Public Theatre Research Articles

Finding a concrete utopia in the dystopia of a ‘sub-city’

ABSTRACTThis article examines a 10-year long series of annual short-term interventions with young people living in Dharavi (India) that has led to a number of public theatre events. The partnership offers a unique training experience to students from the UK in theatre facilitation, and a regular opportunity to participate in theatre for young people in Dharavi. It brings together students from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (University of London), working collaboratively with an Indian theatre practitioner, an NGO based in Mumbai, and young people who live in Dharavi. In the article, I explore the role theatre plays in the precarious lives of those who live in Dharavi, and the potential of this on-going partnership to develop a theatre of change in a community and site affected by extreme poverty. Focusing on the longevity of this applied theatre project and drawing on the writing of Paul Ricoeur on utopia, I argue that this on-going exchange can be understood both as a form of cultural invasion and, at the same time, a utopian community theatre practice. Whilst the project continues to raise troubling questions about cultural colonisation and power, the integrated investment of partners and participants over time has generated a resilient sense of optimism as well as, to a more limited degree, evidence of long-term positive change.

Introduction: Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton: An American Musical and the Early American Republic

IntroductionLin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton: An American Musical and the Early American Republic Catherine E. Kelly By now, we all know the story: In 2008, Lin-Manuel Miranda, a twenty-eight-year-old composer, lyricist, and performer, fresh from his Broadway hit In the Heights, took Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton on vacation to Mexico. The 800-page biography of the first Secretary of the Treasury might have seemed like strange candidate for a beach read. But the sympathetic study, which recounted the personal and political ascent of a West Indian émigré from a nondescript childhood to his death in a duel, resonated. Miranda, himself the child of Puerto Rican immigrants who had achieved professional success in the United States, saw in Chernow's book a distinctly American story, an immigrant striver's story. The following spring at a White House event celebrating poetry and the arts, Miranda performed "My Shot," a song that serves as Hamilton's declaration of intent. By 2015, when Hamilton: An American Musical opened at New York City's Public Theater, "My Shot" had become the opening salvo to a projection of the nation's origins and its identity, set to the cadences of hip-hop and R&B, and performed by actors of African American and Hispanic descent. Nearly three years and countless performances, awards, and YouTube video views later, Miranda's masterpiece has secured a place in contemporary culture. Following the cast's post-performance message to Vice President Mike Pence in the tumultuous aftermath of the 2008 presidential election, it also secured a place in our culture wars. Just as Hamilton: An American Musical made its way to the center of popular culture, it pushed its way into conversations among U.S. historians, who took to print and social media to debate the production's accuracy and its politics. The 2016 meeting of the Society for Historians of [End Page 251] the Early American Republic devoted two sessions (including the presidential plenary and a videotaped interview with Miranda) to the phenomenon. At their most fruitful, the conversations at SHEAR focused on how we might connect Miranda's show to our scholarly practice. How can historians work with Hamilton? How can they teach it? Five of the following essays represent revised and expanded versions of those contributions; Marvin McAllister's essay was solicited separately. Our aim in publishing them here is to provide a view of the musical that is both longer and deeper than even the best punditry affords. ________ Joanne Freeman and Andrew Schocket situate the musical in different historiographical contexts. Freeman acknowledges that Miranda's Hamilton ("a flawed but charming master rap-battler with an almost superhuman work ethic") emerges partly from the historical record and partly from Miranda's imaginative engagement with the present moment. But as she reminds us, American scholars have been figuring and refiguring Hamilton for well over a century. Rather than looking back at previous generations' depictions of Hamilton, Schocket looks at the culture industry's fascination with the founding. He explores this emerging entertainment industry genre (the "American Revolution Rebooted") to consider what its formulaic conventions tell us about the current moment. Readers of this journal might be especially interested to think about Hamilton from the perspective of theater history. As Heather Nathans observes, Miranda is hardly the first actor to play Alexander Hamilton. Recovering a mostly forgotten collection of plays dating back to the turn of the nineteenth century, she demonstrates how artists used Hamilton to consider "critical moments in the nation's passionate and often painful debates about race, citizenship, and belonging." If Hamilton the character has a long history, so too does Miranda's color-conscious casting. Marvin McAllister situates one of the musical's most controversial elements in a far longer tradition of "whiting up." Starting at least with William Brown, African American performers have whited up for multiple and contradictory reasons ranging from social satire and career advancement to the exposure of the "unrelenting terror wrecked on black bodies." The forum comes full circle by assessing Hamilton: An American [End Page 252] Musical as history in general and as a distinct form of popular, if not precisely public...

Treating the Public: Charitable Theater and Civic Health in the Early Modern Atlantic World by Rachael Ball

Reviewed by: Treating the Public: Charitable Theater and Civic Health in the Early Modern Atlantic World by Rachael Ball Ruth MacKay Rachael Ball. Treating the Public: Charitable Theater and Civic Health in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Louisiana State UP, 2016. 212 Pp. RECENT YEARS HAVE SEEN AN IMPORTANT TREND toward linking the Iberian Peninsula to its New World colonies and territories with the understanding that by crossing the ocean—in both directions, often multiple times—people, ideas, practices, and objects underwent transformations and were enriched and altered by contacts on either end. Rachael Ball’s book, her first, takes plays and theater troupes on this voyage, thus offering an original, intriguing, and entertaining way of tracking the survival and meaning of cultural practices. In addition to giving us a transatlantic look at theater, she adds two layers: the first is the link between theater and public health institutions or charity efforts, often run by religious confraternities; the second is a comparison between the Spanish experience and that of cities in England, Ireland, and Virginia. The theater scene in Madrid and throughout Spain, as is well known, was exciting, active, and raucous. No other European country could compare. Its deep bench of playwrights and entrepreneurs benefited from a unique arrangement between municipal entities and theater; as hospitals depended upon ticket sales to finance patient care and alms-giving, the theaters, though shut down now and again for health reasons or for royal mourning periods, were ensured a relatively secure livelihood, notwithstanding some vocal critics of this popular entertainment on moral grounds. The pairs of cities Ball presents for comparative purposes are Madrid and London, Seville and Bristol, Mexico City and Dublin, and Puebla and Williamsburg. At first glance these are fascinating pairings, seeming to offer a potential wealth of material and angles from which to better understand the two great Atlantic empires. The final chapter, the book’s strongest (it also appeared as an excellent article in Sixteenth Century Review [vol. 46, no. 3, 2015]), is thematic rather than geographic, looking at antitheatrical sentiment and writings in early modern Spain and England. The critical genre enjoyed considerable success in both [End Page 117] places, but precisely because Spanish theater was so firmly lodged in cities’ welfare structures, and also because the physical playhouses (the corrales) were often lodged in central locations and thus were guaranteed massive (and mass) attendance, moralistic warnings and rants did not do as well in the south, though Spanish polemicists could cite the ancients as eloquently as the British did when it came to bemoaning the sinfulness and depravity of the stage. Ball makes a point throughout the book of examining women’s role, and roles, in theater. In Spain they were on stage and off, behind the scenes, in the audience (separate from the men), and in front of the house. In England and its colonies, however, they were harder to find. The scandal of women’s presence, be it in the audience or on stage, was part of the impulse behind antitheatrical literature, which argued that loose morals incited the general decline of civility and politics. Ball further speculates that the spectacle of women at the theater also spurred an endless array of concerns over sexual identity and gendered behavior. In the wonderful words of Pedro de Guzmán (words that supplied Ball with the title to her above-mentioned article), public theater was “a cathedra of pestilence and the plague of the city” (142). Madrid’s theater scene is probably the richest of those Ball describes, and it is well known. Less known to this reviewer were the scenes in Mexico City and Puebla, which offer interesting and entertaining examples of how class and colonial relations were enacted within the confines of the theater, at times mirroring the metropolis, at times taking syncretic directions. Both Mexican cities continued the Spanish custom of linking theater and charity or health, and theater furthermore was one of the staging grounds of jurisdictional conflict, a longstanding peninsular tradition. Ball describes Mexico City’s precolonial tradition of religious spectacle and ritual, which was certainly theatrical; however, I’m not sure it tells us much about later commercial institutions...

La Mélancholie Des Dragons by Phillipe Quesne, and: Gardens Speak by Tania El Khoury, and: Top Secret International (State 1) by Rimini Protokoll

Reviewed by: La Mélancholie Des Dragonsby Phillipe Quesne, and: Gardens Speakby Tania El Khoury, and: Top Secret International (State 1)by Rimini Protokoll Matthew Robert Moore LA MÉLANCHOLIE DES DRAGONS. By Phillipe Quesne. Under the Radar Festival, The Kitchen, New York City. 01 11, 2016. GARDENS SPEAK. By Tania El Khoury. Under the Radar Festival, NYU Tisch Abe Burrows Theatre, New York City. 01 6, 2016. TOP SECRET INTERNATIONAL (STATE 1). By Rimini Protokoll. Under the Radar Festival, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York. 01 6, 2016. Each year, the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival introduces New York audiences to cuttingedge international theatre-makers. Although several of the 2017 festival's headliners were anything but obscure, their work powerfully challenged mainstream (American) definitions of theatre, suggesting an expanded performance frame and questioning the efficacy of live theatre engagement. Variously pointing to the audience's role as co-creators of the event, the potential of hybrid embodied/digital technologies to facilitate intersubjective experience, and the inherent theatricality of seemingly objective cultural spaces, the three shows I attended injected a decidedly postdramatic and anti-consumerist aesthetic into the city's season. Touring since 2008, Phillipe Quesne's La Mélancholie des Dragonsinterrogated the limits and processes of theatrical spectacle, asking viewers to marvel at the mundane and to notice their own role in the processes of creating meaning. Situational rather than plot-driven, the piece centered on seven metalheads, broken down in a snowy parking lot, where they inventoried the low-tech attractions of their mobile theme park for a mechanic friend, Isabelle. Largely devoid of spoken language, her name became a beckoning refrain evocative of childhood wonder as the "artists" eagerly rehearsed their eventual park opening. While it seemed that we were to accept the realistic circumstances of their predicament, it was not long before the stranded rockers were peeling back cotton batting (snow) to get at electrical cables and dragging props on from offstage, thereby undermining any sense of realism and highlighting the multiple frames of theatre at work in this performance about a deferred performance. The simplicity of their amateur "theatre"—a bubble machine, wigs "dancing" in the wind, a fountain made from a tiny pump and a Rubbermaid container—initially inspired chuckles. However, by the end of the performance/demonstration (if one accepted their invitation to imagine, to play), there was no denying the force of their aesthetic as they recreated the rhythms and scale of their production research (showcased in their park "library") through increasingly grand theatrical gestures. Romantic paintings, Artaud's theatre theory, and an Appian vision of mass and light took form against a backdrop of ordinary people playing with simplistic techniques. Seduced by the performers' earnestness and led by Isabelle's wonder, viewers entered a park of the mind in which their own associations operated creatively, placing their active gazes at the center of the theatrical event. In this potent state of disarmed curiosity and mutual effort, simple acts like a Scorpions' song on acoustic guitar and recorder or a Chinese New Year-style parade with inflated tarp-dragons, became incredibly moving performances while also remaining rather funny. Both actor and audience herself, Isabelle functioned throughout as our surrogate in the process of immersion and participation that the park hoped to stage. Her sincerity challenged us to suspend judgment as she modeled a new ideal of spectation. And when she climbed a ladder amid a stream of smoke and bubbles to reproduce Wanderer above the Sea of Fogby Caspar David Friedrich, she appeared as co-(re)creator and primary spectator of the work, provoking our spectatorial/imaginative experience and drawing audience and performer together in perceptual solidarity. Her simultaneous insider/outsider status overturned easy assumptions about audience passivity and our role in creating spectacle; her easy naiveté encouraged us to follow her into the possibility of profundity as we watched her being swept away by the world she had both created and imagined. Putting his audience onstage, Quesne deconstructed illusion and conditioned expectations, finally evoking theatre in its simplest and most beautiful terms. Stemming from a desire to overcome a kind of existential melancholy (embodied in the...

God Bless Baseball by Okada Toshiki

Reviewed by: God Bless Baseball by Okada Toshiki Kee-Yoon Nahm God Bless Baseball. Written and directed by Okada Toshiki. Under the Radar Festival. Japan Society, New York. 16 January 2016. A Korean-speaking man (Lee Yoon Jae) repeatedly loses his train of thought as he tries to explain to two women (Wi Sung Hee and Nozu Aoi) the rules of baseball. The terms that confuse the women are second nature to him: inning, strike, out, first base, home plate. But knowing something does not mean you can explain it. This idea, introduced in the comic opening, ran throughout Okada Toshiki’s God Bless Baseball, presented by the Japan Society as part of the Public Theatre’s Under the Radar Festival. Despite the everyday feel, reminiscent of a weekend morning at the neighborhood park, the performance underscored the difficulty of communication. Although none of the characters seemed to notice, the performance jumped between Korean and Japanese. A pair of projection screens displayed subtitles at all times in one of the two languages plus English, calling attention to the many levels of translation and approximation (Fig. 1). Added to this was the bizarre body language of the laborious choreography, the actors warping their bodies into uncomfortable positions in ways that turned the mundane act of explaining the sport into a strangely tense endeavor. Audiences familiar with Okada’s work in two previous invitations to Under the Radar would have recognized the hyper-colloquial language and defamiliarizing physicality as his signature. They marked the triptych of one-acts, Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech (2012), performed by Okada’s own theatre company chelfitsch, and Zero Cost House (2013), a collaboration with Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theatre Company. The latter work was a decisive shift, overtly voicing social concerns (the Fukushima nuclear disaster) in contrast to the disillusioned apathy of earlier plays such as Five Days in March and Enjoy, both produced by American companies in New York in 2010. Whether in Japanese or in English translation, Okada’s hilariously contorted dialogue encapsulates contemporary youth culture even beyond a Japanese context. Jason Zinoman (2010), reviewing the English-language production of Enjoy for the New York Times, noted that Okada can “capture the way hipsters talk in Williamsburg, as well as in Tokyo.” God Bless Baseball, on the other hand, is about the specificity and untranslatability of cultural contexts. This was not only his most political production to date, but also painfully straightforward with its metaphors. Halfway through the performance, one of the women (Wi) stated without irony that everything onstage was “an allegory of reality.” The God Bless Baseball program (2016) noted that this international collaborative project explores “the relationship between Korea and Japan and both countries’ positions within the international state of affairs.” The work was commissioned by the Asian Arts Theatre in Gwangju, Korea, where it premiered in September 2015, followed by a run in Tokyo and then the United States. Now is both a risky and opportune time to take up this subject, as animosity escalates between the two nations, due especially to both neoconservative governments’ disastrous foreign policies on issues such as territory disputes and reparations for Korean “comfort women.” Although baseball seems [End Page 226] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Projection screens displayed subtitles at all times in one of the two languages plus English. (Photo: Courtesy of the Japan Society) [End Page 227] at first to be a dubious entry point, the performance adopted the sport’s slow pace and rhythmic waltz of defense and offense to bring clarity to the historically stormy relationship between Japan and Korea. Perhaps because of foreign presences, Okada’s characters rambled less. Instead, they calmly exchanged stories about baseball culture and the professional leagues of the two countries. There was no dramatic conflict; the questions and answers came at a leisurely pace because there was not much else to do to pass the time, besides half-hearted swings at practice throws and walks around the miniature diamond marked in white tape on the bare stage. (The only other set element was a large white installation suspended in the air upstage.) As they meandered, the characters...

Sfera autonomii, sfera biurokracji. Relacje polskich teatrów publicznych i ich organizatorów w perspektywie międzynarodowej

According to many researchers, the cultural policy model based on the arm’s length principle gives public institutions more autonomy than the so-called bureaucratic model. In line with the typology by Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey (1989), the former is called the “patron model” and implemented in the Anglo-Saxon countries. The latter, dubbed the “architect model,” prevails in continental Europe, including Poland. The aim of this paper is to question the popular belief that the continental model, by definition, has a greater bureaucratic and political influence than the Anglo-Saxon model. For this purpose, the author has analyzed the literature describing the British practice and conducted empirical research in Poland among officials responsible for theaters and directors of public theaters. The results suggest that the difference between the two models in terms of institutional autonomy is not as clear as one could infer from the typology contained in the literature.

The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies ed. by Nicholas Till

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studiesed. by Nicholas Till Jesse Njus The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies. Edited by Nicholas Till. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Cloth $98.00; Paper $35.99. 364 pages. The primary goal of The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studiesis to encourage the growth of opera studies as an interdisciplinary field of research, an approach that is particularly important for theatre scholars since theatre studies commonly but irrationally excludes opera. As Nicholas Till astutely remarks in [End Page 169]his introduction, "if opera has proved a troublesome stepchild for conventional musicology, which sidesteps the problem by pretending that opera is not theatre, it has proved no less delinquent to conventional theatre studies, which has consistently ignored opera as a theatrical form" (7). In order to mend this oversight, the Companionskillfully provides theatre scholars with the methodological and interpretive tools necessary to engage with opera. Till simplifies his task by dividing the Companioninto four sections: I) "Institutions," about the business of performing opera, II) "Constituents," about the individual elements of opera, III) "Forms," about the genre and dramaturgy of opera, and IV) "Issues," about opera and cultural studies. Together, these four sections provide excellent fodder for the fight against opera criticism that "is explicitly unhistorical … , implicitly assumes that the values of one's own culture are universal, and takes no account of the different subject positions that people occupy as the result of culture, gender, class, race, [and] sexuality" (2). Till's Companionunabashedly seeks to rectify the stultified field of opera criticism by foregrounding the political aspects of opera beginning with its origins in "Part I: Institutions," which analyzes the politics behind producing and funding opera throughout the centuries. Thomas Ertman's and Nicholas Payne's essays both sharply examine the political differences between state and private funding, utilizing a methodology that is equally applicable to theatre. Nicholas Till, meanwhile, perceptively analyzes the location of the audience (both physically/architecturally and figuratively) in regard to the personal and national politics discussed in the first two chapters. From institutional politics in Part I, the Companionmoves to internal politics in "Part II: Constituents." Despite the extent to which the media of opera are so clearly intertwined, most scholars prefer to separate opera into its constituent parts and then exclusively analyze the elements with which they are most familiar. Christopher Morris wisely corrects this approach, evaluating the ways in which the music and words are dependent upon each other, the ways in which that dependence can be tested, and the extent to which either can be altered in performance (98). Susan Rutherford furthers this methodological approach by incisively arguing that operatic media unite in the singers who should be considered actors, not simply instruments: "[t]he singer is the defining feature of opera: the living crucible in which music, drama and spectacle coalesce into a single art form" (117). The brilliant premise of Part II, exemplified by not only Morris and Rutherford but also Simon Williams and Nicholas Ridout, is that the constituent parts of opera must be united for any coherent (let alone successful) discussion. Williams effectively defends the notion "that opera is a genre of theatre" (139), demonstrating that the theatrical apparatus is integral to opera and does not "deface" it (139). Ridout's equally persuasive argument for an integrated approach to opera studies cleverly dissects operatic stage technology from the earliest baroque opera through [End Page 170]Wagner's Bayreuth theatre and contemporary productions, explaining that "[w]hen opera emerged from the courts and into the public theatres of Venice in the late 1630s it did so as a spectacular entertainment, in which the effects which could be achieved by means of stage technologies were as significant a part of the production as music or singing" (159). For theatre scholars, the most useful breakdown of the parallels and differences between operas and plays probably occurs in "Part III: Forms," since this section utilizes methodologies drawn from theatre studies and applies them to opera. Laurel Zeiss astutely analyzes the dramatic elements of opera, while Alessandra Campana intricately scrutinizes the genre of opera—or rather the many genres to which opera...

Theatre Organization System in Poland since 1980s

The system of theatre organization in Poland should have basically changed after the political transformation in 1989. This year marked the break up with the central leadership of the Communist Party, followed by introduction of the Act on organizing and conducting cultural activities in 1991. Although the new system of public theatres attributed to appropriate levels of local government seemed fair, it was also deemed quite rigid. After more than twenty-five years, there are several elements that are more changeable than sustainable.

Topicality and conceptual blending in Shakespeare's Henriad - the case of the Earl of Essex

The goal of the following article is to analyse topical allusions to the Earl of Essex in Shakespeare's Henriad in terms of conceptual blending theory in order to shed light on the reception of these plays in the early modern public theatre and to find clues to Shakespeare's intentions.

Parliamentary arguments on powers of access – the Care Bill debates

Purpose Opinion is divided on whether a new power of entry should be introduced for social workers in cases where individuals seem to be hindering safeguarding enquiries for community-dwelling adults at risk in England who have decision-making capacity. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the prevalence and circumstances of situations where access to an adult at risk is denied or difficult and what helps those in practice. The study consists of a literature review, a survey of adult safeguarding managers and interviews with social care staff in three case studies of local authorities. As part of the contextual literature review, during 2014 the authors located parliamentary debates on the subject and this paper reports on their analysis. Design/methodology/approach Following approaches were used in historical research, documentary analysis was carried out on transcripts of parliamentary debates available online from Hansard, supplemented by other materials that were referenced in speeches and set in the theoretical context of the representations of social problems. Findings The authors describe the content of debates on the risks and benefits of a new right to access for social workers and the role of parliamentary champions who determinedly pursued this policy, putting forward three unsuccessful amendments in efforts to insert such a new power into the Care Act 2014. Research limitations/implications There are limits to a focus on parliamentary reports and the limits of Hansard reporting are small but need to be acknowledged. However, adult safeguarding research has surprisingly not undertaken substantial analyses of political rhetoric despite the public theatre of the debate and the importance of legislative initiatives and monitoring. Originality/value This paper adds to the history of adult safeguarding in England. It also offers insight into politicians’ views on what is known/unknown about the prevalence and circumstances of the problems with gaining access to adults with capacity where there are safeguarding concerns and politicians’ views on the merits or hazards of a power of access.

The public space of the Polish high school classroom and the space navigation category of the theatre: A communicative analysis performed for the needs of didactics and glottodidactics

1 IntroductionThe paper portrays the Polish high school classroom as a public space, where one can apply the concept of the theatre as a laboratory. The theoretical background that will elaborate on the aforementioned idea discusses such issues as public space navigation and its types, the theatre as a space navigation category and the concept of the high school classroom as the workshop of communication. The research part of the paper attempts to establish to what extent the space under analysis, in which students are shaped as communicators, can be identified as the theatre-laboratory.2 Public space navigation and its typesPublic space, as a universal framework for communication, may be classified into categories which represent diverse operational backgrounds for communicative processes. The resulting spatial types designate different modes of navigating through public space that may be used by communicators. The classification by Puppel (2008) distinguishes such public space navigation classes as agora, forum, arena, home, lecture hall, temple and theatre (Puppel's categories of navigating through space are described by Bielak 2015:39-44). Significantly, the only common features the aforementioned types share are communicative resources, interactivity and communicativeness, aspects concerning navigation through public space being divergent. The agora signifies an unrestricted exchange of different thoughts. The forum is characterised by the application of very high communicative resources contributing to refined rhetoric skills, whereas the arena represents competition, i.e. a communicative war between different varieties of communicative resources. The temple stands for the type of space determined by ritual-oriented communication. The lecture hall represents an educational milieu characterised by broadcast transmission and directional reception (i.e. one of the language design features defined by Hockett 1963), whereas the home, being an elementary type of space, is responsible for developing communicators' cultural capital. Finally, the theatre constitutes a space rich in communicative means of expression which are subject to escalation. Since the spatial category of the theatre constitutes the underlying idea of the paper, the subsequent section will be devoted to the detailed presentation of the aforementioned space.3 Theatre as a public space navigation categoryThe theatre, as a public space, is determined by a number of ideas. One of them is 'imitation'. The above notion originates from the Greek term mimesis (i.e. copying). In Ancient Greece the concept in question was one of the primary aesthetic categories which determined the relationship existing between a piece of art and the outer reality. Originally, mimesis signified dancing, music and mimicry (the notion of mimesis had its roots in the rituals characteristic of the Dionysian cult). Further on, the term acquired a wider meaning and came to be used to refer to imitating reality by means of art. Firstly, mimesis pertained to drama and later on to music. With time its frame of reference became broader and began to include poetry and sculpture as well (Aristotle 1988; Auerbach 1968; Bielak 2015:42, based on Puppel 2008; Klosinski 1990; Mitosek 1997; Mimesis; Tatarkiewicz 1973:225-230).In Ancient Times, the most elaborate approach to mimesis was presented by Aristotle, who developed Plato's views on the concept under analysis. Both philosophers associated the meaning of mimesis with a mime, i.e. an actor who used gestures to express the emotions, feelings and actions of a drama protagonist. Notably, Aristotle approached the phenomenon of mimesis as the process of both creating new reality and presenting this reality by means of art. In consequence, artistic creations could not constitute mere acts of copying reality as each artist could present their own version of reality which had no correspondence to the real world. …

Reviews [Book review and Play review

The following book is reviewed: A Truck Full of Money (Kidder, T.; 2016). The following play is reviewed: Privacy (written by James Graham and directed by Josie Rourke). Many historians of computing will know Tracy Kidder’s name from his second book, The Soul of a New Machine (Little Brown,1981), which featured engineer Tom West managing a small group working on a tight deadline within a substantially antithetical Data General corporate culture. In this ,the author's 11th book, Kidder returns to the world of computing. Kidder’s featured character is Paul English, who is most known for cofounding the Kayak travel website, which was sold in 2012 to Priceline for $1.8 billion. Anyone interested in the worlds of computer programming, technical leadership and product development, venture capital and entrepreneurship, and philanthropy circa 1990–2015 (the Web era to date) should find the book interesting. It is an easy read about a guy with a good number of eccentricities, so the book will also be fun for general readers who enjoy accounts of interesting personalities. The play, Privacy, premiered at London’s DonmarWarehouse in 2014 and transferred to New York’s Public Theater in 2016. Privacy starred Daniel Radcliffe is a writer and pursues his boyfriend to New York City. But that thin plotline is almost beside the point. What actually occurs is that Radcliffe’s character takes a journey through the Internet and comes to an understanding of how pervasive and powerful the tools of surveillance are. The five remaining members of the cast take on approximately 60 different roles. Some are simply the Writer’s parents and psychiatrist, but most are journalists, activists, intellectuals, and academics who are on the front lines of the public conversation about surveillance.

The Gelbs' Lifelong Journey with O'Neill

The Gelbs' Lifelong Journey with O'Neill

A KORA ÚJKORI POPULÁRIS KULTÚRA VÁLTOZATAI ANGLIÁBAN

A tanulmány röviden felvázolja azokat a jelenségeket, melyek a kora újkori Angliában a korabeli populáris és elit kultúra közti komplex interakciók eredményeként jöttek létre, főként William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson és más, kevésbé ismert szerzők (Philip Stubbes, Nicholas Breton) műveire támaszkodva, elemezve azt, hogy a korabeli közszínház és népszerű könyvkiadás miként használta fel és alakította át az eredetileg orális-rituális és nem profitorientált alkotásokat saját szórakoztatóipari, politikai vagy kritikai céljai érdekében. A kutatás különböző státuszú, eredetű és műfajú szövegeket vizsgál meg, hogy az általánosabb tendenciák kirajzolódjanak, azonban szem előtt tartja azokat a finom különbségeket, melyek részben abból adódnak, hogy szóbeli-rituális jelenségeket írott szövegeken keresztül igyekszünk feltérképezni (erről lásd Jan Assmann elméletét a kulturális emlékezetről), részben pedig arra vezethetők vissza, hogy különböző szerzők saját céljaik érdekében más-más módon használták fel a korabeli populáris kultúra elemeit.

Support System For Creators of the Public Theatre in New York City

Support System For Creators of the Public Theatre in New York City

現代日本の公立劇場・ホールの設計論における主題とその具体化

This study is to illustrate thought on regionality from the point of view of space composition in design theories on Public Theater by contemporary Japanese architects, Through the investigation of their published articles after the Second World War. Public Theater is important to local communities as "New open space". After the Great East Japan Earthquake, The designers of public architecture need to think for the local community. Recently, Public architecture was developed every major application (Building types). So, The thinking about the relationship between architecture and regionality is the most important for the contemporary Japanese architects. Therefore, this study is described about the thinking of relationship between architecture and regionality on design theories on Public Theater. Further after this paper, the some design theories of several building types (Museum, Theater, Public Hall, Library, etc.) are going to be compared. Firstly, the contents each design theory on Public Theater were analyzed, and several descriptions of “The subject on regionality” were extracted(Fig. 1). Next, the meaning of these comments was analyzed by applying the method created by Jiro Kawakita. Then, there were drawn a relationship diagram and 7 groups of meaning were found (Fig. 2). Next, those meanings were divided into two different types (Fig. 2); “Phenomenon value and Physical value” and “Universality and Locality”. Then, the change of that relationship in terms of time was analyzed (Table 1). Secondly, the contents each design theory were analyzed again, and several descriptions of “The Realization by space compositon” were extracted. And the space compositions were analyzed. So, these were classified into 2 space compositions (Table 2); “Singular area” and “Plural areas”. Then Singular area was classified into 3 areas; “Inside”, “Exterior” and “Outside” (Table 3). So Plural areas were classified into 2 areas; “In site” and “Out site”. “In site” is things that have no relationship with “Out site”. “Out site” is things that have relationship with “Out site”. As a result, “Inside” is the most large (Table 4). And “Exterior-Out site” is large. Then, the change of that relationship in terms of time was considered (Table 5). Finally, Between “The subject on regionality” and “The Realization by space composition” were analyzed (Table 6). Then, Relationships of “Phenomenon value and Singular area” and “Physical value and Plural areas” are large. Next, from the detailed analysis, 3 Patterns were found (Table 7). (1) The subjects with Phenomenon value, “Art culture”, are represented by “Inside”. (2) The subjects with Phenomenon value, “Life culture”, are represented by “Exterior”. (3) The subjects with Physical value, “Continuation with neighboring scenery”, are represented by relationship between “Exterior” and “Out site”. Further, the change of that relationship in terms of time was considered (Table 8). So, The thought on regionality of the designers of Public Theater has changed from around 2000. Consequently, a definite meaning about thought on regionality in design theories on Public Theater was found. In this particular study, we have pointed out the design ideas of contemporary Japanese architects about public architecture after Second World War.

Eclipsed by Danai Gurira

Reviewed by: Eclipsed by Danai Gurira Katherine Jean Nigh Eclipsed. By Danai Gurira. Directed by Liesl Tommy. The Public Theater, LuEsther Hall, New York City. October 3, 2015. The particular vulnerabilities that women face during war, most especially the use of rape as a weapon of mass destruction, have until relatively recently been mostly ignored in international diplomatic discussions of war. Just as the diplomatic community, including the United Nations, has recognized the importance of considering the impact of war on women, so too has the theatre community. Plays like Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, Chungmi Kim’s Comfort Women, and most recently Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed very specifically center on this topic. This focus on women brings attention to the above-mentioned particularities of the violence that women face during war, and at the same time is perhaps what makes these plays more accessible to the audience whose experiences, for the most part, are far removed from those of the characters onstage. Eclipsed, which takes place during the Liberian civil war, is almost as female-focused as a play can be; since its production at The Public Theater, it has gone on to be the first production on Broadway written by a woman, directed by a woman, and to star only women (the play features five female characters and no male characters). It is also the first all-black and all-female production on Broadway. The majority of the play’s action focuses on three women who are the sex slaves of an army rebel leader. At the opening of the play we meet Helena, also known as Wife Number One, and Bessie (Wife Number Three), who have been the captives and “wives” of the commanding officer for so long that they do not remember their ages nor much else about their lives before they became sex slaves. Hiding underneath a tub is The Girl, whom the women have found and are trying to keep hidden from the commanding officer. However, it does not take long for her to be discovered and soon she is also one of his slaves. The main conflict of the play centers around The Girl, Maima (who used to be a sex slave of the commanding officer, but has escaped this position by joining the rebels), and Rita (a peacekeeper who bravely travels from rebel camp to rebel camp searching for her daughter). Maima, who has arrived in the hut to deliver provisions to the other wives, wants The Girl to join her as a rebel fighter, and Rita tries to convince her that education and fighting for peace is the best option. In these five characters, Gurira has created smart, funny, and fiercely strong women whose lives (with the exception of Maima) mostly exist independent of men. But the war, which at least in the play is undeniably the creation of men, completely controls these women’s lives. All but one scene of the play take place in their small hut establishing a domestic-like quality to the play; but these women’s domesticity is a forced reality—we cannot forget that. Occasionally, the women nod in the direction of offstage officers who summon the women to have sex with the commanding officer, but neither he nor any other man ever appears onstage. This lack of men keeps the story focused on the women’s lives, but it also demonstrates the impact of these men’s power; they do not need to be seen in order for their devastating impact to be felt. While we are drawn into the more accessible elements of the women’s lives (for instance, they do one another’s hair, gossip, listen to the radio, fight with one another, and so on), we are always aware that the commanding officer is nearby and that his presence is dangerous. Throughout the play there are winks and nods to the connection between these women and audience members in the United States. One of the more humorous plotlines is the women’s fascination with a Bill Clinton biography that The Girl (the only one among them who can read) reads aloud for her companions. Their musings about Clinton and Monica Lewinsky (whom...

Tanya Tagaq in Concert with Nanook of the North by Tanya Tagaq, Robert J. Flaherty

Reviewed by: Tanya Tagaq in Concert with Nanook of the North by Tanya Tagaq, Robert J. Flaherty VK Preston Tanya Tagaq in Concert with Nanook of the North. By Tanya Tagaq and Robert J. Flaherty. Under the Radar Festival, The Public Theater, New York City. January 15, 2016. Tanya Tagaq bantered with the audience as she opened her New York City run at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival. Performing with Robert Flaherty’s controversial silent 1922 film Nanook of the North, the Polaris-prize winning singer and prominent Indigenous activist warmly introduced her band: Jean Martin on drums, Jesse Zubot on violin, and Jeffrey Zeigler on cello. From the stage, side by side with her ensemble, she calibrated rapport with the audience through story, recounting her own roots 300 miles from the magnetic North Pole and her family’s memories of colonization, from her mother’s birth in an igloo to forced relocation and settlement. Tagaq’s searingly beautiful improvisations, “singing back” to Nanook—a renowned black-and-white feature-length film laboriously recorded nearly a century ago in Inukjuak, in Quebec’s far north—reconfigured musical accompaniment for silent film as an Indigenized site of political, as well as artistic intervention. A virtuosa who combines nontraditional Innu throat singing and free improvisation, Tagaq introduced Nanook as the world’s “first glimpse of our culture,” its spectacular images of ice and snow accompanied by troubling depictions of her culture and people. The concert intervenes performatively in a long history of ethnographic films made by white explorers, and in doing so she honors the film’s Indigenous collaborators, performing a keening disruption of settler cultural archives and hierarchies while celebrating the luminous beauty of place shared by the record. Improvising with this suspect archive, long criticized for its “fakeries,” reenactments, and fabulations, Tagaq’s vocal gestures and breathy embodiments danced a fleshy resonance with, and counterpoint to, these celluloid politics. Reaching beyond her body into the air, her fingers seemed to dance her vocal technique, pulling her spine into gesture. She raised her head, twisted her torso, and opened her voice. Moving otherwise afforded Tagaq a different sonic potential as well as a politics of decolonization—singing on the in-breath, as well as the exhalation. Her dancerly connection to movement highlights a false Euro-American conceptual binary between body and voice, singing and standing. As an artist traversing colonial concepts of genre through practices of voice she draws from multiple traditions and is fixed by none. Breaking both metaphorical and technological quiet with her lush sonic worlds, Tagaq’s sensorial reconfiguration of Nanook troubles its privileging of a technological, colonial gaze by inviting a shared play of spectatorial attention between the vast, silvery screen and twenty-first-century performers who, with eyes on monitors, played Nanook as their score. This collaboration activated not simply technological, but historico-cultural silence, notably regarding abuse and colonization in the Arctic, amplifying the film’s dramatic tensions with soaring sounds, daring leaps between ice floes, and wrenching scenes of the hunt. The film’s complicated status as a cinematic masterpiece was not let off the hook, yet Tagaq’s disruptions of the ethnographic film’s premises of recording a vanishing way of life were inevitably superseded by her occupation of the stage. On stage at the Public, Tagaq’s creation of sonic resonance with the film’s subjects both human and nonhuman, whether icy rifts, cold huskies, walruses, harpoon lines, or furs, performed a felt politics that arced from high notes to pulses and gasps. As Flaherty’s brew of heroizing, yet primitivizing portraits of reenacted “traditional” Inuit life at the turn of the last century played out on a giant screen above and behind the band, Tagaq’s sung responses to its stereotypical imagery and fabulations potently entangled her work with the history of music technology, as well as those of cinema and colonial policy. As the film showed Inuit actor Allakariallak, who played Nanook, biting down on a gramophone record in a staged scene historically misunderstood as the hunter’s incomprehension of Euro-American [End Page 649] technologies, Tagaq’s voice thrummed in cross-timbral solidarity, performing a cross...

Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage by Kurt A. Schreyer

Reviewed by: Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage by Kurt A. Schreyer Peggy Knapp Kurt A. Schreyer. Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage. Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. xii, 258. $49.95 cloth. Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft joins other studies in opposing the strict periodization of drama into medieval/religious and early modern/secular, [End Page 357] but it does so from a distinctive angle, that of the weight exerted on Shakespearean drama by the afterlife of material stage properties and practices from the medieval mystery plays. Professor Schreyer makes a strong case for medieval influences on Shakespeare’s stagecraft, especially for the scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, and Macbeth he discusses in detail, but the assumption that London audiences were unanimous in registering the import of the mystery cycles is less persuasive. Surely not all who saw the plays were new to the city; not all of those who were new came from cycle-producing towns; and some, young apprentices for instance, must have had their first experiences of plays in the public theaters. A more modest claim for a heterogeneous audience would have been more convincing, but it would have blunted the edge of the book’s major challenge to “that most sacred tenet of our discipline: Shakespearean authorship” and, more broadly, “assumptions about the relative superiority of the Renaissance author over the medieval subject” (3). The material remnants of the subtitle are agents, not merely precursors, of the celebrated early modern public theater. Professor Schreyer’s focus on the crafts that produced these material agents and their hold on public imaginations is presented through close attention to the Chester Late Banns, a sixteenth-century edict testifying to the continued presentation of the mysteries in Protestant England by the Chester tradesmen, and defending the use of the costumes and props of the “old [Catholic] fashion” (6). In bringing the Banns into the discussion of the Catholic/Protestant divide, Schreyer makes a welcome contribution to our understanding late sixteenth-century controversies. His close study of the Banns finds them fully supportive of the traditional local crafts and production practices of the medieval plays, in contrast, he argues, to Hegel’s dialectical stance about the uses of past tradition to produce positive change. As a practical matter, the prohibition of the mysteries in 1585 freed their properties from the taint of the old faith, making them available for appropriation on a secular stage, “antiquating” them (8). The best example of this combined respect for and practical deployment of an artifact is Shakespeare’s use of Bottom’s ass’s head in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Chapter 3). The head itself was fabricated for the Chester plays. Rather than recalling the ass’s ears of Ovid’s Midas story, Schreyer traces the head to the talking ass of the Chester Moses and the Law: Balack and Balaam from Numbers 22. The cappers are on [End Page 358] record as having crafted the head, which must have produced a striking effect, since, except for the snake in Eden, the ass is the only talking animal in the mystery cycles. It is easy to see how an elaborate prop like the head could be adapted by a late sixteenth-century theatrical company for a non-biblical tale, but there is more to the story. Protestant iconography produced a widely dispersed image known as the “Popish Ass,” elaborated by Melanchthon and Luther and illustrated in a woodcut by Cranach, making use of a familiar Protestant polemic against the pope. In characterizing Bottom, then, the stage presence of the talking ass may have called up a variety of religious associations, and this rich history, Schreyer shows, enhances the play when we acknowledge it. It does not, however, reduce the impression of an authorial hand managing the intricacy of its deployment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chapter 4 is about purgatory, and it tackles one of the persistent problems in Shakespeare criticism: what is signified by the under-stage location from which the Ghost in Hamlet emerges. A medieval stage practice—the multi-level...

Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence, and Punishment in Early Modern Spain by Margaret E. Boyle

Boyle, Margaret E. Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence, and Punishment in Early Modem Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2014. 184 pp.Margaret Boyle's Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence, and Punishment in Early Modern Spain approaches the theatrical depiction of bad women in the Comedia alongside discourses of the real-life entities that worked to rehabilitate them in seventeenth-century Madrid. The inclusion of historical documentation of custodial institutions as well as fictional depictions of deviant women rehabilitated on stage highlights the crucial role of public performance to both. Indeed, as the author points out, the two institutions were even economically bound to one another, given that the revenue from the public theater would have supported the custodial houses (5). Perhaps more conspicuously, Unruly Women signals the fundamentally contradictory nature of rehabilitation inherent in the policing of women in both realms. At once reliant upon criminality and the public exposure of the unruly woman for survival, the custodial institution professes containment and piety for the purpose of rehabilitation. The term recogimiento, for example, encapsulates meditative, spiritual introspection along with forced incarceration. Likewise, the public theater holds up its variants on the deviant woman-the widow, the vixen, and the murderess-as exemplary and in need of transformation. The book, though limited in scope, is fascinating study of the gendered discourses that competed to construct early modern criminality and reform practices in Spain.Unruly Women is divided into two parts. Part One includes Chapter 1, Gendering Recogimiento in Early Modern Madrid, which analyzes the extant institutional literature pertaining to the Casa de Santa Maria Magdalena de la Penitencia (a 1777 manual authored by Don Manuel Recio), together with the introduction to proposal written by Madre Magdalena de San Jeronimo in 1608, petition to King Felipe III to create women's prison in Madrid. Part Two focuses on three full-length comedias that feature, and rehabilitate, three forms of the unruly woman. Chapter 2, Stage Widow in Pedro Calderon de la Barca's La dama duende, argues that Calderon's play carves an imaginative space to feature the widow's own creative (and metatheatrical) response to the physical and economic containment wrought by widowhood. Chapter 3, Dramatizing Community in Maria de Zayas's La traicion en la amistadreassesses Fenisa's designation as bad woman to correct the critical idealization of the community of women represented in the play. Chapter 4, Women's Exemplary Violence in Luis Velez de Guevara's La serrana de la vera, analyzes the comedic facets of Gila's persona as influenced by the larger-than-life cultural presence of actress Jusepa Vaca. The author notes that Gila's unconventional response to dishonoring, her mass violence, succeeds until she infringes upon the confines of the honor code itself, at which point the play's act of rehabilitation (her execution) crosses over to punishment. In all three examples, the comedia works to transform the protagonists' deviance, but in the process of the depiction of that transformation, there is revealed a more fluid negotiation of status in ways that frequently disrupt the clear social categories used to describe their outcomes: married or single, comic or tragic (98).The monograph concludes with call for more archival research to uncover the points of view of women actually housed in custodial institutions during the early modern period. …