Postmodern Performance Research Articles

A German DJ, Postmodern Dreams, and the Ambivalent Politics of East–West Exchange at the First Exhibition of Approximate Art in Riga, April 1987

Organized as part of the annual Art Days festival in the capital of the Latvian SSR, the First Exhibition of Approximate Art comprised a cacophonous and provocative mashup of music, dance, performance art, and design. At the center of the event was a demonstration of mixing and scratching records by Maximilian Lenz, also known as Westbam, one of the leading DJs in West Berlin. Mining archival sources in Berlin and Riga, this article reconstructs the complicated path by which the DJ came to perform at the event. It reveals a surprising network of relations and alliances operating in tandem behind the scenes, featuring a Riga artist dedicated to enacting a vision of postmodern performance in his city, an ambitiously networking émigré Latvian living in exile in West Germany, and a pair of Soviet offices under direct control of the KGB, charged with managing cultural exchanges with the West in hopes of currying sympathies for Soviet culture and policy. Complementing and extending research on the “gaps” and “holes” in the Soviet system that sometimes allowed for the staging of otherwise unacceptable works of art, the story of the First Exhibition of Approximate Art reveals how personal connections and interpersonal networks within even the most highly monitored parts of the system itself—the state security apparatus—could open doors for artistic projects unanticipated and even undesired by the bureaucratic state.

Musical and Theatrical Creativity in the Logos of Music History

The purpose of the article is to analyse the productions of the 21st century musical and theatrical works of the 19th – 20th centuries in the aspect of postmodernism and baroque. The methodology of the work includes scientific methods (source studies, historical, generalising) and methods of comparative analysis to reveal the specifics of postmodern performances. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that sources in foreign languages have been introduced into scientific circulation, and an analysis of musical and theatrical works has been carried out. Conclusions. It is noted that at all times the opera remains a musical-dramatic performance with a synthesis of arts that affect human feelings and immerse in audiovisual art. Postmodern music and theatre creativity, as well as baroque art, are aimed at evoking affects (states of mind) through various influences. In postmodernism, this is already the systemic influence of singing, dancing, modern technologies with the immersion of the audience in the action and plot complications, which also contribute to the transmission of various affective states. In the Baroque era, the composer was not considered an original genius, and their creativity and works were not untouched. The performer was allowed to interpret the written text. Postmodern period plays are characterised by: changing the libretto (E. Humperdinck’s "Hansel and Gretel" ("Jeníček a Mařenka", 1890, 2015); A. Dvořák’s "The Devil and Káča" ("Čert a Káča", 1899, 2016); "A soldier and a dancer". According to the functional sphere and the city of performance, parts of the work could be omitted or replaced. Actually, what we observe today, in the art of postmodernism is a reinterpretation of the heroes and their functions (Hansel and Gretel are not just poor children, but circus students, where the father is a director). Features of domestic comedy, fairy tale – in baroque opera were complemented by masks and tragic events. In post-modern performances, masks are replaced by puppets, for example, in the operas of B. Martin "The Soldier and the Dancer", E. Humperdinck "Hansel and Gretel", A. Dvořák "The Devil and the Duck". A parallel with the French baroque opera-ballet in the works of postmodernism is the strengthening of the role of dance in opera performances ("The Devil and Kacha", ballet with singing by B. Martin "Spalicek"). Plots with real and fairy-tale-fantasy characters, which are similar to the "myth" ("Hansel and Gretel", "The Devil and the Duck"). The external spectacularity and scale in Baroque works resonate with the specific stage design: inn, hell, palace ("Devil and Kacha"); animation of the middle of the 20th century – Disney pictures ("Hansel and Gretel"); the image of the Soldier – the world of dreams – childhood with dolls – a machine with dolls ("The Soldier and the Dancer").
 Keywords: postmodernism, logos of music history, baroque, baroque opera, opera, ballet, opera-ballet, music and theatre art, elements of puppet theatre, stage design, libretto.

A Practical Dramaturgy for Actors through Theatrical Production Procedures

Dramaturgy, as a creative and critical act dependent on the theoretical and practical knowledge of theater, consists of two parts with Greek roots: Drama (action) and Ourgia (work and operation). Ourgia literally means to practice, act, and in other words process a raw material. Eugenio Barba divides Dramaturgy in to three parts: Actor Dramaturgy, Director Dramaturgy and Audience Dramaturgy. The modality of the process of acting (character action, corporeal action, and phonetic action) as actor dramaturgy is collaged, divided and assembled and then the dynamic stage motions present in space and time are conducted by actor. Paul Castagno, in his recent theorem, expounds dramaturgy as ‘‘Individual creative contribution of the actor to the growth of a performance’’ and ‘‘actor`s ability to root what they have recounted into a structure of organic actions’’. This perception emanates from a mode that a play, without actor`s cooperation and taking part, would never take place. Through this combination to create the character, Geoffrey Proel attributes the dramaturgical responsibility to the actor and asks them to participate in the creation of the content performance and transfer their lived and personal experience into the organic dramatic structures of the performance. The major problem of this paper is to expound and elucidate the relation between dramaturgy and actor, based on modality of production, exchange and combination of two internal structure (organic force) and external structure (dynamic force) in post-modern performance in theatre. Patrice Pavis, in 2000, predicted the need for an actor-dramaturge to complete playwriting in the 21st century. In order to complete the present study of Patrice Pavis’ recent theory in the field of dramaturgy-actor, we tried to use the later theories of thinkers such as Edvard Brands, Eugenio Barba and Jeffrey Proel. The present article, using analytical-descriptive method based on dramaturgy theories, presents a model of communication between dramaturgy and actor in the dynamic atmosphere of postmodern theater, which relies on three sides of imagination and conceptualization (a priori agent), Analysis and practice (current agent) and production and performance (posterior agent). Theater in general sense, and acting in the specific, are faculties that are in an internal structure; as the organic force and an external structure as dynamic force, are dependent. The result of the study shows that the combination of the phrase dramaturge / actor plays an important role in the actor’s attention to theoretical, practical and critical considerations to eliminate the shortcomings of rehearsals in the process of creating a role during a certain time.

Doctrine and Difference: Readings in Classic American Literature by Michael J. Colacurcio

Reviewed by: Doctrine and Difference: Readings in Classic American Literature by Michael J. Colacurcio Jonathan A. Cook Michael J. Colacurcio Doctrine and Difference: Readings in Classic American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2021. xiv + 271 pp. In Doctrine and Difference: Readings in Classic American Literature, Michael J. Colacurcio continues to consolidate his place as a leading contemporary critic of classic American literature, with his main focus on writings of the Puritans and the impact of their beliefs on the American Romantics. Composed of essays published over the last two decades, the volume under review is one of several recent offerings from Colacurcio that bring to fruition a lifetime of teaching, thinking, and writing about the national literature—an output that now includes a capacious new two-volume study of Emerson and Other Minds (2021), and a recently published collection of essays entitled Hawthorne's Histories, Hawthorne's World: From Salem to Somewhere Else (2022), to follow up on his earlier The Province of Piety: Moral History of Hawthorne's Early Tales (1984). Additional evidence of this critic's broad impact on literary studies is the Festschrift of essays assembled by his former students and colleagues for his retirement, A Passion for Getting It Right (2015). Such a steadily growing roster of publication puts Colacurcio in a special class of historicist scholars, starting with the transformative figure of Perry Miller, whose foundational understanding of Puritan religious history and doctrine has provided productive insights into the larger development of American literature, particularly in that perennially appealing era known as the American Renaissance. While always rewarding in terms of breadth of comprehension and generosity of analysis, reading Colacurcio can sometimes be a labor of love, given the writer's embrace of a deliberately improvisatory style that at times resembles scat singing in its unpredictable assemblage of insights, strung together on extended fragments and elliptical aperçus. For Colacurcio is seemingly as much a postmodern performance artist engaged in a perpetual play of signifiers as a methodical expounder of ideas, and it occasionally takes some habituation to his style in order to appreciate the remarkable erudition that underlies his analyses. While some readers may be put off by the more gratuitous flippancies [End Page 101] and aporias, Colacurcio's passionate engagement with his subjects always provides productive grounds for thought, making the reader eager to reexamine the works under discussion to test his arguments. In the dozen essays contained in the current volume, Colacurcio examines a wide range of subjects: the tension between religious faith and emotional attachment in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet (Chapter 1); the paradoxical combination of cosmopolitan reading and provincial subject matter in Hawthorne's fiction (Chapter 2); the comparable literary aesthetics of Hawthorne and Poe (Chapter 3); the play of skepticism and subjectivity of Emerson's "Experience" (Chapter 4); the Melvillean idea of the "power of blackness" in Hawthorne's tales, notably "The Bosom Serpent" and "The Christmas Banquet" (Chapter 5); an anatomy of the use of genre in Melville's Polynesian narratives (Chapter 6); the suggestive relationship of Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand" to related scenes in Moby-Dick (Chapter 7); the attenuated liberal Christian ideas of original sin dramatized in The House of the Seven Gables (Chapter 8); the religious and political dynamics in three works of Melville's short fiction (Chapter 9); winter as the implicit seasonal climax of Walden (Chapter 10); the shadowy skeptical world of Emerson's "Illusions" from the otherwise pragmatic Conduct of Life essays (Chapter 11); and, in a rare foray into postbellum American fiction, a study of manners and morals in Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham and James's The American (Chapter 12). Given this heterogeneous mix of contents, I will focus here on the three chapters devoted to Melville's fiction, examining what they offer the reader and the value of their approaches. In "The South Seas in Melville: Genre, Myth (and Sex) in Typee, Omoo, and Mardi," Colacurcio provides an overview of generic affiliations for Melville's first three narratives set in Polynesia, which he identifies as "first, captivity narrative well disguised as travel report, next, political critique masquerading as strolling island adventure, then, comparative mythology dressed in the...

Reframing performance’s ontology: hybridity in contemporary performance art’s ontology

ABSTRACT I argue performance studies’ modernist ontological assumptions of fleeting are antithetical to contemporary performance art which relies on digital technology for mediated viewing processes. In this essay, I argue for a hybrid postmodern performance studies that allow for varying modes of experiencing performance art. I situate Allan Kaprow and Fluxus as the genealogical beginning of performance and argue that Peggy Phelan’s ontological assumptions of performance are inherently modernist. I then pose a postmodern approach to performance studies that embrace an embodiment of hybrid viewing methodologies of performance. Lastly, I use three examples as embodiments and symptomatic representations of this embodiment of a hybrid postmodern performance ontology.

Musical Portraits: The Composition of Identity in Contemporary and Experimental Music by Joshua S. Walden

Reviewed by: Musical Portraits: The Composition of Identity in Contemporary and Experimental Music by Joshua S. Walden Elizabeth Hoover Musical Portraits: The Composition of Identity in Contemporary and Experimental Music. By Joshua S. Walden. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. [xiii, 184 p. ISBN 9780190653507 (hardback), $74; ISBN 9780190653521 (e-book), varies; also available in Oxford Scholarship Online.] Figures, music examples, bibliography, endnotes, index. Musical Portraits: The Composition of Identity in Contemporary and Experimental Music complements literature by Joshua S. Walden on musical representation and identity through the exploration of musical portraiture, "a genre of compositions that operate as musical evocations of aspects of individual identities in the manner of portraits in the visual arts and literature" (p. 2). Walden pioneered the study of musical portraiture by discussing Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in relation to eighteenth-century theories of portraiture in the visual arts, and correlations between music and painting ("Composing Character in Musical Portraits: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and L'Aly Rupalich," Musical Quarterly 91, nos. 3–4 [Fall-Winter 2008]: 379–411; "What's in a Name? C. P. E. Bach and the Genres of the Character Piece and Musical Portrait," in Genre in Eighteenth-Century Music, ed. Anthony R. DelDonna [Ann Arbor, MI: Steglein Publishing, 2008], 111–38). In Musical Portraits, Walden contemporizes the discussion by extending his work on portraiture composed since 1950 initiated in "Representation and Musical Portraiture in the Twentieth Century" (in Representation in Western Music, ed. Joshua S. Walden [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 127–43), which focuses on compositions that challenge traditional modes of representation in parallel to, or inspired by, experiments in literature, painting, and multimedia. In the introduction, four chapters, and epilogue that make up the text, Walden investigates a series of case studies to demonstrate how contemporary musical portraiture constructs human identity and questions formations of the self for both artists and audience. Although quite brief and in no way comprehensive, the introduction, "Portraiture as a Musical Genre," highlights how portraiture has served as metaphor for internal identity. Walden establishes that the nature of twentieth-century portraiture represents this identity apart from mimesis and compares the roles of metaphor in portraiture and music. By calling on select theories of identity construction in postmodern performance, Walden emphasizes the social, performative, and hermeneutic construction of identity in contemporary musical portraiture. Walden explores four main types of musical portraiture, as indicated by the chapter titles: (1) "Musical and Literary Portraiture," (2) "Musical Portraits of Visual Artists," (3) "Listening in on Composers' Self-Portraits," and (4) "Celebrity, Music, and the Multimedia Portrait." To study the complex and multifaceted construction of identity in these types of portraiture, Walden depends on musical, literary, visual, and dramatic texts as evidence. His interpretive, cross-disciplinary analysis is accessible to readers across the humanities and is often enhanced by authoritative artist statements about the works. Mirroring the trajectory of abstract art in the twentieth century and portraiture's break from aesthetic realism outlined in the introduction, Musical Portraits, although often rooted in comparative studies of musical ekphrasis, departs from this approach to question who is represented in musical portraiture and the truthfulness of such representations. The first two chapters compare musical portraits of artists whose styles inspired composers, who name them [End Page 460] in the title. Chapter one analyzes the influence of Gertrude Stein's poetic insistence—gradually varied repetitions of linguistic motifs—on Virgil Thomson's musical portraiture and then turns to Stéphane "Mallarmé's complex ideas about the relationships between poetry and music" as enacted in Pierre Boulez's Pli selon pli: Portrait de Mallarmé (p. 37). Drawing from A. S. Byatt, Walden introduces these case studies by underlining a kinship between music and language that, as Byatt claims, both depend on time and "the unfolding of description" (p. 23) to reveal internal character. Byatt establishes this connection in opposition to the supposed stasis of visual art (painting), but curiously Walden does not probe the aesthetic question of what designates "a temporal art" (or also a "time art"), a much-debated question in the disciplines of music and painting (Jerrold Levinson, Musical Concerns: Essays in Philosophy of Music [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015]; Jonathan...

Postmodern Canons and De-canonizing Function of Performance

This study attempts to investigate the process of canonization that Ionesco‟s initial play went through by means of Martin Esslin‟s famous work of theater criticism that labeled the unknown plays of the 50‟s “absurd”. The present study argues that Esslin‟s attempt to canonize these plays under the label of The Theater of the Absurd did not do justice to the ethical perspectives that these plays set forth. My contribution to this topic will be focusing on a postmodern performance by Jean-Luc Lagarce to try to elucidate how his performance of The Bald Soprano challenged the pre-judged attitude of the audience through challenging the previously established beliefs concerning the Theater of the Absurd. The semiotics as the study of the way meaning is created will be drawn on. In The Semiotics of Theater, Erika FischerLichte outlines the internal theatrical code at three different levels of system, norm and speech. Here, the emphasis will be on speech to illuminate the staging by Lagarce and explain how a classic work precipitates postmodern production from within the established canon.

Idioms of Attachment: Performative Dimensions of Object Relating, Affect, and Connection.

Classical attachment theory has yielded rich explanations for behavior by classifying attachment into "styles" such as avoidant and ambivalent. Modern attachment theory has deepened our understanding of these formations by integrating knowledge about affect regulation and cognitive narratives. In looking at how attachment manifests in the phenomenal, sensation-evoking world, we draw on the work of postmodern performance theorist Judith Butler and others to get a clarified picture not just of one's style of attaching but of the specific ways that attachment behaviors are rehearsed, repeated, and refined over time. We look at attachment at the level of lived experience, rather than merely that of signification, to gain insights on how to interpret and work with attachment-laden behaviors in the therapeutic relationship.

From the Industrial Unconscious to the Cinematic to the Televisual to the Networked

This essay offers a concept of the “post-postmodern” working off of the premise that the unconscious is historically specific. Thus, the Freudian unconscious, modeled according to the conventions of industrial reality, provides its greatest explanatory heft in regard to a realist subject. The Lacanian unconscious, however, modeled on the conventions of cinematic representation, more aptly describes the modernist subject, while an unconscious modeled on televisual principles best serves to understand the postmodern subject. In this context, the post-postmodern unconscious may reflect the synergistic world of new media, where reality is accessed rather than mediated, and the archive, instead of delimiting personal experience, is created by it. Post-postmodern reality, therefore, may characterize an eclectic and sui genris tapestry of rhizomatic connections. This phenomenon is exemplified by the difference between the 1977 Marina Abramovic postmodern performance, “Imponderabilia” and that performance’s incorporation in the post-postmodern MoMA retrospective of her work.

The Erotics of Scenario. On the Construction of the Subject in Postmodern Theatre

Abstract Set in the postmodern culture cadres that Lyotard talked about twenty years ago, we are witnessing an accelerated mistrust of a conspicuous value. In fact, all this mistrust has occurred amid a radical overthrow of the way we were accustomed to perceiving the values of modernity. Having its starting point in philosophy, falling into disuse that postmodernity propose grows like a wave that appeared after a stone was thrown into the water. Theatre has not escaped from postmodern articulation, and its subjects have inevitably passed through the postmodern reconfiguration filter. In this article, we will talk about the subject of eroticism, trying to outline our thesis on the idea that the comprehensive synthesis of the receiver in relation to the postmodern performance is based on the construction of the subject folded on the identification of some indicators. Considered as a cultural construct, eroticism is eliminated through its discourse and requires scenarios to be fully understood and recognized. The question inevitably arises: to what extent can we talk about these scenarios in the postmodern performance?

The Perils and Promises of Self-Disclosure on Social Media

In addition to their professional social media accounts, individuals are increasingly using their personal profiles and casual posts to communicate their identities to work colleagues. They do this in order to ‘stand out from the crowd’ and to signal attributes that are difficult to showcase explicitly in a work setting. Existing studies have tended to treat personal posts viewed in a professional context as a problem, since they can threaten impression management efforts. These accounts focus on the attempts of individuals to separate their life domains on social media. In contrast, we present the narratives of professional IT workers in India who intentionally disrupt the boundaries between personal and professional profiles in order to get noticed by their employers. Drawing on the dramaturgical vocabulary of Goffman (1959) we shed light on how individuals cope with increased levels of self-disclosure on social media. We argue that their self-presentations can be likened to post-modern performances in which the traditional boundaries between actor and audience are intentionally unsettled. These casual posts communicate additional personal traits that are not otherwise included in professional presentations. Since there are no strict boundaries between formal front-stage and relaxed back-stage regions in these types of performance, a liminal mental state is often used, which enables a better assessment of the type of information to present on social media.

M. Heidegger and language concealment in postmodern theatre

The aim of the article is to reveal that Heidegger’s philosophy established the conception ofnonrepresentational language, which is close to No theatre and the postmodern scene where dialogue as such disappears. Rejecting the traditional concept of Logos, Heidegger conceptualizes the language from the perspective of oriental indeterminateness. As No theatre gesture does not match with referential reality, language does not match with a natural expression and thus it primarily opens what it is said. It is such a poetic language which not having a clear speaking but only “contours sketching utterance” is expressed by the openness for the world, at the same time leaving some space for silentness. This particular moment of openness enabled Gerald Bruns to compare Heidegger’s language conception with Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance. Unlike the latter, Heidegger’s différance refers not to an empty space but to another dimension of existence where consciousness, language and meaning veil. Their place is taken by sound, rhythm, tonality, voices and vibrations that do not require understanding – all the things that are dissociated from a specific signification and manifest the being itself. From this point of view, Heidegger’s conception of language is compared with such postmodern theatre which manifests itself as a poetic message. What is being said here is understood as what is revealed (reality) and what veils (signification), and that is no longer a referential meaning of dramaturgical text “grasped” by understanding. In this type of theatre, language is free from rational logic explanations and is usually created lively on the scene, allowing it to flow freely, following its very course, emphasizing the transcendent birth of language or its negative sides – boredom, emptiness, inability to express the meaning, impossibility of significance. Naming Antonin Ataud’s theatre of cruelty as the predecessor of such an expression, theatre critics’ discussions about reality in modern and postmodern theatre that rose in the context of Jacque Derrida’s criticism of metaphysical Western tradition have been presented. It is argued that postmodern performances do not seek for reality but they create it through the energetic interactions of objects and performers. As examples of such an expression in the Lithuanian theatre, Eimuntas Nekrošius’s productions “Genesis. Donelaitis. The Seasons”, “Song of Songs” and also performances of Edmundas Leonavičius, Skaidra Jančaitė, Benas Šarka have been analysed.

ХОРЕОГРАФІЧНА АЛЕАТОРИКА В ТВОРЧОСТІ НОВАТОРІВ М. КАННІНГЕМА ТА ДЖ. КЕЙДЖА

Сьогодні немає цілісного уявлення про сучасне мистецтво, зокрема й про сучасне хореографічне мистецтво, саме тому неможливо дослідити сучасні процеси в даній галузі. Мета. Дослідити новітнє явище в сучасній хореографії – метод Дж. Кейджа ‑ алеаторику, розуміння якого є необхідною складовою для вдосконалення сучасних мистецьких процесів. Дати визначення хореографічній алеаториці, як одного з особливих методів сучасної хореографії. Дослідити застосування хореографічної алеаторики Дж. Кейджа в постановах М. Каннінгема. Методологія дослідження полягає у використанні науково-теоретичного, аналітичного, термінологічного методів та узагальненні отриманих результатів щодо хореографічної алеаторики Дж. Кейджа та М. Каннінгема. Наукова новизна полягає у застосуванні алеаторики Дж. Кейджа в перформансах М. Каннінгема. Висновки. Алеаторика в ХХ ст. стала одним з видів професійної імпровізаційної творчості, основоположниками якої в хореографічному мистецтві були М. Каннінгем і Дж. Кейдж. Основна ідея базується на непередбачуваній зміні рухів – зміні ритму, швидкості й напрямків, одночасність декількох дій, творча свобода, відсутність залежності між танцем і музикою, танець, щоб танцювати, без аналізу. Танцівника і композитора об’єднала ідея «випадковості» як способу створення художнього цілого.

Hypermobility and Uncanny Praxis in Robert Lepage and Ex Machina’s Devised Solo Work

AbstractSince their first performances in 1994, Robert Lepage and Ex Machina have engaged continuously with mobility by staging characters displaced physically or emotionally from home. Consequently, their narratives experiment with the relationship between onstage and offstage worlds, and inevitably produce un-homely, uncanny effects. These features underpin the hyper-mobility of their theatre, which is further articulated by material and aesthetic practices of mobility, including touring, marketing, and animated scenography. Although this hyper-mobility exploits the theatrical potential of the uncanny, this does not result in an alienating, depoliticised theatre practice. Rather, a complex reading of mobility is generated – particularly in relation to the idea of the city – by the intertwining of an aesthetic of active space with ideas and images of both spatial and social mobility. This reading creates a picture of a hyper-mobile theatre practice with vital, contemporary relevance. It also produces a new description of Lepage’s spatial aesthetic, enables his work to be re-positioned within a particular category of post-modern performance, and characterises Lepage and Ex Machina’s praxis positively.

Black Women's Satire as (Black) Postmodern Performance

ABSTRACT: Black American women have taken up satirical humor imbued with postmodern aesthetics that privilege emotion and experience in order to critique particular incidents of racism, sexism, and the lack of access to rights and resources. However, for the most part, comic soapboxing has been unavailable to them in mass-media platforms or in political discourse. Little has been written about the interventionist potential of satire by black women, especially how their marginality within the United States power structure requires the kinds of postmodern tactics that destabilize representations of race, gender, and teleological notions of progress. Black women's use of satire as a representational strategy enables them to spotlight deeply embedded historical narratives that rationalize structural inequalities. These narratives relegate black women to the margins of US society, and black women satirists call attention to the cultural fictions that make them possible.

Talking to Chief Mkwawa: Multivocality and negotiation in an ancestral offering in Tanzania’s Southern Highlands

An ancestral offering carried out by the chiefs of two neighbouring groups in Tanzania’s Southern Highlands was documented through participant observation, photo-elicitation interviews and photography. The ritual took place in front of a museum, which contains the late Chief Mkwawa’s skull – a German war trophy in colonial times. Apart from preserving knowledge about the history of the region, the offering was marked by two other features, namely multivocality and negotiation. Photo-elicitation interviews conducted after the event unearthed the protagonists’ diverse and contradictory perspectives. Their high interest in others’ ‘mistakes’ and at the same time openness to modification can best be conceptualized using a post-modern performance approach. This approach allows reading ‘flaws’ as clues to ritual as a dynamic process that includes the freedom to deviate from a perceived norm.

Adaptation, Re-contextualisation, and Metaphor: Auteur Directors and the Staging of Greek Tragedy

The multiple encounters between ancient Greek drama and postmodern performance have generated heated discussion among artists, theatre scholars and critics vis-à-vis the notions of interpretation and authorship. This article investigates the application of metaphor in contemporary performance and discusses strategies of re-contextualisation in noted adaptations of the Greeks, bringing to light the efficacy as well as potential dangers of fundamentally revisionist directorial choices. It also explores ways in which the dynamic combination of universal reference and specific cultural codification in performance allows the mise-en-scène to reconcile the two ends in the ever polarised set of fraught terms—and practices—of “fidelity” and innovation within the framework of adaption.

Experimental theatre in the twentieth century: avant-gardism, the absurd, and the postmodern

Modern drama is still patently viewed as moving from the realistic Ibsen and the naturalistic Strindberg to the socially, politically, and psychologically oriented "problem plays" of the twentieth century (and beyond), fed occasionally by assorted "techniques" from aberrant avant-garde movements. This essay, agrues, by contrast, for a revisionist history of modern drama that would acknowledge the innovative and visionary contributions of "modernism," as linked to the historical and literary avant-garde, be it in the form of expressionism, symbolism, futurism, dada, or surrealism. From the inception of the absurd, moreover, avant-garde drama has certainly not ceased to proliferate. Yet in the late 1960s we entered the era of postmodernism, in which two events occurred to halt the "advance" of avant-garde drama. The first is the embrace by postmodern playwrights of a stylistic pluralism, an eclectic and often selfreflexive interweaving of different styles drawn from different time periods. The second is the deification of postmodern performance through the merging of author and director into a single "superstar." The most significant efforts of the avant-garde do continue to involve the self-conscious exploration of the nature, limits, and possibilities of drama and theater in contemporary society; but the vision of and for the future manifest in such work remains tentative and unclear, it is as though the avant-garde could not overcome the doubt and distrust foisted upon its potential for inspired vision.

Artistic Imperatives: Merging Theater and Film

This paper examines a series of collaborations that sought new ways to ask (and answer) the following questions: How can we create an alternative perspective on new media within the context of living performance, through cutting edge technologies? How can we actively engage post-modern performance theory in relation to compositional concerns for the stage, creating innovative uses of time, space, and imagination, and introducing new frameworks for critical analysis? Combining theater and film allows us to capture and manipulate new forms of acting and playwriting, and new directorial approaches to visual layering. We openly acknowledge our view that the current American theater has great difficulty understanding the role of its own avant-garde: that to grow and thrive, the medium must keep searching for a truly viable cutting edge. These works represent that edge, coming together during performances that operate on several visual and audial levels. The work strives to keep step with the developing academic and artistic field of new digital technologies.

网络微电影《万万没想到》系列与波普美学思想

2013年的大热的网络微电影《万万没想到》凭借风趣的台词，荒诞不经的剧情，一经推出便在年轻人中掀起一阵强劲的“王大锤”风暴。作为网络文化与电影文化杂糅一体网络微电影，《万万没想到》用独特的后现代表现语言完全颠覆了我们眼中的传统电影，片中那些反常的角色、杂糅的时空和片段化的叙事等后现代语言先一次次粉碎了人们记忆中的经典故事，再用戏谑的形式拼贴重构起来，把狂欢式的网络时代大众文化带到电影艺术中，具有典型的波普艺术气质。Never Thought of That—a hot online micro-film in 2013, with witty lines and ridiculous story, has triggered a strong storm of “wangdachui” among young people once it came out. As a network mi-cro-film which mixed with film culture and internet culture, Never Thought of That has completely subverted the traditional movie with its unique post-modern performance language. Those per-verse film roles, mixed temporal, fragmented narrative style shattered people’s memory of the classic story, and then it joked together with a form of collage reconstruction, and took the carniv-al-like popular culture of network era into the art of film, giving this micro-film a typical Pop art style.