one community which has emerged within a specific context and time, it provides a unique lens to describe the relevance and potential of locally engaged political art for broader society. I utilize Freetown Christiania as an example of Benjaminian and Brechtian utopia in order to showcase how their micro-level artistic engagement has brought about relative autonomy at the local level. In particular, I describe the function of local artistic engagement in Freetown Christiania, especially their theatre group Solvognen (The Sun Chariot), as a unique artistic enterprise which has surpassed Benjamin’s and Brecht’s elaborations of the role of political art in modern societies through the employment of the elements of the avant-garde and postdramatic theatre. I argue that this peculiar combination of Benjaminian and Brechtian forms of political art on the one hand, and the avant-garde and postdramatic theatre on the other, has enabled them to create and sustain this micro-utopia in a neoliberal capitalist order.

Orchestral Theatre and the Concert as a Performance Laboratory

In the past decade the National Theatre has presented two restagings of earlier productions, now featuring an onstage orchestra (the Southbank Sinfonia) that has been choreographed and made a key part of the spectacle: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, by Tom Stoppard, with a musical score by André Previn, performed in 2009 and 2010, and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, performed in 2016 and 2018. Contemporaneously, a vanguard of British orchestras has begun to explore how concerts can be presented in ways that are more theatrically sophisticated than the standard concert format. Here Adrian Curtin investigates ‘orchestral theatre’ as an aesthetic proposition by examining the collaborations between the Southbank Sinfonia and the National Theatre, and their legacy in a series of experimental concerts staged by the Southbank Sinfonia entitled #ConcertLab. He aims to identify the artistic and cultural significance of these collaborations and #ConcertLab so as to better understand contemporary efforts to present orchestras (and, more broadly, classical music) in a theatrically innovative manner. Adrian Curtin is a senior lecturer in the Drama Department at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave, 2014) and Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality (Manchester University Press, 2019), and principal investigator of the AHRC research network ‘Representing “Classical Music” in the Twenty-First Century’.

Avant-Gardism and Experiments of Twenty-First-Century Chinese Theater

This issue’s special focus on twenty-first-century Chinese theater revolves around three key terms: “avant-garde theater” (Xianfeng xiju 先锋戏剧), “experimental theater” (Shiyan xiju 实验戏剧), and “littl...

Subaltern Writing in Twenty-First-Century Chinese Avant-Garde Theater

Since the twenty-first century, subaltern writing in Chinese avant-garde theater has become more prominent, embodied in a subaltern consciousness, subaltern themes, and subaltern discourse. The notion of subaltern writing reflects a kind of divine calling and responsibility on the part of avant-garde theater practitioners.

Boundary-Crossing Experiments

This article delineates the different operational models that have been in use in Shanghai’s “avant-garde” theater in the twenty-first century. Where ZhenHan Café struggled to reconcile market demands with artistic vision, Downstream Garage mobilized market resources. Grass Stage has used avant-garde techniques in order to stage contemporary social realities, while Niao Collective has focused on “liminal” theater and student groups to generate a wide variety of smaller theatrical initiatives. Taken as a whole, these different operational models generate a unique model of Shanghai avant-garde theater, comprised of artists and companies constantly challenging traditional theatrical boundaries in their search for innovative techniques to approach the audiences and issues of contemporary society.

Examining Experimental Theater in Contemporary China

This article charts the history of experimental theater in China. In doing so it suggests three heights of experimental theater: the birth of Chinese theater itself as a kind of “experiment” in the late nineteenth century, the establishment of realist “modern drama” in the 1920s, and the resurgence of avant-garde theater in the 1980s to the twenty-first century. Through this genealogy of experimental theater we can elucidate some of the form’s essential qualities. Ultimately, the notion of experimental theater itself is not immutable; rather, it is contingent upon historical and cultural contexts. The strong exploratory and avant-garde spirit of experimental theater has had and will continue to have a profound impact on mainstream theater, and any new developments should be worthy of our attention.

Er(r)go...

Er(r)go...,
 czas na lewacką sałatę. Przede wszystkim sprawa zwierzęca, sprawa poważna: zwierzobójstwo, krzywda zwierząt i nasze moralne tchórzostwo, zinstytucjonalizowane zarzynanie, chów wertykalny, hodowla intensywna, żywe nie-życie zwierząt, hekatomba ptaków, w Azji kury palone na stosie, festiwale psiego mięsa w Chinach, deanimalizacja zwierząt i ontologiczna degradacja bytów zwierzęcych, zwierzęcy lumpenproletariat. W tle historyczny marsz zwykłych ludzi po zwierzęce białko i zwierzęta idące na rzeź, wszyscy równym krokiem. A przecież mięso zachowuje całe cierpienie.
 Zwierzęta zadają nam pytania: Co jemy, gdy je jemy – Körper czy Leib? A zwierzęta pozaludzkie to „nieosobowe podmioty prawne” czy „rzeczy ruchome”? Ktoś się waha: może tofucznica zamiast jajecznicy? I różne próby odpowiedzi: wegetarianizm, semiwegetarianizm, fleksitarianizm, abolicjonizm, redukcjonizm, ingredientyzm, reduktarianizm, protopijny model postępu moralnego, wystopia, karnizm i neokarnizm, weganizm, cheating vegetarianism, lazy veganism, weganizm tożsamościowy, rewizyjny weganizm polityczny, weganizm bojkotowy, weganizm etyczny, czarny weganizm sióstr Ko, weganizm naiwny i w końcu, a jakże by inaczej, post-weganizm. Wszystko to w ogniu walki: z szowinizmem gatunkowym, z gatunkizmem, z niewolnictwem żywnościowym, z seksizmem, rasizmem, homofobią i klasizmem. Ktoś stwierdza: potrzebna filozofia czująca świat zamiast hermetycznej gadaniny. I oto nowe jest pytanie: bić albo nie bić?
 Między tekstami i w nich dzieją się przeróżne rzeczy. Pięknoduchy estetyzują życie, biała klasa średnia zawłaszcza przestrzeń etycznego, w praktykach wegańskich uwidaczniają się etnocentryczne epistemologie ignorancji, mnożą się wege fora, weganie demonstrują moralną wyższość wobec nie-wegan, Realne staje się tym, co zawsze wraca do tego samego miejsca, „ale” dochodzi do głosu, podmiot zmaga się z dosłownością, wiersz walczy z infekcją myślenia zadaniowego, kobiety mieszkające bez partnera jedzą mniej mięsa, wyobraźnia somatyczna zwraca się ku temu, co gorące i suche, zwierzęta, litując się nad nieporadnością człowieka, oddają mu swoje ciało na pokarm, krowy bogatych zjadają chleb biednych, liczba osób niejedzących mięsa wzrasta, ale szympansy wolą owoce z robakiem, zaś w retoryce wegańskiej dominuje podejście postrasowe. Tymczasem Lacan zakazuje czegoś, co i tak jest niemożliwe, Freud dzieli bliźniego na dwie części, Henry Ford inspiruje się sposobem funkcjonowania rzeźni, Deleuze proponuje ideę mięsa uniwersalnego, Marvin Harris walczy o białko, Central Market, parodia wiejskiego targowiska, składa mitologiczną obietnicę, a jeden poeta przygląda się światu toczonemu przez klisze językowe i przebija się przez prozaiczność plastiku, ale ten nie daje się składni. Cotzee w Texasie jeździ na rowerze bez sandałów, nie uprawia socjalizmu ani wolnej miłości, nie bierze zimnych pryszniców i nie je mięsa, nawet żeberek i kurczaka. Ale pyta: cztery łapy z jednego niedźwiedzia: a co z resztą zwierza? I jeszcze: co myśli wół zaliczony bez żadnej konsultacji z nim do gatunku niższego niż niedźwiedź? Jak Hala Mięsna ma iść z duchem czasu?
 Sztuka nie pozostaje w tyle. Akcjoniści Wiedeńscy powracają znów, by zjadać ekskrementy, kopulować ze zwierzętami, zarzynać, patroszyć i rozszarpywać. Huan ubrany w mięsny kombinezon przechadza się ulicami miasta, na obrazach kobiety i mężczyźni wiją się na podłodze wśród kawałków mięsa i gryzą surowe kawałki kurczaka, Jana Sterbak szyje sukienkę ze steków, Jannis Kounellis rozwiesza wzdłuż ścian na hakach kawały wołowiny, papież pojawia się na tle przepołowionego wołu, Heide Hatry powiada „Heide, ty świnio!”, a Lucien Freud po prostu jest mięsem. Mięso materiałem sztuki! – a bezdomni nie mają co jeść. Na szczęście w wierszach Bartczaka wyłania się nowa forma życia – szczeźnik – już nie człowiek ani nie zwierzę.
 Różne inne byty i nie-byty nam w tym wszystkim towarzyszą: byt pośledni, byt wyklęty, choć nie żołnierz, kolonialność bytów, mięso bezofiarne, mięso czyste, mięso bezmięsne, 101,4 kg mięsa na osobę, kapitalizm ze zwierzęcą twarzą, tajne wojny wegańskie, stosunek babci do jedzenia, mięsne konotacje męskości, wszystkożerca (wszystko?), 100 słynnych czarnych wegan, bawełna – nieetyczny produkt wegański, „okruchy filozoficzne o kotach”, mięsożerność podmiotowości, człowiek etnoklasowy, nieposłuszeństwo epistemologiczne i ontologiczne, owo-lakto-mięsny nadmiar, kobiety – agentki zmiany, technicznie drukowanie mięsa, nasza potencjalna nie nieludzkość, wewnętrzne życie zwierząt, aktywna ignorancja, realistyczne utopie, celebrytyzacja weganizmu, sploty metodologiczne. Może to byty nie-byty wątpliwe, ale jeden fakt nadal pozostaje bezsporny: fakt mięsożerny.
 Fakt mięsożerny! Fakt mięsożerny! Fakt mięsożerny!
 Wojciech Kalagahttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-4874-9734
 P.S. Pragniemy poinformować naszych Czytelników i Autorów, iż począwszy od numeru 40 (1/2020) „Er(r)go” stanie się pismem dwujęzycznym: będziemy publikować materiały w języku polskim i angielskim. Zwiastunem tych nadchodzących zmian jest okładka tego numeru.

Ритуал і драма

The purpose of the article is to study the nature of the ritual relationship and theater on the example of the Muslim ceremonial theatrical performance of the Ta’zijah – the Shi’i passion play. The chosen problem caused the broad context of the study. In particular, the author draws attention to the peculiarities of the combination of ritual and theater in ancient Greece, as well as in the European and American culture of the twentieth century. In addition, the specificity of ritual and theater connections in other cultures, including Chinese and Japanese, is monitored. Considering the ancient ritual action in terms of theatricality and perception of the seen, the researcher turns to the artistic practice of the American avant-garde theater of the 1960’s and 70’s. Particular attention is paid to the influence of the Muslim ritual theater on the European theatrical culture of the twentieth century: the famous director Peter Brook’s impression from the revival of the ceremony in Iran in the 1970’s. At the same time, the author insists that Ta’ziah is practically impossible to adequately perceive outside the social, cultural and religious context. One of the reasons for this is that viewers become part of the action as well as performers, while a detached skeptical public cannot take part in the action which is deprived of faith. Focusing on contemporary non-religious tendencies in European and American theaters, the researcher comes to the thought of the German theater critic Ericks Fischer-Licht, who views non-rationality in the context of contemporary performative culture. In this regard, he resorted to the general characteristics of performative, outlining the ideas of Antonina Arto, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brooke and others. The research methodology is mainly based on the comparative method, which involves comparing the archaic rituals of different cultures from the ancient to the Far Eastern, as well as the features of the combination of ritual and theater in these events. An important theoretical basis for the study was the work of the performance theorist Richard Schehner and his mentor Anthropologist Victor Turner. In addition to cultural anthropology, the researcher uses the theoretical works of contemporary European theater critics, in particular Ericks Fischer-Lichte advocating the exclusive influence on the spectator of the ritual performance of the Ta’ziah. The novelty of the work. For the first time in a complex way involving a broad context, using a comparative approach, based on cultural anthropology and based on the study of art, the connections of ritual and theater have been investigated on the example of the Muslim ceremonial theatrical performance of the Ta’ziah. Conclusions. We have shown that ritual and theatre are not identical, though they may be similar.

The experimental drama of Gao Xingjian inspired by avant-garde theatre

The exploration undertaken by the Chinese writer Gao Xingjian is among the most representative of the drama experiments made in contemporary China. Inspired by avant-garde Western playwrights, especially Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht, Gao transcended the realistic tradition of modern Chinese drama throughout his forty-year career. Brecht’s misinterpretation of Chinese drama enabled Gao to transform the writing and performance of traditional Chinese drama in his own original way, which opened up a uniquely oriental approach to drama explorations worldwide.

JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER ON THE THEATRICALITY OF SOCIAL LIFE: DEEPENING THE HERMENEUTICS OF CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY

Abstract This article provides a critical examination of the cultural sociology developed by Jeffrey C. Alexander, focusing on his view of the theatricality of social life. The argument is that, while Alexander’s perspective do engage in a highly significant valuation of the performative dimension of social and political life that matches his strong program in cultural sociology to add a reflexive turn to cultural production in general, his views on theatre and politics remain somehow limited in their efforts at reaching the symbolic structures that are constitutive of these domains. In using a structural hermeneutics to define the analytical core of his methodology, Alexander loses sight of a more dialectical hermeneutics able to tackle the significant transformations affecting those symbolic structures, and exhibited by both avant-garde theatre and media infused mass democratic politics.

Last Scene Underground: An Ethnographic Novel of Iran

Last Scene Underground: An Ethnographic Novel of Iran

Introduction to the special issue - photo-performance, performance photography in real existing socialisms

ABSTRACT Photography as a creative tool found successful input in Eastern Europe’s experimental art around the 1970s. It was amongst others conceptual art “which liberated photography and made it possible to accept it as equivalent to other artistic media.” (Krizic Roban 2011). Photography was integrated into artistic creation as well as communication, but was also researched analytically in order to extend the possibilities of conventional art production. In the arts already in the early 1960s photography was turned into a self-reflexive, critical medium that escaped rationalization or institutionalization completely. Directness and physicality were not only true for a radical “Western” photo-scene, but also to certain artists using photography behind the Iron Curtain. “Radical juxtaposition” and/or the “collage principle” were methods lent from happenings or avant-garde theater movements (Nudelman 2014) and applied to the originally visual medium. This special issue focuses on the central questions of why photography became a main mediator of performance art during real existing socialism and how it merged to a notion of photo-performance in post-totalitarian times? Compared to Jones’ case studies the topics the issue will be dealing with weren’t having the social, political, economic and cultural background of late capitalism and therefore were reacting to (or ignoring!) a different ideology and its failures. The background might have been different but the essays will not emphasize a complete isolation between the Blocs. With the proposed special issue, the contributors are posing the still urgent inquiry of what kind of methodology does a scholar of Eastern, Central and South East European performance history require to work on photo-performance and performance photography in times of ideological warfare? And, to put it more provocatively, if a different methodology is needed at all?

Alberto Sartoris’ Contribution to the Architectural Culture of Theatre: From the Private Theatre of Casa Gualino to the Avant-garde Theatre for Geneva

In the last twenty years Alberto Sartoris has been the subject of numerous celebrative publications: despite this critical fortune, catalogs of exhibitions and essays dedicated to him are mostly referred to specific episodes of his career, the aspects of his relationship with the architecture of the theater has always remained in the background, in spite of this very rich bibliographic production. The aim of this research is therefore to add a further piece to the complex artistic-theoretical activity of such a multifaceted person, analyzing Sartoris' contribution to architecture of the theatre through the analysis of his main projects and his theoretical contribution to design. His eclectic personality allowed him to successfully apply in many disciplines, so as to be recognized as one of the most important precursors of rational architecture in Italy and abroad. Sartoris' “lyrical rationality” is also clearly visible in his experimental avant-garde theatre project of 1929 whereby he can coherently deal with theatre themes, favoring a rational stage performance, with the involvement of large masses of spectators, a trend typical of architecture in the first half of the twentieth century.