Dramatic Spaces Research Articles

Staging Grounds: Loutherbourg and Warley

Abstract In 1778, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg began work on a pair of companion pictures marking George III's attendance at a spectacular military review on the broad expanse of Essex wasteland that was Warley Common. Scholars of the painter's art have largely overlooked these ambitious, large-scale landscapes, but their commission and subsequent display at the Royal Academy played a key role in advancing Loutherbourg's career. Strikingly novel, the paintings attracted a good deal of critical attention for their curious mix of the patriotic and the satirical, the topographic and the scenographic. Taking its cue from this latter stage set-like quality, this essay situates Loutherbourg’s Warley scenes in relation to a series of dramatic spaces, moving from the ‘battlefield’ depicted to the London stage to the Academy exhibition room, highlighting a series of connections and interactions that shed new light on the performativity of Georgian art, culture and spaces of display.

The role of dramatic space in achieving effective urban design

This article explores dramatic spaces and their role in the intellectual construction of urban design in contemporary architecture. Dramatic space, and its role in intellectual construction, have become more relevant to the organization of urban design through constituting of high-rise buildings in the city’s photos, memory, and sense formation of events dramas in memories for the city. Contemporary architecture depends on a common principle by all designers in the desire to produce spaces involved by the receiver and help structure human relations by checking drama in their spaces to be building something different. Thus, The research problem was determined in revealing the comprehensive theoretical perception of the dramatic space formulas in contemporary architecture in general and the patterns of its realization in particular, that achieve a social and stable reaction. The research aimed to reach reveal the role of the mechanisms of creating drama in achieving new dimensions in the thought of contemporary architecture by creating patterns that bear the attribute of drama as space and according to the mechanisms and strategies of the dramatic system. Thus, Through the realization of drama in space, the topics are fragmented and multiple in thought, and the vision opens to the recipient to weave the plot according to the designer’s intellectual visions and his awareness of the event within the social system and transform it into a dramatic system through which knowledge is generated for the rest of the recipients in the interpretation or embodiment to reach the aesthetic and intellectual patterns inferred in urban spaces.

Symbolism and Metaphor in the Aesthetics of the Temple Garden of Kobori Enshu

An artist, tea master, gardener, calligrapher and poet Kobori Enshu left a great creative legacy. During his life, he had worked on the construction of numerous castles, buildings, gardens. Based on the example of the most representative architectural designs and gardens which reflect the sign of the master’s bright individuality, we can judge the role of art in the creation of the atmosphere of the Zen temple and Zen outlook. Kohoan was the last residence of Kobori Enshu. At the age of 64 he built this garden on the Westside of Daitokuji, where he learned Zen-Buddhism when he was young and spent his last two years here before he passed away in 1647. Throughout his life, Enshu built castles, palaces, tearooms and gardens for the shogun or the Emperor, however Kohoan was at last in a place he created for himself and to his own taste. He must have tried to create what he considered to be the ideal space – spiritualized by beauty, saturated by symbols, deep meaning, with a Zen undertone. Every detail in this space speaks of the master’s artistic taste, the way of thinking of the person who perceives the religious and philosophic ideas without separation from its artistic expression. Behind each garden of Kobori Enshu is a well-developed concept and theme. The true value of his gardens can only be assessed when they are viewed as dramatic spaces that have been skillfully integrated into architectural settings. Although Kobori Enshu is one of the most significant figures in the history of Japanese culture, there is no scientific research devoted to the creative works of this master. This certain fact identifies the urgency and practical value of the article.

“Home Away from Home”: Diasporic Consciousness and Everyday Third Places in Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming (1985) and Inua Ellams’ Barber Shop Chronicles (2017)

“Home Away from Home”: Diasporic Consciousness and Everyday Third Places in Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming (1985) and Inua Ellams’ Barber Shop Chronicles (2017) Moonyoung Hong (bio) For much of its history, the geography of modern drama has been that of “home.”1 But the ideas of home and belonging have increasingly stirred political and cultural debate in the age of migration, globalization, and transnationalism. As the concept of home evolves and complexifies, so do dramatic expressions of it. Home is no longer the domestic interior of the bourgeoise, as popularized by the naturalist dramas of Ibsen and Chekhov. This article explores non-domestic dramatic spaces—the Irish pub and the African barbershop—as culturally specific “third places” in two plays: Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming (1985)2 and Inua Ellams’ Barber Shop Chronicles (2017).3 In the context of diasporic studies, both spaces exemplify what Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur have described as the “nomadic turn in which the very parameters of specific historical movements are embodied and—as diaspora itself suggests—are scattered and regrouped into new points of becoming.”4 Both plays deal with the experiences of their representative diasporic communities, revealing the complex connections between host-homelands and overseas communities. A comparative study of the two plays challenges conventional categories of nation and identity, and demonstrates how these everyday third spaces can become sites of contestation against the hegemonic and homogenizing forces of neocolonialism and globalization. “Third Place” is a term applicable to coffee shops, hair salons, internet [End Page 256] cafes, public libraries, amusement arcades, and many other spaces. As in the case of the Irish pub, it designates locations that are “not work and not home,” “typified by their open, democratic nature, informality and ubiquity.”5 The very idea of a “public house” is in a sense an oxymoron, combining contrary terms: public, defined as communal and open, and house, often concerning private, individual, and exclusive habitation. The pub is one of the most frequently visited leisure venues, where most people may be “regulars” of their “locals.”6 Elizabeth Malcolm explains that, unlike English pubs, Irish pubs were not purpose-built, and their fittings were strictly functional; they were named after the present or past publican, highlighting the fact that one individual ran the house.7 The pub’s homeliness, which derives from its unique origin as a converted house, is a trait evident in Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming. Inua Ellams’ eponymous barbershop is comparable to the pub in that the barbershop blurs normative distinctions between private and public, enabling men to discuss private feelings openly. It is a refuge from a racist post-imperial culture in London. As Ellams puts it, barbershops “for British black men, are a safe, sacred place where they can go to relax, escape racism and talk freely with no fear of being stopped, questioned or moved on by the police, which is a common experience in the world outside.”8 He continues: It’s where men hang out. Barbershops here serve a particular purpose in that there are not many places where black men can gather in large numbers without scrutiny from the police. Quite a few years ago, there was this “sus” law, which meant that the government could stop black men if two or three were gathered and just ask them to move on.9 Ellams’ barbershop is set in contrast to the pub, seen as the socially equivalent but nonetheless privileged space for white men. Winston, a character in Barber Shop Chronicles, remarks: “How many of you go pub? Right! Least there’re couple Jamaican ones. But Africans, nothing! That’s why you fill up the barber shop. This is your pub. Yu na drink!” (44). Another character, Tanaka, refutes this by disclosing the historical fact that in South Africa the Tot system (or “dop,” meaning an alcoholic drink in Afrikaans) was used by wine farmers to pay their workers: “white farmers paid coloureds and blacks barrels of wine instead of money. Generations [End Page 257] later, they’re still pissed” (44).10 Even though the South African parliament outlawed the dop system in 2003, problems of...

PERSONA DRAMATIS IN THE CHERRY ORCHARD BY ANTON CHEKHOV

/ The work deals with the interpretation of the play The Cherry Orchard (1901), the last play by Chekhov, with an emphasis on an unusual dramaturgical solution when it comes to the status of the main protagonist. Instead of the personae dramatis inherent in the theater of that time, Chekhov chooses an orchard as the protagonist of his drama, i.e. selects the space category. Considering extraordinary awareness and thoughtfulness of Chekhov’s dramaturgy, this choice confirms not only his dissatisfaction with the closeness of the modern stage, the so-called scene-box, but also a distance from the predominant, contemporary image of the world, which, thanks to the geometric space of the scene, was based on complete trust in reason. Тhe dramatic spaces of the imaginary, recognized in those unspoken moments when a human being directly responds to his or her life situation, will show their opposition to the objective world of death in the drama The Cherry Orchard.

“To Narrate”—A Verb in the Middle Voice?: Narrativity and Performance in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Ohio Impromptu

This article contributes to growing scholarship on drama and narratology. It asserts that theoretical ideas on degrees of narrativity and types of narration in drama do not always provide a good fit for Beckett’s dramatic works. Instead, Beckett’s practice can be seen to do theory by demonstrating certain relations between narrative and drama. One of the main ways by which this is conducted is through the concept of the middle voice and Beckett’s deployment of it in his dramatic works. By focusing on the immobile and self-reflexive acts of listening and narration that take center stage in Krapp’s Last Tape and Ohio Impromptu, and questioning their implications on shaping the manifold narratives therein, this paper argues that “to narrate” is spotlighted as a verb in the middle voice in these dramatic works. This analysis leads to the conclusion that the medium of drama, far from being narratology’s non-narrative Other, offers crucial insight into the impulses and implications of narrativization on constructing subjecthood. In doing so, this paper also interrogates the links between narrativity and performance, specifically aspects of narrativity that characterize performance on the one hand, and performative aspects of narrativity emphasized through dramatic spaces on the other.

Dramatic Spaces: Scenography and Spectatorial Perceptions. By Jennifer A. Low . London and New York: Routledge, 2016; pp. xi + 207, 16 illustrations. $145 cloth, $54.95 e-book.

Dramatic Spaces: Scenography and Spectatorial Perceptions. By Jennifer A. Low . London and New York: Routledge, 2016; pp. xi + 207, 16 illustrations. $145 cloth, $54.95 e-book.

Dramatic Spaces: Scenography and Spectatorial Perceptions by Jennifer A. Low

Dramatic Spaces: Scenography and Spectatorial Perceptions by Jennifer A. Low

Dramatic spaces: scenography and spectatorial perceptions

Dramatic spaces: scenography and spectatorial perceptions

I thought you’d never become one of us

In this paper, I describe a collaborative process in which a class of grade 6&7 students made and performed two plays, and also transformed their learning. In this process, a reconfiguring of the spaces of learning, the students and I adapted a variety of literacy and drama practices; a key change in practice was the shift away from an instrumental mode of dialogue in which the teacher occupies the superior position of knower and evaluator, towards a Bakhtinian mode in which dialogue, as heteroglossic, moves between all the participants, and becomes the main purpose of learning. In a dynamic combination of linguistic, theatrical, and relational meaning making, the students moved clear of the outcomes-based learning that had hitherto stultified their interactions and language. As a result, they developed a new creative agency, both singly and as a collective, and an authoritative discourse. They left this discourse open for me to join, and also continue afterwards, as I have done here, by presenting and interpreting their voices, and including new ones.[1][1] EDITORIAL NOTE: Charles Bisley’s article is an unusual and brave attempt to transcend the current norms of scholarly and academic genres and create a polyphonic article in which he describes a year long educational event through the voices of all of its participants – among which he counts not only his students and himself, and their audience of parents and the school authorities, but also includes educational, literary and philosophical authors who inspired him and whose thoughts guided him in his actions and reflections during and after his project in creating dramatic spaces and times with his students. His writing has elements of reflective auto-ethnography, Woolfian lyrical stream of consciousness, dialogic double-voicedness and a storytelling narrative that is intended to transport the reader into an experience of the dramatic enfolding of the events and their protagonists, actors and directors: his students and himself. Although, his work doesn’t follow what is currently assumed to be the scientific criteria regarding form, length or standard components, we find it interesting and valuable as a polyphonic approach and qualitative study.

Staging Revolution: Form and Violence in La noche de los asesinos

Written within the first years of the Cuban revolution, José Triana’s La noche de los asesinos (1965) has traditionally been read as either a revolutionary or an antirevolutionary play. This article argues that more than its historical and political context, revolution constitutes La noche ’s form. The concept of revolution as a violent, paradigm-shattering phenomenon relates to La noche ’s shifting and unstable dramatic spaces. Triana creates a complex performative space that turns La noche into a dramaturgical exploration of revolution as violent change and transformation. Through Franz Fanon’s theoretical understanding of structural violence, this article ultimately investigates how La noche offers important insights into the experiential and emotional processes of the Cuban subject within the historical process of the revolution.

Don Juan Tenorio in the Campo de Cebada: restaging urban space after 15-M

The spectacle of the encampments that occupied public plazas throughout Spain during the 15-M protests of 2011 asserted what urban theorist Henri Lefebvre (1968) and others have called the “right to the city.” In a similar vein, the free open-air performances on All Saints' Day in 2011 and 2012 of José Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio by the theater collective AlmaViva Teatro in the self-managed neighborhood space called the Campo de Cebada have also been an effort to reclaim urban space. These performances called Don Juan Tenorio en La Cebada are notable not only for their use of a repurposed vacant lot left abandoned in the wake of the financial crisis but also for their dynamic staging that required the public to move throughout the large vacant lot for each of the play's seven acts. As the public traversed the reappropriated space of the Campo de Cebada, the performance was framed by the urban backdrop created by the bright lights of the Teatro Latina and the adjacent residential apartment buildings. This movement of the public not only foregrounded the trope of mobility evoked by the shifting dramatic spaces within Zorrilla's work but also the mobile and changing character of urban space produced by the perpetual investment and divestment of speculative capital. Just as Don Juan Tenorio journeys from the physical world to the spiritual one and moves from a secular space of individualism to the communal space of heaven, these performances have created an urban experience that promotes community and connection that stands in stark contrast to the cold, individualistic logic of mobile capital and real estate speculation that characterized the economic bubble that preceded the current crisis.

Dramatic Spaces in Patriarchal Contexts. Constructions and Disruptions of Gender in Theatre Interventions About HIV

Dramatic Spaces in Patriarchal Contexts. Constructions and Disruptions of Gender in Theatre Interventions About HIV

Staging the "Cartography of Paradox": The DMZ Special Exhibition at the Korean War Memorial, Seoul

The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) may be a small strip of land, but it is one of the most dramatic spaces on earth, simultaneously standing for the devastating traumas of war and an activist movement for peace and environmentalism. Using the 2010 DMZ Special Exhibition at the Korean War Memorial in Seoul as a case study, this essay examines South Korea's strategic staging of discursive memories of the Korean War in a museum space, where certain performative conditions illuminate the immanent absurdities of the Korean partition. The central questions concern the curatorial design of the exhibition, especially the ways by which spectators are conditioned, both ideologically and kinesthetically, to recall events in history that few of the exhibition visitors experienced firsthand. What happens when the exhibition's mise en scène controls spectators' experiences of recent Korean history—namely, the partition of Korea and the subsequent creation of the DMZmdash;so completely that it potentially alters their perceptions of the historic past and hopes for the future? More broadly, the essay asks how the performative embodiment of memory, often aided by new technologies of seeing, might shift the chronological orientation of museum and memorial spaces. Finally, the essay asks whether museums and memorials that commemorate past events should also speculate on the future.

Any Color of the Rainbow—As Long as It's Gray: Dramatic Learning Spaces in Postapartheid South Africa

Abstract:This article addresses the issue of the relationship between contemporary South African politics and the type of socially committed theater that might be capable of mounting a critique of those politics. The author highlights the contradictions between the aspirations of the Freedom Charter and the realities of subscribing to the neoliberal world order. His contention is that any theater form that is seeking cultural intervention must find a way of representing contradiction if it is to remain true to the experiences of its audiences and its participants. Such a representation can be achieved through a combination of Bertolt Brecht's praxis in relation to contradiction and current practices in Theatre for Development, which themselves draw upon aspects of the antiapartheid resistance theater.

A Companion to Golden Age Theatre (review)

Bulletin of the Comediantes • 2008 Vol. 60 No. 2 157 Reviews____________________________________________________________________ Reviews Thacker, Jonathan. A Companion to Golden Age Theatre. Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2007. 223 pp. JONATHAN THACKER accomplishes what few are able to achieve by publishing an original and valuable study relevant to varying levels of comedia studies. Steering clear of creating a history, Thacker pens a practical pedagogical resource that the most seasoned of professors will find simply outstanding. Not only does he provide an overview of the major playwrights and theatrical forms, he also incorporates performance studies. The variety of this volume’s content allows for incorporation into undergraduate courses on the comedia, and it should most definitely be a required text of any graduate student of the comedia. The thrust of the first half of the Companion is the examination of the theatrical roots of the genre along with the practitioners of the comedia. It commences with “The Emergence of the Comedia nueva” in which Thacker analyzes the usual cast of pre-Lopean playwrights. A novice will undoubtedly be enlightened by this overview and those that follow. The veteran, moreover, will discover pedagogical gems with each turn of the page. For example, subtle reminders about the complexities of the development of the comedia nueva show how easily one can become victim to the “simplifications of chronology” (21), thereby giving an overly general evolution of the comedia nueva when, in actuality, it is complex. These and other points will have experienced professors re-evaluating their teaching habits. The next three chapters analyze individual ingenios and their respective corpuses. As is deserved, Lope de Vega receives his own chapter. A short introductory and biographical sketch ends in a suggestion for a more authoritative biography, noting how Lope’s “myth-like status has tended to prevent scholars [. . .] from challenging naïve assumptions about him” (23). Although Thacker admits the chapter is reductive, with his mentioning of a mere forty plays (55), it does provide a nice overview by examining them. However, one begins to note the arbitrariness of modern day classifications of genres and particularly of subgenres, a topic discussed later in the volume. Thacker looks at Lope’s earlier works along with his political and peasant plays, his comedies, and his tragedies. No other dramatic corpus, not even that of Calderón, receives such scrutiny. 158 Bulletin of the Comediantes • 2008 Vol. 60 No. 2 ____________________________________________________________________ Reviews Chapter 3, “Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, and the First Generation,” considers Lope’s contemporaries, whose work “could not have developed without Lope,” but who are “not slavish imitators by any means” (56). After a detailed look at Cervantes and Tirso, Thacker provides shorter glimpses of the usual suspects of first-wave playwrights. However, a final analysis of both minor and female playwrights of this generation further enriches the volume, adding to the work’s distinctive flair. The fourth chapter, “Calderón and the Comedia’s Second Generation,” focuses most of its analysis on Calderón. Many of his plays are examined, but what is particularly valuable is the treatment of how Calderonian drama differs from that of the first generation. Not only is this change due to the dramatist, but it is also due in part to the change in performance space during the second half of the seventeenth century. Calderón’s contemporaries are discussed to a lesser degree. The final pages of the chapter strengthen the volume’s value by incorporating Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Bances Candamo into the discussion. The second half of Thacker’s Companion delves into sundry aspects of the comedia. The fifth chapter, “Staging and Performance,” makes observations about dramatic spaces, actors, and performance. The accompaniment of performance studies alongside the analysis of playwrights and their corpus sets Thacker’s Companion apart. Chapter 6, “Types of Comedia and Other Forms of Theatre,” catalogs the numerous genres and subgenres of the comedia along with the shorter theatrical forms. The final chapter, “A Brief History of Reception,” accomplishes what the title proposes. However, while the volume is amazingly free of typographical errors, Thacker misspeaks in this chapter when he attributes the operation of the Chamizal festival solely to the Association for Hispanic Classical...

Rahul Mehrotra Associates

AbstractRahul Mehrotra maintains a diverse and active role as an architect, urban activist, writer and teacher. His book Bombay: The Cities Within (1995), with Sharada Dwivedi, is a major enquiry into the history and sociology of India's vivacious and contentious urbanism. He finds his city of practice ‐ Mumbai ‐ a mine for quarrying architectural ideations and languages. Unlike most regions in India that may have to adhere to a conformist cultural agenda, Mumbai offers a conceptual freedom in traversing the traditional and contemporary as the city has its particular plurality in the intertwining epochs, attitudes and ‘coming together and moving apart of the past and present’. Multiplicity is thus axiomatic in Mehrotra's interpretation of the city, although this is transferred in his architecture as a dialogical juxtaposition of public and private, exteriority and interiority, natural and industrial materials, and the traditional and contemporary.Interiority, arising both from reasons of climate and urban conditions, is an abiding theme in Mehrotra's work and is articulated through reified courtyards and walls that also retain an intimate conversation with the larger landscape. From residences to large complexes, he uses these elements with great craft and finesse to create dramatic spaces with changing palettes of materials, colours and phenomenally modulated differences between the exterior and interior.‘In our projects, the approach has been to abstract and interpret spatial arrangements as well as building vocabulary,’ he says. ‘The idea is to combine materials, to juxtapose conventional craftsmanship with industrial materials and traditional spatial arrangements with contemporary space organisation. In short, to give expression to the multiple worlds, pluralism and dualities that so vividly characterise the Asian landscape.’ Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Experimentación dramatúrgica en Rojas Zorrilla: alternancia y simultaneidad espacial en <i>Los trabajos de Tobías</i>

This article aims to analyse the technique used by Rojas Zorilla in a religious comedy of biblical derivation to represent, in a parallel way, dramatic actions that are simultaneously developed in very separate dramatic spaces. Although basing his approach on ancient stage procedures, by combining these with modern techniques the result is of such originality that we consider it to be «experimentation». In order to properly value his creative method, a close comparison is made between the biblical narrative, a sixteenth century auto, and a comedy by Lope de Vega that address the same subject.

Dramatic Learning Spaces Conference: African Performance Practice—Research in Action. 22–25 September 2006

This was the second of the Dramatic Learning Spaces Conferences conceived, planned and organised by Veronica Baxter at the Department of Drama Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The two conferences funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) have provided a very welcome space for sharing research, engaging in conversation and networking within the discipline. Increased participation at the 2006 conference points to the success of, and the excitement generated by, the first conference in 2004. 2004. The conferences, proposed as a series of biennial conferences, have been a timely refocusing of research energies within the discipline.

Corporeal knowledge and pleasure in theatre research: The case of looking at theatre photographs

(2007). Corporeal knowledge and pleasure in theatre research: The case of looking at theatre photographs. South African Theatre Journal: Vol. 21, Dramatic Learning Spaces, pp. 241-252.