Public Theatre Research Articles

Teenage Dick by Ma-Yi Theater Company

Reviewed by: Teenage Dickby Ma-Yi Theater Company Dan Venning Teenage DickPresented by Ma-Yi Theater Company in association with The Public Theater at The Public Theater, New York. 06 12– 07 29, 2018. Written by Mike Lew. Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel. Choreography by Jennifer Weber. Set by Wilson Chin. Costumes by Junghyun Georgia Lee. Lighting by Miriam Nilofa Crowe. Sound by Fabian Obispo. Movement choreography by Robert Westley. Dramaturgy by Jesse Cameron Alick. With Marinda Anderson (Elizabeth York), Alex Breaux (Eddie Ivy), Shannon DeVido (Barbara "Buck" Buckingham), Sasha Diamond (Clarissa Duke), Gregg Mozgala (Richard Gloucester), and Tiffany Villarin (Anne Margaret). In the late nineties and early aughts, a number of major films were released that set the plots of Shakespearean plays within the world of American high schools, including Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You(1999), Tim Blake Nelson's O(2001), and Andy Fickman's She's the Man(2006). To some degree, these films obscure their Shakespearean origins, at least from a marketing perspective. I have taught many undergraduates who adored She's the Manwithout realizing that that it is an adaptation of Twelfth Night. Yet Mike Lew, in his new play Teenage Dick, takes a strikingly different tack. Teenage Dickassumes a basic familiarity with Richard III, which was not problematic for audiences at the Public Theater, which annually produces Shakespeare in the Park, especially considering the glut of productions of Richard IIIthat have appeared in New York since the dawn of the Trump Era (most notably Thomas Ostermeier's version at BAM and as part of Ivo van Hove's Kings of War). Playing on the conventions of both Shakespeare's plays and the genre of high school dramas, Lew, director Moritz von Steulpnagel, and the extraordinary designers and cast created a searing yet frequently hilarious examination of disability, otherness, and what it takes to turn a person into what we would call a "villain." Shakespeare's Richard of Gloucester, at the opening of his play, announces in soliloquy that "since I cannot prove a lover / To entertain these fair well-spoken days, / I am determined to prove a villain" (1.1.28–30). [End Page 707]And of course he does just that, gleefully murdering many of the other characters in his play, including his own brother, wife, and young nephews. Lew's play complicates the question of how Richard arrives at this villainy, engaging with contemporary discussions of disability. Lew's play acknowledges that few people simply announce a choice to be malicious, even when they have been ostracized from society due to disability or difference. Lew's adaptation is pared down to six characters: Richard Gloucester, the junior class secretary who has cerebral palsy; his best friend Barbara "Buck" Buckingham, who uses a wheelchair; Elizabeth York, a well-meaning English teacher and faculty liaison for student government; Eddie Ivy, the junior class president, a jock, and a bully; Clarissa Duke, the junior class vice-president, an overachieving ultra-religious type; and Anne Margaret, a dancer, Eddie's ex, and formerly one of the most popular girls in school. Lew's Richard is determined to become senior class president—he just has to find a way to get Eddie and Clarissa out of the way. He lights upon the idea of becoming Anne's boyfriend, catapulting himself to new popularity. Yet his campaign does not go exactly as planned. Richard's debate with Eddie is a disaster in which he is publicly shamed via social media. But when Richard has genuinely earned Anne's trust, she reveals a secret to him that he uses to destroy Eddie—and, in the process, Clarissa and Anne. At first, the very fact of setting a Shakespearean plot in a high school, utilizing only six actors, removing most of the verse (Lew's Richard has a weird habit of speaking in iambic pentameter; Buck repeatedly tells him to stop), and running only ninety minutes without an intermission might seem like the height of reductiveness, removing all of the grandeur from this early Shakespearean play. But part of Lew's point is that Shakespeare's Richard is ultimately a cartoon...

Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro

Reviewed by: Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro Todd James Coulter OEDIPUS EL REY. By Luis Alfaro. Directed by Chay Yew. Public Theater, Shiva Theater, New York City. December 2, 2017. Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus El Rey is not a new play. Written in 2007, it received its New York City premiere in fall 2017 at the Public Theater in collaboration with the Sol Project. The production punctuated a three-year relationship that began in 2014 with a series of roundtables and conversations on how to bring more inclusive representations, specifically Latinx artists and art, to a larger public. This Oedipus maintained all the prophecy, hubris, and incest of its source material. However, Alfaro and director Chay Yew took fate and agency head-on within the context of gangs, family, and loyalty in Los Angeles. The Public’s artistic director Oskar Eustis and Yew offered Alfaro’s take on the literal bedrock of Western theatre as a way to end the mythic trajectory of the Oedipus story in our contemporary society. Oedipus El Rey was staged in the smaller, more intimate Shiva Theater at the Public. Shallow and wide, the space forced the visual world into a flat plane, presenting the play against iconographic imagery. Scenic designer Riccardo Hernandez’s stylized graffiti mural, which featured a Madonna wrapped in billowing blue folds at center, spanned the entire upstage wall. A large blue figure with outstretched hand holding a small female bride resembling a wedding-cake topper flanked her right side. To her left was another figure, with a male groom in her hand matching the former’s in scale. Cherubic figures fell/flew in the interstitial spaces. The stage area looked paved, at once evoking the sidewalks and streets of LA’s Pico Union district and a prison yard. Multiple sections of prison gates slid on and off on tracks, further emphasizing the two-dimensional quality of the space and story. Hernandez did not offer the generic palace steps of Western antiquity, but a brightly colored world that contrasted the religious ecstasy of the Virgin Mary and Mesoamerican iconography with the confined world of the prison industry. [End Page 561] Click for larger view View full resolution Brian Quijada (Coro), Joel Perez (Coro/Creon), Juan Francisco Villa (Coro/Laius), Reza Salazar (Coro), Julio Monge (Coro/Tiresias), and Juan Castano (Oedipus) in Oedipus El Rey. (Photo: Joan Marcus.) It was against this brightly colored imagery that the play began. Five men dressed in prison orange uniforms entered the space. Yew immediately altered the flatness of the theatre as actors came into the house and climbed ladder rungs embedded in structural columns and the upstage wall. This was the Coro, a small ensemble of six actors from whom Laius, Tiresias, Creon, and Oedipus would emerge. They began a call and response between the house and stage, asking what stories were going to be told. The response accumulated from a single voice answering to the entire Coro responding in unison. Alfaro’s simple use of choral voices at the opening of the production introduced a successful and engaging device that was maintained throughout the Coro’s odes in the play. The vocal rhythm was precise, clipped, and sometimes playful, sometimes threatening, but it always pushed the pacing of the play, demanding that the audience actively listen to keep up. The stories to be told in the prison yard were not immediately for us, the outsiders, but for inmates. The Coro led us to the familiar story of pride, prophecy, and ruin. Characters were announced. Oedipus (Juan Castano)—young, shirtless, and fit—did pushups and sit ups in the yard. As the Coro told the story, actor Julio Monge put on a pair of sun glasses and revealed a collapsible support cane to become Tiresias; Juan Francisco Villa put on a blinged-out chain with a crown to become Laius; and, Joel Perez pulled out a large styrofoam cup, sipped his horchata to become a somewhat hapless Creon. Jocasta was introduced in a similar way, but was soon replaced onstage by Sandra Delgado in a simple black wrap dress. Yew’s presentational staging of the opening kept the characters at a sympathetic remove, further...

Joseph Conrad on the French Stage: One Day More as Demain

Joseph Conrad on the French Stage: One Day More as Demain Susan McCready (bio) In the summer of 1913, The English Review published the play One Day More, Joseph Conrad’s adaptation of his 1902 short story “To-morrow,” noting that the play had been “performed in 1904 by the Stage Society and also at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre, Paris” (Conrad, “One Day More” 16).1 Founded in 1893, Aurélien Lugné-Poe’s Œuvre (the name means “work of art”) referred not to the hall (the Salle Berlioz in the 9th arrondissement) but to the troupe, one of a growing number of “art theater” enterprises around the turn of the twentieth century whose goal was to rescue French theater from the twin threats of commercialization and stagnation. Lugné-Poe produced Alfred Jarry’s infamous Ubu Roi in 1896 and would go on to be a leading light in the art theater movement. The Œuvre’s repertoire was an eclectic array of plays, French and foreign, contemporary and classic. Lugné-Poe argued passionately for international cooperation among theater artists (Dusigne 16) and staged the French premieres of plays by Strindberg, Ibsen, d’Annunzio, and Gorki. However, he never produced a play by Conrad.2 In the spring of 1909, One Day More had played Paris in an adaptation by P. H. Raymond-Duval entitled Demain, but it was at the Théâtre des Arts, not at the Œuvre. It is not clear how The English Review came to make this error or whether it would have been meaningful to its readers, but it was widely repeated in publications that reported on the latest issue of the literary magazine. Would it have mattered to readers of The Cleveland Plain Dealer or The Aberdeen Daily Journal that Conrad’s play had premiered at one Paris theater rather than another?3 To most, probably not, but to those who knew the Paris theater scene well, the substitution of the Œuvre for the Théâtre des Arts would have given a false impression of Conrad’s French theatrical debut. At the turn of the twentieth century in France, the theater was culturally the most important literary genre and commercially the most attractive. Authors [End Page 175] could reach a larger audience and make more money with one hit play than with a string of successful novels, and they could not hope to rival the prestige of Racine and Molière with serializations in newspapers. Still, contemporary commentators warned that the theater in France was in crisis. With an audience subdivided among theaters specializing in various types of entertainment (grand spectacle, café-concert, vaudeville, among others), the “literary theater” had a smaller share of the box office than ever before. More worrisome to the literati was the suspicion that French playwrights were not up to the moment, and perhaps they were not. No French playwright of the period reached the status of Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, or Shaw. Untrammeled by the cultural baggage of the théâtre classique and its nineteenth-century avatar, la pièce bien faite, foreign authors were experimenting more broadly with dramatic form, and were frankly more successful in adapting it to their subject matter. The art theater movement began to emerge in France in the 1880s partly in response to this crisis. André Antoine led the way, founding the Théâtre Libre in 1887; Paul Fort, whose Théâtre d’Art (not to be confused with the Théâtre des Arts, where Conrad’s play premiered) opened in 1890, was not far behind. Lugné-Poe had collaborated with both, and his Théâtre de l’Œuvre was the continuation of Fort’s project, which folded in 1893. Art theaters were generally subscription theaters, that is, private clubs, which allowed them to avoid the rigors of official censorship to which the public theaters had to submit. This meant that they were generally freer in their choice of repertoire, and they used their freedom to push the French theater in new directions. Often this meant in the direction of foreign authors, further stoking anxiety in the theater world that French cultural dominance was on the wane. Art theaters positioned...

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and: Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Reviewed by: Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and: Hamlet by William Shakespeare David Román HAMLET. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Robert Icke. Harold Pinter Theatre, London. June 27, 2017. HAMLET. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Sam Gold. Anspacher Theater at the Public Theater, New York City. July 20, 2017. The Almeida Theater’s 2017 production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet had three major stars, each offering his own singular and revelatory contribution: Robert Icke, the director; Andrew Scott, the actor; and Bob Dylan, the songwriter. These three figures worked with, and against, Shakespeare’s play to create an evening of mystery and surprise. While highlighting [End Page 563] Shakespeare’s language and dramaturgy, each called attention to their own artistic genius. This production, which transferred to the West End after its initial sold-out run, respected Shakespeare’s canonical status while making refreshingly innovative choices, including the use of video cameras and monitors; a Hamlet, as performed by Scott, whose defining attribute was love; and the bold incorporation of several recorded Dylan songs. This production was full of “shock and awe” moments of interpretive beauty, beginning with the sounds of rumbling as the audience entered the theatre. The soundscape set off an aura of daunting suspense, which only increased as the volume grew louder. Icke used sound cues to connote the contemporary period, suggesting that his version of Hamlet would be a departure from both conventional costume dramas, which trade on Shakespeare as cultural capital, and productions pursuing early modern authenticity, which claim historical veracity. Not this Hamlet. The mise en scène, a simple yet elegant living room with a three-sectioned glass-pane wall-divider backdrop—think Danish contemporary—included several strategically elevated video monitors placed throughout the theatre. The set and costume design by Hildegard Bechtler enhanced the sense of the contemporary that infused the performance. This Hamlet was informed by twenty-first-century technologies of surveillance and twenty-four-hour televised communications. The guitar chords of Dylan’s song ”One More Cup of Coffee,” from his album Desire (1976), announced the beginning of the play, as news coverage of King Hamlet’s funeral was broadcast on video monitors. Before we saw any of the actors, the Royal Family appeared to us on televised cable-news programs as mediated public figures. These prefatory moments—sound cues, popular music, visual images—unveiled a Hamlet set in our immediate moment. The play begins once again with nine screen monitors tracking the whereabouts of the castle. We are in a surveillance room in which security guards screen the monitors to track any suspect activity. It is here, on one of these screens, where the ghost of Hamlet’s father has previously appeared. And it is here where Shakespeare’s Hamlet meets up finally with Icke’s Hamlet. Horatio and the guards meet in the surveillance room to anticipate the ghost’s return. Icke’s Hamlet foregrounded the technologies of surveillance we use to observe and deceive one another: hidden microphones, CCTV cameras, and just plain spying. These devices composed some of the main visual language for the production, although never at the expense of the play. The next four hours unfolded with surprising reverence for the text. Shakespeare’s language was made accessible primarily through the conversational style of the actors. This was true especially of Scott, whose performance of Hamlet, including the soliloquies, refused the lofty heritage of the role in favor of a more casual intimacy. Scott spoke with simplicity and clarity, and his vocal inflections and bodily gestures, especially his facial expressions, suggested a Hamlet completely at home with himself. Scott’s Hamlet, as the heir apparent, was formal and intelligent, but as the young man he was buoyant, lively, and at times emotionally unrestrained. He was an immensely likable Hamlet, and his warmth toward others was fully on display. When he first appeared, however, he was pouty, obviously annoyed with the King and Queen for their tasteless urgency to wed so quickly on the eve of his father’s funeral. But among his intra-generational friends and associates, he was playful and affectionate: full of fist-bumps, bear hugs, and big smiles. If there was a guiding...

Introduction to the Special Section

Introduction to the Special Section Brian E. G. Cook (bio) As I write this, the United States is undergoing a radical test of its democratic structures and the very notion of "truth" is increasingly questioned. The White House often functions more as a reality show catering to big personalities, ratings, and large crowds, and so I'm going to take the opportunity of this introduction on "rousing theatre" to attempt to read the political and cultural landscape in terms of performance as I saw it in fall 2017. Though Sara Freeman and I didn't know when we put out the call for papers that the mood in the United States would so profoundly change in the fall of 2016, global politics will likely influence the immediate understanding of this section, and for someone picking it up in twenty years, such reflection might be necessary to provide context. And, since each issue of Theatre History Studies has a long production time line, at least a year will have passed between the period when I wrote this introduction and the time you are reading it, so given the tremendous instability of the current US administration and the rapid apprehension of its every nuance by the national media, I expect the world you're currently experiencing to be different than mine. Political events are riper for performative analysis than ever before. From my couch in July 2017, I witnessed the media's clamor over the "dramatic" vote of Republican Senator John McCain against the "skinny repeal" of the Affordable Care Act.1 Earlier this week I lived through the fallout from and breathless media analysis of Anthony Scaramucci's phone call to New Yorker journalist Ryan Lizza, wherein, amid trying to get Lizza to identify a confidential source, the gregarious Scaramucci also claimed he had no interest in gaining publicity for himself, because, as he said so eloquently, "I'm not Steve Bannon, I'm not trying to suck my own cock."2 Scaramucci was fired days later, and Bannon left the [End Page 89] White House in August 2017. I'm sure you and future-me will have lived through stories even more compelling as the Reality Star Presidency continues its bewildering quest for viewership and ratings. For this special section, we called for papers that focused on "plays, productions, processes, and/or people which have been rousing: specifically, where theatre and politics have intersected to embolden, comfort, or incite artists or audiences, or which have piqued curiosity, exasperation, or anger," and we offered a definition of "rousing" that included "to startle out of inactivity." Like many of you, I teach about theatrical riots in my theatre history classes, and my students are often surprised by the importance placed upon what appeared onstage and bemused by the raucousness in the theatre and adjacent spaces during the Old Price, Hernani, or Astor Place Riots, having never encountered any such thing in their own lives as audience members. My students are also usually surprised by Piscator and Brecht's desire to use theatre to provoke an audience into action, because, for them, theatre has never had such impact. Multiple events that have occurred over the past few months and others that will happen in the future are likely to shift their understanding, and I predict having very interesting conversations with my students about the modern impact of theatre. Though I'll dig into these more deeply later, the attendance of Vice President-elect Mike Pence at a performance of Hamilton in New York City in late 2016, performances of Robert Shenkkan's play Building the Wall, and the reaction to the New York Public Theatre's 2017 production of Julius Caesar with a distinctly Trump-like Caesar have all brought theatre into national headlines.3 Beyond the theatre, Saturday Night Live's continued lampooning of the Trump administration and its central figures have brought home the important role that cultural reflections of the political have come to play in our modern society. If nothing else, as Vulture's Mark Harris writes, "In search of believable oracular leadership that politicians and pundits have failed to provide, it's tempting to turn to art."4...

«Храму Мельпомени» 150 років

The article is dedicated in 2017 150 years a case of foundation of Zymoviy public theater by engineer G. Trambytskiy in Yelisavetgrad (Kirovograd music and drama theatre by M. Kropivnytskуі now ) (1865–1867).

Are polish theatres autonomous? Artistic institutions in a bureaucratic system of culture funding

ABSTRACTThe culture funding systems based on the arm's length mechanism are generally believed to secure more autonomy of artistic institutions than ‘bureaucratic’ systems which directly involve politicians or public servants in the allocation of public funds. There is a wide range of academic literature that defend this approach. The aim of this paper is to readdress this view and show that it stems from typology-based preconceptions rather than real-life policy-making. To this end, the article analyses relations between public theatres and local funding bodies in Poland, where culture funding system is characterised by a bureaucratic decision-making. Mixed methods were applied using questionnaires and focus groups with public servants and theatre directors. The paper suggests that, although Polish local governments play a dominant role in the arts funding, their intervention in the area of culture has merely administrative nature and, in general, does not entail interference in the artistic activity.

“Address to Public Council”: The Additions to Marston’sThe Malcontent, the King’s Men’s Repertory, and Early Modern Theatrical Economics

“Address to Public Council”: The Additions to Marston’s<i>The Malcontent</i>, the King’s Men’s Repertory, and Early Modern Theatrical Economics

Asian Theatre as Method: The Toki Experimental Project and Sino-Japanese Transnationalism in Performance

In 2012, Zuni Icosahedron (Hong Kong), Za-Koenji Public Theatre (Tokyo), and the Jiangsu Kun Opera Theatre (Nanjing) initiated the Toki Project, an intercultural platform devoted to the transmission of kunqu and noh through contemporary performance. Originating from a Shanghai Expo 2010 commission, Toki provides a theatrical application of Chen Kuan-hsing’s influential notion of “Asia as method.” As epitomized by the yearly One Table, Two Chairs performances at Nanjing’s Toki Arts Festival, Toki partakes in Asia as method’s effort toward “decolonization, deimperialization, and de-cold war” through aesthetic and epistemological deconstruction, endorsing a dialogic model of intercultural performance as inter-Asian relation.

Organizational trauma – Types of organizational forgetting in the case of Belgrade theaters

Organizational memory studies (OMS) frame memory in a managerial mode, treating it as a data storage, limiting the scope from wider field of social memory studies. There is a lack of understanding about how the process of institutional forgetting works and how some memories stay a part of oral narratives and communicative social memory while they are omitted from the official memory represented by the official documents and events of remembering. Inspired by Paul Connerton’s article on the typology of forgetting we explore his typology in selected case studies of three public theaters located in Belgrade, focusing on remembering policy and practices investigating if a type of forgetting typical for a state/society/nation level is possible to be applied in the context of a cultural organization. We agree with Wessel and Moulds that developing common language and terminology would be important and beneficial for cross disciplinary dialogue. In this sense, the study shows how the typology of forgetting in societies can be applied and developed in the organizational memory studies and cultural management. The focus of the research is the dynamics of remembering and forgetting explored through analysis of the interaction between changing context, official institutional memories, and social communicative memories.

The Age of Shakespeare versus the Age of Milton: Reopening the Noisy Theaters

AbstractThis essay explores the political implications of the periodization divides created by the closing of the public theaters in 1642 at the start of the English Civil War and their reopening in 1660 at the restoration of Charles II. The meaning of the theater, and the meanings attributed to the cultural icons of Shakespeare and Milton, played important parts in the cultural battle between royalists and republicans, and those debates continue to shape literary studies in the twenty-first-century university despite recent reevaluations of the literature of the Civil War and the Revolution. Shakespeare is walled off from Milton, drama separated from poetry, prose, and epic. These divides distort the readings of the period’s literature and, at a time of resource scarcity, threaten to limit which writers and texts are researched and taught. The essay concludes with a reading of Paradise Lost that puts drama, dialogue, and conversation at the center. In the dramatic Milton, meaning is found in dialogue and conversation, growing out of the noise of debate and conflict.

The Organization and Ethnic Spatial Construction of Gyeongseong Bukchon’s Korean Public Theater District in the 1910s

The Organization and Ethnic Spatial Construction of Gyeongseong Bukchon’s Korean Public Theater District in the 1910s

Beyond acknowledgement of whiteness: Teaching white theatre teachers to examine their racial identity

ABSTRACTWhile some US public school theatre programs seek to move away from an annual token play of color, the white canon persists. This reflexive essay examines one professor’s pedagogical approaches in working with white pre-service theatre teachers as they direct short plays with high school students. The work interrogates intersections of identity, critical race theory, performance, representation and education theory and invites the field of theatre education to move beyond an acknowledgement of whiteness towards critical analysis of such racialization. The author examines her own practice as she seeks to embody culturally responsive theatre pedagogy (and invites her students to do the same), thus interrogating all identities rather than the common approach of viewing whiteness as given, non-diverse and normalized.

Hamilton’s Ghosts

Research Article| July 01 2017 Hamilton’s Ghosts Hamilton: An American Musical. Thomas Kail, director; Sander Jacobs, Jill Furman, Jeffrey Seller, and the Public Theater, producers; Lin-Manuel Miranda, writer, book, music, and lyrics; Ron Chernow, historical consultant. Richard Rodgers Theatre, New York City, performance date, August 6, 2015.Hamilton: The Revolution. By Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-1455539741. Hardcover. Pp. 288. $45.00.Hamilton: An American Musical (CD). By Lin-Manuel Miranda. Orchestrations by Alex Lacamoire. Produced by Alex Lacamoire, Bill Sherman, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Ahmir Thompson and Tarik Trotter for the Roots. 2015. Lyrics enclosed. Atlantic Records 551093-2. Philip Gentry Philip Gentry University of Delaware Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2017) 35 (2): 271–280. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.35.2.0271 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Philip Gentry; Hamilton’s Ghosts. American Music 1 January 2017; 35 (2): 271–280. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.35.2.0271 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: REVIEW ESSAY You do not currently have access to this content.

HUMOR DAN KOMEDI DALAM SEBUAH KILAS BALIK SEJARAH

This paper describes the brief history of Humour in Arabs from (1) the earlier preIslamic period, (2) the Islamic period, (3) the medieval Arabic Literature (Abbasid), and (4) Mamaluke, Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Ottoman periods. This paper will try to show that&lt;br /&gt;Arabic literature is rife with the unique taste of Arabs in humour and comedy. Finally, the result of data analysis shows that humour in the earlier pre-Islamic period and the Islamic period is used dominantly at satirical poem which is called hija‟. But in the medieval period until Ottoman period, Arabic humour and comedy has been spreading to the modern prose, shuch as romantic novel, elegant style of fable, public theater – shadow play and some of elegiac short stories.

The mediated arena: Re-image-ining the epideictic in the digital age

Abstract Colin Kaepernick takes a knee during the singing of the national anthem at an NFL game, and the digital midwife helps birth a movement. Mike Pence is called out from the stage at a performance of the smash-hit musical, Hamilton, and the President of the United States takes to Twitter in rebuttal. New York’s Public Theater and its acclaimed artistic director, Oskar Eustis, stage a thinly veiled parable of the Trump presidency in their Shakespeare-in-the-Park production of Julius Caesar. Images of the performance are alternatively venerated and eviscerated on social media, frightened sponsors pull out and audiences attack the stage. Welcome to the new arena, where the theatre and the stadium have once more taken their places as flashpoints for political protest, and where digital media are not mere witnesses, but powerful participants. This article deploys these examples to ‘re-image-ine’ classical notions of the epideictic as rhetorical display. Engaging with William Beale’s 1978 rhetorical performative update to this classification, along with theorizations of performance and technical images, I argue the epideictic has the unique ability to reflect the values of the community in the moment, activating audiences and speakers in new ways. Modern audiences, informed by digital technologies and evolving relationships to the live event, have entered new areas of interaction and performance that invite new scholarship and explication. How can epideictic performance, (conceived as display and ceremony, but also as live in ways that deliberative and forensic rhetoric are not) act as a useful theory for understanding digital realities and moments of disruption and resistance?

Art as ethical practice: anthropological observations on and beyond theatre

This article discusses a central tenet of anthropological approaches to ethics, namely the notion of conduct. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with contemporary German theatre professionals, this article highlights how actors and directors within a public theatre institution cultivate artistic forms of conduct through the practice of the rehearsal. It analyses how rehearsals emerge as both spaces and practices of self-conduct, building on what actors refer to as Haltung – a term that simultaneously denotes attitude, posture, and conduct. Rehearsals facilitate a collective locus and modus of reflected action, suffused with the authority of the director, but ultimately aimed at training actors’ capacity to make ethical and aesthetic choices. The aim of this discussion is to show how emic artistic concepts and practices may refine existing and open up new pathways for dialogue between the ethnographic study of art and the anthropology of ethics.

АНТИЧНЫЙ ТЕАТР И ВИЗАНТИЯ: ОТ ГРАЖДАНСКОЙ ИДЕОЛОГИИ К ХРИСТИАНСТВУ

The article considers ways to adapt the ancient dramatic heritage in Byzantium. Coming in low to mid. 4th c. ancient drama was transformed and acquired new forms: liturgical drama, literary and public theatres. The Byzantine drama, moving away from the form and essence of the ancient theater performances, retained one important feature – the idea of the transmission of the dominant ideology in a dramatic means.

‘From presence to participation – the role of the juror reimagined.’

ABSTRACTThis article raises new questions about the meaning of juror participation in a criminal trial. Through an interdisciplinary exploration I not only theorize the position and potentiality of the jury, but I also reflect on the process of working with a theatre director to create work which is both academic research and public theatre performance in equal measure. I challenge the reader to reconsider the current assumptions which equate juror presence in the courtroom to their participation in the trial by drawing on participatory techniques found in Augusto Boal's Forum Theatre and my current collaboration with site-specific theatre company, Grid Iron.

Curated Readings

Established in 2006, Barking Spider Visual Theatre is a Melbourne-based multi-art form company whose mission is to interpret history and place through community and individual narratives. The company collaborates with public institutions, theatres, schools and festivals to develop and create stories using puppetry, percussion, art-installation, animation/film, sound installation and live performance. The company often creates immersive spaces requiring visitors to move, explore and experience collections, spaces and buildings in unexpected and, occasionally, irreverent ways.This paper presents two performances created by Barking Spider Visual Theatre that were commissioned by libraries to focus on history and context—the library as a repository of collective stories. Liberty of the Press was created for the State Library of Victoria (SLV) in 2014, while the second work, Ex Libris, was developed in 2013 for The Melbourne Athenaeum Library to celebrate History Week. Each work addressed how performance serves to engage and enliven the library as a learning space for the public, and how it can increase the social and cultural value of libraries and their collections.