Dramatic Production Research Articles

The Space of Identity and the Identity of Space in The City Wit by Richard Brome

My paper examines The City Wit (1629-1632), a city comedy by Richard Brome revolving around the unscrupulous trade world, where all the characters aim at social recognition, even trampling on feelings and moral values. My objective is to investigate the play as one of the earlier examples of strategic use of space in Brome’s dramatic production. Firstly, I will consider the function of space in relation to the identity of the single characters. Secondly, I will show how space can be manipulated for the re-fashioning of a new identity, as in the case of Jeremy, a male servant disguised as a widow, who builds up a fictitious Cornish identity. Finally, I will analyze the geography of the play focusing in particular on the scene set in the Presence Chamber of Whitehall.

Rewriting the ‘Duchess of Malfi’

This article addresses issues of text adaptation in full-scale ESL drama production. After choosing to present Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, participants in the English Drama Workshop at Padua University set about the task of adapting the play in order to make it more suitable for a group of non-native speakers of English acting in front of an audience made up predominantly of non-native speakers. Substantial changes were made during the adaptation process: as well as cutting and simplifying the text, certain characters were eliminated while others were doubled (or rather tripled) and one scene was totally rewritten. When implementing these changes, the group had to take account of both the student-actors’ linguistic competence and the size and composition of the cast, most of the members of which were female. It is argued that text adaptation in ESL drama is not only a way of creating a more appropriate product, but also greatly enriches the process leading up to the performance. The students gained deeper insights into the text and were also able to achieve a strong sense of ownership of the final production. This article addresses issues of text adaptation in full-scale ESL drama production. After choosing to present Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, participants in the English Drama Workshop at Padua University set about the task of adapting the play in order to make it more suitable for a group of non-native speakers of English acting in front of an audience made up predominantly of non-native speakers. Substantial changes were made during the adaptation process: as well as cutting and simplifying the text, certain characters were eliminated while others were doubled (or rather tripled) and one scene was totally rewritten. When implementing these changes, the group had to take account of both the student-actors’ linguistic competence and the size and composition of the cast, most of the members of which were female. It is argued that text adaptation in ESL drama is not only a way of creating a more appropriate product, but also greatly enriches the process leading up to the performance. The students gained deeper insights into the text and were also able to achieve a strong sense of ownership of the final production.

H. T. Tsiang's Proletarian Burlesque: Performance and Perversion in <i>The Hanging on Union Square</i>

Horizontally, in any space, Things must be done. --H. T. Tsiang (Hanging 161) In January 1941, novelist, poet, performer, and playwright H. T. Tsiang used a roll of toilet paper to write a letter to the well-known and politically progressive artist Rockwell Kent from an Ellis Island deportation cell, where Tsiang was being detained on immigration charges. Tsiang, a Chinese American writer who had achieved some notoriety following his publication of three leftist novels and a volume of poetry, was being held by the US government as Case Number 56019/532, and he was biding his time while the judicial system decided whether he was eligible to stay in the country where he had resided since 1926. Tsiang's detention was hardly unique; the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 had sent many of his fellow immigrants to meet a similar fate. Yet his unorthodox response to his conditions was a predictably bizarre supplement to his offbeat literary career: in spite of his vulnerable circumstances, Tsiang refused to behave as a model US citizen, offering friends and colleagues evidence of neither his respectability nor his decorum. Instead, Tsiang sent Kent's letter on the most vulgar signifier of his conditions imaginable, his small cell transformed into a stage upon which he could perform his radical gesture of refusal. As though to reinforce the intentionality of his scatological performance, Tsiang also included a traditional typewritten transcript of his letter. The enjoyment of low culture was always at the forefront of Tsiang's economy of pleasure. Tsiang's profane scroll, now collected and microfilmed in the US Archives of American Art, stands as a testament to his transgressive literary performances. His letter recounts the banalities of life at Ellis Island a sharp sense of humor and quirky eye for irony. Everything is fine and gay, he assures Kent on his toilet paper scroll, the locked door, guard and uniform. Written in the deceptively simple language Tsiang used tremendous sensitivity to double meanings, puns, and the hidden logic of words, Tsiang remarks upon how he created a writing table by folding blankets atop his toilet (redoubling his scatological staging); his discomfort having to interact with all white people; his infatuation Kent's eyes (your eyes as if something carrassing [sic] or some sort--I have no words to express); and his endless amusement at a photograph Kent sent of himself, in response to which Tsiang tabulated the number of hairs he could count on Kent's shinely balled pate: 4+8=11 (Letter, 18 Jan.). Yet language constituted but one aspect of Tsiang's artistic expression, and his correspondence having been written from atop a toilet on such paper was as significant as any of the mundane thoughts he recorded. Throughout Tsiang's career as a writer and actor, his public and private cultural production emphasized performance as much as description, and paratext was always as important as diegesis. In Tsiang's hands, a quotidian form such as a letter could be transformed into a pungent performance of insubordination, just as under his pen a novel could become a dramatic production of proletarian burlesque, a peculiar sexual radicalism that combined a commitment to leftist politics a perverse celebration of sexual misbehavior's revolutionary potential. Tsiang's Ellis Island letter encapsulates his penchant for curating performative scenes that were multilayered, obscene, challenging, campy, nasty, and provocative. In this article I study Tsiang's novel The Hanging on Union Square (1935) to consider how he used textual and paratextual performances embodying each of these characteristics to articulate leftist politics in his Depression-era radical fiction while refusing to meet the heteronormative expectations often assigned to proletarian literature. Tsiang strategically deployed an aesthetic and ethics of performance that both queered radicalism and radicalized sexual categories by emphasizing political, literary, and sexual performativity, (1) His profound sense of the ironies in American life was uniquely attuned to the difficulties confronting those who wished to challenge the repressive sexual mores, oppressive economic conditions, and racial and ethnic prejudices that made a mockery of American ideals such as freedom, equality, and justice for all. …

Louise Dupré: le Québec au féminin by Anne-Marie Jézéquel

associated especially with Maurice Blanchot. For Qader, récit is linked to the idea of catastrophe since both notions involve a distancing between the subject (whose experience is not to be discounted) and the story which (s)he is telling, due to the fact that both involve using language a means of both addressing and turning away from a particular event or set of events. In this way, Qader uses the work of Boubacar Boris Diop, Tahar ben Jelloun and Abdelkebir Khatibi to present literature as a space that recounts catastrophic events yet allows for the inevitable silence and uncertainty involved in telling such traumatic tales. The fascinating conclusion of this text parallels the “feminine” as a category of excess with that of the slippery notion of the catastrophic, noting how the two can be associated as radical affirmations of the turn or rupture. In the style of the theoretical texts that underpin this work, the conclusion provides more new openings than closure, and is alone a useful document for use by pedagogues teaching about representations of femininity. Due to its complicated theoretical nature, this text would be most suitable for graduate students and specialists in the areas of literary theory, Francophone/ African studies, and Comparative Literature. The usefulness of this text in the latter area is remarkable, due to the uniqueness of this grouping of authors (especially the little-known corpus of Diop) and the author’s approach, which takes from European as well as African theory. This text insists upon the importance of recognizing Francophone North African countries as part of the continent, with their rich heritage of traditions from the wider Arabic world, of which Qader shows profound knowledge, in her constant references to that favorite of world literature, A Thousand and One Nights. Wagner College (NY) Christopher Hogarth JÉZÉQUEL, ANNE-MARIE. Louise Dupré: le Québec au féminin. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. ISBN 978-2-296-05736-4. Pp. 268. 24,50 a. Louise Dupré has been a central figure in Quebec literature since the 1980s, when she published her first collection of poetry and became an active participant in the theorization of contemporary Quebec women’s writing. A professor of literature at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Dupré published one of the first critical studies of her own generation of Quebec women poets, generously analyzing the work of three of her fellow poets, Nicole Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon, and France Théoret. Yet, despite her continuing production of prizewinning poetry, it was the publication of her first novel, La Memoria, in 1996, as Anne-Marie Jézéquel points out, that brought her to the attention of a wider public. And the 2006 dramatic production based on Dupré’s poetic text on mothers and daughters, Tout comme elle, featuring fifty of Quebec’s best-known actresses, was a major event of the 2006 theatrical season that made her poetic voice audible to an even broader public (as I can attest from my conversations with audience members at a presentation at the International Francophone Theatre Festival in Quebec City later that year). With the publication of Jézéquel’s Louise Dupré: le Québec au feminin, at long last this important French-language writer has become the central subject of a scholarly study. Jézéquel—a Frenchwoman who moved to Montreal at a moment of great political and literary activity and went on to earn her doctorate in the United Reviews 583 States—is well placed to situate Dupré within the context of the Francophone world, as a writer capable of speaking to readers across cultural boundaries. It is appropriate that her book was published in Paris by the Francophone publisher L’Harmattan . As Jézéquel describes it, Dupré’s writing on love, loss, and memory, the intimate emotions of daily life, reflects a lifetime of experience as daughter, mother, wife, and lover. Although Jézéquel emphasizes the lack of Quebec particularism in Dupré’s use of the French language or in the nature of her poetic vision, her study is attentive to the specificity of Dupré’s coming to maturity at a moment of radical change in...

“The Bagnios of Algiers” and “The Great Sultana”: Two Plays of Captivity by Miguel de Cervantes (review)

REVIEWS 236 Miguel de Cervantes, “The Bagnios of Algiers” and “The Great Sultana”: Two Plays of Captivity, ed. and trans. Barbara Fuchs and Aaron J. Ilika (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2010) 208 pp. Near the end of his life, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra published a work entitled Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos, nunca representados (1615), capitalizing on his great success as a novelist and very modest one as a playwright . This edition contains a translation from Spanish into English of two plays from this volume, using as its base text the critical edition of the plays coedited by Florencio Sevilla Arroyo and Antonio Rey Hazas (Alcalá 1993), along with a useful introduction and bibliography. The plays are set in two contrasting Mediterranean locales, Algiers in North Africa and the Ottoman court at Constantinople. As Fuchs and Ilika note, “The Bagnios of Algiers and The Great Sultana enact the intense imaginative engagement of early modern Spain with the Muslim worlds of the Mediterranean” (xiii). The vigorous topicality of the plays is enriched by Cervantes’ own experience in naval engagements (most famously at the Battle of Lepanto) as well as his captivity in Algiers; the playwright interlaces the generic tropes familiar from romance with allusions to historical individuals: “Both plays figure a mix of historical specificity and literary license, with ideologically charged material —gender roles and exotic sexual practices, relations between faiths, conversion to Christianity—clearly heightened” (xxii). The plays’ interrogations into early modern cultural dialogues surrounding racial, religious, and national identity, and the intersections of these with sexual practices, offer fascinating counterpoints to other contemporary dramatic and prose texts grappling with similar cross-cultural issues. The edition’s introduction offers an interesting discussion of the status of “renegades” in the early modern Mediterranean world and on stage: “The large number of characters whose religious alliances are ambiguous suggests the impossibility of essentializing difference in a world full of renegades and counterrenegades” (xxiv). The slipperiness of the renegades , their resistance to clearly-defined religious affiliations, renders them a fundamentally theatrical category by implicating their performative identities in the mimetic spectacle of dramatic production. Cervantes’ plays dramatize the fluidity—and even elusiveness—of confessional identities in the era of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation through their treatment of conversion, apostasy, and martyrdom, often in ways that reveal the inextricably united experiences of devotion and romantic eroticism. As the editors write, when “religion and eros conflict in exogamous unions, love qualifies conversion, just as conversion qualifies love” (xxvi). The teleological pressure of marriage plots leads to a foregrounding of the economics of exchange that further complicates the thematic nexus surrounding conversion. When the rich Muslim character (and “secret” Christian) Zara raises moneybags on a pole in order to ransom (and subsequently marry) the Christian captive Don Lope, we are squarely situated within an early modern theatrical imagination of the Mediterranean in which recognizable tropes and staging devices can be used for variously inflected purposes; it is not far, in short, from Zara’s gold to Jessica’s in The Merchant of Venice, inasmuch as both occurrences of this motif navigate the waters of several interrelated themes: captivity, conversion, interreligious erotic attachment, and cultural stereotyping. REVIEWS 237 The translation of these two plays by Cervantes is an invaluable contribution to the burgeoning field of early modern Mediterranean Studies. The plays’ depiction of imperial rivalry and of empires under threat can be seen in both their anxious retrospection on imperial precedents—one of the Spanish Harquebusiers in The Bagnios of Algiers utters proverbially: “We can only bear witness that here was Troy” (7)—and teleologies, the progression of translatio imperii which so fascinated Cervantes’s medieval predecessors. Read in this light, the aside muttered by Constanza about romantic love can be expanded beyond its immediate context and made to articulate some of the fundamental concerns experienced by Cervantes’s compatriots in the Mediterranean: “What if Barbary concludes what Spain began?” (37). As Fuchs and Ilika note, the Cervantine legacy of dramas of captivity was far-reaching, and can be seen in both Spanish dramatic successors such as Lope de Vega and in English adaptations of this captivity “subgenre,” such as Philip Massinger’s The...

Dynamics of the Livestock Revolution: Marginalization and Resistance in Southern Brazil

The increased meat consumption during the past 15 years has boosted a dramatic production increase called the Livestock Revolution. This case study from Rio Grande do Sul indicates that the Livestock Revolution causes prosperity for large-scale food processing companies, while small-scale farmers are being marginalized. Utilizing the food regime analysis, this polarizing pattern is interpreted as an expression of the ‘corporate food regime,’ which is challenged by an alternative agri-food paradigm. As farmer resistance constitutes alternatives that fuel the dynamics of the Livestock Revolution, it is argued that these tensions reflect an ongoing crisis of the contemporary food regime.

Marc Maufort and Caroline de Wagter, eds. Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama

MARC MAUFORT and CAROLINE DE WAGTER, eds. Signatures of the Past; Cultural Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama Bruxelles, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wein: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2008. 314 pp. Originating a conference at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles 2007, this inclusive collection of critical essays on postmodern and postcolonial Canadian and American drama English provides a detailed consideration of In his Introduction, Marc Maufort acknowledges both the genetic and generic affinity between the dramatic production of the two countries (11) and the and divergence respect to identities, exilic predicaments, and multi-ethnic subject positions (11-12), leaving the field wide open for the following twenty essays. Although he offers the proviso the notion of 'cultural memory' is not only an attribute of ethnic difference (14), most of the essays focus on minority cultures both countries, placed opposition to an assumed homogenous white majority In this collection, the recurrent motif of interculturalism is positioned both positively and negatively: the Canadian essays construct intercultural ism as conciliatory, whereas the Latina (American) essays view it as a form of cultural genocide. Only a few of the essays undertake useful cross-border comparisons which identify and similarity terms of cultural memory. Craig Walker's opening piece, 'Hopeful Memories and Doomed Freaks.' Evolutionary Overtones Canadian and American Drama, draws on the environics research of Michael Adams Fire and Ice (2003) to launch a provocative analysis of four Canadian performances which embody patterns of hope and fulfillment, and six American plays which enact harsher Darwinian principles with respect to survival terms of their monstrous protagonists. Other critical border crossings, however, occlude historical differences, as is the case Jacqueline Petropoulos's 'The Ground on Which I Stand'. Rewriting History, African Canadian Style, which interprets Djanet Sears's Adventures of a Black Girl Search of God and Harlem Duet terms of drawing on African American culture as part of the larger project of rewriting and reclaiming blackness an African Canadian and diasporic context (80). Harry f. Elam's Remembering Africa, Cultural Memory more convincingly places Djanet Sears an American context, a comparison with Lorraine Hansberry and Suzan-Lori Parks, implicitly demonstrating Sears's acknowledged debt to Hansberry. Although these acclaimed women playwrights (32) differ many respects, their plays position cultural memory in service of identity construction and racial repositioning the present (32). His essay, like many the collection, is informed by Diana Taylor's The Archive and the Repertoire and Paul Connerton's How Societies Remember, which insist on the performativity of cultural memory. Ric Knowles elaborates on Taylor's thesis Performing Intercultural the Diasporic Present. The Case of Toronto. He begins with the questionable categorical assertion that [a]ll memory bridges difference (49), and then clearly establishes his terminology, distinguishing interculturalism from Canada's much vaunted policy of multiculturalism, which he believes commodif[ies] or exoticiz[es] difference (49) and which constructs memory as nostalgic. He effectively mines Toronto's complex intercultural performance ecologies(49) for his diverse case studies, which move from the individual effort to suture a divided cultural identity to the communal building of shared cultural memory, to the actual constitution of new forms of community through prosthetic' memory-making (52): Fish Eyes by South Asian Canadian Anita Majumbar, Singkil by Filipina Canadian Catherine Hernandez, The Sheep and the Whale by Moroccan Canadian Ahmed Ghazali, and The Scrubbing Project by the Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble. …

The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism Dennis F. Mahoney Nicholas Saul, ed., The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xx + 335 pp., 2 illustrations. German romanticism, with its penchant for crossing boundaries and its ever-shifting groupings of artists and intellectuals, is a phenomenon that calls for interdisciplinary, collaborative scholarship. Nicholas Saul, who has done pathbreaking work as scholar and editor on what he has called the “Aesthetic Humanism” of the period from 1790 to 1830, has here assembled a distinguished team of scholars from British, Irish, German, and American universities to take a fresh look at German romanticism. After Azade Seyhan’s introduction to the historical, philosophical, and literary origins and essential features of early romanticism, Ricarda Schmidt traces differing notions of human fulfillment in love and art from early to late romanticism, while also taking note of the triadic concept of historical development that distinguishes the romantic writers from their predecessors and successors. Then follow concise, informative chapters on the narrative, lyric, and dramatic productions of German romanticism, written respectively by Anthony Phelan, Charlie Louth, and Roger Paulin, which are complemented by John McCarthy’s ensuing reflections on the forms and objectives of romantic criticism as a “a fourth generic category” (114). Both in these chapters and throughout the volume as a whole, it is encouraging to encounter more than just the “usual suspects” of literary histories of German romanticism. McCarthy discusses, for example not only the Schlegels and Hardenberg/Novalis, but also Görres and Adam Müller, while Louth includes treatments of Hölderlin and Günderode in his interpretations of the romantic lyric. Kleist’s works are treated in the chapters on romantic prose and drama; likewise, Zacharias Werner’s works appear not only in this latter chapter, but also in Saul’s essay “Love, Death and Liebestod in German Romanticism.” Here Saul makes a convincing case for re-examining in its capacity “as a central focus of Romantic thought” (166) a theme that opponents of romanticism long regarded as evidence of its life-denying nature, but which in recent decades has been less in the forefront of critical attention. First, though, in his capacity as editor he provides three further wide-ranging and insightful contributions from Jane Brown (“Romanticism and Classicism”), Gesa Dane (“Women Writers and Romanticism”), and Carl Niekerk (“The Romantics and Other Cultures”). The next five chapters form a subunit in their discussions of romantic philosophy and religion (Andrew Bowie), romantic politics and society (Ethel Matala de Mazza), romantic science and psychology (Jürgen Barkhoff), German romantic painters (Richard Littlejohns), and romanticism and music (Bowie’s second contribution to the volume). Littlejohns deserves particular praise for providing an overview of romantic artists and their achievements in the areas of landscape, political, and religious art that also gives a vivid sense of individual paintings and drawings—so much so that it seems as though there were more illustrations provided than the two black-and-white reproductions of Caspar David Friedrich’s Das Kreuz im Gebirge (1808) and Runge’s Morgen (1803). The volume concludes with Margarete Kohlenbach’s survey “Transformations of German Romanticism 1830–2000,” which ranges from Heine and Nietzsche through French symbolism and neo-romanticism (with a special focus on Hugo von Hofmannsthal) to the Frankfurt School and contemporary writers like Botho Strauß and Peter Handke. [End Page 327] With the exception of Saul (less) and Kohlenbach (slightly more), each author has written essays between fifteen and twenty printed pages in length. All the contributions are scholarly and accessibly written, with observations of value both to specialists and to individuals seeking a good preliminary guide to the topic at hand. Some chapters have more extensive notes than others, but all conclude with select bibliographies of relevant scholarship for those readers interested in further investigations. In addition, Saul provides a concise but well chosen guide to further reading (291–304) for the volume as a whole, subdivided into sections on editions, works in English translation, and secondary literature relating to general topics, authors, genres, and themes. Similarly user-friendly is the extensive index (305–35), which includes entries not only for authors and their works, but...

From Refugee to the BBC: Rudolph Cartier, Weimar Cinema and Early British Television

The lack of critical material on emigre Rudolph Cartier is surprising given his pivotal contributions as producer-director to British television.2 Working for the BBC until 1977, he was responsible for over 100 programmes, among them many landmark productions such as the science-fiction series The Quatermass Experiment (1953), a controversial adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour (1954), episodes of the police drama Z-Cars (1962–78), the drama-documentary Lee Oswald – Assassin (1966) and numerous early television plays such as Portrait of Peter Perowne (1952) and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1956). Underlining a general tendency of television studies to value the contributions of writers higher than those professionals working in other capacities, many of his best-known programmes have been discussed more in relation to the writer Nigel Kneale than to Cartier as their director and producer. This tendency has only recently changed in favour of studies that stress the collaborative nature of television drama production and acknowledge the multifaceted creative relationship between Kneale and Cartier (Johnson 2005; Jacobs 2000). Still, many of these works cannot explain satisfactorily Cartier’s legacy as their scope is often limited to a few critically acclaimed television programmes. They also largely fail to acknowledge Cartier’s status as an emigre artist. This article offers a clearer sense of Cartier’s overall career and his importance for the BBC. It contextualises Cartier’s work for German cinema before the Nazis came to power, and early British

Multimodality and the study of popular drama

This article reviews a range of methodological issues in the study of dialogue in popular drama (film and television). First of all it discusses some of the factors that may until recently have acted to discourage such research, showing that there are no intractable difficulties. Secondly it compares two recent logocentric studies of dialogue-in-film, one emerging from stylistics itself (McIntyre, 2008) and one from film studies (Kozloff, 2000), both of which, despite a primary focus on interactive spoken language, recognize and address the multimodal character of film productions. Finally, it concludes that, subject to certain provisos, there is merit in approaching the multimodality of film and TV drama productions from a methodologically logocentric perspective.

일본 공영방송 TV 역사드라마 콘텐츠의 경제효과 -NHK의 2010년 대하드라마 '료마덴(竜馬伝)' 사례 분석-

본 연구는 일본의 공영방송인 NHK의 역사드라마 콘텐츠가 가져다주는 경제적 효과'에 주목하고 있다. 연구결과, NHK의 역사드라마는 일본의 지역경제 발전에 결정적인 역할을 하는 것으로 나타났다. 일본 은행의 분석에 의하면 2010년 작품인 '료마덴'은 드라마의 무대인 고치현과 나가사키현 등에 무려 6127억원의 경제효과를 가져다주는 것으로 나타났다. 이는 드라마가 큰 인기를 끌면서 지역을 찾는 관광객이 크게 늘어난데 기인한 것이다. NHK는 또 같은 시기에 특정지역을 배경으로 한 드라마 3편을 집중적으로 방송함으로써 해당 지역에 대한 관심도를 부각시키는 전략도 사용하고 있다. NHK의 이런 노력은 제조업계와 서비스업계에도 긍정적인 영향을 미쳤다. 국민이 낸 수신료를 통해 운영되는 NHK는 역사드라마 콘텐츠를 통해 '지역경제발전'을 꾀하는 등 방송의 공공성을 극대화하기 위해 노력하고 있는 것으로 평가되고 있다. This study covers the economic effects generated by historical dramas of NHK, which is the Japanese Public Broadcasting company, The Study shows that NHK historical dramas have significantly contributed to the development of Japan's local economy. According to the analyses conducted by the Bank of Japan, "Ryomaden" brought an economic effect of 6.127 billion Korean Won to Kochi and Nagasaki where the dramas were filmed, because the number of tourists increased dramatically as the dramas became very popular. The NHK historical dramas also had a very positive influence on the manufacturing and service sectors. NHK's production of historical dramas has been regarded as an effort to maximize the public service of the broadcasting.

Disonancias musicales: violencia y performance en Cuarteto de Eduardo Rovner

Music is a powerful presence in Eduardo Rovner's dramatic production that resists being considered merely part of the background. In "Disonancias musicales: violencia y performance en Cuarteto de Eduardo Rovner" I aim to show that music assumes a key role in this Argentine play, by allowing the audience to connect diverse political and historical spaces and times, from the world of Beethoven and his Ninth Symphony , to the present-day performance of four inept and cruel string musicians that unsuccessfully play Beethoven's work. In Cuarteto , the violent acts of the members of the quartet connect the historical past — including Nazism — with a present moment when social and political violence is being linked to artistic creation, ironically joining Beethoven's admirable music with the moral indignities and murderous acts of the contemporary musicians, and in turn, indirectly with the atrocities of the Argentine Dirty War of the late 1970's and early 1980's. In Cuarteto , Rovner creates an ambiguous artistic world — both sublime and horrendous — as a way to explore the processes of artistic communication, and to claim not only the artist's own creative freedom, but also the political and ethical freedom that has been suppressed in Argentina's recent history.

Music and Religious Compromise in John Bale's Plays

Music and Religious Compromise in John Bale's Plays Katherine Steele Brokaw (bio) In John Bale's 1538 allegorical history play, the titular, idealized Proto-Protestant King Johan describes how the clergy have mentally and financially impoverished his country: "Than for Englandes cause I wyll be sumewhat playne. / Yt is yow, Clargy, that hathe her in dysdayne. / With yowre Latyne howres, serymonyes and popetly playes" (ll. 413-15).1 Throughout Bale's theatrical Protestant polemic, "Latyne howres" and other types of Catholic ceremony are performed and derided, and these musical and sacramental representations iterate the king's point that Roman practice "decayes" God's holy word. King Johan disparages "howres, serymonyes," and "playes," but the extant oeuvre of arguably England's greatest early Protestant playwright reveals that Bale was conflicted about such things. While King Johan's antimusical stance resembles Bale's prose polemics—"masses, ryngynges, synginges" are "heythynshe wares" in one tract, for example—in his morality drama Three Laws , music is used to restore order to the church, and the biblical God's Promises is structured around liturgical antiphons.2 Bale's plays, and his other writings, disclose that despite his well-earned critical reputation as a fanatic, the playwright is moderate and compromising when it comes to religious music.3 Bale's maneuvering exposes the flexibility and contentiousness of acoustic issues in early Tudor religious and theatrical contexts. His work contributes to contemporary conversations about music and hearing in conflicting ways, and those very contradictions expose the complexities of early Reformation debates about sacred and secular aurality. When Bale composed his dramas in the 1530s, he was a newly converted Protestant; his proximity to traditional religion was temporal as well as geographic. Born in Suffolk in 1495, Bale grew up in a region full of [End Page 325] practicing Lollards. He was resistant to reformed thought, and his parents sent him to the Carmelite House in Norwich when he was twelve. At the monastery, the youthful Bale was trained in sacred music—the antiphons, anthems, and chants of Catholic rite—and he was likely involved in the dramatic productions for which the order was well known. He remained with the Norwich Carmelites until going up to Cambridge in 1514, as a member of the order. Bale's early writings, all entirely orthodox, reveal a fascination with religious-musical experience, and one of his hymns to the Virgin, written in 1526, survives. As a Tudor playwright who understood the efficacy of religious drama, Bale would go on to refashion the morality plays of his Suffolk youth, and the cycle drama that had been popular among the Norwich Carmelites. Bale's break with Catholicism—at the behest of a Suffolk Protestant courtier—likely occurred around 1533, while he was a Carmelite prior of the White Friars at Ipswich. Pursuing his passion for reform, he at last left the Carmelites in 1536 and moved to London, where his career as Protestant playwright and polemicist began. Bale's shift to radical religious politics came with significant personal risks. The consequences of his conversion and fiery promotion of reform included two exiles: the first to Wesel, Germany, in 1540, after Henry VIII executed Bale's friend and patron Thomas Cromwell, and again to Basel after the assumption of Queen Mary in 1553, at which time Bale had been bishop of Ossory in Kilkenny, Ireland. While most of his plays were written in the late 1530s, "Bale and his Felowes," as his company of actors was called, continued to perform the plays until the reign of Elizabeth, and Bale had many of them printed while in exile. Like Bale, many of the actors in his company were brought up in monasteries or cathedral schools and trained in liturgical music. The characterization of that sort of liturgical music as a clerical practice meant to dupe congregants into blind submission is typical of Protestant anticeremonialism, and Bale quickly adapted an antimusical stance in his early prose polemics. The fissures created by Bale's conversion—his early passion for the very rites and ceremonies he would later be obliged to condemn—produce a divided religious identity that gains external efficacy in the public sphere by the...

Farnesol production from Escherichia coli by harnessing the exogenous mevalonate pathway

Farnesol (FOH) production has been carried out in metabolically engineered Escherichia coli. FOH is formed through the depyrophosphorylation of farnesyl pyrophosphate (FPP), which is synthesized from isopentenyl pyrophosphate (IPP) and dimethylallyl pyrophosphate (DMAPP) by FPP synthase. In order to increase FPP synthesis, E. coli was metabolically engineered to overexpress ispA and to utilize the foreign mevalonate (MVA) pathway for the efficient synthesis of IPP and DMAPP. Two-phase culture using a decane overlay of the culture broth was applied to reduce volatile loss of FOH produced during culture and to extract FOH from the culture broth. A FOH production of 135.5 mg/L was obtained from the recombinant E. coli harboring the pTispA and pSNA plasmids for ispA overexpression and MVA pathway utilization, respectively. It is interesting to observe that a large amount of FOH could be produced from E. coli without FOH synthase by the augmentation of FPP synthesis. Introduction of the exogenous MVA pathway enabled the dramatic production of FOH by E. coli while no detectable FOH production was observed in the endogenous MEP pathway-only control.

From Neighbours to Packed to the Rafters: Accounting for Longevity in the Evolution of Aussie Soaps

If there is one television programming staple for which Australian television drama is known internationally, it is the long-running television soap, with Neighbours (originally produced by Grundy in 1985) lauded as ‘the most outstanding example of Australian series export’ (Cunningham and Jacka, 1996). Twenty-five years on, this program still airs on domestic and international TV schedules five days a week, despite waning popularity with local Australian audiences. Considering past interest in the success and longevity of this soap, it is apposite to look again at the continuing progress of Neighbours foremost as a global brand. In comparison, Packed to the Rafters is treated here as a contemporary version of familiar Aussie themes related to everyday middle-class suburbia, populated with blue skies and feel-good characters expressing wholesome family values, but with a stylistic innovation defined here as domestic realism. As part of the production ecology of the late 2000s, Packed to the Rafters demonstrates the considerable role for local drama productions as loss leaders and flagship programming for commercial free-to-air networks up against an increasingly difficult domestic market.

Learning & Development: Drama - A dream performance

Children from a group of six nurseries found a sense of ownership of their large-scale drama production when they turned their creative talents to Shakespeare, as Katy Morton hears

Os Jesuítas e a Civilização pela Palavra

Este artigo trata das estratégias que compuseram as técnicas educacionais dos missionários jesuítas no contexto do Brasil colonial. A pedagogia de Anchieta, auxiliada por sua própria produção de poesia e teatro, alicerçou-se em práticas eclesiásticas da tradição oral. Congregando a população indígena pela mediação do idioma tupi, Anchieta mesclou liturgia, teatro e escola.

File-Based Sports Production

File-based workflows have revolutionized news production, even migrating from the on-air server to the camera. Nonlinear editing features taking advantage of this trend, found to be as powerful in dramatic production and electronic cinematography, continue to claim more production credits. Additional file-based tools have emerged as higher quality file-based imaging and post-production has become commonplace. Live sports production may have been considered distinct from scripted programming in all skill sets, but although the management of many live streams of media remain an integral element of the live broadcast, diverse applications involving recorded media insertions continue to grow far beyond instant replay, driven by the speed and flexibility of file-based recording. Daily 24-hour sports highlight coverage and retrospective sports production has grown in parallel with the live broadcast, and the repackaging of gripping game footage day by day or season by season has become an integral part of sports broadcasting. Here, the advantages of file-based production have already been realized. As broadcast and dramatic production tools have merged and the speed of data networks have even surpassed that of streaming media; the distinctions between broadcast and dramatic production have become more logistical than technical. This paper examines the innovations and possibilities of file-based sports production. The concepts and implications of moving from real-time to faster than real-time content transfer is also examined. As broadcasters seek to offer viewers ever more viewing options, ready availability of alternative content is always a tempting proposition.

A Prompt Book Copy of St. Patrick for Ireland at the Bibliothèque nationale de France

The discovery of a prompt book is an important one for early theatre history in that it gives us clues as to how plays were presented near the time of their original production. This article announces the recent discovery of a prompt book at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It is of a play by James Shirley (1596-1666) that has long puzzled scholars in relation to dramatic production – St. Patrick for Ireland – first presented in Dublin 1636-40.

Getting the message across: does the use of drama aid education in palliative care?

Drama is a promising means of delivering educational messages in palliative care. Research studies have found drama to be an effective means of delivering educational messages in other domains of learning, such as teaching health education to children and adults and engaging the general public in health policy development. This paper discusses the potential of drama for palliative care education and provides an example of the use of a drama to deliver messages about death and dying at a conference on palliative care. The paper suggests a theoretical framework for how future drama productions could be developed to educate the community, health professionals and students about palliative care.