International Theatre Research Articles

The Ethics of Encounter in Contemporary Theater Performances

Dramatic arts, speech andmusic theater acts, performances, dance, films and other audiovisual media, cultural performances (from carnivals to gay pride parades) and all kinds of performances (from academic lectures to truth finding commissions) are currently understood as fields of research in Theatre Studies. Since its emergence in Berlin in the 1920s, Theatre Studies has developed a considerable diversity in terms of its content and method: while European Theatre Studies usually distinguishes between theatre arts and social performances, this separation does not hold in Asia, where an understanding of theatre and dance as art forms only emerged due toWestern influences. While at U.S.-American and British universities, Theatres Studies and practical training in theater and performance are usually housed in a joint ›Drama Department‹, scientific and artistic research are often situated further apart in continental Europe due to the institutional separation of academic and artistic universities. Thus, there can be no general approach to the question as to what kind of relationship Theatre Studies and Performance Studies have in reference to ethical questions. In any event, it must be addressed in connection with the great diversity of international Theatre Studies, which also means that one’s own perspective must also be embedded in its local context. My perspective has been shaped by US-American Performance Studies as well as by German-speaking Theatre Studies. Richard Schechner, who is known today as the founder of Performance Studies, first offered a course on »Performance Theory« at New York University in 1979 (1998, 357–363). Performance Studies allow performances from different cultures to be included within Theatre

Hamlet in England, Hamlet in Exile: What’s Hecuba to him, or Kupenga to them?

At the end of 2010, while London audiences flocked to see ‘a Hamlet for our age’ in Nicholas Hytner’s modern dress production (a catalogue of modern-dress ‘innovations’: media-savvy dictators, busy apparatchiks, surveillance, rioting, silenced dissidents, suited extras with conspicuous earpieces, all assembled on the National Theatre’s grand stage) a smaller audience gathered at London’s Oval Theatre to watch Kupenga Kwa Hamlet (The Madness of Hamlet), an eighty-minute two-man version after the ‘bad quarto’, performed in English and Shona. The production, which was warmly received in its first run, raises a number of questions touching the themes of this issue: questions about exile and expatriation, as well as xenophilia – in the international theatre’s embrace of foreigners (xenos) who tend to be guests, performing between two worlds.

I am Jerusalem (review)

Reviewed by: I am Jerusalem Maurya Wickstrom I am Jerusalem. Written and directed by Nasser Omar. Conceptualized and performed by Iman Aoun. Ashtar Theatre Company, Al Midan Theatre, Haifa, Israel. 9 January 2010. The Ashtar Theatre Company is based in Ramallah, Palestine, where I interviewed artistic director Iman Aoun a few days after seeing I Am Jerusalem in the Arab section of Haifa. I found it a beautiful work, equal to any international performance that might be seen in New York. It is a play founded on an expressly Palestinian politics and experience. Theatre producers have struggled to bring such plays to the United States, just as scholars have produced little scholarship on theatre that is made in Palestine. I hope that will change and that Palestinian [End Page 116] theatre will be more welcomed here because this work is worthy and important, even critical, to see and think about. Click for larger view View full resolution Iman Aoun in I Am Jerusalem. (Photo: Edward Muallem.) I say that the play carried a specifically Palestinian politics. Aoun and others with whom I spoke stress the importance of Palestinians' engagement with international theatre, literature, and art. At the same time, exceptional circumstances locally mean that almost all theatre artists, in solidarity, work politically; nor do artists there necessarily concede to creating the balanced picture that is often asked of them. The fact that artists like Aoun use theatre for peaceful (though not passive) resistance does not mean that the work is not also frequently a form of militancy. The politics of this piece were located partly in its critique of the successive and often violent "identitarianisms" that have made and remade Jerusalem for thousands of years. But also, and even more importantly, the politics were in the making of a new space filled with a kind of luminous idea resurrected from the past into the present. This new space was made possible by evacuating from the stage any signs of Jerusalem-as-is, and instead returning the Cannanite trinity, in visual forms of the triangle, as a kind of unconquerable idea. The city of Jerusalem has been made and remade over and over, and now it is a city that Israel has remade, and is still remaking, into a birthright of the Jewish people alone. I am Jerusalem made something entirely different, and this was the key to its refutation of identitarian claims. As the play began, the stage was enveloped in red light and smoke through which three humans began to move, walking in slow undulations, linked almost as a single body—the emergence of humans awakening. These were the dancers Rasha Jahshan and Mohammad Eid with Aoun (costumed in black-and-white-checked kaffiyeh across one shoulder). The sound was stunning: it was a long, magnified exhalation, underscored by drums, and a nearly single-toned chant in a deep base tone. This sound reverberated throughout the piece, as each successive phase in Canaan was presented. Onstage there were three triangles and Aoun explained that the triangle is the symbol for Canaan and its trinity: father, mother, and son. These triangles were formed and reformed into the signature shapes of each successive invasion, including pyramids, refugee tents, churches, and the Star of David. The triangles worked so that as they formed these shapes, Canaan was both occluded and always there as a trace in each successive present. One more thing was onstage: a large steel structure, a metal carapace with a red apple at its top. This structure [End Page 117] served as a mount, a mosque, a cross, and a cage. It bore a striking resemblance to the towers of the early Zionist "wall and tower" architectures of settlement. The carapace was a beautifully made thing; it had presence; it insisted upon itself. For Aoun, it was a symbol of oppression, a symbol of pain, a cross. Through the words of the text the apple became the reminder of expulsion, and, specifically, expulsion from Paradise (Jerusalem). Aoun then began the play as the feminine core of Or Shalem, the earliest Jerusalem, a Canaanite city. Aoun / Jerusalem was the Palestinian who was simultaneously the Canaanite in the undivided land, indifferent...

Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen (review)

YI SANG COUNTS TO THIRTEEN. By Sung Rno. Directed by Lee Breuer. Warehouse Theatre 31, Seoul, Korea. 28 June 2009. Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen (Figure 1) is a contemporary American play staged for a Korean audience about the twentieth-century Korean Yi Sang (born Kim Haegyeong, 1910-1937). Yi Sang was a self-proclaimed genius poet during Korea's Japanese colonial period whose work was little understood. Beginning with his Twelfth of December (1930) and As the Raven Flies (Ogamdo, 1931 in Japanese and 1934 in Korean) and continuing with prose works The Wings (Nalgae, 1936) and Chronicle at the End of Life (Chongsaenggi, 1937), his writing baffled his contemporaries. His surrealistic poems were nonsensical, abstract, daring in their deconstruction of reality, and as odd as his adopted name, Yi Sang, which means strange in Korean. He was a lonely modernist who has been posthumously recognized as the preeminent surrealist that he was. Korean American playwright Sung Rno, a and experimental modernist himself with an MFA from Brown and numerous fellowships and awards, and avant-garde director Lee Breuer worked in unison to recreate Yi Sang's artistic world on stage during the author's residency at Mabou Mines. They took their production to the Seoul International Theatre Festival in 2000. Although Breuer considers that first production of Yi Sang Counts to Thirteen to have been totally unsatisfactory, ongoing interest in his work by Korean artists resulted in his return to Korea in 2009 to redirect the play. Jung Dae Kyung, of Warehouse Theatre 31, invited Breuer and Rno. Jianwoks Gagaelreori Incorporation in Seoul provided $75,000 for the creation of the new version. For this Seoul production, Breuer worked with a Korean team of major actors, designers, and visual artists. Rno modified the play for a Korean audience by translating it into Korean and adding contemporary Korean slang, and Breuer completely reconceived the staging in collaboration with the Korean artists, including set designer Paek Ji Hee. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Breuer's aesthetic--which mixes a stylistic range, meticulous choreography, and powerful visual images--perfectly realized Rno's fifteen-scene play, which was inspired by Yi Sang's surrealistic poems. Together Breuer and Rno created a production that engraved stunning images from Yi Sang's world of poems on the spectators' minds and planted the poet's deep solitude into the spectators' hearts. Korean audiences were mesmerized by the production, which ran for more than a month. Artist Paek Ji Hee designed the small seven- by six-meter stage. A screen spanning the entire rear of the stage is used for digital projections. A hydraulic lift over half the size of the stage rises to create a large central platform. Two wide venetian blinds suspended above it shut and open to reveal action on the platform. Another hydraulic lift at the rear of stage right allows actors to enter and exit the stage from above. Two stagehands in black open and close the blinds, give actors props, and sometimes film live images of the actors projected on the screen. Three male actors--Lee Chang Soo, Shin Dong Ryuk, and Lim Young Joon--play the narrator (Yi Sang) and the characters Blue and Red, respectively. Actress Kim So Jin plays Green. Blue represents Yi Sang's inner self. Red is Yi Sang's best friend, Koo Bon Heong, and Green is his lover, Kum Hong. Red and Green also portray other characters that exist in Yi Sang's poems. The production consists of three acts. The first is about Yi Sang's life, including a scene where Blue (Yi Sang) first meets Kum Hong, a Korean kisaeng (female entertainer-prostitute) with whom he falls in love. In another scene Blue witnesses his best friend, Red, and his lover having an affair in his apartment. The second act moves inside Yi Sang's imagination, where abstract and mysterious thought involving body parts dwell. Some images are drawn from Yi Sang's Poem XIII in As the Raven Flies: Holding the razorblade my arms became severed and fell off. …

The Natasha Plays

The Natasha Plays Yaroslava Pulinovich Translated by John Freedman These translations of The Natasha Plays: Natasha's Dream and I Won were originally produced by the MFA Program in Theatre Arts at Towson University in collaboration with the Center for International Theatre Development, with the following cast: Natasha Banina (Natasha's Dream).....................Julia M. Smith Natasha Vernikova (I Won)...............................Sarah Lloyd The productions were directed by Stephen Nunns. Natasha's Dream Character: Natasha—16 years old. Dressed in an athletic costume. Her hands are squeezed into fists. She often glances around her. She's missing one front tooth. Natasha See, that's all a bunch of crap that they're saying. None of that shit happened. Huh? You wanna hear what did? Anything else you want? Maybe you wanna quick fuck while we're waitin'? I'm not cussing. Those are regular words. (Silent. Looks straight ahead. Quiet suddenly.) All right. It happened . . . Huh? I'm not mumbling. I'm telling you normal (talks a little louder). It happened last year. September. We just got back from camp. I was even kinda happy that we were back. Because there was nothing but mosquitoes out at that camp and they put Cross-eyed Tanya in my room. So all night long I saw nothing but mosquitoes and her ass, and that's the last thing I wanted to see. The only funky thing that happened was when Vitya pantsed Alex and we all keeled over laughing. I felt a little bad for Alex—he probably didn't think it was so funny. Anyway. They said, pack up your things we're going home and when we were packed, I lifted Tanya's studded hair clip. What's a fat slob like her need with a hair clip? Then we got in the bus and I was kinda bummed out because I realized I can't even wear the thing. Tanya would sniff that out right away. I decided if I ever got a boyfriend I'd wear the hair clip on our dates. But until I get a boyfriend I'll just let it hang. But, man, it was like I knew something was going to happen! I mean, there was this guy. I'm not some scarecrow or something, but usually we just hung out at keggers. We even kissed a time or two. His breath stunk like potatoes all the time—I never realized how disgusting that is. I was kissing him at a dance once, we're kissing, and then I think—what if I stink like potatoes now but I just can't tell? Even if I didn't used to stink like potatoes I sure will now. So I ran into the bathroom and I stood there washing my mouth out with soap forever. Then a bunch of the girls dragged me [End Page 421] into one of the stalls to light up and I went with them. Sveta's inhaling beer and she opens the window and says, "You chicken to jump?" I say, "You stupid twit, are you crazy? Where you gonna jump to? It's the third floor." Sveta's all huffy and says, "I know you won't jump." And I say, "Who says I won't?" Man, she's telling me I won't jump! I say, "What makes you think I won't jump?" So she's going—"Jump! Jump!" And I say, "Hey pillow-tits, is your head screwed on wrong?" And she quick goes and opens the window wider. No, I mean, naturally, right then I got scared some but there was no going back then—I couldn't flake out in front of Sveta! So I give her this look like, you fucking cow, and down I went. I don't remember what happened after that. But as I was flying I really started shittin' it 'cause I figured this was it. And I made a wish: I want real love. I want a bridal veil and chocolate candies. And I want all the girls following us in a line and I want 'em all dying of envy. Only that's not the main thing. The main...

I Am the Machine Gunner

I Am the Machine Gunner Yury Klavdiev Translated by John Freedman This translation of I Am The Machine Gunner was originally commissioned and produced by Generous Company and developed at WordBRIDGE Playwrights Laboratory in collaboration with the Center for International Theatre Development. The cast for the development and premiere of the US production was: Young Man ..............................James Knight The production was directed by David M. White. Character: A Young Man about 20 to 30. Young Man If you didn't know any better it would seem like a snap—just up and go. All you have to do is cut half way across the city and then kick back. Easy as pie. There's a little resort place there. You rent a cottage, pull some beer out of the fridge—you get the drift. Pine trees, forest all around. I hadn't been out to the woods for two years. I mean, that's not counting the times I went out there to work over some retard. That's different. I'll tell you what: Life is hard. You gotta take time off, otherwise you get to feeling like a gnat trapped on a bus window. You ever seen that? Sure you have. Climbs half way up the window pane and slides back down. Starts climbing again and slips on down again. That goes on forever until it reaches the open crack in the window. Or until somebody squashes it. Pause. I'd never been to that little resort place before. But what's the difference? They're all the same except for how much the bar charges for tequila. All that really matters is that the sun shines (sneers) and no jackass starts a war. (Short pause. Slowly wipes his hand over his face as if he's extremely tired.) I got burned to a crisp and my head was exploding with an inferno of thoughts surging in from eternity even as they struggled wildly to keep pace with real time. Pause. The roar of a forest fire. Don't even think about death. There wasn't a single, untouched spot of earth where we were. Shrapnel, tracks, shells, empty cartridge cases smashed under foot. I dragged him off towards the sea and he was barfing all over my back because his lungs were all burned out and because he only had a couple of minutes left to live. But that's a lot when you're in pain. Who can say how long that is? Remember that. Pause. Silence. [End Page 443] That's how long it took him to die. How much can you do in that much time? For him it was enough to finish off a whole lifetime. True, he wasn't very old and he didn't know much about life. He didn't even have his own watch yet. He kept hanging onto his shoulder strap and he'd lost his helmet. A stray bullet ripped off his ear and his hair was soaked in blood and rifle grease. Shells and bombs are going off all over the place and airplanes are falling on us. There were bullets flying at us from the direction of the sea as if the sea itself were throwing death at us to make us keep our distance. Yeah. My palms were all blistered from the burns and there was blood seeping out of them. The scorched blood flaked on my skin, cracked up and fell off. Meanwhile he keeps whispering in my ear with his corrosive breath as if he was exhaling ammonia. And he's groaning about something. We got as far as the sea—dead and half-dead from fear. That evening we must have picked off enough men to fill a whole company. Just us two. On that part of the front for about five kilometers we were pretty much the only ones there. In fact, it felt to us like we were all alone on that whole goddamn Moonzund archipelago in the Baltic Sea. Pause. The silence is suddenly broken by the horrific sounds of battle. Silence again. I often think about my grandfather. He liked to sit on the balcony in...

Roman Tragedies , and: Coriolanus , and: Julius Caesar , and: Antony and Cleopatra (review)

Reviewed by: Roman Tragedies, and: Coriolanus, and: Julius Caesar, and: Antony and Cleopatra Sarah K. Scott Roman Tragedies Presented by Toneelgroep Amsterdam at the Barbican International Theatre Events 2009, London, England. November 20–22, 2010. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Translated by Tom Kleijn. Scenography and Lighting by Jan Versweyveld. Video by Tal Yarden. Music and Sound by Eric Sleichim. Costumes by Lies van Assche. Coriolanus Roeland Fernhout (Cominius), Renée Fokker (Tribune of the People), Fred Goessens (Menenius), Janni Goslinga (Virgilia), Marieke Heebink (First Senator), Fedja van Huêt (Coriolanus), Chico Kenzari (Aufidius), Chris Nietvelt (Anchorman), Frieda Pittoors (Volumnia), Alwin Pulinckx (Brutus), and Eelco Smits (Sicinius). Julius Caesar Roeland Fernhout (Brutus/Lucius), Renée Fokker (Cassius), Fred Goessens (Lepidus), Janni Goslinga (Calpurnia), Marieke Heebink (Casca), Chico Kenzari (Anchorman), Hans Kesting (Antony), Hugo Koolschijn (Julius Caesar), Hadewych Minis (Octavius Caesar), Eelco Smits (Decius), and Karina Smulders (Portia, Lucius). Antony and Cleopatra Roeland Fernhout (Thidias), Fred Goessens (Lepidus), Janni Goslinga (Diomedes), Marieke Heebink (Charmian), Fedja van Huêt (Agrippa), Chico Kenzari (Enobarbus), Hans Kesting (Antony), Hugo Koolschijn (Proculeius), Hadewych Minis (Octavius Caesar), Chris Nietvelt (Cleopatra), Frieda Pittoors (Iras), Alwin Pulinckx (Dolabella), Eelco Smits (Ventidius), and Karina Smulders (Octavia). Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s Roman Tragedies, part of the Barbican International Theatre Events (BITE) 2009 season, was a provocative, ambitious production conflating and reimagining Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra to create a chronicle of emerging populist Roman rule which traced public and private forms of ambition and power. Premiering in Amsterdam in 2007 and staged a year later at [End Page 347] the 2008 Avignon Festival, the London staging of the play was the Dutch company’s Barbican debut and its first production in London after a ten-year absence. The smart set-design, modern-dress costuming, and brilliant music complimented superb ensemble acting and a carefully crafted script to produce a deftly layered, visually stimulating study that vitalized the historical past by depicting, somewhat chaotically, political clashes of the present. Running time was approximately five-and-a-half hours with brief scene changes of three to ten minutes in lieu of an intermission. Actors delivered dialogue in Dutch. Click for larger view View full resolution Chris Nietvelt as Cleopatra and Hans Kesting as Antony (above), with (from left to right) Eelco Smits as Ventidius, Chris Nietvelt as Cleopatra, Marieke Heebink as Charmian, Jacob Derwig as Thidias, Hans Kesting as Antony, Janni Goslinga as Diomedes, Frieda Pittoors as Iras, Alwin Pulinckx as Dolabella, Barry Atsma as Enobarbus, Fedja van Huêt as Agrippa, and Hadewych Minis as Octavius Caesar (below) in Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s production of Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Ivo van Hove. Photo courtesy of Jan Versweyveld. A sleek, visually impressive contemporary set design used the entire Barbican stage to create an open-plan modern conference center. The audience was invited to watch the action on the stage amongst barrel-shaded accent lights, mushroom-colored modular sofas and stuffed chairs, coffee tables, and office planters. Numerous plasma-screen televisions delivered live and recorded images. Additional common areas were located to the far sides of the set, including makeup and first aid stations, a Toneelgroep [End Page 348] Amsterdam information area, and a bar and café serving London Pride and Pad Thai, among other fare. A space was also dedicated to a computer that was connected to a red LED display that ran English surtitles underneath the screen above the proscenium. The audience was invited to type messages that were then transmitted to the display, which meant that a good amount of jocular commentary was delivered when the surtitles were not running. Such messages, often distracting and gratuitous, included the following: “Apparently all Dutch men are gorgeous. I’m moving to Amsterdam” and “Take off your shirt Aufidius.” Click for larger view View full resolution Fedja van Huêt as Coriolanus (above), with (from left to right) Marieke Heebink as First Senator, Renée Fokker as Tribune of the People, Barry Atsma as Aufidius, and Jacob Derwig as Cominius (below) in Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s production of Coriolanus, directed by Ivo van Hove. Photo courtesy of Jan Versweyveld. The production favored the use of technology and media over the presentation...

International Theatre Festival in Jerusalem, November 23-26, 2008

International Theatre Festival in Jerusalem, November 23-26, 2008

Song of the Goat Theatre: Finding Flow and Connection

Anna Zubrzycki and Grzegorz Bral worked for a number of years with Gardzienice before founding Teatr Pieéń Kozła – Song of the Goat Theatre – in Wrocław in 1996. The conversation that follows took place on 22 June 2009, during Song of the Goat's run of Macbeth, their most recent production. Created in tandem with the Year of Grotowski theatre festival, the ‘World as a Place of Truth’ held in Wrocław on 13–30 June 2009, it was one of a series of meetings, presentations, and performances organized by Joanna Klass of Arden 2 for the US Artists Initiative, a project established in partnership with the Grotowski Institute and the Center for International Theatre Development. Macbeth will be performed at the Barbican Centre in London as part of Song of the Goat's two-month-long British tour of this production in October and November 2010, accompanied by workshops and demonstrations. Its itinerary is Eastleigh (4–9 October), Birmingham (11–15 October), Cambridge (18–23 October), Manchester Metropolitan University (25–30 October), London (3–20 November), and Brighton (21–26 November). This conversation about some of the principles of the company's work was led by Maria Shevtsova, Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Toward a National Heterotopia : Ancient Theaters and the Cultural Politics of Performing Ancient Drama in Modern Greece

Performing in ancient Greek theaters in modern Greece is an activity which often finds itself embroiled in the cultural politics surrounding a classical heritage which is conceptualized as venerable, unbroken, and exclusive. The first ever instance of a non-Greek production of a Greek play at the ancient theater of Epidaurus was the British Royal National Theatre's Oresteia directed by Peter Hall in 1982. (1) Despite Hall's adherence to key conventions of classical theater, such as an all-male cast and the use of masks, the admission of a non-Greek group to the theater of Epidaurus did not go uncontested. Yannis Varveris, a well-known critic, maintained: I do not think that this generosity is to our own cultural benefit, especially when it comes to Epidaurus. We are--as Rondiris has at least proved--capable of articulating our heritage better than anyone. A place of such sanctification like this koilon [the spectators' area in ancient amphitheaters] could be reserved for the whatsoever most legitimate interpretation of ancient drama and not yielded as an arena for international theater acrobatics, especially if the genre itself is not amenable to them. It is a matter of category. The tragic word is not just one page in theater repertory. It is morally and aesthetically adamant, most of all because it is ontological. Epidaurus is its natural manger. On the contrary, the foreign director, having not the affinity of language and the umbilical cord--of both language and place--with the source deigns well-intentioned experimentations which are perhaps irreverent. (2) This passage encapsulates the most cherished Greek views about ancient drama: uniqueness, legitimate interpretations, and the authenticity of a highly acclaimed tradition established by past Greek directors (Dimitris Rondiris, 1899-1981). It is telling that the theatrical space is discussed in a language pregnant with religious allusions (sanctification, manger) which, in turn, generates the view of a sacredly ontological text. Most notably, performing in Epidaurus, in the critic's view, presupposes a biological relationship with the place and the language (umbilical cord, source) which naturalizes the idea of Greek continuity from antiquity down to the present day. The view of the theater of Epidaurus as a sacred place continues to come up in disputes over stagings of Greek drama by, most characteristically, non-Greek directors. In the 2009 production of Dimiter Gotscheff's Persians, for example, the audience was exasperated every time the actors set foot on the ancient thymele, the altar of the god Dionysus, which is not meant to be stepped over according to a well-established Greek theater custom. (3) The spectators responded in indignation against the supposed act of desecration with hisses, loud jeers, and massive walk-outs which nearly interrupted the performance. The sacralization of the ancient theater of Epidaurus within modern Greek culture requires serious scrutiny in relation to the Greek claim of an exclusive authority over classical antiquity and the sense of cultural preeminence. However, the idea of sacred ancient ruins was not unknown to the nineteenth-century European imagination. The foundation of Greek state itself in the mid-nineteenth century triggered the Romantic Hellenism of European travelers, by providing the actual place where they could connect to the classical past through the ruins of antiquity. (4) In this spirit, leading theater figures of that time sought the very origin of the theatrical art in the ancient theater of Dionysus on the slopes of the Acropolis. When great Italian tragic actresses toured to Athens, their visits to the ancient monuments was filled with a sense of worship. Adelaide Ristori marveled at the theater of Dionysus in 1865, (5) while it is submitted that Eleonora Duse went on a pilgrimage there on the evening before her Athenian performance in 1899. …

Robert Lepage Inc. – Theatre for Festival Audiences

There has been much debate in recent years in scholarship on Robert Lepage's theatre regarding his position as a local-turned-global performance-maker in post-capitalist and post-postmodern contexts. Lepage has been seen as an exponent of intercultural theatre, cultural tourism and the festival marketplace, and his work has been viewed as a form of international theatre transforming and developing performance through movement between different cultures. The themes in Lepage's devised performances are at the junction where global intercepts local, showing Québécois characters exposed to international contexts that change them. In his narratives Quebec as a local site is perceived in response to processes of globalisation. Lepage's style of festival touring theatre develops through cycles, using the audience as another partner in the collective process. Lepage is aware that his kind of touring theatre would not exist if there were no international festivals to provide a market framework and commission his work. The paper looks at Lepage and his companies (Robert Lepage Inc. and Ex Machina) as an international corporation that engages its target audience as part of a process of economic, political, social and cultural globalisation, suggesting that the international festival audiences form a Festival Group following on from Huntington's Davos culture and Berger's Faculty Club International. Because Lepage's productions incorporate the audience's response into the creative process, they are substantially influenced by the reception of the Festival Group that both funds and serves as gatekeeper of cultural production. The paper challenges the notion of intercultural theatre based on equality and cultural exchange of local theatres, and rather sees festival theatre in a post-capitalist context where culture is a commodity.

“In the Interest of the State”: A Cold War National Theatre for the United States

The emerging cold war was a key moment for the question of a national theatre for the United States. Anxieties were strong around how the country should fulfill its new role as world super-power, while a need for national institutions to represent the United States created the context for the first truly fruitful collaboration between the live performance communities and the federal government. One the most important sites for this work was the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) during the first fifteen years following the end of World War II. In that period, a small group of theatre professionals, who were also war veterans, worked to transform ANTA into a public foundation for the performing arts. To understand the role theatre’s leadership played in moving the US government from suppressing to supporting the arts, this article focuses on the strategies and tactics of its postwar leadership, looking at both ANTA’s history and one of ANTA’s key projects—the International Theatre Institute (ITI), founded in 1948 as a nongovernmental organization of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Practical issues of funding were central, and ANTA’s leaders and others pointed to funding as evidence of national values. The pursuit of federal recognition and funding as the surest path to a national theatre, however, permanently altered the movement for a national theatre. As the 1950s wore on, the call became less for an institution that could be designated as a national theatre, and more for the imprimatur of “national” that only the federal government could bring.

Staging the Numinous1

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. These notes were part of the program and website for Kennesaw State University's production of Moby-Dick in April 2008. The dramaturgical website, which also includes information about the July 2009 trilingual adaptation of Gentile's Moby-Dick that took first place at the International Theatre Festival in Casablanca, can be accessed at <http://www.kennesaw.edu/theatre/moby-dick/>. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJane BarnetteJane Barnette is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, Kennesaw State University

Yangmen Nüjiang (Heroines of the Yang Family), Baishe Zhuan (Legend of the White Snake), Bawang Bieji (Farewell My Concubine), Guifei Zuijiu (The Drunken Beauty) (review)

YANGMEN NUJIANG (HEROINES OF THE YANG FAMILY), BAISHE ZHUAN (LEGEND OF THE WHITE SNAKE), BAWANG BIEJI (FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE), GUIFEI ZUIJIU (THE DRUNKEN BEAUTY). By Mei Lanfang Troupe. Artistic director Mei Baojiu. Kodak Theater, Hollywood, California, 10-11 October 2008. In 1930, Mei Lanfang entered the City of Angels after a long, tumultuous ship ride across the Pacific and was embraced by a wildly enthusiastic crowd. This marked the entrance of the Chinese celebrity whose name was already well known to the international theater community well before he had even set foot on the Los Angles stage. Mei Lanfang's illuminating performance, as well as his encounter with Hollywood luminaries Charlie Chaplin, Anna May Wong, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford would all become a part of Mei's legend to be reminisced and researched long after the iconic actor's return to China. Almost eighty years later, the same troupe, led by Mei Lanfang's youngest son Mei Baojiu (b. 1934), performed to an enthusiastic audience who flocked to the Kodak Theater in Hollywood to witness the historical return of this legendary troupe to a place where the original legend maker once conquered the stage. The performance marked not just a celebration of the consummate art of jingju (Beijing opera), but also brought out impressive crowds from the ever growing Southern California Chinese community. Much has changed since Mei Lanfang's visit to Los Angeles in 1930. In 2008, Chinese Americans are no longer powerless individuals without rights to citizenship, nor are they the economically disadvantaged minority group they once were. Their pronounced visibility and political power in the Los Angeles area today, as seen in the congratulatory remarks placed in the performance program by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and other elected officials, constitute a far different notion of Chinese Americans than the impoverished and discriminated-against assembly of laborers of the 1930s. Perhaps Rosana Hsu, the president of the California Institute of the Chinese Performing Arts (CICPA) and a sole sponsor of the tour, which rented the Kodak Theater in Hollywood for two nights in a row, best exemplifies this shift in the status of Chinese Americans. As a dedicated patron of traditional Chinese opera, she has spared no resources in introducing these genres to the Chinese American community as well as a certain cross section of the mainstream American public. Born into a wealthy family in China, she was able to enjoy a wide spectrum of the jingju repertoire from an early age in private performances at her house and learn arias from the guest singers. Her passion and taste for the extravagant jingju obviously has lasted a lifetime, culminating in the establishment of CICPA in 1994, which, since its founding, has been inviting numerous opera performers from mainland China to perform in a 275-seat theater in El Monte, California. It was Hsu's insistence on bringing the Mei Lanfang Troupe as soon as possible to the Los Angeles area that set the performance date in 2008 instead of a few years later. As one anonymous organizer told me, an event of this magnitude, with over fifty performers, thirteen orchestra members, and numerous other crew and technical staff, and with sets and costumes for six different plays, often takes several years to organize and publicize. But with blinding persistence, Hsu has made it possible for fortunate Southern California audience members to bear witness to the historic return of the star-studded troupe, which has not performed in the United States since Mei Lanfang's appearance in 1930. The seats in the Kodak Theatre were filled mostly by Chinese Americans for the two-night extravaganza, but also attending were a few non-Chinese, such as academics like myself and other curious spectators. On the opening night (10 October) at the reception before the performance Mei Baojiu appeared to the excited crowd. …

FROM ADAPTATION TO TRANSFORMATION: SHAKESPEARE CREOLIZED ON CAPE VERDE'S FESTIVAL STAGE

This is a tale of two directors. The setting is the Republic of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony and a tiny archipelago nestled off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Framing the story is Cape Verde's annual Mindelact International Theatre Festival, which since 1997 has invited Lusophone theatre artists from three continents to perform a wide array of theatre genres on a mainstage program alongside Cape Verdean troupes. João Branco, a Portuguese director who moved to the islands in the early 1990s, is the artistic director of both the Mindelact Festival and the veteran Cape Verdean theatre troupe GTCCPM (Grupo de Teatro do Centro Cultural Português do Mindelo/Theatre Group of the Mindelo Portuguese Cultural Center). For Mindelact 2003, GTCCPM performed an abridged version of King Lear rendered in Cape Verdean Crioulo, a mix of Portuguese and several West African languages. Beyond bolstering Branco's cherished goal of creolizing Shakespeare's plays by transporting them to Cape Verde's Afro-European cultural milieu, Rei Lear worked in concert with the festival's media blitz to extol local spectators in Mindelact's host city, Mindelo, for their good taste. Two years later, Herlandson Duarte, a young Cape Verdean director and Branco's former theatre student, staged a Crioulo-language Midsummer Night's Dream at Mindelact with his new theatre company, Solaris. Duarte's production transformed Bottom's play-within-a-play into a searing critique of Mindelense audiences and the structures of authority that prop up the festival itself.

Whither peacekeeping in Africa: Revisiting the evolving role of the United Nations

Post-Cold War turbulence between 1990 and 1994 led to huge UN peacekeeping operations and the cost of these operations increased six-fold over this period. However, as the number of peacekeepers declined sharply towards the end of the 1990s, critics were quick to contend that the UN Security Council had been lax in carrying out its mandate and responsibility to maintain international peace and security. Specifically, it was argued that the Security Council had limited responsibility and commitment to deploy Blue Helmets in sizeable numbers on the African continent where involvement in conflicts had been among the UN's most challenging endeavours. The tide has turned in recent years and today the UN deploys more peacekeepers in international peacekeeping theatres than ever before - the majority on African soil. The question arises : What does this imply with regard to the political will of the international community to invest in or contribute to peacekeeping operations in Africa? Furthermore, where does this leave important African roleplayers such as the AU and the envisaged African Standby Force? Against the above background this article aims at providing a better understanding of UN peacekeeping operations with special reference to African peacekeeping challenges.

American puppet modernism: essays on the material world in performance

Introductions The Sioux War Panorama and American Mythic History Masks and Shalako Puppets: Anthropology meets Indigenous Mask and Puppet Theater The Little Theater Movement and the Birth of the American Puppeteer Jane Heap and the International Theater Exhibition of 1926 Puppets and Propaganda Identity: Gertrude Stein's Puppet Show From Sorcery to Science: Remo Bufano and the 1939 World's Fair American Puppets and Television Kustom Kulture and Detroit Industrials: Cars as Performing Objects Landscape and Teeth Masks ACT-UP and the Puppetista Movement: Reinventing Activist Performance as Object Theater Mass Media and Motion Capture

Working the Field with Oral History: Talking Towards the Research Encounter in Theatre and Performance Studies

When I began teaching within the auspices of a drama department some years ago, I wondered: how does this curricular structure imagine the student of theatre and performance? How does it initiate students into the field? Can there be something new in the practice of theatre and performance studies, in its curricular modules and methodologies of instruction, to nurture the energetic connections between its practical and scholarly components? Whether faced with the propinquities of BFA or BA degree programs, these questions are pivotal for developing talent, teaching, and leadership in the interdisciplinary fields of theatre and performance. It is not just that institutional structures consistently illuminate a familiar division of labor among the faculty or in turn reproduce that old sequencing in students, who sense that they can safely care either about scholarly or practical study (as if those divisions made any sense), but not so easily accommodate both identities in their work. In this way, curricular concerns are as institutionalizing as they are pedagogical. Students are always grappling with what those distinctions might mean as they navigate their own imaginations of what they might do; the quality of these negotiations, in turn, impacts not only how our students apprehend the field, but how they invent its future possibilities. As a process of initiation, an education in theatre and performance typically introduces students to the protocols of authority that define the distinctive paradigms and powers of the field, here appended as acts of making performances versus critical thinking about them, “as though studies were theory and the arts were practice.” 2 Curriculum development has always been one of the mechanisms to articulate and develop shifts in the organization of the field and its methodologies at the local level—sometimes, as those with an appetite for departmental histories know, with epochal struggle. Whether or not faculty choose to deliberate upon it, curricula elaborate theoretical agendas. Within the international theatre and performance studies community there is real commitment

Der Sprachpluralismus und die Sprachpflege in Algerischen Theater: Der Fall des Theaterstückes „El Ajouad“ von Abdelkader Alloula

Linguistic Pluralism and Language Maintenancein the Algerian theatre: The case of the play "El Ajouad" by Abdelkader Alloula&#x0D; This article is primarily intended as a linguistic contribution within the large and diverse complex of Alloula's research, including literary, linguistic and theater results.Brecht is one of the central figures in international theater history, both as a theater practitioner and playwright and as an important theoretician and aesthetician. He had a strong influence on the German language and had an effect on it. Thanks to this dual competence as a practitioner and a theoretician, Brecht presents an extremely interesting subject of investigation.The well-known Algerian dramaturge Abdelkader Alloula was inspired by Brecht. He said this publicly in a conversation with university teacher and researcher Mhamed Djellid(Oktober 1985 ; 10):“Brecht was and remains a role model in my work through his theoretical writings and his artistic work. I will even say that he is my spiritual father and better still my friend and my faithful companion”.Like Brecht, Abdelakder Alloula worked on the Algerian language so creatively, cultivated it so passionately and nurtured it from the soil of the standard written language. In the piece "El Ajouad" there is a lot to say and also to learn about this language work.

The Reflection Forums at Moving Stage Lab

In 2005 Bruce Barton and I were commissioned by the Danish chapter of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) to design and facilitate an ambitious laboratory on theatrical devising. The intentions and framework given by the ITI were to foster exchange between twenty-four professional stage artists from the Scandinavian and Baltic countries through a physical workshop with an online reflection component. The participants included playwrights, dramaturges, directors, choreographers, performing artists and designers. The workshop, known as Moving Stage Lab (MSL), was held in the summer of 2006 as part of the Nordic Theatre Days Festival in Copenhagen.