Richard Schechner Research Articles

Um Diálogo às Margens do Ganges: Gordon Craig e Ananda Coomaraswamy

RESUMO O artigo analisa o diálogo entre Edward Gordon Craig e Ananda Coomaraswamy, historiador de arte indiana, como ponto inaugural do universo investigativo conhecido como teatro intercultural e as consequências desse diálogo no pensamento do diretor inglês, desafiando sua criação do Über-marionette. A partir desse diálogo, o texto apresenta a postura precavida de Gordon Craig sobre as trocas entre tradições culturais. Problematiza-se as idiossincrasias inerentes a estes intercâmbios, que povoaram as pesquisas ao longo do século XX e início do XXI. Exemplifica-se o aspecto cíclico do debate, resgatando o embate entre Rustom Bharucha, crítico severo das tentativas de interculturalismo ocidental, e Richard Schechner, um dos mentores do teatro intercultural.

Performing/Understanding Poland: A Review EssayTeatra polskie: Rok katastrofy

Abstract Dariusz Kosiński, Teatra polskie: Historie [Polish theaters: Histories] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN and Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego, 2010), 587 pp. ISBN 978-83-01-16264-1 Dariusz Kosiński, Teatra polskie: Rok katastrofy [Polish theaters: The year of the disaster] (Warsaw-Kraków: Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego and Wydawnictwo Znak, 2013), 408 pp. ISBN 978-83-240-2126-0 More than ten years ago, a strong performative tendency inspired by American and German researchers (e.g., Richard Schechner, Marvin Carlson, and Erika Fischer-Lichte) appeared in Polish theater studies. Some important scholarly conferences were held, several departments of performance studies were established at Polish universities, and quite a number of books on performance studies were published.

Always and already excessive: Theorizing diva performativity in a TAMU studio soprano

Abstract There is no word that brings to mind simultaneous bodily, vocal and affect excess quite like ‘diva’. Contrary to popular belief, the opera diva’s behaviours both in and outside performance are results of her training and the Euro-classical repertoire. On the levels of the body, voice and affect, the student soprano studies and performs a particular kind of ‘divaness’. She inures herself into a particular tradition that teaches discipline through repertoire. Through an analysis of Euro-classical pedagogical discipline on a soprano’s body, voice and affective display, this article presents a theory of diva performativity using Judith Hamera’s definition of virtuosity, Roland Barthes’ ‘The grain of the voice’, Wayne Koestenbaum’s discussion of ‘divaness’, and Naomi Cumming’s illuminations of Richard Schechner’s ‘not me, not not me’. At these levels, a soprano’s vocal study teaches her to be always and already excessive.

Frank Hoff (1932–2013)

Frank Hoff (1932–2013) Cody Poulton Frank Hoff taught Japanese theatre at the University of Toronto from 1973 to 1996. I took both undergraduate and graduate courses from him, and I remain his student. He whetted my own interest in Japanese theatre, and I discovered that we shared a similar background in what used to be called Classics (now called Greek and Roman studies at my own university). Born in Los Angeles on 31 January 1932, Hoff graduated summa cum laude from the University of Southern Califor¬nia in 1954 and made his first trip to Japan, from 1954 to 1956, as a lieutenant in the US Navy. He received an AM in classical philology from Harvard University in 1958, but as a result of his experiences in Japan switched to comparative literature, and he received his PhD, also from Harvard, in 1966. Frank taught at Princeton University (1965–1968), Sophia University (1968–1972), and Tokyo Women’s College (1972–1973) before joining the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. In Tokyo, he became a good friend of David Goodman’s. With Willi Flindt, Frank published “The Life Structure of Nō,” an introduction to Yokomichi Mario’s analysis of nō theatre “as a performance event, and not as a genre of literature,” in David’s seminal magazine Concerned Theatre Japan (Hoff and Flindt 1973: 212). Frank’s work anticipated the “performative turn” taken by scholars like Karen Brazell and Monica Bethe, but like Goodman he was equally interested in the ways in which Japanese theatre and culture of the 1960s were overturning Western ideological hegemonies and our own assumptions of what theatre was or should be. My own understanding of drama [End Page 606] had been largely text-based, but Frank’s lectures—which ranged from scripts for plays to the popular songs of Japan’s middle ages, newspaper clippings of police raids on the Victory Burlesque House in Toronto, rock concerts, Lou Reed, and Mick Jagger—were a heady and intoxicating brew. Frank also introduced me to the work of Richard Schechner, now considered the “father” of performance studies. Both Goodman and Schechner were featured in this journal’s “Founders of the Field” series last fall, so it is fitting that we honor Frank Hoff here, too, for his contribution to our understanding of a wide range of Japanese performing arts, from folk song to shamanistic dance, from classical theatre to the avant-garde (see Hoff 1976; 1977a; 1977b; 1981; 1982a; 1982b; 1992; in addition to other works discussed below). Click for larger view View full resolution Frank Hoff in 1988. (Photo: Courtesy of Christopher Yohmei Blasdel) A real intellectual trendsetter, Hoff was erudite, but an exceptionally good listener, sincerely interested in what he could learn from others; his tastes were discriminating but catholic. Having lived through much of the cultural ferment of the Japanese 1960s, he had both a keen understanding of the contemporary zeitgeist and a deep knowledge of the roots of Japanese culture. From his ongoing studies under Honda Yasuji at Waseda University in Tokyo, first as a Fulbright scholar (1961–1964), Frank learned the extent to which folk performance (minzoku geinō) has influenced the course of Japanese culture since earliest times. He drew a clear distinction between geinō and engeki, the latter being a more recent and restrictive term, closer to the Western notion of theatre. Writing in his introduction to a translation [End Page 607] of Honda’s essay on Yamabushi kagura and bangaku (both folk forms of ritual dance unique to Akita and Yamagata prefectures), Hoff states that “Honda’s scholarship has laid the groundwork for what I feel is a shift in theatrical values” (Hoff and Honda 1974: 192). Inspired by Honda’s research, Frank’s interest in ethnology paralleled the work of American scholars like Victor Turner and Richard Schechner. Yet the work of other Japanese theatre scholars like Omote Akira, Gunji Masakatsu, and Dōmoto Masaki, as well as practitioners like the nō actor Kanze Hisao, with whom he became friends in 1972 during seminars on Japanese theatre sponsored by Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret in Denmark and at the Biennale in Venice, had an equally...

Contributing Editors Announcement from Richard Schechner

Contributing Editors Announcement from Richard Schechner

The Black Mass as Play: Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out

The Black Mass as Play: Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out

On Ritual Knowledge

There is evidence to suggest that the discipline of ritual studies is currently in the midst of a golden age. Apart from a variety of approaches developed during the past century, recent contributions have given us a good deal more to think about. But where, in these contemporar y perspectives on ritual, lies “knowledge” ? While several scholars discuss the ways in which ritual knowledge is transmitted (as in accounts of rites of passage for instance), few consider the kinds of knowledge involved in ritual and the extent to which such knowledge is shared. Who asks whether knowledge is essential to the right practice of ritual? Theodore Jennings has argued, uniquely, that ritual is fundamentally noetic, and I engage seriously with his argument here. However, t here seems little doubt that theories developed by, among others, Victor Turner on liminality, Richard Schechner on performance, Catherine Bell on ritualization, Humphrey and Laidlaw on ritual commitment, Maurice Bloch on ideology, and Lindsay Jones on ritual-architectural events, in casting their gaze on other aspects of ritual, have served to complicate any straightforward understanding of what constitutes ritual knowledge through a greater emphasis on practice . My aims in this paper are, first, to shed a little light on issues relating to the position of k nowledge in theories of ritual; and second, to remind colleagues that we should be wary of reducing rituals to a single quality, no matter how significant that quality might appear.

Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power by Shulamith Lev-Aladgem (review)

Reviewed by: Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power by Shulamith Lev-Aladgem Elliot Leffler Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power. By Shulamith Lev-Aladgem. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; pp. 208. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, who has published numerous articles about participatory theatre projects, has now contributed to the scholarly literature in the fields of applied and community-based theatre with this monograph about theatre projects in Israel. Lev-Aladgem argues that participatory theatre projects can be a vehicle for marginalized communities (which she calls co-communities) to articulate their concerns, identities, political protest, and ambivalent feelings vis-à-vis the mainstream, even when the authorities and funders sanction the projects with more conservative intentions. In each of the nine chapters, Lev-Aladgem describes and analyzes another project, and with the exception of the first three chapters (which all consider projects at a single site), each chapter foregrounds a separate co-community. Four of the chapters consider projects that she herself facilitated, and five others are on projects facilitated by other theatre artists. As Lev-Aladgem describes these projects with vivid detail, she leverages several theoretical constructs to analyze their power dynamics and advance her argument. First, and most extensively, she mobilizes Michel de Certau’s notion of making do. In almost every case study, she addresses how participants of theatre projects make do with theatre—how they use the tools and resources available to them—to pursue particular objectives, which may differ from the objectives of the sponsors and authorities. For instance, in a chapter detailing some of the community-based theatre projects in Israel’s Mizrahi communities (communities of Jewish citizens who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries), Lev-Aladgem describes how participants made do with theatre to vocalize their angry feelings of marginalization, despite the fact that these projects were funded and supervised by the government, who hoped that theatre would “calm [them] down” (81). She describes the most controversial scenes of these plays, the heated negotiations with authorities, the compromises that the ensembles agreed to make, and the “red lines” that they drew to preserve the integrity of their critiques. In a chapter that describes a theatre project at a boarding school for Ethiopian immigrants, Lev-Aladgem tells how a facilitator made do with theatre to nurture a space for critical reflection about their education, although the funding came from an organization that was interested primarily in keeping children “more occupied” (122). Based on interviews with the facilitator and her own firsthand account of watching the production, she shows how the performance choices (including a bilingual script, costuming choices, comedy, and Ethiopian ritual) enabled the cast to explore and express the ways that they navigated the tension of existing between two worlds. Second, in many of the case studies, Lev-Aladgem analyzes participatory theatre programs as a form of play (based on scholarship by Richard Schechner, Johann Huizinga, Gregory Bateson, and others). In an array of examples that range from elderly members of a day-care center, to children in a hospital, to survivors of domestic abuse, she analyzes how the act of playing a character—of assuming an identity that is simultaneously not-me and not-not-me (terms borrowed from Schechner)—provides the safety to articulate concerns that one might otherwise self-censor. For instance, in a chapter about elderly people who dramatically enact the story of Purim (a Jewish holiday), Lev-Aladgem depicts participants who voice their concerns about aging within the context of an improvisation. By speaking these concerns while in-role, they are able to do so without being labeled as depressed or disengaged. “I am not so young anymore, I have nothing to lose,” one of the participants says while in-role as an old woman and beside two of her peers, who are enacting younger characters (38). Lev-Aladgem argues that statements such as these, through which participants express their alienation from mainstream society, are normally taboo though become speakable within the context of play. Lev-Aladgem’s examples further contribute to the fields of applied and community-based theatre by adding nuance to its vocabulary through expanding the meaning of articulation. First and most conventionally, she uses articulation as a...

Bennewitz, Goethe, Faust: German and Intercultural Stagings by David G. John (review)

David G. John, Bennewitz, Goethe, Faust: German and Intercultural Stagings. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.329 pp.Goethe's Faust is not only Goethe's most performed work but arguably the closest Goethe came to his own ideal of Weltliteratur. Relatively little, however, has been written about the history of non-Westem Faust performances or, for that matter, about some of the directors who have made directing Faust on international stages their life's work. Considering the essential roles that performance studies, GDR history, and intercultural exchange currently play in German Studies, David G. John's monograph provides a timely introduction to an important figure in East German theater.John not only suggests that Fritz (1926-95), previously overlooked in almost all histories of theater, in fact towers above any other German director, including Peter Stein (7), but also argues that deserves a place alongside the twentieth century's greatest intercultural innovators. Each of Bennewitz's Faust productions explicitly engages with the linguistic, cultural, economic, political, and even racial environment in which it was staged. Citing the connection that Carl Weber has drawn among twentieth-century theater practitioners who use foreign impulses as models, from Bertolt Brecht to Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowsky, Peter Brook, and Richard Schechner, John seeks to add to this legacy (10).Beyond elevating this director to his place on the pedestal of creativity, John also uses Bennewitz's East German Faust productions as a lens through which to read GDR sociopolitical history. By comparing Bennewitz's multiple Faust stagings, including four productions of Faust I and II, the book offers an unusual opportunity to explore Goethe's classic drama in artistic, political, and cultural terms, both in Germany and internationally (5). began his directing career as an East German true believer (24), and his evolution from card-carrying member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) to reluctant critic of the 1980s GDR status quo proves to be an intriguing artistic reflection of changing East German public opinion. His most successful Faust staging ran at the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar for ninety-seven performances between 1981 and 1994. Additionally, beginning in 1970, received approval for many trips to India and its surrounding countries, resulting in a peculiar phenomenon: Bennewitz is a hero of the stage for many Indian and Filipino actors, academics, and theater folk, even if most in his own land have forgotten him (22).John's study consists of a biographical introduction; interviews with East German directors, who comment on Bennewitz's work as well as the pragmatics of directing in East Germany; commentary on Bennewitz's three Faust productions in East Germany (1965-67,1975, 1981), his 1995 Faust in Meiningen, and his stagings in New York (in English), Bombay (in Hindi), and Manila (in Tagalog); and sixty pages of appendixes documenting the contents of the archive. …

<em>The Art of the Pose: Oscar Wilde's Performance Theory</em>, by Heather Marcovitch<br/><em>The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde</em>, by S. I. Salamensky<br/><em>Wilde's Wiles: Studies of the Influences on Oscar Wilde and His Enduring Influences in the Twenty-First Century</em>, edited by Annette M. Magid

Reviewed by: The Art of the Pose: Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theory by Heather Marcovitch, and: The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde by S. I. Salamensky, and: Wilde’s Wiles: Studies of the Influences on Oscar Wilde and His Enduring Influences in the Twenty-First Century edited by Annette M. Magid Ellis Hanson (bio) The Art of the Pose: Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theory, by Heather Marcovitch; pp. 222. Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 2010, $77.95 paper. The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde, by S. I. Salamensky; pp. vi + 210. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, £55.00, $90.00. Wilde’s Wiles: Studies of the Influences on Oscar Wilde and His Enduring Influences in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Annette M. Magid; pp. xiii + 225. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, £44.99, $75.99. In the 1990s, Oscar Wilde’s reputation was reinvigorated when he became a touchstone for new theories of performativity, theatricality, imitation, and sexual subversion, and three new books demonstrate that we are still working through the significance of this influence. In fact, one of the books, The Art of the Pose: Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theory, by Heather Marcovitch, could easily have been written in the 1990s and cites no scholarship written since 2000; however, it raises an important question about how Wilde’s work for the theater, his production of himself as an aesthetic spectacle, and his various meditations on the theatricality of just about everything, present an evolving theory of performance that might resonate with the foundational theoretical work of modern performance studies. As her benchmarks for the modern here, she cites the late twentieth-century work of such critics as Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Philip Auslander, and Judith Butler—not with any great rigor or new insight—but the concepts she discusses are still at the core of current discussions of performance with regard to identity politics—to self-invention, self-promotion, and self-commodification. This book may do more critical rehearsing than performing, but Marcovitch offers an overview of the contemporary relevance of every aspect of Wilde’s thinking about theatricality as it developed from his American lecture tour and his early dandyism, to the spectacular success of his plays and dialogues, and to the tragic spectacle of his trials. The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde, by S. I. Salamensky, offers a more eclectic series of readings of the spectacle of Wilde’s aesthetic persona. She is at her best as a critic of other critics, interrogating the diverse uses made of Wilde’s aesthetic persona by scholars, fans, and foes. She has herself become an ardent consumer of ephemera about Wilde, both the Victorian and the more modern varieties, and her lighter critical asides are suitably amusing and opinionated, as when she [End Page 348] raves about a Monty Python skit about Wilde, or when she derides the study guides that accompany a live transmission of a Wilde play at the cinema, or when she sips Pimm’s at Oxford with the members of the Oscar Wilde Society, whose obsessive biographical inquiries she characterizes as “half gossip, half Talmudic debate” (157). In a more scholarly mode, she digs into the archive of aestheticism to discuss a few parodic fictionalizations of Wilde’s persona during his lifetime, especially the figure of Nash in Henry James’s novel The Tragic Muse (1889–90). She reads James alongside two lesser known novels, Julia Constance Fletcher’s Mirage (1877) and Rhoda Broughton’s Second Thoughts (1880), both of which have much the same plot: “In each, a bright, sensitive young woman is romantically pursued by a brilliant, creative, charismatic, yet also unmasculine, ungrounded aesthete presented as a creature of an impending modern era that is both exciting and discomfiting. The Wilde figure is positioned in opposition to a blunt, solid, stolid, strong-but-silent suitor able to provide a conventional marriage and sound material future” (13). The Wilde figure is rejected in both cases, but we may infer from Salamensky’s numerous other examples, both Victorian and more modern, that this opposition is...

W sarmackim teatrze życia (nie)codziennego

The main purpose of this article is to show Old Polish literature and culture with regard to their performative aspects. By referring to Richard Schechner’s reflections, the author presents the Old Polish period “as a performance”. She focuses on issues such as time, space and behavior, which allows us to notice those activities of nobles that led to the formation of their personal and collective identity. An analysis of poems and diaries reveals different ways of creating one’s “self”. Various gestures and ceremonies as well as the skills that nobles developed through school education and socialization processes unified the Old Polish society, even though it was ethnically and religiously diverse.

The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance by James M. Harding (review)

James M. Harding. The Ghosts of Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 234 pages. $50.00. Ghosts materialize with some regularity in theater and performance studies, both as subject and as theory-enabling metaphor. Herbert Blau, Joseph Roach, and Marvin Carlson have all powerfully used haunting or ghosting as tropes to explain how theater and performance work. But only James M. Harding proposes to conduct an exorcism, with intention of casting out one particularly persistent specter from field of studies: Peter Burger's 1974 Theory of Avant-Garde, which has exerted an outsized influence since its 1984 publication in English. Burger's central claim, as many will recall, is that is distinguished by its critique of art as an institution--not only museums, academies, publishers, etc., in or through which people usually encounter art, but also prevailing ideas of what counts as art. For Burger, emerged in early twentieth century to dismantle barriers between art and supposedly erected, or at least reinforced, by aesthetic movement. With avant-garde, art ceased to function as a social safety valve for mildly disaffected bourgeoisie and became instead a life praxis. In Burger's Theory, ferocious mockery of Dada is essential stance, and once that mockery became a predictable source of pleasure for a large enough late-capitalist public, was effectively dead. Cage? Warhol? Merely neo-avant-garde to Burger. Harding wants to expel ghost of Theory so that other, more performance-friendly theories of avant-gardes might thrive. To do so he critiques at length not only Burger, in whom he rightly detects an anti-theatrical streak, but also entire Eulogist School of Avant-Garde Studies (51), among whose members he counts Richard Schechner and David Savran. Harding borrows that pithy phrase from Mike Sell, whose critical work serves as a major source for his own argument. Like Sell, Harding insists that all movements are internally pluralistic, always moving in multiple directions from multiple points of origin. Likewise, he resists any account of vanguard activity that explicitly or implicitly leaves off s in Indeed, Harding's fundamental problem with Theory of Avant-Garde is that it's theory of the avant-garde (9): singular, homogenizing, and totalizing. To characterize non-linear historiographical method with which he wants to replace Burger's theory, Harding adopts Deleuze and Guattari's botanical metaphor, rhizome. The book's strong general claim is that concepts of origin and originality that enable critics to speak of an historical mistake manner in which avant-gardes coalesce, develop, and disperse. While Rosalind Krauss and Martin Puchner, among others, have made similar arguments about misapplication of such concepts in histories of vanguard art and performance, point bears repeating. Harding repeats it convincingly, taking scholars to task for confusing demise of any one with death of all past, current, and future avant-gardes. To demonstrate what an attention to vanguard multiplicities can reveal, Harding revisits several performances well known to scholars, reading them grain (23) not only of artists' stated intentions but also against conventional critical wisdom. He is not first critic to note that Hugo Ball's verse without words, performed at Cabaret Voltaire in magical bishop (1) regalia, existed in tension with Ball's expressed desire for a unified, stable discourse (8). Harding does well, though, to celebrate that tension as a condition of plurality (9) that demands a flexible theoretical model. To emphasize how contested ideological terrain is within any particular avant-garde, he recounts squabble within Paris Dada that produced both sober, Breton-helmed 1921 mock of Maurice Barres, through which Breton and Aragon attempted to expulse Tristan Tzara, and Tzara's retaliatory trial of Breton, which degenerated into a Tzara-approved melee. …

Filling in the Blanks: Music and Performance in Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Filling in the Blanks: Music and Performance in Dante Gabriel Rossetti Lorraine Wood (bio) While the enigmatic woman staring out from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blue Bower (1865) continues to fascinate first-time viewers, the unusual instrument she fingers—a Japanese koto—is no less intriguing. The painting is certainly not unique among Rossetti’s oeuvre; indeed, one of the most striking features of both his art works and his poems, as many scholars have noted, is the frequent inclusion of musical imagery.1 The pictures are filled with bizarre instruments and odd scenes of music-making, while the verses are replete with musical terminology, titles, and allusions. While Rossetti’s interest might be attributed to the Victorian mania for collecting and exhibiting musical artifacts—what Christopher Small terms the “presumed autonomous ‘thingness’” of music2—his blatant disregard for historical accuracy in his visual depictions and poetic descriptions belies this explanation. Moreover, Rossetti had very little musical training; in fact, according to his assistant Henry Treffry Dunn, he was “indifferen[t] to music” and never played on any of the instruments he collected.3 Why, then, did he repeatedly turn to music as an artistic paradigm for his paintings and poetry? I argue that Rossetti utilizes music, one of the most performance-oriented of all art forms, as a vehicle for positing his aesthetic theories about temporality and the interactive relationship between artist and viewer. In so doing, he challenges the long-held conception of art as material object and re-envisions it in terms of process—a model that operates through temporal constructs and requires the participation of an audience for its completion.4 Music’s unique character as a performative art form that is actualized in time through the participation of a listener is particularly well suited to Rossetti’s conception of art as a process. The Victorians themselves recognized the importance of the performative act: William Pole’s treatise The Philosophy of Music (1895) characterizes music as a “mass of useless hieroglyphics until he [the composer] can get them interpreted and made known by the process [End Page 533] we call performance.”5 Contemporary performance theory further supports this notion. A musical score, Christopher Small explains, is not music; it is merely a “set of coded instructions” to the performers for bringing music (that which is absent) into existence (presence). “If a musical work exists in the relationships between the sounds as performers make them and as hearers hear them,” Small continues, “then it exists only in performance. Its identity and whatever meaning it may have are embodied in the act of musicking itself” (p. 113). His attention to relationships is insightful in highlighting the two key components of musical performance: its temporal sequence (the relationship between sounds) and its dependence on interaction with a listener (the relationship between performer and audience). Rossetti’s emphasis on sequential progression in time is not surprising. Thanks in part to the popularity of physicist Hermann Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music following its English translation in 1875, music was commonly understood by the Victorians as sound waves propagating through space in a time-dependent manner. But Rossetti is also interested in the interrelationship with the audience that such temporality implies. While the sound waves are initiated through the performative act, the task of converting these impulses via the brain into what we identify as musical sound is left to the listener. Without this translation process on the part of the listener, there simply is no music. Logically, then, as Richard Schechner asserts, “the performance is the domain of the audience,”6 since the involvement of the listener in deciphering the sounds is essential to the creation of a musical work’s meaning. Similarly, Alice Rayner suggests that the term “audience” refers not to a group of people, but to an “act [of listening]”7—a distinction Rossetti seems to have understood in his approach to performance. Using music as a model, Rossetti’s aesthetic project is thus to re-envision art such that the temporal process of unfolding and the audience’s participation are as crucial to a...

Performance Studies Floating Free of Theatre. Richard Schechner and the Rise of an Open Interdisciplinary Field

As Marvin Carlson points out, the term performance has recently developed “as a central metaphor and critical tool for a bewildering variety of studies, covering almost every aspect of human activity.” While there is a tendency to stress their similarities and theoretical convergence, Performance Studies and Cultural Studies have different origins: the roots of Performance Studies are clearly located in theatre studies and practices. The essay outlines a short history of the rise of Performance Studies, focussing on Richard Schechner’s work. According to him, a Performance Studies paradigm came to the fore in the mid-1950s, with books by Bateson, Austin, Goffman, Caillois and others. In the Sixties Schechner started to teach and was founder/director for influential theatre groups on the American avant-garde scene. When his interest shifted from theatre to performance and from aesthetics to social sciences, he found anthropology extremely useful because in ethnographies anthropologists treat the actual lived behaviours of people performatively. Schechner developed these assumptions and cooperated intensely with social scientists, in particular the anthropologist Victor Turner. In 1980 Schechner co-founded the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. Since then many academic institutions have started similar programs; Schechner’s books have been translated into many languages; and worldwide a growing cohort of scholars have been attracted to this stimulating, inter-disciplinary, threshold-crossing approach.

Rituais de devoção: dádivas no messianismo do Contestado

This work intends to analyze the devotees of Saint Joao Maria's religious practices, from an inland region of Parana state's south and from the Santa Catarina's plateau. The devotion and the cult to the Saint can be found at the region where, almost a century ago, occurred the Contestado War, a millenialist and messianic movement. Using the multisited ethnography, we intend to understand these religious practices, through a theoretical proposal which appears by an emergent anthropology field of discussions related to the performance studies. Based on Stanley Tambiah, we propose an approach that privileges the rituals of these practices, supported by a dialogue between anthropology and theatrical perspectives coming from Victor Turner and Richard Schechner works.

Theatre translation as performance

In 2008, the Finnish National Theatre produced the Lebanese/Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s tragic play Incendies in Finnish. The advertisements, newspaper pre-reviews and reviews named Reita Lounatvuori, a well-known Finnish theatre translator, as the author of the translation. However, several other people were also involved in the translation process before Mouawad’s text reached the stage. In my article, I offer an empirical study of the process of translation of Incendies into Finnish to argue that translations in the theatre are not objects of art but products of art worlds, bearing the fingerprints of many subjectivities. To support my argument, I draw on Actor-Network Theory, as recently developed in the context of translation sociology (Buzelin 2007, 2005; Bogic 2010), and on Performance Studies, following Richard Schechner’s articulation of the concept of performance (Schechner 2013). I apply these models to the specific context of the theatre, the specific genre of drama, and the process of translating one play. This interdisciplinary exploratory study argues for the relevance of Schechner’s analytical model, and more broadly of Performance Studies, to the analysis of interlingual translation processes.

From the Editor

From the Editor Kathy Foley Our field will greatly miss Nakamura Kanzaburō XVIII. I invite scholars to take the time in future articles to evaluate the important work of figures such as him in more substantive ways to more fully acknowledge their contributions. It gives me great pleasure to introduce the second in the ATJ series: “Founders of the Field” (see Asian Theatre Journal 28, no. 2: 281–476), a group of short essays, which have again been solicited and edited by Siyuan Liu (University of British Columbia) and David Jortner (Baylor University). The symposium reflects some ideas first presented at the 2012 AAP Conference in Washington, DC, in a panel they organized. While this grouping in no way “finishes” the story started in the first installment, it does extend it, showing some new directions. For example, in the last set we saw a generation coming largely from the United States, Europe, and Australia who became fascinated with Asian performance traditions as a number of the men received their first exposure to the forms during military service in World War II or the Korean War. In this second group we see mostly figures who began their study, teaching, and practice of theatre in the Cold War era. Daniel Yang from China/Taiwan and I Made Bandem from Indonesia, for example, are talented Asian artists who came to study for their PhDs in the United States, Yang with A. C. Scott at the University of Wisconsin and Bandem with Fredrik de Boer at Wesleyan University (both of their teachers were discussed in the first Founders of the Field Symposium), so in some sense we can say that they are “second generation.” Farley Richmond was an early student of James R. Brandon’s at Michigan State University. Schechner and Goodman found their own paths to Asia as travelers. So, with the possible exception of Benito Ortolani, who came to Japanese theatre research via a religious studies route, these individuals are part of the “next wave.” Travel was growing easier and funding was beginning to be available though area studies and international grants to promote East-West flows. Though some of these researchers worked intensively on arts that seemed to be endangered or archaic (Farley Richmond on kutiyattam, [End Page iii] Ortolani on the religious roots of Japanese performance, and Bandem on gambuh as a root of Balinese performing arts), as a group over the long run they were as invested in the modern as in researching the past: Richard Schechner became the poster boy for American intercultural theatre and one of the major figures in cross-fertilization of anthropology, dance, and theatre studies. He blew some of the traditional Eurocentrism out of theatre studies, showing it was no longer mandatory to start that survey with the Greeks, even if some (Rustom Bharucha, for example) found his methods of borrowing and eclectic uses of Indian models too free for their taste. But while potshots were being taken as the emergent concepts of “Orientalism” and “PC” became part of the academic lingua franca and steps were made toward the construction of postcolonial discourses, this was part of the academy discourse of the period; as these men entered it was engaged in deconstruction, postmodernism, and gender and culture wars. It was natural that these would have their reflections in our field. Such crosstalk enriched our field and our thinking. Interculturalism was also a part of the living experience of this group of artist-thinkers hitting their stride in the 1970s and 1980s. Daniel Yang became the head of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and then led the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre in its work. David Goodman was arriving in Japan at a moment of red-hot political theatre and he became a witness to and participant in the new theatre, documenting it in Concerned Theatre Japan. Farley Richmond began with modern theatre in India, stepped back to kuttiyattam, and has taken his Indian training to directing opera and explored new media in interface with Asian work. I Made Bandem, whom some wily press person dubbed the “Joe Papp of Bali,” has used his interests in traditional theatre to develop new-old performances. His reconstructions of gambuh...

On SHOT! : A Rationale for Research and Dramas Depicting Violence in the ’Hood

Can you perform research data? And if so, can we as scholars/artists turn “research” into an equally exciting and dramatic piece without sacrificing efficacy? Theatre, by definition is both theatrical and engaging. “Situated at the crossroads of theater and anthropology, thanks to the collaborations of Victor Turner in anthropology and Richard Schechner in theater studies” (Koram 3), ethnodrama takes research data off the printed page and disseminates it to a much larger audience on the American stage (see also ; , ). Like traditional theatre and judged for its dramatic quality, ethnodramas are dramatic stories peculiar to a culture or a people that encompass that group’s history, cultural memory, and ethos. Gleaning dramatic monologues from taped interviews as “transcripted-testimonials,” performed research is a constructed process that mediates issues of authenticity, ownership, and social activism. Who constructs the performance is as critical to the development and process of the project, as insider/outsider dynamics can color or compromise the participant/observation. This essay looks at the impetus behind the North Philadelphia research and its resulting world premiere of the performance piece SHOT! (2009) as the constructed process to performed research.

Personal Is Political, Practice as Critical: The freedom of information Performer as Site for Change and Discourse

Personal Is Political, Practice as Critical: The freedom of information Performer as Site for Change and Discourse Amanda E. Hamp (bio) It is New Year’s Eve. I am wearing two blindfolds, a pair of earplugs, and a few layers of dance clothes. I am in a public art space, a single rectangular small room, with its entrance on the main street in downtown Decorah, Iowa. There are several wooden chairs, a couch, a Christmas tree. I navigate my way around the room with these as landmarks, as well as the utility sink, where I have a jug of water, and the table next to it, where I am keeping a notebook. Over time, I become sore. I get tired of moving, and tired of how I move, but I keep moving. I keep this up because I am performing freedom of information 2008 (foi), a twenty-four-hour-long improvisational score designed by dance artist Miguel Gutierrez, during which the solo performer moves continuously, wears a blindfold and earplugs, and refrains from eating in order to create solidarity with people displaced in US-occupied war zones. Gutierrez calls foi a “performance/protest/ritual.” He did not originally position it as a practice-based research (PBR) project, yet the piece demonstrates that physical practice can produce knowledge. Performers’ reflective writings on the work come to bear as evidence for foi ’s sociopolitical efficacy, and this essay evidences that the twenty-four-hour practice itself produces bodies with new knowledge, generating political and scholarly discourses prior to anyone’s writing. Fulfillment of the foi score creates what I call experiential empathy in the performer, which proves politically critical. Gutierrez first carried out foi in his apartment studio in Brooklyn in 2001, following the United States’s invasion of Afghanistan. In 2008, he recalled the performance, but made it a broader, nation-wide event. He expanded the project in order to mark the continued war in Afghanistan (and, by then, Iraq as well), to make the contemplative act accessible to more audiences (including both live and online viewers via internet video streaming), and to allow the piece various expressions by multiple artists (Gutierrez 2008b). In Gutierrez’s words, foi intends to “create solidarity with people displaced by armed conflict,” as well as “with the community of people who still resist and reject the U.S.’s interventionist tactics abroad” (Gutierrez 2008a). He designed foi to raise a felt consciousness about displacement. The score cultivates in its performers physical recognition of people “who do not have the basic right of rest after an active day, and who instead have to remain ever-vigilant for violence,” and awareness that “my ability to roam where I want when I want is actually a privilege, while for others, having to constantly move and find new shelter is a form of imprisonment” (ibid.). Thirty-one participants, each performing in and representing a separate state, simultaneously enacted foi on 31 December 2008, during the last twenty-four hours of the calendar year (fig. 1). When invited to participate as the Iowa representative I agreed, but performed the twenty-four-hour action interrogating my entitlement to create solidarity with people from whom I had remarkable distance—so sharp was the difference between my choice and their coercion. More practically, how could anything I was doing in the middle of the United States affect anything in the Middle East? In terms of PBR, what does foi produce? How can the piece be an effective protest if it does not disrupt the status quo? Questions regarding the efficacy of ritualistic and sociopolitical acts staged by performing artists have been taken up before. Analyzed through Richard Schechner’s [End Page 185] concepts in Performance Theory, foi has strands of both efficacy and entertainment, aspects that are both social and aesthetic, goal-oriented and display-oriented (125, 129–36). foi resembles actuals, a 1970s American genre of homemade rituals that sought change, but, Schechner remarks, failed to accomplish it (127–28). He argues about the actuals: “In contemporary western societies only a charade of power can be displayed at theatrical performances; or the actual changes played through by the performance artists affect very...

Richard Schechner

As one of the founders of the discipline of performance studies, Richard Schechner has been instrumental in the development of new paradigms for experiencing and theorizing theatre in Asia. The impact of his scholarship, teaching, mentorship, theatrical practice, and editorship of TDR: The Drama Review is significant worldwide. Many of his major theoretical constructs have grown out of his encounters in and with Asia, particularly India and China.