Kim Solga Research Articles

Views and Reviews

Views and Reviews Natalie Alvarez "If the theatre were a verb," Anne Bogart writes in A Director Prepares, "it would be 'to remember'" (22). The bountiful body of scholarship on theatre and memory that has accumulated over the past three decades alone seems to substantiate Bogart's claim, and the views and reviews featured here contribute to this corpus by raising provocative questions about this poetic coupling. But what is an act of remembrance and how does the theatre remember? To remember is to recapture the past in a unique form of possession: it is to bring back before oneself a past event but simultaneously to negate it, to acknowledge that the past is not, in fact, now, nor as it was. We could say that remembering is as much about forgetting: a past event is reclaimed as another is displaced and recedes again into the oblivion of time (which gives another sense to Michel de Certeau's assertion that "memory is a sort of anti-museum" (108)). Remembrance, then, occupies a metaphorical space of analogy and of seeming. If theatre is remembering, as Bogart says, it is because they share the same task: to overcome the inevitable failure to restore the past. If theatre remembers, it does so as a palliative praxis, "exorcising the vertigo time" by "conquering it through repetition" (Ubersfeld 136). If theatre and remembering share the same task, they also share the same structure. As Peggy Phelan writes, "performance plunges into visibility—in a maniacally charged present—and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility" leaving "no visible trace" (148-49). The upcoming production of Vancouver's The Only Animal titled Sea of Sand, a site-specific show at Jericho Beach, makes elegiac use of these performative disappearing acts with set pieces made of sand that are swept away by the tide. "The beach," Kendra Fanconi writes in her lyrical treatise "Place Remembers" featured in these pages, "is an amnesiac [...] What we construct is washed away. Within a day, no trace remains." A story about an amnesiac who encounters the washed-up remains of his past life, Sea of Sand dramatizes this ebb and flow of forgetting and remembering. But the piece also invites us to think about the particular ontology of site-specific performance that complicates what we understand as the ephemerality and "tracelessness" of performance. Fanconi reminds us of how place serves as both a context and container of remembrance. "This is our version of public artwork," Fanconi writes, "the memory trace we have left on the landscape" (99). [End Page 88] These traces, like the remains washed up on the beach in Sea of Sand or the wheels of recordings in Krapp's Last Tape, save us from becoming complete amnesiacs and forgetting altogether. In an interview with Michael Hays, director Jennifer Tarver shares her insights on Beckett's play after critically acclaimed runs at Stratford in 2008 and Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 2010. Tarver considers the metaphor of Krapp's reel-to-reel player as not merely concrete proof of the past's existence. The tape plays only to be looped in on itself, winding back tightly on a spool—a movement that not only captures a quintessentially Beckettian gesture of moving "forward only to go back" (94), but also the movement of remembrance that allows the past to be reinserted in the present, only to recede once again. For Anne Ubersfeld, performance provides a means of overcoming the forgetting of memory and retrieving what has been forgotten. But if it can retrieve the past, it can also re-inflict its pain. In her examination of the domestic memory play The Walworth Farce in which family members terrorize themselves through a repeated re-enactment of the family's sordid history, Kim Solga examines the "fickle," and potentially damaging, "performatics of memory" (89). Not unlike the movement of Krapp's reel-to-reel, the memory play in The Walworth Farce "fold[s] in on itself " though here, the recounting is "an act of terror" that "consum[es] its witnesses" (90). Solga's review raises important questions about the ways in which theatre can be traumatogenic. That "performance might augment and reproduce...

Performance and the City. Edited by D. J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga. Performance Interventions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. xiv + 269. $90.00 cloth, $29.00 paper.

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Violence Against Women in Early Modern Perfomance: Invisible Acts (review)

Reviewed by: Violence Against Women in Early Modern Perfomance: Invisible Acts Catharine Gray Violence Against Women in Early Modern Perfomance: Invisible Acts. By Kim Solga. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. 248. Kim Solga's stimulating study participates in an innovative trend in scholarship on early modern drama to interweave late-modern performance theory with historically specific representations of embodied violence. In this way, she contributes to recent critical discussion of the shattered selves and violated bodies of the Renaissance stage, but does so by calling attention to a representational and scholarly gap. Solga argues that the embodied suffering caused by violence against women is too often missed by modern scholars' analyses of stage violence and is actively suppressed or displaced by early modern representations of that violence. Her goal is to make acts and effects of violence against women visible, while calling attention to the ways in which their invisibility is actively produced and reproduced, socially and performatively, then and now. Her approach is polemical and experimental: combining analyses of historical non-literary documents, canonical plays, and recent performances, she argues for feminist practices of performance and scholarship that would stand witness to and interrogate this telling absence, rather than simply repeat it. The book focuses on rape and domestic violence in four "iconic" plays (canonical plays that continue to be regularly performed) from the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling. Solga's introduction establishes the theoretical grounds and ethical stakes of her analysis of these plays, as she uses performance theory's emphasis on the ephemerality, absences, and alternate ways of knowing embodied in performance to theorize what she calls "the in/visible act" (16). This act is "the performance of violence against women as critical forgetting; it charges its witnesses to come to terms with what we've missed but also with how we've missed—with how we have failed to see the suffering before us, hidden in plain sight" (17). Each main chapter exposes the "latent" potential for this self-consciously critical mode of performing and witnessing in early modern plays, and then analyzes in detail selected modern performances that best "manifest" this potential (3). Solga begins each of her core chapters by revealing how early modern conduct books, legal prescriptions, religious treatises, and architectural discourses script women's public performance of victimization in ways that work to contain female suffering and promote the patriarchal status quo. In fact, her chapters have a neat, tripartite structure: they begin with analysis of the cultural scripts regulating Renaissance representations of violence against women; then proceed to close readings of plays potentially troubling to these regulated depictions; and end with detailed explorations of recent productions that offer ethically engaged forms of feminist spectatorship. Chapter 2, for example, analyzes the way legal discourses construct a socially condoned role for rape victims, one they must adopt when telling their story publicly in order to be taken seriously. According to Solga, Titus Andronicus depicts Lavinia as spectacularly failing to enact this approved social role, indeed failing to "act" in any readily comprehensible way at all. Through this failure, the play reveals the wider, social scripts and theatricalizations shaping public displays of victimhood. Solga argues that the best performances of Shakespeare's play help us to see rape's history as resting on a series of legal and social performances that consistently sanitize and displace women's experience of suffering—a suffering Titus Andronicus refuses to hide. The chapter concludes with an analysis of [End Page 478] modern productions that stress both the elisions and social performances that structure rape's representation, reserving particular praise for Julie Taymor's eclectic and self-reflexive film Titus. In the next two chapters, Solga moves beyond Shakespeare to consider how representations of domestic violence are shaped by the cultural scripts and social performances associated with religious discourse (chapter 3) and engendered by architectural space (chapter 4). Her analysis of The Duchess of Malfi is particularly illuminating for revealing moments when the Duchess resists the sublimation of emotional and bodily pain required...

Building the Activist Classroom: Learning to Collaborate, Learning through Performance in English 2470: Canadian Drama

What does it take to build an “activist” classroom in practice? How do students learn what it means to collaborate, to make knowledge interdependently? How can performance assist in this process? UWO Associate Professor Kim Solga talks with former undergraduate students Paige Beck and Lauren Moore about the ways in which regular group performance work both helped and hindered their and their peers' experience in Canadian Drama: Performing An Intercultural Nation in winter 2010.

Building the Activist Classroom: Learning to Collaborate, Learning through Performance in English 2470:Canadian Drama

KIM SOLGA talks with former undergraduate students PAIGE BECK and LAUREN MOORE about the ways in which regular group performance work both helped and hindered their and their peers' experience of "the activist classroom" in Canadian Drama: Performing An Intercultural Nation in winter 2010.

Toward the Activist Classroom

Toward the Activist Classroom Kim Solga In the spring of 2005 I spent several months in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. I was there to be a part of an innovative PhD stream called "Performance as a Public Practice." My colleagues and I worked closely with extraordinary, socially engaged practitioners. We made work of our own and we talked again and again about how, when, and where theatre becomes a force for political and cultural change and when, where, and how it does not. When I returned to Canada to take up my first full time teaching job in September that year, I was full of the theories and practices I had absorbed at UT and determined to implement the ethos of Performance as a Public Practice in my own teaching. My new job was in an English department, in which students were accustomed to calling plays "novels." I knew immediately that by demanding the students learn by doing—by performing, embodying, making personal the very political work we would read together—I could help them to see theatre's potent public strengths. We began (in the wake of Hurricane Katrina) with a simple exercise: what if you were a theatre artist in Houston, in Baton Rouge, or in Nashville, I asked them; how would you muster your resources to help the people of New Orleans? I was amazed at the eager, smart responses—something that continued each week thereafter as students, divided into teams for the term, made outstanding poor theatre and spoke with sensitivity about what they and their peers were accomplishing, for whom, and whether or not it mattered. We were on our way. Six years on, I am now a decorated teacher at my school, something that makes me proud but also makes me laugh. After all, I'm not doing anything that my peers in theatre and drama departments across North America aren't doing; I'm just a queer [End Page 3] presence on a campus where "Theatre" no longer formally exists. I've always known that my students and I do good work, but I've also always known that we're not special. I've been wanting to tap into the teaching and learning knowledge of my fellow theatre and performance teachers for a long time; this issue has grown from my hunger to know not just how my work fits in, but how it could be better, stronger, for the help, advice, and encouraging war stories of my peers. What makes us good teachers? What makes our classrooms collaborative learning spaces? What makes our classrooms safe spaces to try out unsafe ideas? What makes our classrooms places where large-scale change can, in tiny steps, appear to begin? What makes our teaching activist, anyway? How do we—teachers and students—define that term for ourselves? My activist classroom is constantly evolving, and it will be so much richer for my experience of putting this issue of CTR together. For those looking for concrete suggestions to improve their teaching, Julia Lane, James McKinnon, Grahame Renyk, and Jenn Stephenson offer exercises that can be transported straight from these pages into the classroom. Lane considers the natural weave between improv performance and environmental education, and provides simple, excellent exercises from a recent workshop. McKinnon asks us to consider the creativity required to produce a good adaptation, and to use that creativity to help students rethink their capacity to be producers of "real" art. Renyk and Stephenson introduce us to the ICE technique and its capacity to enliven both assessment and assignment design. Learning to teach better isn't just about absorbing new techniques, of course; it's also about listening to the stories that mark us as teachers, for better or worse. Some classroom struggles can seem intractable, and those of us who fight for sexual, racial, and gendered social justice each day know all too well how hard bridging the divide between activist life choices and activist teaching choices can be. Natalie Alvarez and Stephen Johnson both teach the history of blackface performance. They stage here a conversation about the challenges of that work and...

Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts. By Kim Solga. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. 248. $85 cloth.

Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts. By Kim Solga. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. 248. $85 cloth.

Views and Reviews

Money, Money: Is Theatre a Rich Man's Game?, by Robin Breon How to Be Indie: The Fight for Independent Theatre Artists to Get What They Need from the Canadian Actors' Equity Association, by Alison Broverman What Did You Say about My Mama? On Being Productively Uppity, by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard Marlis Schweitzer, When Broadway was the Runway: Theatre, Fashion, and American Culture, reviewed by Sally Charnow Kim Solga, D.J. Hopkins, and Shelley Orr, eds., Performance and the City: Performing and Writing Urban Space, reviewed by Helen Paris

Realism/Terrorism: The Walworth Farce

Kim Solga reviews The Walworth Farce – a "farce" in name only – as a play that is actually about the dangerous performatics of memory. As it explores the ways in which the theatre both enables and *dis*ables the drive to remember, it thinks seriously about traumatic re-enactment and the limits of the theatre as a site for such.

Views and Reviews

Introduction to Views and Reviews, by Natalie Alvarez Realism/Terrorism:The Walworth Farce, by Kim Solga Remembering Beckett, interviewed by Matthew Hays Violence, Memory, and America, by Alex McLean Place Remembers, by Kendra Fanconi with contributions from Eric Rhys Miller Stanislavsky as Catalyst, by Grahame Renyk Directors and Voice Work: An Attempt to Bridge the Gap, by David Ley

Re-reading Rape in The Changeling

In Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622), Beatrice-Joanna's father insists that she marry Alonzo di Piracquo. Her servant De Flores demands her virginity in payment eliminating Piracquo so that she may instead marry Alsemero, predicting, loathsomely but correctly, that Thou'lt love anon / What thou so fears't and faint'st to venture (3.4.173-74).1 Alsemero, despite his apparent lack of sexual experience, travels prepared with test to ensure that his wife, should he happen to acquire one his journey, is virgin. When Beatrice-Joanna is discovered to have had sex with De Flores and to have colluded in Piracquo's murder, her father, husband, and lover all turn her. Alsemero even locks her into closet with De Flores, commanding repeat performance of her adultery: I'll be your pander now; rehearse again / Your scene of lust, that you may be perfect (5.3.114-15).In response to this trafficking in Beatrice-Joanna, The Changeling has sometimes been read as about rape. In provocative and influential essay challenging long tradition of demonizing Beatrice-Joanna, Deborah Burks argues that the not only presents De Flores's defloration of Beatrice-Joanna as but also, in accord with obsolete but not superceded statute definitions of rape, as crime targeted at propertied men, through piece of their property, women. The violation of the woman in this is shown clearly and horribly to be an assault man, by whom she means first Piracquo but then Beatrice- Joanna's husband, Alsemero, and her father, Vermandero (762-63). (As this string of possible stakeholders suggests, one of the interesting things about the is that it is hard to determine in 3.4 precisely who owns Beatrice-Joanna and is thus the victim of this theft.)2 Christina Malcolmson calls what happens between Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores a form of (156); Molly Smith describes their relationship as rooted in (112, 90). Building the assumption that what happens between De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna is rape, Judith Haber reads the as insisting on the coincidence of fear and desire, of virgin and whore, of marriage and (80). Although Kim Solga points out that Beatrice-Joanna's status as victim of sexual violence (indeed, of any violence at all) is wholly uncertain (146), and therefore up to the audience to determine, she also consistently assumes that De Flores rapes Beatrice-Joanna, who might best be described, therefore, as victim. Finally, Karen Bamford labels The Changeling late Jacobean play (151).This essay argues that The Changeling depicts coercion and consent in socially and morally complex ways that describing it as rape play flattens. I am particularly interested in the ways in which Beatrice-Joanna is herself sometimes coercive or at least strategic in her schemes to have her will. Yet I also want to challenge division in criticism of The Changeling between those critics who argue that the depicts and those who simply ignore the possibility and the criticism that posits it. Although questioning the usefulness of as verdict is riskier strategy than ignoring it, keeping the possibility of active allows us to scrutinize the interplay of coercion and consent, of victimization and strategy, not only in the but also more broadly in theoretical and historical discussions of rape. I propose to re-read the in light of both Janet Halley's critique of carrying brief for the feminine, or in this case, female character, and recent work the available ways of describing and assessing sexual coercion in seventeenth-century England. Is it possible to re-read the negotiations between Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores in The Changeling as something other than rape, as statutes defined it, while still suggesting that the participates in history of debating rape's meaning? Is it possible to take break from either defending or prosecuting Beatrice-Joanna? …

Review of <em>Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts</em> by Kim Solga

Review of <em>Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts</em> by Kim Solga

Ghosts: Death's Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre Kim Solga Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre. By Alice Rayner . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006; pp. xxxv + 205. $67.50 cloth, $22.50 paper. At the end of her sometimes frustrating yet finally marvelous Ghosts, Alice Rayner returns to the scene of her own haunting. She opens her afterword with a brief anecdote about a young colleague who recently remarked that "she was awfully tired of all the talk about loss and death and trauma." "And, indeed," responds Rayner, "it seems these concerns may have run the critical course in academia, especially in the fading light of Derrida and Lacan and poststructural fever" (183). So what, writes the author [End Page 698] to herself, am I doing in this book? Is this discourse about the ghosts that haunt the materiality of the stage, the traumatic effects theatre generates, and the encounter with trauma it produces merely nostalgic? Is it a warding-off of its own loss? Or is it something more? I appreciated this anecdote, voicing as it did the ghostly question that trails this book that is full of spooks, because I had wondered a few times in its pages whether I was truly reading something new, or whether in fact I was reading the same chapter over and over again. And yet, faced with Rayner facing her own death's double in the form of the spectral question, I found myself shaking my head. In hindsight, I don't think Rayner needs to worry. As she traces theatre's engagement with and complication of human perception, "not so much to give us truth as to enable us to encounter the otherwise unseen, unacknowledged, and denied reality of what is not otherwise apparent" (184–85), her book marks for me a kind of culmination—or perhaps I might more accurately say a joining together—of two recent performance theory preoccupations. The first is the attempt, made iconic by Peggy Phelan in Unmarked, to understand theatre's ontology in terms of the missed, the absent, the disappeared—that which "hides in plain sight" as Rayner often puts it. For Rayner, theatre's specificity lies not in its passing into disappearance, as Phelan famously theorized in Unmarked, but rather in the way it is haunted by disappearance, by what Rayner calls the "ghosts" that raise questions about what we do and do not see when we watch performance—the ghosts that plague our attempts at belief, the ghosts that operate those characteristics germane to all theatre: "repetition, the double, matter, and memory" (xxviii–xxix). The second appears in scholarship that centers on performance's power as a memorial device, its status as a witness to the traumas of history, and its potential as a model or even a vehicle for a better, more inclusive future. Phelan's work in Mourning Sex stands out for me here, but so does David Román's recent Performance in America and Jill Dolan's Utopia in Performance. Rayner might fear that she is writing into an abyss at the tail end of a long and exhausted intellectual tradition, but my sense is that she is, rather, building a bridge between performance as the stuff of loss and doubt and performance's positive, public powers of mourning. My favorite thing about Ghosts is the ease with which the author assimilates a variety of theoretical and practical discourses. This is a book of phenomenology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, but it is also a book about the stuff of the theatre and about what things like curtains (chapter 5, "Double or Nothing: Ghosts Behind the Curtains"), curtain times (chapter 1, "Tonight at 8:00: The Missed Encounter"), props and prop tables (chapter 3, "Objects: Lost and Found"), and lighting technology (chapter 6, "Ghosts Onscreen: The Drama of Misrecognition") might have to do with phenomenology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. All of Rayner's analyses are governed by the trope of ghosting, the notion that the simplest, most seemingly transparent relations produced at the theatre mask an unseen other. The encounter with this other defines theatre as such for Rayner and allows it to act...

Book Reviews

Ian Cohen-Cruz and Mady Schutzman, A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics, reviewed by David Watt Elain Aston, Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory, reviewed by Erin Striff James Fisher, Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays, reviewed by Philip C. Kolin Stephen Bottoms, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee, reviewed by Norma Jenckes Philip C. Kolin, Understanding Adrienne Kennedy, reviewed by Erin Hurley Varun Begley, Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism, reviewed by Mireia Aragay Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama, Vol. 2: 1933–1952, reviewed by Lee White James M. Harding and John Rouse, ed., Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance, reviewed by Kim Solga Joe Kelleher, Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion, reviewed by Julia Dobson,

The "Garbage Heap" of Memory: At Play in Pope's Archives of Dulness

This article is a regular feature of Fifteenth-Century Studies. Our intent is to catalogue, survey, and assess scholarship on the staging and textual configuration of dramatic presentations in the late Middle Ages. Like all such dated material, this assessment remains incomplete. We shall therefore include 2007 again in the next listing. Our readers are encouraged to bring new items to our attention, including their own work. Monographs and collections selected for detailed review will appear in the third section of this article and will be marked by an asterisk in the pages below. On late-medieval in general we report that the periodical European Medieval Drama* in its seventh, eighth, and ninth volumes, highlights the thespian activities of many countries. Also, on a more theoretic note, an article in Comparative Drama and a monograph are devoted to the origins of theater. Steven F. Walker probes India and Greece before Christ and muses whether staging was a global phenomenon then, where actors performed scenic events in ritual or entertainment, watched by (passive) spectators. The monograph of Eli Rozik rethinks similar origins, where fictional human beings were imprinted upon real persons, a process beginning in rituals. Spontaneous image-making exploited the actors' mimetic faculties - in Rozik's book Roots of Theater. While Donnalee Dox studies the in Latin Christian times, beginning with Augustine's, Isidore of Seville's, and Rabanus Maurus's objections against the stage, she also considers attempts reworking pagan into Christian drama. William Egginton tells us how the world became a stage. In another articleJody Enders reviews rape and the violent foundations of medieval theater, and Kim Solga reports (on the same topic) that rapes are rarely seen on the stage but told (epically) by a person, at a safe distance. As for English stages, eight monographs were devoted to general aspects. Pamela A. Brown wrote on women, drama, and the culture of jest, and found that mostly lower-class women submitted to drunken husbands but gained a social validity within their communities. Alehouses became theater stages for dramas of sexuality, commerce, and violence. Sarah Carpenter and Meg Twycross viewed masks and masking, while Clifford Davidson pondered the subjects of history, religion, and violence on the stage in a collection of his past articles, showing several genres of English plays in their cultural settings. Peter Happe investigated the cyclic form of mystery plays, comparing them to continental and iconic counterparts - but holding new research in abeyance. His bibliography focused mostly on English scholarship. Furthermore, volume two of Minstrels Playing (Music) was brought out by Richard Rastall; critics discovered serious shortcomings in both volumes. John Elliott et al. brought out the Oxford Records of Early English Drama, the seventeenth volume of the Records series, covering 360 years from 1284 to 1642/43, while Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel studied From Script to Stage in early modern drama (methodology). Gender and Medieval Drama was probed by Kate Normington: women's roles in Corpus Christi plays were held by cross-dressed males, except for those of vulgar parts, i.e., the Chester ale wife and Mrs. Noah. Signifying Godby Sarah Beckwith viewed medieval York stagings (Corpus Christi plays) and their contemporary revival, complete with communal struggles and problems. In the Middle Ages, these festivities did not unify the citizens, she emphasized; and chief divisions between the merchants and the manufacturing guilds persisted, as did the tension between performers and ruling elites. However, sacramental thus made present the absence of Christ's body. Natalie Crohn Schmitt pondered numerology in York's creation sequence, with the first numerologist being God. She discussed the number five as structural symbol (to be compared, perhaps, to that number in the Old French Lfe fSt. …