Public Theatre Research Articles

Modeling and Investigating the Economy and Production Structure of Iran Public Theater

Cultural productions are considered as a sign of civilization in modern societies. Theater is known as an important type of cultural productions, playing important role in the cultural economy of a society. Due to complexities of socio-economic interactions, this sector needs dynamic investigation to illuminate different aspects of possible potentials and threats. The present paper tries to find relationships between Iran public theater economy and production structure based on a dynamic model including all economic stages, namely production, distribution, and consumption to achieve a solid perception of Iran theater position. The authors use System Dynamics to create a model that can explain or mimic the behavior of the system in order to evaluate policies. Since Tehran City Theater complex is the sole place for the public theater in Iran, the authors assess it over the period 2012-2015 and predict its behavior to 2022. On the other hand, the investigation in this context is being directed in accordance with microeconomics principles. The results indicate that the position of Iran public theater is undesired due to vague managerial policy. Also, the findings offer insights into the problems and suggest practical solutions.

Melodrama,Purimspiel, and Jewish Emancipation

Long forgotten, Elizabeth Polack (fl. 1835–43) is the earliest known Jewish woman playwright in England. This essay argues that her first play,Esther, the Royal Jewess,or the Death of Haman!(1835), performed at a public playhouse in the Jewish working-class neighborhood of London's East End, radically realigns diverse genres and populations in advocating both Jewish emancipation and a voice for women. By way of a very brief introduction, I first point out the applicability here of Judith Butler'sNotes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Butler explores how group protest, such as Tahir Square or Occupy Wall Street, serves as a kind of communal bodily signification. Of course, her point is not to address how people come together in a public theater, where the cast arrives daily for salaried jobs and the audience plunks down cold cash for a fun night out. Yet something else meaningful can occur in assembly within the theater. Theatrical performances can take on the discursive power of political assembly that Butler defines, signifying “in excess of what is said,” bringing actors and audience together with potentially political valence. Butler helps us understand the stakes of theatrical performance and public assembly and why it is important to examineEsther, the Royal Jewessbeyond recovering a neglected author, though that too is part of my object.

Okumkpo Masquerade Concert: Traditional Public Theatre and Social Commitment in Afikpo, Southeastern Nigeria

As an ethnical subgroup of Southeastern Nigeria, Afikpo has a cultural heritage that showcases its rich oral traditions and from where emerge its philosophy, mythology and religiosity. Sociological researches have unveiled the people’s ethnography and treated superficially their oral traditions. For example, Okumkpo community theatre prioritize its entertaining performance over its guided responsibility of community watchdog. From literary perspective that is built on some ideological and epistemological underpinnings of “théâtre engagé”, this study considers Okumkpo masquerade as a public theatre with social commitment. The masked major performer/character plays a role of a social commentator, critic and activist, thereby becoming a sacred actor who promotes moral growth and justice in Afikpo social space. It takes place in an open space called Ogo and it combines drama and dance, rhetoric and gestures, and humor and songs from. This work raises language and gender issues which, combined with the theatre’s ritualized performance, pose a threat to the survival of this oral tradition. Okumkpo’s risk of extinction is strongly premised on its gendered cast that makes its masked actors homogenously masculine with heterogenous public. This paper proposes that demythologization and partial feminization of Okumkpo masquerade would increase its cultural acceptability while the introduction of English and other international languages as its language of performance would enhance its eventual cultural commodification.

Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani

Reviewed by: Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani Erica Stevens Abbitt RETURNING TO HAIFA. By Ghassan Kanafani. Adapted by Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace. Directed by Caitlin McLeod. Finborough Theatre, London. March 3, 2018. The tempestuous political environment of 2018 was marked by the seventieth anniversary of what some celebrated as the founding of the state of Israel and others deplored as the Nakba (or “catastrophe”) of the Palestinian people. In this landmark year, an American stage adaptation of Returning to Haifa by the late Palestinian activist, author, and journalist Ghassan Kanafani challenged cherished assumptions about the progressive nature of contemporary US theatre. Remarkably sympathetic to both sides, Returning to Haifa was originally a novella, published a few years before Kanafani’s assassination by a car bomb in 1972. It concerns a Palestinian couple who drive across the Israeli border in 1967 searching for the home and infant son they were forced to leave behind twenty years earlier. Invited in by the elderly widow (and Holocaust survivor) who took over their property, they encounter a young man in an Israeli army uniform who embraces his Jewish identity and foster mother. The meeting is painful, awkward, and at times even humorous, but the ending seems inevitable. The couple leave Haifa without their long-lost son, wondering if the conflict will ever end. Kanafani’s story has been adapted for the stage in Denmark, Lebanon, and Israel, where the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv created a version in Arabic and Hebrew that toured to Theater J in Washington, D.C. In 2010, a “rogue” version in English was produced by Evanston’s Next Theatre, deepening the ethical debate on translation and the representation of Palestinian issues. American playwrights Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi were granted the rights for a new adaptation by the Kanafani estate. Wallace, [End Page 106] a Kentucky-born, UK-based poet, screenwriter, and playwright, is best known for her dramas on class, war, labor, gender, and race (One Flea Spare, In the Heart of America, And I and Silence). Khalidi, a Palestinian American playwright (Tennis in Nablus, Truth Serum Blues), is currently writing works for Noor Theatre and Actors Theatre of Louisville. Click for larger view View full resolution Marlene Sidaway (Miriam), Myriam Acharki (Safiyya), and Ammar Haj Ahmad (Said) in Returning to Haifa. (Photo: Scott Rylander, courtesy of Lynne McConway Productions.) The Khalidi/Wallace version of Returning to Haifa was supported by a commission from New York’s Public Theater, where artistic director Oskar Eustis planned to direct it. After a successful reading, the production stalled in 2016, several months before the US election. According to the playwrights, although the Public cited scheduling issues, the decision was actually prompted by board members concerned with the risk of presenting a play on Palestinian themes. UK independent producer Lynne McConway and director Caitlin McLeod stepped in, offering to present the work at London’s Fin-borough Theatre, a fifty-seat venue renowned for its advocacy of contemporary British, American, and Canadian drama. For the world premiere of the newly adapted Returning to Haifa, a resourceful British team concentrated on turning the challenge of an unanticipated change of venue (and country) to advantage. Although set in the midst of large events, the play is tightly focused in scope. McLeod and her design team wisely configured the tiny space at their disposal into an inviting central area with a minimalist set (designed, along with costumes, by Rosie Elnile). Representing home, exile, and the journey in between, it was saturated by warm Mediterranean light (Joshua Gadsby) and enhanced by a soundscape evoking city and sea (David Gregory). The actors, surrounded on all sides by spectators, moved fluidly around one another in a vivid interplay between past and present (the movement director was Lanre Malaolu). Said (played by Ammar Haj Ahmad) was rumpled, charming, angry, and self-deprecating in turn. Ahmad’s virtuosity with language drove the tempo of the play, which is also about the ability (and inability) to communicate when political rhetoric encounters emotion. Said’s wife, Safiyya (Myriam Acharki), came to life in the stage version with a beautifully observed performance of a spouse sparring with her excitable husband while...

Twelfth Night by The Public Theater

Twelfth Night by The Public Theater

"Why Don't You Love Me?": Post/colonial Camp and the Imeldific Fetish in Here Lies Love

"Why Don't You Love Me?"Post/colonial Camp and the Imeldific Fetish in Here Lies Love Chris A. Eng (bio) They went into my closets looking for skeletons, but—thank God—all they found were shoes, beautiful shoes! —Imelda Marcos Around the world today, Imelda Romualdez Marcos is often remembered solely for the extensive shoe collection she left behind when she fled the Philippines.1 Her accumulation of over three thousand pairs of shoes, most notably stilettos, underscores the rampant corruption and abuse of power under the regime of her and her husband, President Ferdinand Marcos, from 1965 to 1986, during which the majority of the country lived in destitution. Among the many crimes they committed both during and outside martial law (1972–81)—crimes the former First Lady vehemently denies—are assassinations, executions, disappearances, secret detentions, torture, censorship, and extortion.2 Yet, as Imelda's cry of relief attests, the shoes were her saving grace. Captivated by the extravagant footwear, the international community has largely forgotten or abandoned the search for the thousands of skeletons hidden in plain sight. Through their incongruous juxtaposition, the beautiful shoes and the missing skeletons become dialectically linked within competing narratives around the Marcoses' legacy. This dynamic elucidates the fetishistic attachments prevalent throughout popular accounts of Imelda Marcos in the American cultural imaginary. Her shoe collection has become a fetish, "the object to which one consciously clings as a means of disavowing trauma."3 Such disavowal thus acknowledges trauma only to manage it through acts of displacement and substitution.4 Redirecting attention toward the shoes, Imelda's statement both registers and denies the possibility of skeletons in her closet. For Imelda, however, these skeletons only constitute a trauma insofar as they indicate the ongoing potential for a tarnished reputation. Whereas the masses who stormed the palace hoped to find the skeletons that offer definitive proof of the violence under the Marcoses, [End Page 993] their absence signals a crisis averted for Imelda. What they discovered instead suggests that her main crime is the extravagant actions that led to the excessive accumulation of not skeletons but shoes. Given how common invocations of Imelda remain fixated on the shoes, the highly publicized Off-Broadway production Here Lies Love raised concerns about its motives for performing martial law. Produced by David Byrne, frontman of the rock band Talking Heads, in collaboration with Fatboy Slim, an English DJ, it began as a concept album that centered on the relationship between Marcos and her domestic caretaker from childhood, Estrella Cumpas, and was later adapted into an immersive musical, which opened at The Public Theater (New York) in April 2013 and followed "the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos" through music reminiscent of the 1970s–80s disco scene.5 Featuring a predominantly Asian/American cast, the musical was heralded as a victory for diversity in theater. Yet some caution is needed against any emphatic embrace. Reminding us that "she danced while a nation burnt,"6 Luis H. Francia questions the implications of yet another cultural production centering on Imelda, through the form of a musical set to disco music no less, for a historical period marked by brutal state violence. Meanwhile, Denise Cruz calls attention to how the album "relies on the screen of structural ironies to attenuate its complicated politics."7 As Neferti X. M. Tadiar clarifies: "To be ironic (a deliberate act) is after all quite different from being in an ironic condition (an unwitting state)."8 She questions the prevalence by which Americans interpret Filipino cultural performances as being intentionally ironic, explaining: "The view of the ironies of third world existence comes with a long history of delighting in the contradictions that colonials/traditional peoples represent when they bear the trappings of an alien modernity."9 The fixation on Imelda Marcos may reproduce this dynamic by positing her as emblematic of the individualized act of "being ironic" while eliding consideration of her political actions and the broader ironic condition of the Filipino people under postcoloniality. Productions that encourage American spectators to delight in the acts of Imelda Marcos both invoke and disavow a broader fetish for the colonial other. Defenders of Byrne, however, might dismiss these...

2017 Black Tent Theatre Project in Gwanghwamun Square: Staging Tragic Memory and Building Solidarity through Public Theatre

2017 Black Tent Theatre Project in Gwanghwamun Square: Staging Tragic Memory and Building Solidarity through Public Theatre

Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500–1900: Democracy, Discourse and The State by Tony Fisher

Reviewed by: Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500–1900: Democracy, Discourse and The State by Tony Fisher Jim Davis THEATRE AND GOVERNANCE IN BRITAIN, 1500–1900: DEMOCRACY, DISCOURSE AND THE STATE. By Tony Fisher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017; pp. 290. Tony Fisher's monograph provides a new and original way of looking at the relationship between theatre and governance in Britain between 1500 and 1900. Through a series of case studies and an ongoing analysis of the philosophical basis for the perspectives he examines, he untangles the complex relationship between theatre and the state. While he covers familiar territory, he also offers new ways of reading Britain's theatrical past in a study that is well-grounded in both contemporary and historical discourses pertinent to the topics of government and theatre. In particular, he provides a valuable insight into Platonic notions of theatre and their impact on European thought. In Fisher's view, theatre was seen by government not only as a symptom of social corruption, but also as a potential instrument of reform. Consequently, as public theatres evolved alongside the expansion of the population in early modern Britain, so perceptions of the relationship between theatre and governance also changed. We move from the notion of theatrum mundi, wherein men and women are players on the stage of the world, to the "theatre of the multitude," focused more on the material conditions of everyday life. Within this context, Fisher suggests that anti-theatrical prejudice has less to do with puritan and moral opposition to the stage and is based more on a fear of disorder, sedition, and the instability and potential idleness of the common people. Insofar as theatre calls into question the authority of government by questioning the legitimacy of social and political order and hierarchy, it therefore represents the growing self-assertion of the laboring classes and their right to leisure. Thus two notions of community are at loggerheads: an ordered, unified community on the one hand, and a community of individuals (the multitude) on the other. The discourses around the threat of the [End Page 401] multitude and the threat of theatre coalesce, indicating the necessity of political governance over both common life and theatre. As new forms of power emerge in the late 1600s, the Restoration stage comes to represent an important moment in the development of theatre's relationship to governance in Britain. While anti-theatricalism, especially as represented by the opinions of Jeremy Collier, continues, freedom and conduct are more central to discourses of governmentality. In Restoration drama, this emphasis on freedom and conduct (and the possible tensions between them) is embodied by the character of the libertine, enabling a satirical emphasis on the public dimension of private conduct (in civil society rather than politics). Dramatists are not necessarily endorsing libertine conduct; rather, they could be seen as advocating appropriate governance (and self-governance) within the family through correct conduct. While Restoration comedy takes place in a predominantly upper-class milieu, it hints at the wider social consequences when liberty is not restrained by governance. Within this context, Collier's anti-theatricalism in this period can be seen as a social rather than moral critique of the theatre. In the early eighteenth century, as liberal governance absorbs the autonomous freedom of the individual, through various techniques of influence that curtail personal liberty, the question arises around the optimum license the theatre should be allowed within the public sphere. In his analysis of the events leading up to the Licensing Act of 1737, Fisher concludes that the emphasis is on keeping politics off the stage, and that the legislation aims to discipline rather than suppress theatre. Central to this discussion are the political satires of Henry Fielding, but whereas Fielding believed the stage should instruct through example and hold the powerful to account, the government believed that his satires, which often disparaged political figures, were a misuse of the stage. Fisher, however, suggests that another concern of the act was to regulate for appropriate behavior in the public sphere, and to prevent corruption and incivility among the lower orders. Prior to the act, the theatre was beginning to provide moral lessons in relation to...

"The Satin Sisters": Performing Afro-Filipina Women's Intimacies through Felt Architectures

132 CLA JOURNAL “The Satin Sisters”: Performing Afro-Filipina Women’s Intimacies through Felt Architectures Jewel Pereyna “The earth cannot move without music.” —Sun Ra, Space is the Place, 1974 “When Jessica and Ntozake performed their work together, with the dancers and the music, they could stir a crowd to an obsessive frenzy, the language hit such a chord in the time.” —Steven Vincent, The Poetry Reading, 1981 On Dec. 22, 1974, Ntozake Shange, Jessica Hagedorn, Paula Moss, and Elvia Marta performed the first showing of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Shange’s famous choreopoem, which initiated as a four-woman performance piece set in the women’s bar Bacchanal (1369 Solano St. in Berkeley, California), turned into the first major Black feminist Broadway production at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in 1976. A celebration of Black feminist intimacy and girlhood, today high school and university students continue to perform for colored girls. Major theaters still sing the words that Shange first published in Oakland with Alta Gerrey’s Shameless Hussy Press. With dancers Paula Moss and Elvia Marta, Shange transformed the textuality of for colored girls into a piece intermixed with choreography, song, and dance. In addition, fellow collaborator and Filipina American writer Jessica Hagedorn and college classmate and Black feminist poet Thulani Davis were the first co-performers of this piece. Both women influenced Shange’s literary and theater career. Hagedorn, Davis, and Shange’s friendship and artistic collaborations demonstrate an overlooked narrative of Black and Filipina American feminist artistic alliances during the political and artistic emergence of the Black Arts, Third World Liberation, and women of color feminist movements. In particular, Hagedorn and Shange traveled and performed at readings together in the San Francisco Bay area and New York City. With poet Thulani Davis, who was one of Shange’s closest friends and writing partners at Barnard College, they formed a trio called “The Satin Sisters” and co-authored plays and poems together. Hagedorn and Shange’s coupled performances embodied Third Worldist visions for Afro-Asian racial and feminist unity. However, current scholarship seldom analyzes Filipino and African CLA JOURNAL 133 Performing Afro-Filipina Women’s Intimacies through Felt Architectures” American feminist solidarities, often privileging masculinist Afro-(East)Asian nationalisms.1 This article mediates these gaps by mining through fragmented archives—both print and expressive cultures that are archived at University of California Berkeley, Barnard College, and Emory University—that reveal political possibilitiesof “Afro-Filipina”women’sintimaciesthroughsoundandperformance. Hagedorn and Shange’s unique collaborations adopted what Shange termed “felt architectures”:sensorial spaces that center female intimacies and resistance through sound, touch, sight, and dance (Shange x). Mapping these felt spaces, where Hagedorn and Shange’s coupled performances contend with gender, sexuality, and race, this article analyzes their intimacies intertwined in the productions of for colored girls (1975) and their lesser known traveling cabaret performance where the mississippi meets the amazon (1978). Apryl Berney’s article “In the Basement: AfroAsian Teenage Female Alliances in Post-War America”focuses on the Afro-Filipino collaborations between singers Etta James and Sugar Pie DeSanto. Drawing from Gayle Theresa Johnson’s ideas of “spatial entitlement,” Berney’s article argues how girls in interracial music groups in the 1950s“used technology, creativity, and sonic spaces to construct new collectivities across racial and ethnic lines” in the Bay Area (Berney 1). Building off of Berney’s constructive work, this article uses the term “felt architectures” to examine how the “Satin Sisters” constructed these sites of intersubjective intimacy in their poetic performances by layering their voices on top of one another, giving eye contact, and ultimately alluding to each other in their poems, which were written as homages to one another. As playwright and former for colored girls actress Laurie Carlos explains, “[for colored girls] developed through an interracial, organic process of creating work from ritual, in which looking at each other, and loving each other in performance was as important as the words and the movement” (Dolan). Through their intersubjective aesthetics the “Satin Sisters” created, this article seeks to theorize and index the possibility of political Afro-Filipino women’s friendships within these theater spaces as acts of...

Transgender Shakespeare Performance: A Holistic Dramaturgy

Shakespeare's plays have long been viewed as a space where the boundaries of binary gendered sex, sexuality, and desire become murky. However, the contemporary social justice call for trans/gender-inclusivity has been ambivalently integrated into standing conventions of the Shakespeare theater. This essay close reads reviews and advertising materials to argue that contemporary Shakespeare performance is space in which a public makes meaning of gender nonconformism; as such, it is vital for performance institutions to become self-aware of their role in potential education or misrecognition. Recent productions at the African-American Shakespeare Company, the Pittsburgh Public Theater, and the California Shakespeare Theater offer examples of complex and holistic strategies for engaging transgender themes through staging, casting, and outreach programming.

Can Audience Development Promote Social Diversity in German Public Arts Institutions?

Despite generous public funding, arts institutions in Germany are primarily serving a small, educated section of the German population. This article presents findings from arts participation surveys, research from an empirical study on “Intercultural Audience Development” in public theaters and museums, and an analysis of cultural policy debates to reveal the role of audience development in overcoming the social imbalance of audiences in German cultural institutions. Research findings suggest that traditional concepts of audience development do not lead to sustainable changes in the social structure of the audience. More substantial institutional changes are necessary, supported by new cultural policies.

Memory and the written testimony: the actresses of the public theatre in Calcutta in the 19th & 20th century

Modern theatrical performances in Bengali language in Calcutta, the capital of British colonial rule, thrived from the mid-nineteenth century though they did not include women performers till 1874. The story of the early actresses is difficult to trace due to a lack of evidence in contemporary sources. So though a researcher is vaguely aware of their significance and contribution to Indian theatre, they have remained shadowy figures – nameless except for those few who have left a written testimony of their lives and activities. It is my intention through the study of this primary material and the scattered references to these legendary actresses in vernacular journals and memoirs, to recreate the stories of some of these divas and draw a connection between testimony and lasting memory. ***Memória e testemunho escrito: as atrizes do teatro público em Calcutá nos séculos XIX e XX***As representações teatrais modernas na língua bengali em Calcutá, a capital do governo colonial britânico, prosperaram a partir de meados do século XIX, embora não incluíssem mulheres até 1874. É difícil traçar a história das primeiras atrizes devido à falta de evidências em fontes contemporâneas. Dessa forma, embora o pesquisador tenha uma vaga consciência de sua contribuição e importância para o teatro indiano, elas permaneceram obscuras – anônimas, com exceção daquelas que deixaram um testemunho escrito de suas vidas e atividades. Por meio do estudo desse material primário e das referências esparsas a essas lendárias atrizes em diários e memórias na língua vernácula, pretendo recriar as histórias de algumas dessas divas e estabelecer uma conexão entre testemunho e memória duradouraPalavras-chave: Atrizes; Teatro bengali; Párias sociais; Representação e produção criativa; Memória e testemunho escrito.

"A pleasant seat": Macbeth by Public Theater's Mobile Shakespeare Unit

For the production: Macbeth (2015, Public Theater Mobile Unit, USA).

The Racial Unconsciousness of the Parisian Public Theatre: Borders and Demotions in Francophone Contemporary Drama

This article analyses the impact of France’s colonial heritage on French and Parisian public theatre. Theatrical programming corresponds to an imaginary still structured by a cultural and social construction of race that reflects the past of the “Grande Nation.” Three different plays by Ivorian dramatist Koffi Kwahulé are examined, each depicting situations of demotion experienced by French citizens of foreign origin. I argue that the way French public theatre is structured and administered today mirrors, to a certain extent, real situations of tension reflecting the disparities between the “centres” (symbols of power and homogeneity) and the “peripheries” (socio-economic and cultural spaces of relegation structured by a racial imaginary). I also analyse the concept of the border as a geographic, economic, and sociocultural paradigm, allowing us to understand, in the French and francophone contexts, what unites and divides – or more accurately, how francophone writers and French writers of foreign origin can still be condemned in the twenty-first century to a sort of exile from metropolitan Paris, the capital of a Jacobin state.

Being in “The Room Where it Happens”:Hamilton, Obama, and Nationalist Neoliberal Multicultural Inclusion

The two white male cosponsors, a Democrat and a Republican, dressed as King George and Hamilton, respectively, as they rapped the resolution in the state senate. InHamilton, chief creator Lin-Manuel Miranda stakes out space for an immigrant from the Caribbean who was in the room where the United States of America was founded. Based on Ron Chernow's biography,Hamiltonfollows the struggles and successes of Alexander Hamilton in a story largely told by his nemesis, Aaron Burr. The musical opened Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2015 and subsequently moved to Broadway. With its Founders Chic historical approach, hip-hop aesthetic, and multiracial cast, this Broadway blockbuster has earned substantial commercial and critical acclaim from across the political spectrum. Former President Barack Obama joked, “Hamilton, I'm pretty sure, is the only thing Dick Cheney and I agree on.”

L'autoria teatral valenciana del segle XXI: la consolidació de noves veus

Summary: This article focuses on Valencian playwrights of the 21st century, specifically authors who appeared at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, and who normally write plays for adults in the Catalan language. For this purpose, some typical characteristics of the Valencian theatrical context will be taken into account, such as the increasingly prominent presence of women playwrights, the creation of playwrights by their own companies, and the role of public theatre in the support and promotion of young writers. In addition, the work of Patrícia Pardo (b. Alaquàs, 1975), Juli Disla (b. Aldaia, 1976), and Xavier Puchades (b. València, 1973), as well as El pont flotant company (founded in València, 2000), four creative forces who have consolidated their careers during the second decade of this century, will be presented individually. Keywords: Contemporary Valencian theatre, Valencian playwrights, El pont flotant, Patrícia Pardo, Juli Disla, Xavier Puchades

Pale imitations: White performances of slave dance in the public theatres of pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue

ABSTRACTThis article offers an original and nuanced contribution to the larger discussion of dance in the colonial Caribbean. Its focus is on the largely neglected phenomenon of the colonial imitator, and specifically on white imitations of local slave dances in the public theatres of Saint-Domingue in the 1770s and 1780s. Colonial accounts of different types of slave dance (calenda, chica and vodou) are examined as an important point of reference for the subsequent analysis of theatrical performances of what were heralded as slave dances. The majority of these formed part of the performance of a local Créole-language work called Jeannot et Thérèse, set explicitly in Saint-Domingue and featuring slave characters. Despite a number of claims to verisimilitude in relation to these dances, it is clear that they bore little resemblance to their supposed models and that what was presented was, from the colonial perspective, a less threatening, more Europeanized form of slave dance. Most revealing of all is the fact that white dancers in the theatre appear never to have imitated vodou dances, which were bound up with spirit possession, even in a work that does allude to local vodou practices. Rumours had no doubt spread of the involuntary imitations that some colonials had experienced when spying on vodou rituals in secret. This avoidance of vodou dance – and the careful negotiation of a pseudo-vodou ritual in the body of the work – is further evidence of a genuine fear – and, crucially, recognition – of the potency of vodou practices even before the Haitian revolution.

“The Bright Shapes Were Going”

The article considers a theatrical adaptation of the “Benjy Chapter” from William Faulkner’s 1928 novel The Sound and the Fury created by the experimental theatre company Elevator Repair Service (ERS) and presented at the Public Theater in New York in the spring of 2015. Told from the perspective of Benjy Compson, Faulkner’s text contains one of the most significant and complex representations of a mentally disabled character in modern American literature. The article examines how ERS attempted to evoke Benjy’s consciousness using the specific affordances of theatrical performance. It argues that the ERS production asks questions about theatrical form in ways that echo and yet significantly diverge from the questions that Faulkner’s novel asks about literary form. In so doing, it further suggests that the emerging discourses of neurodiversity and neurodivergence offer powerful new methodological possibilities for theatre and performance studies.

Frank Castorf's Art of Institutional Dis/avowal : A Volksbühne Elegy

There is so much to say about the persistent critiques of and mobilizations against Chris Dercon's vision (or lack thereof) of the newly named Volksbühne Berlin. My task here, however, is a different one: to begin to understand why there has also been such persistent mobilization on behalf of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. In what follows, I provide some critical context for reflection upon the unique role the Volksbühne played in post-Wall Berlin. I suggest that in his twenty-five-year tenure at the Volksbühne, Frank Castorf worked to refunction the theatre apparatus itself, to transform the theatre as state institution, as interrelated set of supporting structures that extend beyond and behind the proscenium arch. Further, Castorf's work as both director and artistic director helps us to understand the complex relations between a theatre aesthetic, which exposes and critiques the structures of its (state) support, and a theatrical institution with similarly ambitious goals. As an aesthetic and as an infrastructural project, Castorf's Volksbühne enacted a new kind of public theatre in Berlin—and it is this project of institutional dis/avowal that we must remember (and dare to reenact) as so much more than reactionary or provincial nostalgia.

Petrarca Theatre: A case study to identify the acoustic parameters trends and their sensitivity in a horseshoe shape opera house

This article is intended to describe possible acoustic parameters’ trends and their sensitivity in a horseshoe theatre, considering the characteristics of the Petrarca Theatre in Arezzo (IT), one of the co-called ”teatri all’italiana”.In this theatre’s typology, the public is distributed in the stall and in surrounding little boxes (the “palchetti”), located on more levels of balconies.Several authors have come up to a fairly unanimous definition of the descriptors characteristics in a Opera House and have assigned their optimum values.In this case study the physical parameters, that contribute to the sound quality, are evaluated in relation to geometry and materials of which the theatre is made and they are compared with the values of another rectangular hall with a similar room volume, the so called Sassi di Verbania (IT) Theatre, to understand the possible merits of the horseshoe shaped hall for Opera.A percentage deviation Δ% is defined and the results are linked to the specific horseshoe shape which characterizes the space geometry. The precious boxes, in particular, are identified through a grid in which rows represent the balconies’ levels and columns the different sectors.To evaluate the acoustic parameters’ sensitivity the JND (just noticeable difference) is considered.The parameters’ trend for the different levels and sectors and for the receivers in the stall is described. Because more than one receiver is placed in a single box, the local sound distribution is related to the global one of the hall.It comes out the success of the Italian theatre shape is undoubtedly linked to its sound quality, thought for the genre it was represented first, namely the Melodrama and the Opera, but also to the fact that the introduction of the balconies with boxes symbolically represented the social structure of Italy of the time: in the stall of public theatres poor people gathered together; the boxes at different levels were rented annually to the aristocrats.A earlier shorter version of this paper was presented at AIA meeting 2017 [1].