Theatrical Genre Research Articles

The Audience Is the Message: Blast Theory’s App-Drama Karen

“App-drama” is a new theatrical genre that exists in the liminal space between live performance and electronic prerecording. Karen uses the data participants provide to tailor her conversations to the participant in a participatory smartphone theatre production/game/film about the virtual relationships we create by oversharing private information in virtual spaces.

O Precipício de Chichisbéu: o ‘gracioso’ feito à sombra do ‘galán’ em O precipício de Faetonte, de Antônio José da Silva

Neste trabalho, analisamos a personagem de Chichisbéu na peça O Precipício de Faetonte, de Antônio José da Silva (1705-1739), representada em 1738 no Teatro do Bairro Alto, Lisboa, Portugal. Partindo de perspectivas teóricas diversas, mas convergentes no sentido de compreender a pouco explorada dramaturgia do período, tentamos um entendimento dos textos joco-sérios do comediógrafo. Como forma tragicômica de origem espanhola, a personagem do gracioso é o principal representante do cômico nesse gênero teatral. Busca-se, portanto, o entendimento desse personagem (Chichisbéu, no caso) em suas relações com o ‘galán’ e a relação da obra do dramaturgo com as preceptivas e técnicas de escrita teatral vigentes no período.

HEREDITY ABANDONED, AND KANNAGI'S COURAGEOUSDECISION TO ACT IN SPECIAL DRAMA

Women artists have performed in the Tamil theatre genre known as Special Drama since the early twentieth century, though they have been highly stigmatized for their participation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Special Drama artists in the early 1990s, I returned in 2014- 2015 to conduct a follow- up study on the subsequent generations of drama family lineages. I became increasingly concerned – largely because this proved a primary concern of the artists themselves – with problems posed by the lack of any established route for the cultural transmission of knowledge of this field. In this essay I document one hereditary acting family lineage in which the stigma on stage actresses has resulted in a silencing of family history. I discuss Special Drama artists’ ideas for how to encourage subsequent generations to take up this profession, and how my own presence and support contributed to their efforts to repatriate the artistic tradition. I focus specifically on the courageous decision of one young woman, a member of the fifth generation in the hereditary acting lineage I document, to buck the trend of her generation and become a dramatic Heroine even in the face of the globalizing social and economic climate of contemporary India.

Semiotic and Synergistic Approaches in the Study of Musical-Theatrical Productions as Synthetic Art Texts

In today's art criticism there is an increasing necessity in searching for new methodological approaches to the analysis of literary texts, based on the synthesis of various art forms. This paper highlights the need for an integrated approach to the study of musical and theatrical genres (opera and ballet), taking into account the stage interpretation phase. For this sake musical-theatrical work is regarded as a synthetic literary text, understood as the result of a gradual multi-level interpretation of the text from literary source (the composer creativity phase) and interpretation of the musical score (the staging incarnation). The semiotic approach can explain the multiplicity of meanings in a musical- theatrical text - both the original and interpretative source; reveal the text intention as generating meanings, the text being seen as an incentive to the emergence of new staging versions. For the first time ever to analyze the musical and theatrical genres the author used a synergistic ap-proach that allows understanding the synthetic literary text of Opera/Ballet as an open system with features of self-organization. At the same time artistic interpretation of the composer and producers is considered a manifestation of its instability and the subsequent establishment of a new order in the newly formed text (whether it is a composer score, opera or ballet performances).

Course Syllabus: The Theatre of Rob Ford 101

From 2010 to 2015, no fewer than twenty dramatic works have been composed about Toronto’s former Mayor Rob Ford, a politician whose administration was plagued by scandal after scandal and who quickly became the star of an international media spectacle the likes of which the city had not seen before. Theatre artists saw unlimited potential in this unfolding drama: Ford’s public gaffes and buffoonish behaviour provided ample material for slapstick and physical comedy. The media coverage of his apparent misbehaviour reached a fever pitch, and each day seemed to bring another story of Mayor Ford—instigating a municipal conflict-of-interest investigation, arriving inebriated at a major event (again), smoking crack on video, or ranting wildly under the influence. It was decidedly operatic, the stuff of Shakespearean or Greek tragedy. Artists from across Canada (and beyond) answered the call, producing such an abundance of theatrical responses to Ford that they might profitably be treated as constituting a new genre of theatre in their own right, what this piece will refer to as “Fordian theatre.” Here, Levin offers a syllabus for The Theatre of Rob Ford 101, a course that surveys key play texts and productions in this emerging body of work, providing students with a set of critical tools for analyzing their central themes and formal conventions. At the same time, it responds to widespread dismissals of Fordian theatre voiced by journalists and members of the public, begging playwrights to cease writing Rob Ford plays.

From Stage Scripts to Closet Drama: Editions of Early Chinese Drama and the Translations of Yuan Zaju

Abstract This study will trace the way shifts in performance and textual function reshaped the zaju from its late thirteenth-century appearance to the early seventeenth-century publication of the Yuanqu xuan by Zang Maoxun. Whereas the Yuanqu xuan offered literary texts for readers, the earliest printings from the fourteenth century were most likely based on lead performers' role texts, printed as aids for the audience. The author will also compare changes introduced into the texts by Ming theatrical agencies and their court performances, with the editorial policy of Li Kaixian, among the first to reprint Yuan zaju as the representative literary genre of that era. Long the major source for Western translations of early Chinese drama, the Yuanqu xuan has been selectively drawn on, according to the different aims of its translators: the plays have been used for language study, observation of Chinese daily life, and appreciation of Chinese literature. The author concludes by noting the growing interest in both Japan and the English-speaking world of scholars and translators, in earlier editions of Yuan drama.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Judgment on Parchment: Illuminating Theater in Besançon MS 579

The fourteenth-century northern French manuscript Besançon MS 579 contains an extensively illuminated copy of the Middle French Antichrist and Last Days play known as the Jour du Jugement. Its illumination and mise en page shape the Jour in MS 579 as a book-based experience that capitalizes on the theatrical genre. The visual program works toward the creation of a spiritually profitable book, defined through the marriage of text, illuminations, and the theatrical form. I describe the strategies by which the manuscript is designed to engage a reader-viewer with its eschatological theme, including considerations of iconography, image placement, and the relationship between visual and sonic elements in the play. The essay then addresses the role of theater qua theater in the design of this play-within-a-book. I account for the clarity of genre in Besançon 579 as a component of its argument, considering how the subject of Antichrist and the form of an illuminated play combine to make reading an exercise in discernment and to comment on the role of art in preparing for Judgment. The combination of an Antichrist play, the manuscript medium, and the explicitly theatrical terms of the text’s presentation renders the manuscript a durable production of the Jour designed to offer a means of preparation for the Judgment described in the drama. The theatrical genre itself becomes a subject of reflection in conjunction with the themes of the play and its stated project of spiritual aid for the spectator, here recast as reader-viewer.

On the Three Transformations in Seng Ni Gong Fan 僧尼共犯

The object of this paper is Feng Weimin’s shortzajuplay calledSeng Ni Gong Fan. The first part of the article deals with the more visible differences between Feng’s play and the traditional, canonicalzaju, and here the writer tries to show how Feng broke away from the tradition while at the same time preserving some of its elements. After these macro-level observations, the second part deals more in detail with the language that Feng used in order to give life to his characters, and how he modifies well-known sayings, images, and tropes to obtain new, surprising effects. The third part deals directly with the choice of characters, the motivation behind their action and how their role changes as the plot unravels. Through a detailed analysis centred on the characters’ lines and on the already existing commentaries, this article tries to bring to light the underlying intention of the text, together with its ideological focal points, and ultimately explains the often downplayed influence that Feng’szajuhad on other genres of Ming theatre.

Little steps: The absurdity of A Chorus Line

Abstract By tracing some of the ways that Michael Bennett’s choreographic dramaturgy telescoped, refracted and collapsed the presumed dimensions of musical theatrical space, identity and emotion, this critical rumination listens for the experimental echoes in A Chorus Line. Explicating how A Chorus Line recasts the audition as an especially absurd dramatic scenario, I submit that Michael Bennett re-choreographs theatrical scale – especially through the musical’s fractal storytelling and composite characterizations – to magnify the scale, scope and impact of every little story told and every little step danced ‘on the line’ of A Chorus Line. I contend that A Chorus Line’s absurdity lay not only in its dramatization of (paraphrasing Martin Esslin) the metaphysical anguish that defines the entertainer’s life but also in how its ‘affective absurdism’ has emerged as one of A Chorus Line’s most enduring, influential yet unexamined legacies for the genre of musical theatre.

Performing Bidesiyā in Bihar: Strategy for Survival, Strategies for Performance

Bidesiyā is a popular folk performance from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in eastern India. Similar to other popular theatre genres, such as jātrā of Bengal and nauṭaṅkī theatre of Uttar Pradesh, bidesiyā incorporates dance, drama, music, acrobatics and other arts. Because of the prominence of lauṇḍā (female impersonator) actors, bidesiyā is often called lauṇḍā-nāc (the dance of female impersonators). The performance emerged as a cultural response to the British era colonial outmigration of the nineteenth and early twentieth as a text of tribulation of those who were left behind remembering those often forcefully migrated to bidesh (foreign land). Bidesiyā continues to be performed with similar echoes of labor and migration. During the time of my fieldwork in 2009–2011 in Patna, Vaishali, and Nalanda districts, there were more than two hundred such bidesiyā parties (troupes) estimated to be performing. This study gives an overview of bidesiyā theatre in Bihar in relation to the inseparable link between a performance and a marginalized community’s struggles for survival based on viewing forty performance by twelve groups and focused on the works of two popular troupes.

Dying for Love: Eros and Violence in Lopean Drama

Lope de Vega's El caballero de Olmedo, El perro del hortelano, and El castigo sin venganza are plays ostensibly concerned with questions of love and honor. All three comedias center upon dilemmas facing individuals in conflictive relationships that often culminate in violence and death. It has been argued that because Lope favors theme over action, his plays generally exhibit little psychological depth and his characterization strike one as perfunctory (Pring-Mill xiv). To be sure, complex issues such as existentialist problems or a character's deep psychology were not the comedia's principal concerns. This theatrical genre was, after all, primarily a popular form of entertainment. Lope aimed to please his audience by giving them plays that were swift-moving and exciting [...] lithe in plot and both lifelike and witty in dialogue (Pring-Mill xiv). As such, his drama tends to relegate psychology and other less immediate aspects of human existence to a secondary plane, using them only to the extent that they lend themselves to a lively illustration of theme or action (Pring-Mill xiv-xvi, Gerstinger 55).Be that as it may, a good number of Lope's works do reveal a metaphysical dimension and owe much of their structure and appeal to the psychological dynamics of complex love triangles. The mechanics of these triangles and the role they play in the three comedias in question constitute a promising avenue of exploration. Concepts such as Denis de Rougemont's notion of passionate love and Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire1 can be used productively in a reinterpretation of these plays, thus affording new perspectives into the development of the intrigues so much at the heart of Golden Age comedias.The plays of Lope de Vega have been studied extensively from various critical perspectives in the recent past. They have especially benefited from poststructuralist critical approaches such as the ones employed by Edward H. Friedman (semiotics), Christopher B. Weimer (Girardian mimetic desire), and Anne M. Pasero (Freudian psychoanalysis), among others. In recent rereadings of Lope's drama, the connection between love (or sex) and death has been examined at length by students of the Spanish Golden Age comedia such as Helmy F. Giacoman, Thomas A. O'Connor, Laura Ana Leo de Belmont, Bert Carduilo, and Antonia Petro, although never in the light of the de RougemontGirard model as it is applied here.El caballero de Olmedo is the story of Alonso, a knight from Olmedo, who comes to the fair of Medina and falls in love with Ines, the lovely daughter of a widowed nobleman. Unable or unwilling to approach the young woman himself, Alonso enlists the aid of Fabia, an old bawd and sorceress, who agrees to serve as their go-between. Due in part to Fabia's spells and beguiling rhetoric, Ines becomes infatuated with Alonso, even though her father has already agreed to give her hand in marriage to another knight, Rodrigo. At the prospect of having to marry a man whom she does not love, Ines pretends to develop an interest in a religious career and asks her father for permission to enter a convent to become a nun. Surprised but at the same time pleased with the news, the father grants his daughter her request and hires two to prepare Ines for convent life. However, these tutors are none other than Fabia and one of Alonso's servants, Tello, who have been instructed to infiltrate Ines's household in order to establish and maintain communication between the two lovers. During a celebration in honor of King Juan II, Alonso has an opportunity to display his courage and bullfighting skills, both of which are greatly admired and celebrated. He has a chance to showcase his expertise in this area especially when he dramatically saves the life of Rodrigo, who deeply resents this embarrassment and dishonor at the hands of his rival. That evening, as Alonso returns home along the solitary road to Olmedo, he is attacked and killed by Rodrigo and his cronies. …

Safe Distance, Dark Tourism, and Ambivalent Spatial Relation in Gillian Plowman’s Yours Abundantly, From Zimbabwe, and Christine Evans’s Trojan Barbie

AbstractColonial adventures and imperialistic travels have taken a new pattern as in the cases of humanitarian travel and dark tourism in the twenty-first century. Dark tourism not only satisfies Western individual’s hunger for orientalism labeling the touristic site a marginal and exotic landscape, but also uncovers the touristic undercurrents involved in the voyage. In this article, by utilizing the immediacy of the theatre genre, I argue that dramatic literature shares similar ambivalent spatial relations with humanitarian travel in that they both locate themselves between proximity and remoteness in their relation to the other. Similarly, by staging metatheatrical aspects, Plowman’s

2015 International Siglo de Oro Drama Festival Coordinated by Anna-Lisa Halling

2015 International Siglo de Oro Drama Festival Coordinated by Anna-Lisa HallingIn 2015, Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso, Texas, celebrated forty years of Golden productions as it hosted both professional and student troupes from Spain, Colombia, Mexico, and United States. The festival ran from Wednesday, March 18, through Sunday, March 22, and featured five unique performances by four very different companies. Performances by these groups ranged from recreation of baroque celebration (iFiesta!) to theatrical adaptations of both novel and novella (El buscon and El coloquio de los perros), as well as pastoral play (El amor enamorado) and tonadilla ( Villa y Corte-The Music of Goya). Far from usual comedia fare, these productions not only include wide variety of genres, but also artistic vision, thus creating rich and diverse experience for spectators.iFiesta!It is not without reason that Morfeo Teatro has recently become perennial presence at Chamizal National Memorial's Siglo de Oro festival. In this production, company's minimalist approach to sets and scenery, attention to visual detail, incorporation of variety of genres of early modern theater, and clear respect for texts that they bring to life all demonstrate production approach that aligns well with stated objective of festival. In his opening statement in event program, Fernando Gus Sanchez, park superintendent, indicated that purpose of event was to increase public's awareness and appreciation of the rich tradition of drama from Spain's Golden Age through a significant encounter with performing arts.Each member of this small company shoulders variety of roles, and quality of production demonstrates success of their cooperation. The artistic decisions of company's director, Francisco Negro (who also played role of lead actor in majority of pieces presented), paralleled rather than duplicated those of comedia production in corral theater. Scenery and props consisted of such basic items as chair, few pieces of rope, fan, and semitransparent scrim. The use of lighting changes and fog added modern touch to production and effectively augmented audience's response to emotionally charged scenes. Each of these staging techniques drew audience focus to actors and dramatic texts themselves. The actors took advantage of and heightened this attention through very deliberate, considered physicality of their interpretations. The combination of these elements was particularly apparent in selected scene from Lope de Vega's El caballero de Olmedo. Dim lights, enough fog to initially obscure dancer portraying physical representation of death omen that Alonso sees, and musical adaptation accompanying lines all combined to make Alonso's death particularly frenetic and emotionally draining scene.The attention to detail paid to various visual representational elements speak to talent and precision of Mayte Bona (who also portrayed variety of female characters) as costume designer. The masks worn by actors at various moments throughout production were beautifully detailed nod to influence of commedia dell'arte tradition. At outset, they contributed to element of mystery created by cast as actors stepped onto stage in front of main curtain, speaking while audience wondered what lay behind curtain and ahead in play. Rather than relying on costume changes to mark scene transitions, each actor maintained single costume throughout production. To adjust for dramatic differences in character types, costumes incorporated added elements like manto, hat, an eyepatch, tucked-up skirt hem to make respectable lady's dress short and revealing, and particularly memorable tied-on apron that transformed galan into nagging wife. …

Practices of Enchantment: The Theatre of Zora Neale Hurston

Contemporary critical work in the field of new materialism, whose practitioners take seriously the concept of nonhuman agency, has largely neglected the genres of theatre and performance. African American author and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston’s folk revues of the 1930s offer an opportunity to examine the intersections between contemporary new materialist theory and the stage, revealing that black Atlantic performance practices have long explored concepts of nonhuman agency in the service of a cultural and racial politics.

“Not a Play”: Redefining Theater and Reforming Marriage in Candida

ABSTRACT In his early plays, Shaw repurposed conventional theatrical tropes and privileged discussion over dramatic closure, redefining drama in ways that some of his contemporaries considered antidramatic. These strategies are especially important in Candida (1895), written explicitly in response to Ibsen's Doll's House, which Shaw considered the prototypical New Drama. I argue that in questioning popular assumptions about marriage and gender relations, Candida also reworks theatrical genres and devices commonly associated with these assumptions, in particular the dramatic stock characters of the preacher and the poet, and the related performance genres of religious homiletics and poetry reading. The play suggests that marriage itself is a theatrical performance modeled on these and other theatrical forms; thus, traditional theater is to some degree held responsible for faulty popular assumptions regarding love and marriage, and newer kinds of theater are called on to correct those assumptions.

Spitballing, slapstick, lazzi and improvisation: The benefits of practising Commedia dell’Arte in secondary schools

Commedia dell’Arte is the 16th century genre of theatre from Italy where characters such as Pantalone, Dottore, Il Capitano and Arlecchino reappear in performances showcasing human frailties in comic ways. The term Commedia was initially used to describe “theatre” and Arte to describe one’s trade or business. Now, commonly referred to as “the art of comedy”, Commedia dell’Arte is often taught within the middle years of Australian secondary schools, where it is explored not just for the understanding of the genre itself, but more importantly to impart a number of theatre and life skills. Sometimes aided by an artist in residence or through viewing live Commedia dell’Arte performances, the slapstick manner and ensemble characteristics of Commedia dell’Arte players can serve as pedagogical tools to enrich the academic and personal lives of 21st century students. This article refers to a devised theatre play, The Marriage of Flavio and Isabella , which was developed as a contemporary Commedia dell’Arte performance and aims to show how the intrinsic characteristics of the genre can be translated to suit a contemporary Australian context. In doing so, the performance targets student-learning outcomes within Australian secondary schools. To devise the performance, I drew on my training and ten years of experience as a Commedia dell’Arte practitioner, the ideas and work of Antonio Fava, a leading expert in the genre, data collected from interviews with five professional Commedia dell’Arte practitioners, and interviews and participant observations with ten secondary school drama teachers. The purpose of drawing on a variety of sources was to explore the place and potential for Commedia dell’Arte in curriculum practice and to determine how Commedia dell’Arte could be better understood in a context where the genre is not part of the day-to-day culture. This article includes a discussion on Commedia dell’Arte’s influence in different genres and encourages a dialogue on how might the mode of performance embodied in traditional Commedia dell’Arte be translated to respond effectively to contemporary contexts, both educational and public.

THE MASKS OF ORTHIA: FORM, FUNCTION AND THE ORIGINS OF THEATRE

The British School excavations in Laconia from 1905 to 1910 unearthed terracotta masks from the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, just east of Sparta, right on the Eurotas river. Buried in two pits adjacent to the archaic temple, the masks were made between c.615 and c.450bce. Description and analysis of the material and technique of the masks reveal their diverse character and the impracticalities of their being worn. The masks’ function is related to the presence of linen or wood originals that the terracotta versions reproduced, though not uniformly. Difficulty in explaining the (original) masks’ use is predicated on vague approximations of the nature of Orthia's origins and cult. The linguistic clusters proposed by the excavators as early as 1906 as descriptors of the masks or their use are scrutinised for possible illumination of the (original) masks’ use; the burial of the masks some centuries before the descriptions of Pollux, Hesychius and Pausanias begs the question of their applicability to the excavated masks. On the basis of theories of masking from Classics as well as from Japanese Noh theatre and neuroscience, the ‘grotesques’ and ‘caricatures’ proposed by the excavators are recast as comic and satiric figures. Like Aristotle's pre-urban drama, the ‘Orthian drama’ does not correspond to a single theatrical genre, but contains risible figures whose facial expressions are naturalistic and often negative (pain, worry). Given Aristotle's firm assertion that the roots of Greek theatre are Dorian, and the uniqueness of the Orthia material, it is proposed that these masks point us towards the origins of theatre.

Utopian Views of Spanish Zarzuela

ABSTRACT The article addresses zarzuela, a musical and theatrical genre that was very popular in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, in which we can see plentiful examples of a “utopian impulse.” In its comical way it portrayed society by satirically turning it on its head, a tradition that dates back to Swift, among others, and gave vent to social criticism against the liberal order of the mid-nineteenth century. Years later, zarzuelas trumpeted an ideal of national and social harmony, although they simultaneously warned of potentially dystopian situations caused by workers' and gender demands or breakaway tendencies in some regions.

Instrumental, Vocal and Choir Theatre of Juris Karlsons

The purpose of this article is to introduce the instrumental, vocal and choir music of the Latvian composer Juris Karlsons (*1948) in the context of music theatricality research. The article is based on discoveries and conclusions outlined in the doctoral thesis “The Theatricality Phenomenon in Music. Theatrical Space of Juris Karlsons”. The author introduces the current issues of theory and artistry in the instrumental theatre genre, as well as the contribution of Juris Karlsons to this genre and composition technique of the late 20th century. The thesis employs the following research methods: - theoretical methods (research studies): method of abstract analysis (gathering and evaluation with the purpose to create a general background) – studies of theatricality theory, studies of musical theatricality theory, analysis of Karlsons’ oeuvre; - methods of musicological analysis: approach to Karlsons’ works based on the genre analysis and classification method, defining and describing of the immanent characteristics, as well as musical style analysis method; - empirical and deductive methods (contributed from personal experience) – research, comparison and evaluation (determination of tendencies and guidelines), personal perception experience, observations and discoveries, writing and publishing articles for scientific conferences, music history lectures at JVLMA, secondary music schools and other institutions, own conductor’s experience; - semiotic method (significance of a system of symbols in Karlsons’ oeuvre); - data processing methods – evaluation, comparative analysis and systematization, including hypothetical modelling; - comparative research methods, providing parallel view comparison of musical practices, Karlsons’ oeuvre, as well as other means of expression in music and other arts – music and theatre, music and literature, music and visual arts; - methods of selection – evaluation of scientific research works and selection of analytical works; - field research methods – interviews with Karlsons and his contemporaries.