Festive Play Research Articles

종묘제례악의 축제적 놀이로서의 변용양상

The purpose of the study is to discover the possibility of traditional festival contents of court music by examining the recent performance changes that showed the possibility of festival contents by discovering the festival play elements of Jongmyo-Jeryeak. Jongmyo- Jeryeak is a ritual with strong ritualism and lacks a play concept. Since modern festivals have the most important elements of play and deviation, play elements must be developed more than before in order to emerge Jongmyo-Jeryeak as a traditional festival content. The plan for JongmyoJeryeak to move forward as festival content in the future is as follows. First, there should be storytelling and easier. Second, it should be drastically scaled down. Third, there should be no restrictions on the audience and place. Fourth, various musical attempts and collaborations should be made. Finally, it is necessary to change folk music and rhythm-oriented education. Through this study, we hope that a new festival venue will be opened through JongmyoJeryeak in the future as well as traditional festival research.

Goethe’s Politics and Political Uses: Nazi and Anti-Nazi Readings of Des Epimenides Erwachen

This article examines the first leaflet produced by the anti-Nazi White Rose group in 1942, focusing on its use of a quotation from Goethe’s festival play Des Epimenides Erwachen. I begin by exploring the appropriation of Goethe by the Nazi Regime, in particular the instrumentalisation of his works during wartime. In contrast, I then consider how the White Rose use their chosen Goethe passage to send an anti-war message and to incite passive resistance, reclaiming Goethe for an anti-Nazi agenda. Finally, I consider the passage’s political significance in Goethe’s own context ca. 1813, which was characteristically ambivalent, reflecting the lack of a singular political, nationalist narrative at the time of the Wars of Liberation.

Dorothy L. Sayers’s Christology in The Man Born to be King

Dorothy L. Sayers’s Christology in The Man Born to be King Kathryn Wehr (bio) The writings of Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) span a breathtaking range of genres and topics: from early poetry and detective fiction, to translations of medieval French poetry, to plays for the stage and radio, to nonfiction books, articles, and speeches on religious and societal subjects, to her last great passion of Dante— including a new translation from medieval Italian. Her friend C. S. Lewis predicted that she might even, in the end, be known as one of the great English letter writers for her meaty and entertaining correspondence. 1 Sayers is an author who reminds us that it is never too late to learn a new subject or language, to take an interest in a new cause, and to engage the world through a new format. Many readers enter her work by one door and are delighted to find all the other rooms to explore. For theologians, Sayers’s work of the late 1930s and early 1940s is of particular interest. Although Sayers’s fiction written throughout the 1920s and 30s is sprinkled with occasional religious comments and characters, she expresses a new kind of theological voice beginning with her 1937 Canterbury Cathedral Festival play, The Zeal of Thy House. From this point on we see an almost continuous [End Page 110] working out of creedal theology, an emphasis characteristic of her Anglo-Catholic tradition, a stream within Anglicanism.2 “To check one’s theology by the Creeds,” Sayers writes, “is the best plan I know for being sure that what one is thinking, saying, or writing, is actually Christianity.”3 She became very interested in what she called “the combined Catholic front” of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy.4 When she uses the word Church, it is the shared historic tradition of this group she usually has in mind, and she hoped that their public cooperation could speak to the wartime needs of culture with a common platform and clear message. This was a period of intense and varied work for Sayers as she wrote for the stage, radio, and print. Her themes overlap and build upon each other, laying a solid foundation in form and content for her largest project of this period: The Man Born to be King, a cycle of twelve life-of-Christ radio plays produced on the BBC from 1941 to 1942 and published in book form in 1943. Sayers’s varied works between 1937 and 1943 all shed light on her Christology. Readers should not expect to find a systematic theology; Sayers protested that she was not a theologian and she neither was trained in nor wrote academic theology.5 Nevertheless, she wrote and spoke confidently when she believed herself to be finding fresh words for creedal theology—giving flesh to “the strong, bony structure of ‘dry’ official theology.”6 We will consider which parts of this creedal Christology caught her attention and imagination, and particularly how this takes flesh in the project that consumed much of her time from 1940– 1943: The Man Born to be King. The Zeal of Thy House includes a discussion in scene 4 between William of Sens and Michael the Archangel about the meaning of work, suffering, and the Incarnation. Sayers summarizes its message in an interview this way: “It is the work, not the workman, that matters, and . . . it is possible for men to endure great suffering because God Himself took human flesh and plumbed the depths of suffering.”7 The reaction from audiences, according to Sayers, was “not so much ‘this is too good to be true’ as ‘this is too exciting to [End Page 111] be orthodox.’”8 In response to this reaction to her play, Sayers wrote an article entitled “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged Is the Official Creed of Christendom” for the Sunday Times. 9 Before people dismiss Christ, they should at least know what the Church actually teaches about him, which is, she writes: That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God...

A FESTIVAL AS A PEDAGOGICAL TOOL TO PROMOTE INCLUSION IN THE COMMUNITY AND IN SCHOOLS

The focus of education policies on greater equity and accessibility of education for all exposes an important difference between narrow and broad definitions of the concept of inclusion. The narrow definition is tied above all to the school context, where responsibility for the realisation of inclusion lies with pedagogical workers. The broad definition refers to an understanding of inclusion as the embracing of diversity as a positive value for the community, regardless of the institutional context in which we endeavour to achieve inclusion. The research discussed the inclusive educational practice of a special educational institution catering for individuals with intellectual disabilities. Using a sample of 139 participants at the international inclusive festival Play With Me, the attitudes towards inclusion and towards persons with special needs (a Likert scale was created) were researched. The results indicate that respondents generally had positive attitudes towards inclusion; there were differences between them, depending on the roles they undertook at the festival (mentors of students taking part in the festival and volunteers running various festival activities), the institutions they came from (special or mainstream educational institutions, associations, NGOs), and whether or not they had experience of individuals with special educational needs (SEN), either in their work or in their studies. Although a broad understanding of inclusive culture is present in the statements of respondents, it appears that both general and special teachers (in the role of mentors) still incline slightly more towards a narrow understanding of inclusion than volunteers do, which raises questions about pedagogical workers' conception of education. Keywords: inclusion understanding, intellectual disabilities, positive attitudes, special educational institution.

A New Noble Kinsmen: The Play On! Project and Making New Plays Out of Old

A New Noble KinsmenThe Play On! Project and Making New Plays Out of Old Martine Kei Green-Rogers (bio) and Alex N. Vermillion (bio) When evaluating any play, dramaturgs ask of it: "Why this play? Why this play now?" The answers to these questions are complicated when evaluating the purpose and power of a play that is a retelling of a currently existing dramatic story. What does it mean to make a "new" play out of an "old" play? Why do we need to make a new play out of an old one? This line of questioning belies subtextual questions such as, What is the issue with the older version of the play that hinders an audience's understanding of or appreciation for the story being told? Has something changed about our society and the way we view the older version of this story that needs to be addressed for the story to resonate with contemporary audiences? How do our answers to these questions shift if we are talking about one of the most revered playwrights of the early modern era? To engage these questions, this article discusses Tim Slover's "translation" of The Two Noble Kinsmen, commissioned as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Play on! project and supported by a workshop and production process at the University of Utah during the 2015–16 and 2016–17 school years. It seeks to document the successes and challenges facing Slover, the dramaturgs, the students at the University of Utah, and the leaders of the Play on! project at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) involved in this experiment to modernize the language of the canon of Shakespeare. What adds to the difficulty of this Play on! project is that Shakespeare and Fletcher's version of The Two Noble Kinsmen is a modernization and dramatization of another "old" text: Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale." Slover's translation of Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen [End Page 231] continues their precedent by making "new" writing out of "old" writing, and that positions his resulting new play as a dramatic metanarrative that continues the bold statement foregrounded by Shakespeare and Fletcher's original version. We explore these iterations of old and new texts to argue that for the continued relevance and survival of some stories, those stories must be changed and updated as language shifts and evolves. We also challenge a contemporary academic assumption that early modern English is close enough to contemporary English that it is easily understandable to a lay audience. The OSF project sets up a paradoxical task—to preserve Shakespearean text by rewriting it—and therefore opens debate about the general comprehensibility of early modern plays left unchanged, the continued role of Shakespeare in contemporary culture, and the type of newness desired in contemporary American theatre created by focusing on contemporary language. Slover's task is a heavy one: The goal of the OSF project is translating Shakespeare's plays in a way that requires examining the language "with the same kind of rigor and pressure that [Shakespeare] did" and keeping in mind the poetical, metaphorical, and thematic elements of the original text while rediscovering the play in contemporary language.1 Dramaturg Martine Kei Green-Rogers is assisting Slover in an experiment that involves students in the Theatre Department at the University of Utah in pursuing that goal, and already the artists and students are discovering the difficulty of accomplishing this paradoxical task. For example, if the point of the project is to leave as much of the play intact as possible, do precedents such as trimming Shakespeare for time still apply when a production is attached to the commission (and if so, at what point does it venture out of the realm of translation and into the world of adaptation)? In addition, what techniques do actors use to help them determine the meaning and intention behind a line when the verse and punctuation is, for one reason or another, not reinstated in a section of text in the translation? These kinds of dilemmas demonstrate the nuts-and-bolts decisions facing artists at work on Play on! commissions, and they carry particular weight because of...

The contribution of a special educational institution to a more inclusive society

Despite the fact that the integration model of education was introduced in Slovenia 17 years ago, the inclusion of persons with special needs into education and community remains a major challenge. In order to improve their opportunities, the largest special school in Ljubljana has for ten years organised an international festival Play with me, with the main aim of supporting inclusion of people with special needs with the rest of the population. The organisers aim to create opportunities for all to take part together in various play, sport and artistic activities. The paper presents the findings of a study in which the inclusive practices of the festival were researched and evaluated. The study was aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of the role a special school can play in the creation of a more inclusive society. Data were gathered using an online questionnaire targeting the mentors and volunteers who accompanied participants at the festival. 132 mentors and 64 volunteers responded. The quantitative non-experimental empirical analysis of the data has indicated that the respondents recognised the inclusive nature of the festival. The festival proves that inclusion is a multifaceted phenomenon which can be supported by various activities and endeavours.

Mediations on a Digital Workforce

The work presented here ranges from small-scale interventions on Amazon.com ’s Mechanical Turk virtual crowdsourcing job board to collaborations with the Turkers (workers) for exhibition and festival play. Virtual job boards have a tendency to commodify digital labor, often resulting in exploitative practices. In these works, the author offers the Turkers a reprieve from the tensions between play and labor (play/bor) with an opportunity to express themselves while being paid for their creativity.

Wagner's Parsifal as ritual theater: approaching the numinous unknown

Richard Wagner spent 37 years developing and refining his final work,Parsifal, which he would not call an opera but, rather, a ‘Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage’. Critical response toParsifalhas historically taken up the work's ambiguous nature as a puzzle to be analyzed and solved, yet treating the opera as a Grail quest for some ultimate meaning reveals more about the seeker than the work and simultaneously errs by distancing the audience from participation in the ritual Wagner orchestrated.Parsifalis deeply psychological in the most radical sense of the word. A depth psychological approach finds the essential value of the work through a direct encounter with the dynamic symbols of the archetypal unconscious, which emerge through Wagner's images and music. Then, the light of understanding emanates from within the drama, from within the music, and from within the landscape and its characters as complex and dynamic autonomous beings – so that it becomes, in Nietzsche's description ofParsifal, ‘an event of the soul’.

Inception of Wagner's doctrine of regeneration prior to the revolution 1848-1849

The predominant opinion in contemporary science is that Richard Wagner began formulating his doctrine of regeneration in the 1860s, with a subsequent elaboration in the so-called regeneration writings, creating a sort of theoretical platform for working on Parsifal, a festival play for the consecration of the stage. Wagner's written legacy, however, shows that he had been thinking about regeneration ever since the 1840s, as well as that he used the term in a broad range of meanings-especially considering that he used that word of the French origin as the synonym for the German word Wiedergeburt. This paper focuses on three instances where he referred to regeneration in the fifth decade of the 19th century: a letter from 1843, a text "How do republican aspirations stand in relation to the monarchy?", and a paper Art and Revolution. In 1843, Wagner had only vague ideas about regeneration in art; five years later, while the city of Dresden was eagerly awaiting the revolutionary wave from France, it was the rebirth of human society that he had in mind; after the collapse of the revolution, realizing his limitations and dispelling illusions about its success, he established a correlation-never to be dismissed-between regeneration and art; i.e. he fancied that the regeneration of the being of a nation's members could be achieved by exposing them to the effects of a special, true art.

Nielsen on the Boulevard: Modernism and the Harlequinesque in 'Cupid and the Poet'

Carl Nielsen’s music for Sophus Michaelis’ festival play Cupid and the Poet , written in 1930 for the 125th anniversary of H C Andersen’s birth, is one of his most immediately engaging but neglected late scores. The story of an old poet whose heart is pierced by Cupid, disguised as a bedraggled young boy, suggests an obviously autobiographical interpretation, which locates Carl Nielsen once more in the familiar surroundings of his native land. But the overture, which has gained some mileage as an independent concert piece, is startlingly cosmopolitan, and invites a number of more searching analytical interpretations, especially in the light of other pieces such as the Sixth Symphony and the two Wind Concertos. In this paper, I will offer a close reading of the overture, drawing particular attention to the (ambivalent) presence of Carl Nielsen’s European modernist contemporaries Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky among the work’s richly complex array of musical characters.

Negotiating Religion and Art: Wagner, Petrarch, Dante

❦In the mid-fifties of the last century, when I was twelve years old, my mother took me to the Wagner festival in Bayreuth. This was to be my reward for an unexpectedly good year at school. Because of my somewhat eccentric passion for heroes, fairy tales and music, my parents thought that Wagner might be worth a try; especially because one of my older cousins was employed at the festival. Tickets were relatively easy to come by for him. I had set my heart on The Flying Dutchman, but we ended up with Parsifal. That was all right though, for everything was mystical, solemn and beautiful. When, after the long first act, the curtain went down, I did what I had learned to do during my earlier visits to the opera. Full of dauntless youthful spontaneity, I applauded. I applauded most vehemently. When I think of it, what followed was one of the more embarrassing moments of my life. Apart from mine, not a single pair of hands was clapping; everyone remained in rapt silence. Only a gentleman seated in front of me turned around hissing, “Stop it. One doesn’t applaud Parsifal.” Unfortunately, my mother felt obliged to provide moral support and encouraged me to keep on clapping—which I did, until my applause died away in the ringing silence of the Bayreuth Wagner sanctuary. Until this day, I remember how on my way out, during the inter val, I felt a thousand eyes upon me. What had I done? A young fool (if not necessarily an innocent one), I simply had not grasped that the site of the performance, as well as its nature—a festival play for the consecration of the stage (ein Buhnenweihfestspiel) at Bayreuth—

The Heavenly Cow Rupan and the Festival of Ceremonial Torture Gai-Goheri: Myth, Rituals and Sacrifice among the People of the Bhil Tribe of Western India

Gai-Goheri, the festival of ceremonial torture, is a popular ritual among the people of the Bhil tribe of Western India. Beliefs and myths of this festival play an important role in forming a series of rituals, which include not only the buttock-burning of the cattle but also their decorations and worship- ping. The ritual, in which the villagers, while in religious mood, prostrate before hundreds of running cattle and get seriously hurt, is the climax of the festival. Villagers then inhale the smoke of burning dhup (perfumed sawdust), dance and drink liquor in a state of trance. This article makes a serious attempt to analyse the festival of ceremonial torture, as well as the associated rituals, along with the related mythological story of the cow named Rupan, which has presented a pragmatic charter of the primitive faith, vouching for the efficacies of the festival. The socio-economic system of the tribe has also helped in making the entire celebration amply adaptable even today.

The Shoemaker's Holiday as a Festive Play

The Shoemaker's Holiday as a Festive Play

A Companion to Wagner's Parsifal

Richard Wagner's Parsifal remains an inexhaustible yet highly controversial work. This stage consecration festival play, as the composer described it, represents the culmination of his efforts bring medieval myth and modern music together in a dynamic relationship. Wagner's engagement with religion - Buddhist as well as Christian - reaches a climax here, as he seeks through artistic means to rescue the essence of religion by perceiving its mythical symbols ...according their figurative value, enabling us see their profound, hidden truth through idealized representation.The contributors this collection break fresh ground in exploring the text, the music, and the reception history of Parsifal. Wagner's borrowings-and departures-from the medieval sources of the Grail legend, Wolfram's Parzival and Chretien's Perceval, are considered in detail, and the tensional relation of the work Christianity is probed. New perspectives emerge that bear on the long genesis of the text and music, its affinities Wagner's earlier works, particularly Tristan und Isolde, and the precise way in which the music was composed.Essays address the work's bold, modernistic musical language and its unprecedented soundscape involving hidden choruses and other unseen sources of sound. The turbulent, astonishing, and sometimes disturbing history of Parsifal performances from 1882 until 2004 is traced in vivid detail for the first time, demonstrating the abiding fascination exerted by this uniquely challenging work of art. Contributors include: Mary A. Cicora, James M. McGlathery, Ulrike Kienzle, Warren Darcy, Roger Allen. William Kinderman and Katherine Syer teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and often lead study seminars during the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany.

Colchester’s Legend on Stage:The Emperor Constantine by Dorothy L. Sayers

When Dorothy L. Sayers was asked to write a play for the Colchester Cathedral Festival (part of the Festival of Britain) of 1951, she took the opportunity of using Colchester’s favourite legend concerning the town’s patron, St Helena. This legend was an obvious choice for Sayers: not only was Helena important for her legendary discovery of the True Cross, she was also claimed by Colchester as a local girl. Most importantly for Sayers’ purpose, this legendary Helena, as the daughter of Old King Cole, conferred British ancestry on her son, Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome.2 The festival play, which Sayers called The Emperor Constantine,3 exploits the local legend specifically to tie Constantine to Colchester and thereby to justify situating the origins of her story on home soil. But once the play is underway, the familiar legend is relegated to the background so that Sayers’ real interests – fourthcentury ecclesiastical history and Christian theology – can take the spotlight. Now that the fourth volume of Sayers’ letters has been published, the dramatist’s passionate attitude towards her subject matter and personal involvement in staging this ambitious and complicated play have come to light and can be examined in the context of her strategic use of the legendary tradition by which Colchester lays claim to Helena.

"Mardi Gras, Chic-a-la-Pie:" Reasserting Creole Identity Through Festive Play

Abstract Mardi Gras, in the predominantly Creole and African American 12th Street area of Lafayette, Louisiana, reflects both the cultural diversity of Creoles of color and the dynamics of asserting Creole identity in a region more widely known as Cajun Country. The festive play of this Mardi Gras incorporates Afro-Caribbean performance styles as well as French Louisiana Mardi Gras chants and rituals. Creole identity is reflected, challenged, and celebrated in the intercultural borrowings and negotiations of this carnival performance.

"Mardi Gras, Chic-a-la-Pie:" Reasserting Creole Identity through Festive Play

Mardi Gras, in the predominantly Creole and African American 12th Street area of Lafayette, Louisiana, reflects both the cultural diversity of Creoles of color and the dynamics of asserting Creole identity in a region more widely known as Cajun Country. The festive play of this Mardi Gras incorporates Afro-Caribbean performance styles as well as French Louisiana Mardi Gras chants and rituals. Creole identity is reflected, challenged, and celebrated in the intercultural borrowings and negotiations of this carnival performance.

Syphilis, sin and the social order: Richard Wagner'sParsifal

In the age of AIDS, few would be surprised to find sexuality connected to suffering and disease; in the age of syphilis – from its arrival in Europe in 1492 to today, when it is on the rise once again – the connection is equally strong, though many of us have forgotten this. The brief respite offered by the discovery of a cure for syphilis (through the use of penicillin) in the 1940s ended with the appearance of AIDS. Over the last five hundred years, the Christian reading of syphilis as the scourge of God directed against the sexually sinful has merged with societal sexual anxieties about the effects of syphilis on the general social fabric and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the family in particular. The perhaps surprising focus of this discussion (by a literary theorist and a physician) of suffering and social decline in the context of sexually transmitted disease is Richard Wagner's last music drama,Parsifal, finally completed in 1882 and called aBühnenweihfestspiel(a stage consecration festival play) for his Bayreuth theatre.

The Festive Play of Fernando Arrabal

The Festive Play of Fernando Arrabal

The Festive Play of Fernando Arrabal

The Festive Play of Fernando Arrabal