Physical Theatre Research Articles

THE GENESIS OF THE TERMS “PHYSICAL THEATRE” AND “PLASTICHESKIY THEATRE”

Each era of theatre history has its own characteristics and is distinguished by its main trends, work of prominent stage figures, key terms and concepts. Modern theatre art has radically changed as a result of global changes in the economy, politics and culture. Some topical distinctive properties date back to the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, when the attitude towards drama text, artistic solution and form of the performance, space of the stage changed.Currently, with each year, more new forms are added to Kazakhstani theatre space. New performing arts centers and groups, positioning themselves as, for example, a physical theatre, a plasticheskiy theatre or a dance theatre, are created. Therefore, it has become relevant to study the phenomenon of productions, wherein movement is the main means of expression.The terms "physical theatre" and "plasticheskiy theatre" have become wide spread in the performing arts of Kazakhstan. They have firmly entered modern theatrical vocabulary causing some disputes and discussions at the same time. The purpose of this article is to define the terms "physical theatre" and "plasticheskiy theatre" and establish their connection.The article systematizes information related to the appearance of the terms under consideration. Materials by contemporary foreign theatre researchers, works of leading practitioners and theorists of the XX century stage are used. An attempt to identify the genesis and specifics of the development of "physical" and "plasticheskiy" theatres, as well as determine the content of the concepts "physical theatre" and "plasticheskiy theatre”, which are becoming increasingly widespread in the modern theatre of Kazakhstan, is made. These results can be used by theatre practitioners in the creative process and by teachers and students of performing arts departments of creative universities in the educational cycle.

Touch as a feedback loop: exercising the leap from inertia to activation

This article critically reflects on the facilitation of embodied practice in virtual spaces of teaching, learning and creation, specifically looking at ways of facilitating touch within the broader context of decolonising dance and movement practices in South Africa. When working without the touch of another (human)being, I explore how the affordances of environment and surfaces can offer a feedback loop for the sounding body in motion. The article draws from experiences of facilitating movement and physical theatre courses at the University of Pretoria to suggest how touch may become an embodied technique that structures practice in spaces of isolation and inertia and in times where notions of continuity and discontinuity are ruptured. I explore how walls, surfaces and objects become secondary affordances that offer an external force onto the body through tactility. Reading discourses of embodiment and decoloniality through one another, I further argue that using touch to re-initiate motion offers political possibilities to exercise the leap from inertia to activation, and trouble the colonially formed category of human.

Signed Music in the Deaf Community

In the spring of 2019, the first signed musical stage production was performed at Festival Clin d’Oeil—the world’s largest deaf arts festival that brings thousands to Reims, France, biennially. Surrounded by visual and performing arts, an invited delegation from Canada debuted the musical The Black Drum internationally, incorporating physical theater, signed music, projection, and dance. Signed music is an inter-performance art that demonstrates musical elements by culturally deaf individuals who have explored creating musical performances with their hands and bodies. These performances operate according to a distinct artistic style, incorporating elements of signed languages; rhythmic hand, facial, and/or body motions; and media video arts. This article offers insight into the performers’ process and development of a deaf-created signed musical for an international audience, the ways signed music galvanizes community and identity through self-expression, and the impact of The Black Drum on an international audience at Festival Clin d’Oeil. Through ethnomusicological analysis and reflection with perspectives as insider-outsider-mediator, signed music has been researched by the authors and observed throughout the development of The Black Drum in preparation for its Canadian and European premieres. The festival setting is a place where new types of performances are welcomed and evaluated for their acceptance into the community. Responses from audience members and performers revealed that signed music is an emerging genre of its own.

Chekhov’s Gull

Chekhov’s Gull

Introduction

A scene from Grand Panorama, directed and designed by Theodora Skipitares. Photo: Richard Termine.The ever-expanding world of puppetry presents a rich fabric of cultural influences encompassing old and new styles that approach nearly every subject imaginable: from climate change to the performance of ancient texts to contemporary politics and immigration. The pieces collected here provide a snapshot of this artistic field and a plethora of styles, including shadow puppets, hand puppets, Japanese bunraku-style puppets, rod and arm puppets, marionettes, stick puppets, and a melding together of puppetry with dance, physical theatre, and opera.Claudia Orenstein explores the impact of the three-week-long visit of the ten-year-old Syrian refugee puppet Little Amal to New York City from September to October 2022. Created by the South African Handspring Puppet Company, the U.S. itinerary of this performance followed after the gigantic puppet’s 5,000-mile journey across Turkey, Europe (France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Belgium, among other countries), and the UK in search of her mother. Walking in NYC across all five boroughs with the assistance of numerous puppeteers, and followed by large crowds everywhere she went, the itinerant performance drew together New York’s many immigrant communities and spread a message of hope and inclusion to audiences throughout the city.John Bell revisits the legacy of the radical Bread and Puppet Theater, founded by Peter Schumann in 1963, which remains one of the longest-running puppetry companies in the U.S. Just shy of its sixtieth anniversary, the celebrated activist ensemble’s work continues today under Schumann’s direction as documented in reviews of the two recent Covid-era productions included here, written by Skye Strauss and Paul Bedard. The company continues to address contemporary politics head on with the playfulness and do-it-yourself aesthetic for which they have long been known.Kate Brehm offers us a snapshot of puppetry in New York City over the Winter 2022 season, covering four puppetry events and a broad range of artists from the U.S. and abroad. These works include Book of Mountains and Seas, a collaboration between Basil Twist and Huang Ro at St. Ann’s Warehouse, which also hosted multiple productions in the Puppet Lab series also reviewed here; Song of the North by Hamid Rahmanian at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; and Theodora Skipitares’s Grand Panorama at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club.Lastly, Robin Frohardt provides an excerpt from her production The Plastic Bag Store, “a tragicomic ode to the foreverness of plastic,” which premiered in Times Square in 2020 and has since toured to Los Angeles, Chicago, and Austin, Texas. The Plastic Bag Store is a public art installation that questions the enduring effects of our single-use plastics. In the piece, shelves are stocked with thousands of original, hand-sculpted items to mimic store products made from discarded plastics and packaging. During timed activations, the store transforms into an immersive stage involving inventive puppetry, shadow play, and intricate handmade sets.Considered together, these pieces are a testament to some of the most exciting work happening in the theatre now, and offer new meaning to the power of objects to speak for the human. As humankind becomes ever-more fragile and divided, puppets seem to provide a universal language to explore an unknown future.

Seeing Puppetry: Winter Report from New York City

Seeing Puppetry: Winter Report from New York City

Unspoken Indigenous History on the Stage: The Postcolonial Plays of Jack Davis

Literary scholars and linguists have argued extensively that language is not simply a purely representational vehicle of thought but its determining medium, whose ordering powers not only shape cognizance of reality but are also actively involved in processes of imperialism and cultural erasure. It is the determinative yet slippery quality of language, prompting the loss of meaning in attempts at translation, that colonial powers manipulated to violent effect and which, as enacted in the plays of Nyoongah Indigenous Australian playwright Jack Davis, continue to haunt history and the present. This article considers how a history and culture made unspeakable by colonialism through the erasure of Indigenous Australian oral traditions, languages, and historical perspectives is translated on to the Anglophone stage in the plays of Davis, one of the first Indigenous playwrights to be published and performed internationally, and how this was received by the witnessing audience. Davis achieves this theatrical translation not only through the negotiation and manipulation of colonial language and verbatim history alongside Indigenous languages, enacting a kind of linguistic double consciousness, but also through physical theatre and dance. The latter are the central means of communicating meaning and knowledge in Nyoongah culture. Jacqueline M. Brown is a graduate student at Worcester College, University of Oxford, studying for a Master of Studies in English (1900–present). This article received first prize in the 2022 TORCH Reimagining Performance Network Graduate Essay Prize competition run in collaboration between the University of Oxford and New Theatre Quarterly. For more information on the Reimagining Performance Network, see <https://torch.ox.ac.uk/reimagining-performance-network>.

The Climate Siren

An accomplished dancer, acrobat, and physical theatre performer, Hanna Cormick became ill in 2014 with a trifecta of rare genetic conditions that make her severely allergic to pollutants in the air — smoke, detergents, and food particles — and her bones and internal organs prone to dislocation. In January 2020, during Australia’s summer of unprecedented bushfires, Cormick stagedThe Mermaid, risking her life to make a performance about the climate emergency and how we are all vulnerable bodies at risk in a changing environment.

Stillness and André Gregory’s Meyerhold

ABSTRACT This article considers André Gregory’s transition from the acclaimed “physical theatre” produced with his company the Manhattan Project to a signature form of static performance circumscribed by stillness and poetic declamation. Gregory’s 2020 book This Is Not My Memoir, written with Todd London, offers complementary lineages that have shaped Gregory’s approach to theatre. His early career reflects his progression through a pedigree defined by his firsthand study of Brecht and Grotowski, while his later work mirrors a conscious channelling and revivification of a genealogy back through Grotowski to Meyerhold – whom he would maniacally impersonate – and Stanislavski.

피지컬 씨어터의 새로운 융합 가능성

Physical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that tells a story primarily through physical movements rather than language. Physical theatre provides a live, human experience, which is very different from any other form, and audiences are affected much more viscerally. The performance, emphasizing the metaphorical aspect, allows the audience to use their imagination to the maximum and induces emotional immersion through the dynamics of mime, gestures, physical movements, modern dance, and acrobatics. Since the 2000s, scientific studies on human behavior and cognitive neuroscience have caught the attention of physical performance researchers and performers, who have started to question the correlation between physical performance and cognitive behavior and neuroscience. The convergence of cognitive science and performance has developed in the direction of reviving “working memory” and “implicit memory” and activating “sensory memory” in people living with dementia in need of behavioral correction. Theatre Re’s The Nature of Forgetting (2017) received the great attention of the 2017 London International Mime Festival with a sell-out run. It is a powerful and explosive physical theatre piece about what is left when memory and recollection are gone. The process of “forgetting” that takes place in the human brain seems to be perfectly realized on stage with the emphasized “physicality”.

Under the Canopy of Sal Trees: A New Vocabulary of Performance in Sukracharya Rabha’s Minimal Theatre

This paper would be structuring and documenting Rabha’s theories of performance which are heavily laced with ecological concerns, and also his penchant for body-centric performances that explore the contact point between man and nature, the given and made, public zones and biospheres. The paper aims to capture the nuances of his unique ensemble called “green theatre,” something that is akin to a search for roots, a drive to cultivate an “intrinsic rural mechanism”, in the words of H. Kanhailal, a renowned theatre exponent and Rabha’s mentor. There is an urge to capture the ebb and flow of country life, humankind’s vital affinity with nature. Rabha fuses lifeworlds, bio-forms, and landscapes. He gives birth to new grammar and vocabulary of “physical theatre” by weaving the synergy of life into the fabric of performance.

Re-Shaping Innovations in the Contemporary Fashion Show: Emerging Aesthetics and the Rising International-Based Chinese Designer Collective

The past five years have seen a rapidly rising “new wave” of design power created by Chinese designers who are devoted to showcasing their works within the legitimate European fashion week system – which includes the “Big Four” fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan, and Paris – to upgrade their cultural status as Chinese design collectives. In addition to showing their collections with a high-end design standard, this group of visual innovators are constantly seeking aesthetic innovations when showing fashion and have gradually been changing and influencing the emerging generation of international-based Chinese designers by displaying and showing fashion at international fashion weeks. This paper integrates and investigates the new aesthetics in fashion visualization brought forward by a collective of emerging international-based Chinese designers who have gradually expanded their cultural influences and re-shaped innovations in contemporary fashion shows within the current global fashion ecosystem. These new aesthetics feature fashion’s new affinity with immersive physical theater, a type of avant-garde post-dramatic theatre, when being shown on a global stage. Furthermore, the rising institutions at Shanghai Fashion Week have been producing and advocating for the formation of international-based Chinese designer collectives to experiment with new aesthetics via multiple forms at London and Shanghai Fashion Weeks between 2017 and 2020, both physically and digitally. This has led to systematic changes and innovations in the global fashion cultural system, in terms of both forming and shaping a new aesthetic identity of Chinese designers within the global fashion system.

Unsettling feelings in the classroom: scaffolding pedagogies of discomfort as part of decolonising human geography in higher education

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the tension between the need to create spaces for unsettling feelings as part of a decolonisation of the curriculum in Higher Education, and the need to create a sense of safety in the classroom. Decolonising the curriculum, here, means exploring how histories of coloniality structure educational institutions, established canons, and socio-natural relations, and cultivating collective practices that move beyond oppressive patternings. As part of this process, as we find ourselves imbricated in the struggles of others and as our emotional grip on the world is unsettled, we – students and teachers alike – may find ourselves experiencing discomfort. This raises an important question, for it is clearly part of the responsibility of an educator to create spaces that feel “safe” for students, and do not induce or trigger trauma. Drawing on experiences in the university classroom and lecture halls, this paper develops the concept of “scaffolding” as the basis for an ethos for embracing discomfort pedagogically. The affordances of physical theatre, film, and visual culture are considered alongside particular tactics as ways to foster the transformation of “settled” fabrics of feeling in care-full ways.

Loss, Great Grief, and Preservation: Brandy Leary’s Suspended

In 2017, Toronto-based physical theatre artist Brandy Leary performed choreographic research as part of the Arctic Circle’s Summer Solstice Expedition, a multidisciplinary voyage of invited scientists and artists who developed work during their travels in and around the Svalbard archipelago, located in the Arctic Ocean. I focus on one such performance, entitled Suspended, in which Leary hangs precariously off the side of a boat and above a (melting) ice floe. Leary’s explorations were influenced by the Norwegian eco-scientist Per Espen Stoknes’s concept of “Great Grief,” a public grief based on ecological loss due to climate change, as well as the loss of her husband before she embarked on the residency. I read Suspended as a performance that sutures public and private processes of grief. Because Svalbard is home to the Global Seed Vault, a repository of seeds intended to preserve the world’s plant biodiversity, Suspended also connects forms of self-preservation in the face of ecological loss with larger cooperative efforts toward ecological preservation via the saving of seeds. Both Suspended and the vault as endeavours compel us to collectively care about and act toward futures where our relationships—to ice, to the environment, and to each other—are radically changed.

Physical training online: transitioning towards digital pedagogies

This article discusses a case-study revolving around an experiment in transferring online a teaching component on physical theatre. It documents a response to the COVID-19 pandemic when actors, teachers, and students had to find ever more creative ways of working in the digital space. The article argues that working online does not need to refute those values and learning objectives that are typically embedded in performance training, such as interaction, collaboration, and experimentation and adaptation. The article also offers concrete suggestions aimed at facilitating the transition to online teaching.

What I was Told: verbatim-physical theatre as feminist protest theatre in South Africa

Verbatim-physical theatre presents the possibility for women’s stories, not only to be told, but to be heard, interacted and engaged with. This article explores the combination of physical- and verbatim theatre for feminist protest theatre in South Africa. It argues that verbatim-physical theatre as feminist protest theatre presents a mode of storytelling that is challenging and oppositional through embodied and dynamic performances. It further makes the case that South African theatre is built on a long tradition of story-telling, is imbued with inherent physicality and has always been a strong means for political consciousness-raising and education. It is this nature of South African theatre that makes the combination of verbatim- and physical theatre so effective for feminist protest theatre. The article also analyses the creation and staging of What I was Told, a verbatim-physical theatre production telling the stories of women, the stories told to us and the stories that still need to be told.

Dramatising Cultural Diversity: Youth Theatre as a Performance of Local Memory and Identity in a Multiethnic Environment

AbstractThis article presents a comparative analysis of two ethnographic case studies conducted in local theatres in the Slovak town of Komárno and the British city of Coventry. These two locations are very different – one is a small town on the Slovak-Hungarian border and the other an urban centre in the Midlands region of Britain – and yet they are both characterised by the multiethnic and culturally diverse composition of their populations. The two youth theatres in question are also distinct in their genres: one bases its performances on folklore traditions, whereas the other is an avant-garde physical theatre. At the same time, the productions of both groups manifest a deep involvement in the representation of cultural heritage and the current social issues in their respective locations. Drawing on anthropological conceptualisations of theatre as a form of ritualised performance (see Turner, 1969, 1982; Schechner, 1985, 1993), this paper explores the processes and contexts of the enactment of past conflict and/or violence presented by the two theatrical groups in order to engage with traumatic events in local (and national) history. These processes, which embrace the values of cultural diversity and inclusion, are important for the construction of community identities. The liminality of ritualised performance enables actors and audiences to cross social (including ethnicity and class) and temporal boundaries. They reproduce memories of past violence to make sense of present tensions, such as growing nationalism and xenophobia, and to project their vision of the communal future. This often results in the contestation of the very meaning of place, community and belonging. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that such artistic interpretations of the local past and heritage are instrumental in shaping the identities of the participating youth. The comparison of the two cases also reveals noticeable differences between cosmopolitan and ethno-cultural discourses, which are prevalent in imagining the place, history and heritage of Coventry and Komárno respectively.

Per un teatro di suoni. Riflessioni su possibili dimensioni sonore nelle creazioni site-specific di physical theatre

Taking physical theatre as a reference point, in this paper I aim to explore the possibilities for a theatre that starts from sounds and places to develop its own forms, structures and contents. In the first part I explain what the expression “physical theatre” can mean, then I focus on the issue of space in theatre, before devoting a section to some peculiarities of site-specific approaches to the performing arts. The next step is to take into consideration certain aspects of the sound dimension in theatre, before outlining considerations that can help to start an exploration of a theatre of sounds that promotes new spaces for a real dialogue of this art with society.

Co-design Techniques for and with Children based on Physical Theatre Practice to promote Embodied Awareness

Research in Full-Body Interaction suggests the benefits of activities based on using embodied resources to strengthen the sensorimotor, cognitive and socio-emotional aspects of the user experience. However, scholars in this field have been often primarily concerned with the comprehension of and design for the user's mind. Little attention has been drawn on its connection to the bodily experience. The scarcity of adequate co-design methods with and for children to raise an awareness of their body during design risks of deriving interaction design decisions only from the perspective of adult designers. In this article, we present our research on novel co-design techniques to elicit children's embodied awareness. These techniques were analysed in the context of a design workshop series with a local theatre school. For the analysis, we used the Think4EmCoDe research framework, a tool to foreground key aspects of an embodied co-design technique for children. Results indicate the benefits of techniques based on physical theatre practice that (1) help children understand their body and space as mediators of ideas and meaning making processes; (2) allow them to incorporate the specific features of Full-Body Interaction in their co-design.

The Theatre of Yes: Beauty as the Axis of Change for the Transformation of Communities Through Their Own Stories

Tejidos is a community artistic project that aims to develop a community to give voice to the particular stories of those who live in Oaxaca (women and the deaf community) and Mexico City (older adults). The project has been funded by the Arts Council England (2018) and Iberescena (2019). “Theatre of Yes” is a methodology that uses the power of beauty as a language to break the stereotypes of situations that society views with apathy. By creating a provocative and emotional performance, we can transform the lives of people who suffer social exclusion. Yet, how can we create a high-quality performance with people who are not professional actors but have stories that should be shared? How can we use powerful performances as an axis of change? How can emotions be the motor for the struggle against the social oppression that many groups suffer? Artistic work has helped us to observe how creativity pushes people to find a freer self and, above all, to be close to the essence of the human being. The base of the Theatre of YES brings together the universal characteristics, honesty, simplicity, humility and generosity. The characteristics of the methodology developed with these groups are the yes as a weapon against the non-worthy self, beauty as the axis of change, physical theatre according to the Lecoq methodology.