Sense Of Theatre Research Articles

Ella Es el Matator (review)

Reviewed by: Ella Es el Matator James F. Scott Ella Es el Matator (2009). Written, Produced, and Directed by Celeste Carrasco and Gemma Cubero. Distributed by Women Make Movies. www.wmm.com In Italian and Spanish, with English subtitles Running Time: 62 minutes. Ella es el Matador is a stylish documentary on women in bull-fighting that uses the ritual and prestige of this conspicuously masculine profession to explore the evolving self-image of post-Franco Spain. Crafted by Celeste Carrasco and Gemma Cubero, talented documentarists who move gracefully across international borders, the film follows the career of two 21st-century toreras determined to prove that women can perform as well as men at el momento de la verdad. Seen largely through the eyes (and understood through the voices) of its two central protagonists, Ella Es el Matador not [End Page 114] only situates women within the profession of bull-fighting, but also locates bull-fighting in a new Spain that is increasingly integrated into a post-national, post-Christian Europe. Carrasco and Cubero make good partners, Carrasco's theatrical sense (when away from the film studio she works with the Madrid Opera) augmenting the directorial skills Cubero brings from earlier work both in documentary and the fiction film. They first teamed under the directorial hand of Lourdes Portillo in Señorina Extraviada (2001), a powerful human rights documentary that inquires into unsolved crimes against women in the border city of Juarez, Mexico. Though quite different both in style and theme, Ella Es el Matador shares with the earlier production an interest in women at the margin, be it the marginalized status of crime victims or that of women determined to achieve lives beyond conventional gender roles. Without directly addressing the flurry of animal-rights activism that in 2004 briefly made Barcelona a "bull-fight free city," the film looks at bull-fighting as a powerful symbol of national identity, yet one that seems slightly anachronistic and oddly positioned in a world committed to multi-culturalism and striving for gender equality. Cinematically, it is also gracefully fashioned, blending social commentary with the personal narratives of its protagonists, while enlivening both with the dark magic of the bullring. The details of this drama are vividly present: we watch as the magenta stockings are drawn tightly against the legs, the cape swirls in an energy-charged arc, the inevitable horns threaten, the sword is poised in a trained hand, which soon will be blood-stained. Meanwhile, at key moments, the long lens composition compresses the planes, drawing the antagonists together, wordlessly bringing home the excitement and peril the matador must certainly feel. Cubero and Carrasco also add to our sense of the politics of bull-fighting, the consignment of women to rural arenas and contests with inadequate bulls, as well as the implicit chauvinism of male bull-fighters like Enrico Ponce who says, probably with no malice intended, "the physical strength just isn't the same." The filmmakers have chosen two protagonists who balance each other effectively, and together offer a relatively full-spectrum view of women in the profession. Eva Florencia, the novice, is an Italian, the child of a family hostile to bullfighting, though she herself sees "beyond the cruelty people always talk about" and is determined to "create something beautiful." In spite of arduous efforts, Eva fails to achieve her goals. Her counterpoint is Maripaz Vega, a native of Andalucía, whose mother and several male siblings all supported her bull-fighting ambitions. In the course of the film, we see her confirm her place as Spain's one active professional female matador, ultimately enjoying a triumphal moment in front of hometown fans in the massive stadium at Malàga. More problematically, we also watch her count the scars that disfigure an otherwise beautiful body and look on as she is grazed by bull's horns and borne from the ring on a stretcher. She knows that "death is always there, like a shadow that follows us." These scenes are respectful, but not romanticized or sensationalized. The filmmakers' glance is steady and sure, catching what Hemingway called "grace under pressure." Of the two women, Eva is in the...

Sam Thompson, Stewart Parker, and the lineage of northern Irish drama

Northern Irish dramatist Stewart Parker (1941-1988) wrote plays typically valued for their wit, intellectual content, and formal experimentation. Nonetheless, he was profoundly influenced as a young man by a very different sort of playwright. Sam Thompson (1916-1965), who began his working life in the Belfast shipyards, squarely confronted Northern Irish sectarianism in his plays. His sense of the political potential of drama left an enduring mark on Parker, who organized and edited Thompson's manuscripts several years after his untimely death. Although their dramatic writings bear little resemblance to each other, the two writers should be regarded as united in a common Northern Irish dramatic tradition by virtue of their shared socialist outlook, belief in the importance of individual stands against conformity, and sense of theatre's social mission.

MacB: The Macbeth Project (review)

MacB: The Macbeth Project Presented by The African-American Company at the Buriel Clay Theatre, San Francisco, California. September 19-October 5, 2008 and Willow High School, Crockett, California. March 9-March 20, 2009. Directed and adapted by Victoria Evans Erville. Lighting designed by Kevin Myrick. Set designed by Atom Gray. Costumes designed by Steven Lamont. Choreography by LaTonya Watts. Fights directed by Dave Maier. Music by Dogwood Speaks and Johnathan Williams. Teaching by Sherri Young. With David Moore (Macbeth), Melvina Jones (Lady Macbeth, Melody), Johnathan Williams (Banquo, Hipcat, Macduff), Maikiko James (Witch 1, Old Man, Ensemble), DC Allen (Witch 2, Porter, Ensemble), Toya Willock (Witch 3, Lenox, Ensemble), Clifton Jones (Duncan, Ross), Levertis Stallings (Fleance), and others. San Francisco's African-American Company recently finished staging its second hip-hop Macbeth. This time it's a Not too long ago, at the height of the culture wars, any combining hip-hop and seemed like the radical and inventive solution to increasingly turbulent racial politics and troubled divisions between high and low culture, but today we can find and hip hop conjoined in a host of pedagogical and performance practices. Stephen Greenblatt has enthusiastically endorsed Flocabulary's hip-hop curriculum, is Hip Hop, and Ian McKellen recently recorded a rap version of Sonnet 18 before joining Akala, a British rapper claiming to be Shakespeare reincarnated, to form East London's Hip Hop Company. The San Francisco Bay Area is no stranger to hip-hop Shakespeare. In 2006, we saw Jonathan Moscone and the California Theater performing Naomi Iizuka's hip-hop remix of Hamlet, Blood in the Brain, at San Francisco's Intersection for the Arts. In 2007, we saw Ayodele Wordslanger Nzinga direct West Oakland's Lower-Bottom Playaz in her localized and poetic hip-hop adaptation of Macbeth, Mack, A Gangsta's Tale. It's no surprise, then, that this year the Bay Area, home of everything Mac, from Oakland's The Mack (1973) to Vallejo's Mac Dre, hosted a play calling itself MacB. The Macbeth Project. What did the African-American Company add to the mix with their Macbeth Project? We might begin by looking at what made the AASC's Macbeth a project. The word project evokes corporate and artistic collaboration at the same time that it conjures the specter of public housing. As an action, project is doubly verbal, containing both language and movement; to is to utter in the linguistic or theatrical sense, but it also includes the spatial emanation which results from such utterances. A can be simultaneously an eidos, its logos, and its telos. The AASC's performs all of the above. The Macbeth Project is an ensemble of sites and institutions, players and pupils, actions and ideas. Partially funded by an NEA grant as part of the latter's Shakespeare for a New Generation initiative, the Macbeth Project conjoins performance and pedagogy as its teaching artists engage at-risk Bay Area youth in theatre games through their Shake-It-Up program (The NEA's Shakespeare for a New Generation program is part of the larger Shakespeare in American Communities initiative, both of which are partially supplemented by funding from the US Department of Defense and the Department of Justice's Office of Justice and Juvenile Delinquency Prevention). The Macbeth Project involves schools in San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, and Crockett. As a series of nodes in a larger network of projects, the Macbeth Project operates, in part, as the local and mobile expression of a national arts pedagogy as it projects itself through local voices and bodies. I attended a performance of MacB towards the end of its run in San Francisco. Before taking my seat in the Buriel Clay Theater, I decided to get a closer look at Atom Gray's set. …

Jag-reformen

Installing the »I«. Editorials by Olof Lagercrantz in Dagens Nyheter 1960–1975
 This study concerns the Swedish writer and critic Olof Lagercrantz who served as both editor in chief and cultural editor of Sweden’s major daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, between 1960 and 1975. The material upon which the article is based is a corpus of 300 editorials, mostly unsigned and hitherto unnoticed by scholars.
 By focusing on matters of style, it is shown that the texts by Lagercrantz distinctively break the laws of the editorial as traditional genre, which in short involved framing in the newspaper’s political standpoints in by speaking from the position of an editorial »we«. Lagercrantz’s editorials differ from this well-trodden mode by using styles of writing that resemble of everyday language and by using forms of letter-writing. To a wide extent, the editorials also play with intertextual allusions to the established literary canon, and often take literature and literary issues as their starting point.
 The article stresses how Lagercrantz finds strategies of installing »himself« in the text, i.e. how he constantly seeks ways of establishing an »I« in a type of text where this particular word is not allowed. The letter-forms seem to convey the sense of presence of a subject in the text. Metaphors of body and voice, and mentioning of everyday, mundane events create effects of intimacy. Attention is drawn to the fact that Lagercrantz even on the level of grammar conveys a sense of body in the text: the number of substantives is by comparison quite high with Lagercrantz – constantly avoiding the adjective, he prefers words which literally have matter, substance.
 Finally, it is suggested that the installation of the »I« in the editorials be considered a performance in both a linguistic and theatrical sense. By means of contrast, Lagercrantz’s figurative and literary writing make apparent the laws of the editorial as generally written and understood. The latter thereby also seems to be highlighted as text, as form of language.

Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (review)

Reviewed by: Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare O. Bradley Bassler (bio) Angus Fletcher , Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (Harvard University Press, 2007), 185 pp. Angus Fletcher's new volume Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare considers the impact of the "New Science" on the culture of renaissance English poetry. In ways a revaluation of the Elizabethan world view, the book is more ambitious than Tillyard's classic work in its attempt to look for the core motivation behind the New Poetry in the transformation rather than the perpetuation of cultural strands. Fletcher's A New Theory for American Poetry rewrote the terms for considering the current development of the American poetic tradition; his most recent volume is even more ambitious in scope, revamping the landscape of poetry in the English language. It is out of a twinned sense of cultural destabilization and aspiration occasioned by the New Science's overthrow of the medieval world view that Fletcher's portrait of the "New Poetry" emerges, set against the probing backdrop posed in the question "whether the human yearning for fixed cynosures is not the actual source of long term instability." In terms of this paradoxical dialectic of stability and instability, Fletcher traces the drama that the New Poetry itself plays out upon the stage of early modern literary history. The early modern natural philosophers developed a counter-language set against the traditional Aristotelian description of natural motion, with consequences for the classical Aristotelean idea of dramatic unity as well. In the Aristotelian vocabulary, "things had to act like persons." The point of the reverse translation Fletcher identifies in the New Poetry is not to make persons act like things; rather, this reversal makes possible a precedence of human actions over human character. If the qualitative description of nature which Aristotle promotes is transferred to the dramatic domain, then what wears itself on its external sleeve, so to speak, are precisely human actions. The linguistic consequence of this reversal is that actions are taken up into words and then redoubled in the dramatic re-presentation of action, leaning heavily on the theatrical sense of "drama." To mine this theatrical sense, Fletcher focuses intensively on the metrical structure of poetic language: how it simultaneously conveys quantitative rhythm and emotional expression. In this respect, it is the twin of music. Motion is taken up into language at an almost presemantic level, but one which [End Page 342] stands in intimate proximity to what, following Fletcher, we might call "semantic crossover." Most interesting are those cases like Donne's and Shakespeare's, where the metrical structure of poetic expression is loosened from strict metrical devices but in a way which not only preserves but in fact intensifies the musicality of language. The need for a wresting of metrical rhythm from all Procrustean beds leads to Fletcher's insistence that "the drama gives the moving action its embodiment." To convey the dramatic, in particular, action must outstrip commentary. And so there is a critical issue of tempo in the dramatic presentation of action, for in reality we act "on the fly," with niceties of comprehension traveling in action's wake. It is just this pacing of dramatic action which saves it from the threat of rigidity always faced by allegory, and which makes possible the dynamic sense of forward motion which is needed for plausible embodiment. As Donne remarks in a passage Fletcher cites, there is never "[t]ime enough to have beene Interpreter / To Babells bricklayers," as is reflected particularly in the "rapid verbal transport" of the then raging pamphlet wars. Fletcher cites also Anthony Nutall's diagnosis of the rhythms of Timon of Athens in "the curious way in which Shakespeare's mind continually races ahead of itself," and it is such racing which makes possible that trait of Shakespeare's characters' capacity to overhear themselves which Harold Bloom identifies throughout the Shakespearean corpus. No doubt this explains in part Bloom's particular fondness for Macbeth's "proleptic imagination," which Fletcher glosses in terms of "an insane drive to accumulate and annihilate the traces of his past, whipping them into his future, before...

Coriolanus , Antitheatricalism, and Audience Response

This article examines the intersection of early modern English antitheatricalism, performing bodies, and audience response, arguing for a re-invigoration of a sense of theatre's "corporeality" that looks beyond conventional, semiotically-influenced readings of the bodies presented and represented on the early modern stage. The essay concentrates in particular on how the antitheatrical (or anti-audience) rhetoric of tract writers, Elizabethan civic officials and even playwrights themselves was concerned with the moral and ethical implications inherent in the live transaction between performers and spectators, and their potential to frustrate or confound the rational, stable legibility of social and cosmological hierarchies. Using Coriolanus in light of these descriptions affords a focus on how the drama places the protagonist's body at the centre of the phenomenal, lived experience of performative exchange, an exchange it depicts as profoundly unstable. The reading offers insight into Coriolanus' depiction of the audience as an active agent in constructing the body's meaning in social performance as not merely consistent with contemporary antitheatrical sentiment, but, even more so, the play's dramatization of the engagement between the actor's presenting body and the onstage audience. Through engaging with the text in this way, the article seeks to offer an image of performative corporeality that may serve to redress the balance of overly "bookish" readings of early modern theatre.

Oaths of allegiance, theatricality, and Lessing's Nathan der Weise

The nature is assessed of the obligations imposed on Lessing by the 'Erbhuldigungseid' and the 'Diensteid', which he swore as a condition of appointment to the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, and the 'Maurereid', which he took some months later. One aspect of these ceremonial oaths is that, like theatre, they were performed before an audience, pre-arranged or rehearsed, and spoken. Lessing's subsequent behaviour in the light of these obligations, the oaths of which were each sworn on the Bible, is then examined in so far as it is reflected in his correspondence with Carl I, Herzog zu Braunschweig-Lüneburg and Ferdinand, Herzog von Braunschweig, who also held the office of 'Magnus Superior Ordinis' of Strict Observance, and in relation to his publications at the time, notably Ernst und Falk: Gespräche für Freimaurer. One of the questions raised is whether Lessing's sense of theatre played a similar role, in the context of the letters he exchanged with royalty, to the urge to publish. Finally, the dramatic treatment of oaths in Nathan der Weise is considered, from which tentative conclusions are drawn about the unmistakable discrepancies between the specific demands made by the oaths and Lessing's changed attitude towards them.

Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different. By Gordon S. Wood. (New York: Penguin, 2006. xiv, 321 pp. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 978-0-14-311208-2.)

It has taken Gordon S. Wood nearly forty years to assemble his cast of “revolutionary characters” and place them all onto the stage of the republican synthesis he helped create. These essays have been published independently elsewhere and revised for this volume. There is little new aside from the introduction, which asserts that the founders “unleashed … egalitarian forces” that prevented the “character” they embodied from being reproduced in the nation they created (p. 26). In that sense, they became truly “revolutionary characters,” with goals and ideals informed by the Enlightenment, empowered by republicanism, but ultimately impeded by egalitarianism. These players are also “characters” in the theatrical sense of the word. George Washington is Wood's hero—the ultimate republican citizen and the most perfect example of the “gentleman” described in the introduction, deemed worthy of governing the fledgling republic. Benjamin Franklin is second only to Washington, Wood argues in a greatly condensed version of his 2004 assessment (The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin), and is more difficult to grasp because his true character has been obscured by eighteenth-century misconceptions and the resultant myths, placing him within the “bumptious capitalism of the early Republic” (p. 90). Thomas Jefferson is the epitome of the naïve, enlightened intellect and represents the duality, nay, hypocrisy of America.

A Conversation with Jerome McGann

The following dialogue evolved in February 2007 from a series of email exchanges with Professor McGann. I was curious about the importance of Manfred in McGann's work and what his most recent thoughts were about Byron's devilishly enigmatic play. I had earlier queried McGann about the significance of Manfred and together we published our dialogue as the epilogue to Byron and Romanticism,1 but I wanted to push McGann to see exactly what he had in mind for staging Byron's notoriously unstageable play. Byron, we recall, said he had 'a horror of the stage'.2 As my conversation with McGann continued, I began to see how and why he wants to bring Manfred, and its author, out of the closet-drama and on to the stage. JS In the time I've known you (roughly twenty years) you seem to have kept going back to Manfred, for one reason or another. What is so alluring about this work? What unfinished business do you have with it, and how is your current project in Stratford (Canada) related to the magnetic pull of Manfred? JM You've lighted on a question you may come to regret - because I have a lot to say here. Yes, Manfred is for me the central Byronic text - as it was, I might point out, for the entire nineteenth century, even in England, which took such a fright from Byron and ran away from him until very recently. Swinburne, who had very harsh (and, I might add, just) things to say about Byron's verse skills - always excepting Don Juan - once wrote that Byron's forte lay in his 'sincerity and strength'.3 This seems to me right, at least in my understanding of Swinburne's comment. I translate him to mean that Byron's writing is like Yeats's Cuchulain fighting the sea. Until he takes up with Don Juan, his work is an assault on the impossible. He makes a drama of wanting to know things that cannot be known and saying things that cannot be said. Even knowing the impossibilities, or discovering them, he presses on. The first two cantos of Childe Harold lay down the pattern. They are an extraordinary, even a preposterous, failure - starting with the prosodic choice of the Spenserian stanza, a choice made in sheer technical ignorance of its resources. Carrying on with it forces him to fight with it, maim it - 'spoil' it, as Paul West long ago taught us to see.4 And out of the event comes Byron's first great success, his first great failure. (I might add, out of it comes as well a renewal of the verse form's technical possibilities.) 'Bloody but unbowed', we might say. But that idea scarcely gets at the situation and the textual event. Through his work, Byron's famous defiance emerges as at once sincere and hypocritical, his strength something that will persist to fall short. The consequence is a philosophic mind that settles for nothing except what is always 'beyond the fitting medium of desire' (CHP, III, 42). Manfred comes on this scene to square Byron's account with this poetry of failure. Without Manfred, Don Juan could not have been written. Don Juan is Byron's masterpiece of the poetry of the impossible because with it he makes impossibility look so easy, so natural. 'In play, there are two pleasures for your choosing / The one is winning, and the other losing' (Don Juan, XIV, 12) - Don Juan is an extended gloss on Manfred's last prophetic words: 'Old man, 'tis not so difficult to die' (III, iv, 151). I began studying Byron in 1963. By 1967 I had come to a very vague sense of what was entailed in Byron's sincerity and strength. Only with many more years of work did I find ways to talk about it that seemed, at least, not perfectly incompetent. 1967 was crucial because that year I and some friends at the University of Chicago founded an experimental theatre company - Cain's Company. Our purpose was to stage works that were regarded as unplayable (in a theatrical sense). We were much influenced by Living Theatre, by Artaud, by Stanislavsky, by Stein, by Brecht. The company was named after our first production, Byron's Cain. …

Discourse, Theatrical Performance, Agency: The Analytic Force of “Performativity” in Education

“I PERFORM” In educational theory, as in other domains of theory, the popularity of a particular concept can wax and wane, and every so often, a (seemingly) new concept emerges that captures imaginations. The concept of “performativity” is a case in point. In discussions with students and other colleagues I have noticed a growing interest in, but also confusion about, what feminist philosopher and queer theorist Judith Butler means by “performative” and “performativity.” People say things such as, “Performativity means that identity is not an essence, but that I perform my identity.” They understand correctly that Butler’s conception of identity is nonessentialist, but misinterpret identity as performed by the subject. That is, they understand correctly that performativity is related to the fluidity of identity, but they interpret that relation in a theatrical sense: “Identity is fluid because I can perform different identities in different contexts.” Although there are connections between theatrical performance and the concept of performativity as used by Butler, the reading of performativity as performance by the subject glosses over the way Butler’s work reconceptualizes agency. It is this reconceptualization, I will argue, that has important implications for education. In this essay I will retrieve and analyze the differences and points of connection between the theatrical and discursive conceptions of performativity. This analysis will illuminate what Butler’s discursive conception of performativity and the attendant conception of agency have to offer educational theorists. I will close by analyzing the educational issue of bullying through this lens of discursive performativity.

Personality as a work of art

The idea of the personality as a work of art offers a new conception of personality. From this perspective, personality would be the ethical and aesthetic style each person gives to their life, according, naturally, to the prevailing personal circumstances and social values. The idea is developed in two parts. In the first, which constitutes the empirical part, a historical review, from the time of Homer to the present day, reveals a ‘great chain of personality’, with its characteristics in each era. In the second, or transcendental part, we argue that it is some kind of work-of-art or life project that constitutes personality, whatever its aesthetic form. From this point of view, life projects, though in principle fictitious, may end up forging a person's true character, in accordance with a person–character dialectic. This dialectic is well illustrated by the literary figure of Don Quixote, but it is equally valid for anybody in everyday life. In any case, it is understood that the development of a personality is a dramatic task (in line with the theatrical sense that is at the basis of this conception). Among the most important consequences of this idea is the confirmation of responsibility as an essential constituent of the person.

Can an Analysis of the Contrast Between pre-Galilean and Newtonian Theoretical Frameworks Help Students Develop a Scientific Mindset

This study examines a course in which students use two writing activitiesand collaborative group activities to examine the conceptual structure ofthe calculus-based introductory Physics course. Students are presented withtwo alternative frameworks; pre-Galilean Physics and Newtonian Physics. Theidea of the course design is that students would at first view the frameworksalmost in a theatrical sense as a view of a drama involving a conflict of actors;Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and others occurring a long time ago. As participantspassing through a series of interventions, the students become aware that theframeworks relate concepts from different parts of the course and learn to evaluatethe two alternative frameworks. They develop a scientific mindset changing theiroutlook on the course material from the viewpoint that it consists of a tool kit ofassorted practices, classified according to problem type, to the viewpoint that itcomprises a connected structure of concepts.

Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromzvellian Ireland by Alan J. Fletcher, and: Drama and the Performing Arts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland: A Repertory of Sources and Documents from the Earliest Times until c.1642 by Alan J. Fletcher (review)

MLRy 98.1, 2003 177 tolerant?tolerant, that is, by the standards of his day rather than ours. That Middleton propounds a theological view of sodomy is not obvious. Heller's difficultand challengeable project requires that he is able to identifyparticular characters who have committed the act, and to determine their spiritual destiny. Sodomy as an act could not be presented on the stage, and could be mentioned only elliptically. Middleton insinuates without necessary commitment to narrative specificity,daring the auditor to imagine while accepting the condition of unrepresentability. In these provocatively teasing circumstances, a fixed moral authorial intention is hard to ascertain. Grace shares with sodomy in that it too was invisible on the early modern stage. Acts of grace can be manifested only as events that most immediately are something else, and might be no more than that something else. To consolidate these acts in the mind as concretely specific events marking out the gist of a play's purpose and mean? ing can scarcely avoid detracting from both the immediacy and the ambivalence of the theatrical moment. The plays will in some sense accommodate the kind of reading that Heller advocates. Whether they require his specific interpretative horizon and demand the specific reading he advances is another matter. Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham John Jowett Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromzvellian Ireland. By Alan J. Fletcher. Cork: Cork University Press. 2000. xvi + 52opp. ?45. ISBN 1-85918-245-3. Drama and the Performing Arts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland: A Repertory of Sources and Documents from theEarliest Times until c.1642. By Alan J. Fletcher. Cam? bridge: Brewer. 2001. xiii + 624pp. ?90; $160. ISBN 0-85991-573-5. Ben Jonson's The Alchemist famously starts with a fart,a sort of alchemy in reverse, but that unsubtle, in-your-face opening stands as the prologue to an entertainment. In early modern Ireland, however, as Alan Fletcher demonstrates with tremendous wit and verve, not to mention formidable scholarship, the fart is an art in itself, and not just an opening gambit or untimely intervention. Indeed, breaking wind is the peculiar forte of an itinerant company of 'braigetori' (Gaelic Irish for 'farters'). To? gether with face-contortionists (muggers in the theatrical sense of the word), gambler s, harpers, acrobats, tricksters,jesters, jugglers, and hummers?no, not mummers, but hummers?the farters of Gaelic Ireland contribute to a varied and vibrant culture of performance art. Modern Irish drama is the envy of us all, but it is often portrayed as a colonial legacy, English in origin, though Irish in verbal energy. Fletcher's aim is to establish Ireland as a fulcrum of dramatic activity, steeped in traditions, local and vocal, prior to the Restoration, challenging English colonial representations of the country as a cultural vacuum. Ireland has excited a great deal of interest among Renaissance scholars over the past two decades, ever since Stephen Greenblatt's decisive intervention on Edmund Spenser and Ireland in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), an essay which drew on important work by Irish historians such as Brendan Bradshaw, Ciaran Brady, Nicholas Canny, and D. B. Quinn. A constant complaint from historians of early modern Ireland, and from those engaged in re? search on Irish language and literature in the period, has been that the preoccupation with English literary representations of Ireland and the Irish implies that England had a culture which it wished to impose on a country without one. This goes against the grain of Spenser's own perspective, since he argued in^4 View ofthe Present State of Ireland (1596) that the Irish had letters before the English, that the work of Irish poets was worthy of attention (and translation), and that itwas but the other day since England grew civil. In other words, one of the earliest and most canonical of English 178 Reviews colonists and commentators was prepared to concede that Ireland had a rich literary culture that pre-dated that of England. Yet the image ofthe 'wild Irish' promulgated by other planters has persisted. These two major new works offerample evidence of Ireland's complex cultural context from the seventh to the seventeenth century. The critical volume...

Gender and Politics in Greek Tragedy (review)

486Comparative Drama Michael X. Zelenak. Gender and Politics in Greek Tragedy. Artists and Issues in the Theatre Series 7. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Pp. 156. $23.95. This is a puzzling book. In his introduction, the author says he wants to help his audience recover "some of the immediacy which I believe the original audiences experienced" by dispelling "the reverential mist that continues to keep [Greek plays] distant from most readers and enthusiasts of drama and theatre" (1). Since Zelenak teaches drama, I assumed that his way of recovering immediacy would be to discuss ancient plays as scripts for performance, either in their original production context, or now, or both. In The Greek Sense ofTheatre (1996), a volume as compact as Zelenak's, J. Michael Walton shows what valuable insights into ancient drama can be offered by a scholar who combines training in classical studies with a theater practitioner's perspective. Zelenak's project is more ambitious, however. He wants to offer an overview of tragedy as an Athenian institution, including its connection with democracy and the relationship of particular plays to their historical context, particularly the Peloponnesian War, and he is especially interested in tragedy's representation of gender. Athens was a deeply patriarchal society with strong restrictions on women's political and social power. The tragedies were written , produced, performed, and possibly viewed exclusively by males. So why do so many tragedies feature strong, transgressive female characters and raise questions about the nature and role ofwomen? Studies such as J. J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin's Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context (1990) depict tragedy as a state-sponsored institution that allowed Athenians to debate important civic issues, including gender. Zelenak, however, apparently regards this view as part of the "reverential mist" that he aims to dispel. He takes a strongly polemical position, arguing that Athenian tragedy is a massive example of bad faith. It only pretends to raise questions about gender while actually reinforcing male dominance . It does so by offering a psychological escape valve that "provided the male citizen audience with the imaginative inoculation against any guilt they might have felt about their gender ideology" (67). After three introductory chapters on tragedy and democracy, the female as a category invented by males, and drama as a masculinist institution, he discusses individual plays, including Aeschylus's Suppliants and Oresteia, Sophocles' Antigone and Philoctetes, and Euripides' Alcestis, Medea, Helen, Orestes, Iphigenia at Aulis, and Bacchae. Zelenak's position resembles that of Sue-Ellen Case in the first chapter of her Feminism and Theatre (1990; not cited by Zelenak), but he goes much further. The complex question of tragedy's origin is solved: it began as "a male-bonding ritual" (2). A monolithic collaboration between authors, pro- Reviews487 ducers, and audience, tragedy "is not ideologically subversive" and "does not celebrate chaos but order" (14). This reductive view leads him to disregard complexities and contradictions both within individual scripts and between different plays. Aeschylus's Suppliants is "not about women's rights or feminism . . . not addressed to women . .. not concerned with understandingwomen but defining and controlling die female" (56). Antigone's "life is meaningless, a total waste. She dies a zero, a nothing" (80). He is especially fond of binary oppositions: for example, all female characters in Athenian tragedy fit into one of two categories—the "passive, suffering 'female' victim" and the "active, destructive, 'male' woman." As a result Antigone is grouped with Clytemnestra and Medea in the second category (22). Male protagonists, however, are not criticized: Agamemnon "does not emerge as evil" (61); "Creon's values were not wrong ... just too extreme" (78). Fortunately, in his discussions ofPhiloctetes and Euripides, Zelenak moves beyond his simplistic categories. Admetus in Alcestis is "an embarrassingly honest representative of the male egocentrism of his audience" (96), Jason in Medea is "not only discredited but also ridiculed," while Medea "gives voice to the suffering and rage ofall the nameless and faceless oppressed ofAthens" as "a new dramatic sign ofthe female" (107-08). Zelenak sees Euripides in his last plays confronting "the deepest anxieties and nightmares of the Athenian experience" and re-encoding and empowering the female "with almost...

Tibetan Secular Theatre: The Sacred and the Profane

Ache Lhamo (or A-che IHamo, to use the Wylie system of transliteration), the secular theatre of Tibet, has the unique distinction of being the oldest living theatre in the world, for its origins date from at least the eighth century A.D. and the performances we see today are the product of a virtually uninterrupted development.' This alone-together with the fact that it is perhaps the last Oriental theatre form not yet studied in detail-makes the Ihamo (as it is known today) of particular interest to theatre scholars as well as to students of Tibetan culture. Furthermore, given the current interest in intercultural dialogue, the Ihamo, by virtue of its retaining a long-standing tradition deeply rooted in and nurtured within an ancient culture, is well-positioned to initiate inquiries into the nature and practice of interculturalism, particularly in relation to Western theatrical practices. This essay does not set out to describe the lhamo,2 but attempts to indicate some grounds for dialogue between Tibet and the West, drawing on this ancient theatre to better focus on a cultural question that is central to late modernity: the context of theatre within our community or, to put it another way, the (unrecognized) sense of theatre in our world.

Robert d’Uzès, prédicateur

Robert of Uzès, Preacher. Robert of Uzès, who died at the age of 33 in 1296, was a fiery orator in troubled times. Mindful above all of the poor, he vigourously contested false curates during the days of Lent 1294 or 1295. He had a sense of spectacular theatre and gestures. His marginal preaching worried those in authority, but made him into an archangel of the Word.

Bored to Distraction: Auto-performance and the Perniciousness of Presence

... the fact is that most of the time when I go to the theater, I am bored to distraction. – Daniel Day-Lewis (qtd in Welch 62) This is probably the only thing which Daniel Day-Lewis and I have in common: like Day-Lewis, most of the time when I go to the theatre, I am bored to distraction. In this cranky critical mood, the thought of writing for an anniversary issue of CTR, an occasion which would seem to demand a witty, gracious response to Canadian theatre, seemed impossible. Over the past few years, I have developed an interest in the phenomena of solo performance, much of which I find particulary tedious. I could explain this boredom in facile enough terms: I am not terribly interested in this performer’s life. But I don’t think that’s the full explanation. Solo performances are often excruciatingly boring because they involve a simplistic sense of theatre, evident in their production of subjectivity in the theatre.

Translational implications of TamilHamlets

Abstract Translation, as some scholars aver, is not a futile process but a valid means of bringing the finest specimens of world literature within the ken of readers worldwide. An attempt is made here to assess the role of translation in all its variety ‐ literal, word‐for‐word, transliteration, adaptation ‐ when teaching English as a second language in a Tamil context. A particular text, Shakespeares's Hamlet: Prince of Denmark, is taken as a case study. I conclude that an ideal translation can be produced by a collaboration between an English professor and a Tamil professor, both having the same sense of theatre and equal degree of inspiration.

Auflosung in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Music

The concept Auflosung offers an especially rich topic for interdisciplinary investigation into nineteenth-century aesthetic theory and practice. The word Auflhsung may refer to: dissolution, disentanglement, denouement (in a theatrical sense), analysis (in a chemical and mathematical sense), and disbandment (in a military sense). In music the resolution from an unpleasant or unstable pitch configuration to one that is pleasant or stable is an Auflhsung. Furthermore, Auflhsung was an important concept for nineteenth-century aesthetics, in which the dissolution and resolution of the boundaries between the various modes of aesthetic expression are examined theoretically. This essay will examine Auflhsung in three different nineteenth-century contexts: as a poetic term and musical procedure, as an actual musico-poetic expression, and as an aesthetic principle. This examination will show that Auflksung is an icon, index, and symbol of the synaesthetic orientation of nineteenth-century aesthetic theory and practice.

In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights by David Savran (review)

Book Reviews banishment of actor/audience barriers, the Handke-like assaults on the audience and Beckettian reflexivity of language. Throughout the book Roudan6 successfully argues for Albee's optimism. He quotes the playwright on his "plays unpleasant": If I were a pessimist I wouldn't bother to write. Writing itself, taking the trouble, communicating with your fellow human beings is valuable, that's an act of optimism. There's a positive force within the struggle. Serious plays are unpleasant in one way . - -. tiranother. Roudane moves freely and gracefully in and around his thorough research with a confident familiarity with the mass of secondary criticism on Albee and a rewarding intimacy with the plays. He also offers-thorough primary and secondary bibliographies and useful biographical material. Understanding Edward Albee will prove a valuable addition to academic libraries. LYNDA HART, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA DAVIDSAVRAN. In TheirOwII Words: COnlemporaryAmericanPlaywrighls. New York: Theatre Communications Group 1988. Pp. 320, illustrated. $24.95; $12.95 (PB). David Savran offers 20 original interviews with playwrights who met with him between fall 1986 and early spring 1987 in such places as the Ibiza Restaurant, the Royal Pacific Motor Inn, and studios, lofts, and townhouses in the Big Apple. Interviewing playwrights who "have written a significant body of work (as opposed to one widely perfonned play) and [who] remain at the peak oftheir creative activity," Savran includes five women (Maria Irene Fornes, Joan Holden, Emily Mann, Marsha Norman, and Megan Terry), two blacks (Charles Fuller and August Wilson), one Asian American (David Hwang), two Hispanics, (Luis Valdez and Fornes - 1 give her double billing), and eleven white males (Lee Breuer, Christopher Durang, Richard Foreman, John Guare, David Marnel, Richard Nelson, David Rabe, Wallace Shawn, Stephen Sondheim. Michael Weller, and Lanford Wilson). Sam Shepard, alas, refused Savran's invitation. Some may quarrel with Savran for n'ot choosing more women, especially black women (Beth Henley, Karen Malpede, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange) or survivors from the 1960s (Ronald Ribman, Terrence McNally), but on balance Savran satisfyingly fulfills his goal of presenting playwrights who "personify the diversity of American theatre." Each interview. Savran tells us, lasted approximately 90 minutes, and "all were edited and cut, some quite heavily." Obviously Savran did not regard the transcript as an inviolate text but, like a director. reshaped the playwright's initial, no doubt rough, scripts, To each playwright Savran posed a series of "general" questions on early Book Reviews experiences in the theatre, training. influences, working practices, "attitudes toward the critics," views of the American theatre, and "goals for the future." The playwrights' answers about the critics grow stale, but the other questions frequently elicit entenaining and illuminating responses. Savran, though, is at his best when he breaks away from these predetennined queries to ask follow~up questions or leads the playwrights into interpretations of their own works. Memorable examples are Rabe on his affection for Eddie in Hurlyburly, Nonnan on foreign productions of 'night Mother (in Scandinavia "the daughters are Valkyries towering over those little Mamas"), or Durang on Sister Mary Ignatius ("Mother Teresa doesn't belong in this play"), Savran gets each playwright to define his/her art, sometimes in one or two sentences. Whether this laconic self~analysis is the result of Savran's editing or his talent as an interviewer I do not know, but he does achieve quotable results. America's leading documentary playwright, Mann observes "1 love courtrooms." Terry's pronouncement "I am all feeling" contrasts with Fornes's "I don't romanticize pain." August Wilson holds that "All my plays are political" without being didactic. Weller's sense of theatre ("When. go to the theatre now. I get antsy at small plays. IfI see there are three people in the cast, [go 'Oh Lord.' What if[ don't like them?") rebuts Nonnan's ("[ really believe that plays can be about one person. I've tried ... to break this rule and make plays about two people or about groups. The audience will subvert this every time.") There is much valuable information here about the playwrights' lives, most notably the.if lives in the theatre. Durang reveals that he would not let Belle arid Boo be perfonned until his father...