Theatrical Stage Research Articles

Modelling and Analysing Creative Communication within Groups of People: The Artistic Event at FET11

Theatre stage and artistic performances aim at joining participants to act together, to share, shape, and co-create cultural content by means of active experiences. Future networked and social media technologies promote new ways of experiencing cultural events and artefacts. Nonverbal social signals are major components of future social media characterised by embodiment and physical engagement of users. This contribution introduces research results from the EU-ICT-FET SIEMPRE Project, presenting how these results were shown in the final performance at FET11.

Italiani DOC? Passing and Posing from Giovanni Finati to Amara Lakhous

Author(s): Spackman, Barbara | Abstract: This essay examines historically varied tales of transnational migration through the lens of a topos that links nineteenth-century Italian migrations to Egypt, with the representation of an Italian infiltration of “Little Cairo” in Amara Lakhous’s 2010 novel Divorzio all’islamica in Viale Marconi: the topos of European Christians who pose or pass as Muslim. This essay proposes a contrapuntal reading between two historical moments and two directions of Italian migrations. It first takes up the case of Giovanni Finati, Ferrarese, who converted to Islam and passed as Albanian in Muhammed Ali’s para-colonial Egypt, as recounted in his 1830 Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Giovanni Finati. This essay then shows how Lakhous reprises Orientalism’s practice of representation by updating the powerful nineteenth- century metaphor of the Orient as “a theatrical stage affixed to Europe” (in Edward Said’s fortunate phrase). Among the particularly rich repertoire of plays upon that stage was the practice of passing and posing as Muslim in order to enter the sacred space of Mecca, prohibited to Christians upon threat of death. In its nineteenth-century version, such passing was the sign of the extraordinary man, alone at Mecca among a sea of authentic, and supposedly “transparent” believers. Lakhous, instead, takes up the topos in order to generalize it as the condition of post-colonial Italian identities, whether “migrant” or “italiano doc,” as the novel calls them: “un italiano al cento percento, un italianissimo” The theme and possibility of conversion to Islam links the two historical moments in an embrace that conjures with Islamophobia, the historical malleability of a weak national identity in the Mediterranean, and the frisson of entry into a forbidden space in a disguise that is in equal measure linguistic and semiotic.

Rahvusliku ajaloo tõlgendusi eesti draamas ja teatris 1970.–1980. aastatel. Interpretations of National History in Estonian Drama and Theatre in the 1970s–1980s

According to theatre scholar Freddie Rokem, theatre portraying or performing historical events is seeking to overcome both the separation and the exclusion from the past, as well as ’striving to create a community where the events from this past will matter again’. This article covers the topic of interpretations of national history in Estonian theatre and in original dramaturgy during the Soviet era, with the focus on aspects like national self-reflection and the relationship to the common past. The main focus is on the 1970s, with examples from Rein Saluri’s, Mati Unt’s and Jaan Kaplinski’s drama productions. During the period in question, re-tellings of national history on Estonian theatre stages were clothed in metaphors, allusions and secret codes – Aesopian language. Within the Soviet cultural context, I analyse if and to what extent theatre of the time displayed resistance, political theatre or social allegory. Theatre was also connected with the principle of playing or playfulness, which on one hand indicates national resistance, national endurance, and a certain survival strategy, but on the other hand indicates the Estonian as being an involuntary homo ludens – the Playing Man, who through various enforced roles is trying to adjust to the whirlwinds of history. Saluri’s first play, the intellectual drama Kulalised (The Guests), opens with an allusion to a drama classic the world over, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, adding a powerful national-symbolic background to the play. The role-play which permeates and structures the play (The Host–The Guest) however, displays allegorical references to changes in the status and self-image of Estonians. In Unt’s play Peaproov (Dress Rehearsal), the principle of playing/acting sheds ironic light on the makers of an historical film and their readiness to create superficially flashy interpretations at any cost: this take acts as an estranging and generalising reflection in a context of general humanism on the one hand and artistic ethics on the other. Kaplinski’s Neljakuningapaev (The Day of Four Kings) is based on a historically familiar tale about four Estonian kings. Here, the take with the play within the play helps amplify the play in both a mythical and a historically-philosophical manner as well as within the polemical stance of the author.

Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama Vitaly Chernetsky Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama. By Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2009; pp. 316. $25.00 paper. This volume is a comprehensive introduction to innovative Russian drama emerging over the past decade. The book is lucidly written yet makes bold and constructive use of a wide range of theoretical concepts, from anthropology to Lacanian psychoanalysis. To date, drama has been fairly marginalized within the study of Russian literature; thus this volume fills a very important lacuna. While the book's principal focus is on "New Drama" as a specific movement within Russian literature and theatre that emerged around 1999, Beumers and Lipovetsky also provide extensive historical and cultural context for this phenomenon. [End Page 478] Performing Violence opens with two prefatory essays, one by Kirill Serebrennikov, the theatre director most closely associated with the movement, and the other by Sasha Dugdale, the leading English translator of the plays by New Drama authors. The latter provides an eyewitness account of the birth of the movement, an unforeseen result of a series of seminars sponsored by the British Council in Moscow involving several writers, directors, and other members of London's Royal Court Theatre. These talks, and in particular the introduction of verbatim drama (documentary drama) spurred a surge of interest in the form among young Russian playwrights. Within a few years, what once seemed like tentative experiments of younger authors eager to break the dominance of plays by classic and foreign authors on the contemporary Russian stage coalesced into a heterogeneous though clearly identifiable movement. For the first time in many years, drama, rather than poetry or prose, appeared to be at the forefront of innovation within Russian literature. As Serebrennikov notes in his foreword, the principal accomplishment of New Drama is "the recording of a new linguistic reality"; it "forced the actor to speak the language of today" as heard on the streets of Russia (11). While the phenomenon of New Drama did not spread widely beyond the core group of playwrights and experimental theatre stages, this is the first school of playwriting in Russia to receive international recognition in our time, particularly in Britain, where many of these plays have been staged in recent years. A dominant feature of New Drama is its neo-naturalist aesthetic, with unprecedented prominence given to representations of violence. New Drama's main thematic preoccupation is the deep crisis of identity that has characterized post-Soviet society. New Drama playwrights' strategies of tackling this problem range from appeals to shared existential experiences and memories, to bold interrogations of the place of the Self vis-à-vis the Other and a return to the in-your-face performance characteristic of the 1920s Soviet avant-garde theatre. Although many of these playwrights reject what they believe to be the dominant features of postmodernism, especially in its consumerist incarnation, Beumers and Lipovetsky disagree, arguing that the hyper-naturalism of the Russian New Drama builds on the foundations of a wide range of postmodernist cultural strategies—and this is particularly pertinent to the carnival of cruelty observable in these plays, and in the eroticized charge manifested in them through such violence. In their theoretical model, Beumers and Lipovetsky emphasize the ritual aspects of play and the sacralization of theatrical language and space, linking New Drama experiments with the tradition begun by Chekhov and radicalized by Artaud and Genet. Russian New Drama does not seek to represent or reflect life, they assert; instead, it aspires to create a magic/ritual space of performative existence and a special type of communication with the audience. The ubiquitous violence in these works has several functions: first, it demonstrates the disintegration of Soviet social order and the ensuing chaos; second, it reflects a new social reality linked to the redistribution of both symbolic and economic capital; and finally, it points to the sacred by performing the ritual of transgression. Beumers and Lipovetsky deftly trace the place and logic of violence within Russian culture from the early post-revolutionary days to the years after the collapse of the USSR. In particular, they point...

Letters of Introduction: Film Credits and Cityscapes

ABSTRACTThis essay is about the textuality of film credit sequences and their relationship to the expressivity of urban life. It traces the development of credit sequences away from models based on the book and the theatrical stage, towards an engagement with the material objects and expressive forms of cities. Using a wide variety of examples, from the 1920s through the 1960s, the essay traces the shifting status of words, images, and forms of public textuality in the credit sequence.

Glasbeno-gledališka režija na Slovenskem: od diletantizma Dramatičnega društva do poskusov profesionalizacije v Deželnem gledališču

Prispevek obravnava razvoj glasbeno-gledališke režiji v slovenskem gledališču v času delovanja Dramatičnega društva in Deželnega gledališča do leta 1914. Avtorica skuša odgovoriti na vprašanja, kdo so bili posamezni akterji, ki so zaznamovali razvoj glasbeno-scenskih uprizoritev, katere gledališke šole so zastopali, kakšni sta bili njihova poklicna naravnanost in narodna pripadnost, ter ugotavlja interakcijo med gledališkim in glasbeno-gledališkim uprizarjanjem.

Anxious Enactments: Postcolonial Anxieties and the Performance of Territorialization

This paper examines the specific configurations that territorialization took in the colonial and post-colonial Malaysian state within the context of the crisis of authority that accompanies violent conflicts. I trace the post-colonial Malaysian state's attempt to legitimate itself when its elites supported the British in the counterinsurgency campaign, known as the Emergency, against the forest-based Malayan Communist Party who fought for independence after WWII. Territorializing Malaysia required both physical reconfiguration and imaginative recuperation of the landscape. The success of the counterinsurgency rested on two ambitious spatial policies: the New Villages and the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) agricultural scheme. I explore how the two policies constructed moral “citizenscapes” for the performance of national identity. The New Villages comprised a punitive landscape designed to contain 20% of the population through curfews and a geometric architecture rendering them visible to, and manageable by, the state. But an equally urgent task of the reterritorialization project for the Malaysian post-colonial government was the creation of a positive moral scopic politics and an essentialized national space inhabited by loyal subject-citizens in place of the anarchic rainforest and its insurgent population. The FELDA schemes were conceived as theatrical stages for performing national identity as embodied in the male bumiputera settler. My paper explores how state power is legitimized through a performance of its subjects and citizens within punitive and affirmative landscapes that construct a postcolonial nature.

Asymmetry of Creative Activity: Product-Based Iterative Measurement Procedure

To measure the relative role of left- or right-hemispheric processes involved both in creation of works of art and their perception, a procedure was derived based on calibrated expert estimations (of works or their authors). The resulting instrument for measurements consists of 7-10 scales and two sets of ‘contrastive objects’ (‘tuning forks,’ each containing 7-12 objects). The asymmetry is reflected by appropriate index which varies from –1 to +1 (‘pure’ right- and ‘pure’ left-hemispheric dominance, respectively). It occurs possible to eliminate subjectivity both of experts and researchers (compilers of the instrument). The method was used in evolutionary studies concerning 102 composers, 240 painters, etc.; the error of measurement was usually 3-5%. Evolutionary curves built on the basis of these indices, permitted to observe periodical switching between left and right styles in music, painting, theatre staging, and poetry.

Is Mr. Euripides a Communist? The Federal Theatre Project's 1938 Trojan Incident

On 6 December 1938, Hallie Flanagan, director of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), testified before the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities. (1) The FTP, a publicly funded nationwide theater organization, was allegedly advocating Communist propaganda. Flanagan came under heavy fire for including socialist messages in productions like the children's show The Revolt of the Beavers (1937) in which a beaver, Oakleaf, organizes his fellow rodents to rise against the Chief, who has been mercilessly making the animals work without break on the busy wheel. (2) Flanagan, who had traveled to the Soviet Union and written approvingly of Russian theater, was especially vulnerable as a witness. (3) During the contentious hearing, Flanagan parried assaults from a hostile committee investigating play selection, Communist ideology, and the purpose of theater. At one point, Congressman Joseph Starnes quoted an article by Flanagan that described what she had in 1931 seen as two opposing theaters in the United States: the commercial theatre, which was out to make money, and the workers' theatre which was out to change the world with what she had playfully termed a Marlowesque madness. Congressman Starnes concluded by asking, You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a communist? This question led to the oft-quoted exchange: Mrs. Flanagan: I am very sorry. I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe. Mr. Starnes: Tell us who Marlowe is, so we can get the proper reference, because that is all we want to do. Mrs. Flanagan: Put in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period of Shakespeare, immediately preceding Shakespeare. Undaunted, Starnes pressed on with another line of inquiry: Mr. Starnes: Of course, we had what some people call Communists back in the days of the Greek theater. Mrs. Flanagan: Quite true. Mr. Starnes: And I believe Mr. Euripedes [sic] was guilty of teaching class consciousness also, wasn't he? Mrs. Flanagan: I believe that was alleged against all of the Greek dramatists. Mr. Starnes: So we cannot say when it began. (4) One might be surprised to find a conservative congressman arguing over the class-consciousness of an ancient dramatist, but Starnes's attacks on Marlowe and Euripides reveal a real threat to stain even the most canonical writers red. Rather than look at Flanagan's exchange with Starnes as an iconic example of the committee's notorious anti-intellectualism, I will read Starnes's pointed assault in conversation with the most recent staging of Euripides that the committee knew about: the FTP's 1938 Broadway production of Trojan Incident. Running for only twenty-six performances, the militantly antiwar Trojan Incident had closed just six months before the hearings. Although the production receives little more than a passing mention in studies of Federal Theatre, its populist politics coupled with an appeal to ancient authority ignited widespread controversies. By examining this innovative production and the responses of critics, producers, and politicians, I will use Trojan Incident as a case study of how ideas about Greek antiquity were applied within the institution of the FTE I begin by tracing the production history of Euripides' Trojan Women to a transatlantic antiwar movement at the turn of the century. I will focus on how the FTP's translational strategies departed from established models of Greek play production by aggressively modernizing the source material. As the FTP was part of a government agency, its artistic and political choices were subjected to wider attacks on New Deal policies. The struggles over Trojan Incident were as much about the role of government in society as about its antiwar content. I will return to the example of HUAC to anchor the production in a volatile moment that held stakes beyond the fate of the arts in America. The very identity and meaning of democracy was being fought over on the Federal Theatre stage, and, consequently, in the House of Representatives. …

Ingmar Bergman, the biographical legend and the intermedialities of memory

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) wrote his autobiography The Magic Lantern (Laterna magica, 1987) 5 years after he had finished his film career with Fanny and Alexander, his last feature made for the cinema screen. This arguably marked the second stage of his strictly literary career, the first being his plays for the stage in the 1940s.The Magic Lantern is of interest from an intermedial perspective in its forthright theatricalization or cinematization of the written text and the self-conscious performativity of its authorial voice. Of particular interest is the way the narrator turns into a kind of distanciated autobiographical witness, which in turn reminds the reader of the inherent narrative split in the autobiographical genre between the enunciating subject speaking from the present, and the described subject, the younger self in the past. In doing so the narrator seems to turn language itself into a performative venue: the medium of words becomes a theatrical stage or a cinematically charged mise-en-scène for memory as such.This is of course not only stylistically elegant, for what can be more natural than a film- and theater director who, as the very title of the autobiography announces, turns memories into cinematic and theatrical performances? But even more interesting is the extent to which Bergman in doing so seems to conjur forth his biographical legend, reminding the reader of who is in charge of text: the narrator becomes the director of the text, so to speak, lighting and setting the stage.Besides this artful approach, Bergman also clearly fictionalized his life in other ways, which is corroborated by the private note books and original manuscripts that the writer of this paper has gained access to.

Mapping the Body's Movement

Both geography and choreography are concerned with the movement of the body in space, and in the context of South Africa, the geography of apartheid might be understood as a legislative choreography. This article seeks to establish how aspects of geography studies could be employed as tools to analyse the choreography of a South African individual's embodied experience both on and off the theatre stage.

Intimate revolts—some approaches towards pedagogy and performer training in Physical Theatre: In conversation with First Physical Theatre Company's Artistic Director: Gary Gordon

Gary Gordon's reputation has assured him legendary status in South African dance, physical theatre and choreography. He has been called the 'father of Physical Theatre' (Zingi Mkefa: BASA Newsflash Podcast: 7 March 2010 Interview), the 'guru of the innovative' (Claire Bezuidenhout, Independent On Saturday) and the 'doyen of physical theatre training and stage creation in South Africa' (Guy Willoughby, Mail and Guardian). He has the reputation of having nurtured and trained top theatre makers and choreographic innovators in the country. The country's most prominent dance critic, Ms Adrienne Sichel, has called the choreographic and theatrical work produced by Gordon's First Physical Theatre Company a 'living South African artistic heritage in the truest sense' (The Star: Tonight: 11 February 2005).

Le prolongement de l’esthétique de l’Âge d’argent durant la période caucasienne de l’oeuvre d’Eugène Lanceray

The article is devoted to a question of the late displays of an aesthetics of the Silver age. Without insisting on the term "a late Silver age” concerning 1920s, it is interesting to track lines of the fine arts and a creative life of this time, similar to the classical period of 1890-1910s. It acts of the stylistic variety, the reciprocal influences of the painters inside the country and abroad, of the new experiments of these " renaissance" masters of which Evgenij Lanceray (1917-1934). After moving to Caucasus in 1917 Lanceray continues to work actively in the field of the journal, book, easel drawing, creates monumental lists, sketches to theatrical stagings. In 1920s he masters technique of an etching and works as the artist of film statements. The relative freedom of the international dialogue in this time is confirmed by the diary records of the artist, made during his last foreign trip to France in 1927. Remaining enough conservative master and keeping line of an aesthetics of the Silver age, in 1920s Lanceray, nevertheless, in a greater degree develops realistic bases of art and in the early 1930s participates in formation of the style of socialist realism.

The Impossible "Return to the Native Land": Exile, Loss of Memory, and Identity in José Pliya's Play Nous étions assis sur le rivage du monde…

The Impossible "Return to the Native Land"Exile, Loss of Memory, and Identity in José Pliya's Play Nous étions assis sur le rivage du monde… Stéphanie Bérard (bio) José Pliya is a very atypical Francophone writer: he is one of the rare, if not only, African writers living in the Caribbean and his theatrical work is clearly situated at the crossroads of the African, the Creole, and the European cultures. Pliya defines himself as a writer of the "entre multiple," the "multiple in-between."1 Born in Benin in 1966, he has lived in several parts of the world: in France, where he grew up and studied French literature (he wrote his doctoral thesis on Paul Claudel and Bernard-Marie Koltès), in Cameroon, where he worked as the head of the Alliance Française, a position he also held in Dominica in the West Indies, and finally in the French Caribbean, where he has now been living for about ten years, alternately in Martinique and Guadeloupe. He was appointed Director of the Scène Nationale L'Artchipel, the National Theatrical Stage of Guadeloupe in Basse-Terre in 2005; he is also the founder of the theatrical association Ecritures Théâtrales Contemporaines en Caraïbes (ETC Caraïbes), which works for the recognition and promotion of young Caribbean playwrights from both the Francophone and Creolophone regions, as well as the English and Spanish speaking Caribbean islands. José Pliya's dramatic work, as a reflection of his own life, expresses an unstable and changing identity, never defined or confined, and constantly evolving. The questions of exile, space, and territory—of belonging and wandering—are addressed by Pliya in his play Nous étions assis sur le rivage du monde… (2004), which offers multiple intertwining layers—personal and collective, physical and psychological, racial, social, and historical—that I would like to explore in this article.2 Staged in 2006 in Guadeloupe and in Montreal by the Canadian director Denis Marleau, head of the Theatrical Company Ubu,3 the play was acclaimed by both the Caribbean and the Canadian audiences. José Pliya succeeds in creating dramatic tension through a simple conflict whose intensity increases throughout the play. A Woman arrives on the beach of her childhood, the Shores of the World, to meet with friends whom she has not seen for a long time. Born on the island, she has left to work in a big city—certainly in France—and is now back to her native land for vacation. When she gets to the meeting point, her friends have not yet arrived and she meets a Man who forbids her to stay on the beach which is now private. The woman refuses to obey, ignoring the authority and the orders given by the Man who must use physical violence to make her understand she has to leave. Although We Were Sitting on the Shores of the World… is a one act play, the action takes place in three stages: the first moment introduces the conflict between the Woman and the Man alone, on a beach which seems to be removed from time and space; the confrontation ends when the Man [End Page 874] slaps the Woman in the face and disappears into the sea. The second part begins with the arrival of the friends, one female and one male, who try to convince the Woman to leave without revealing to her the reasons why she is not allowed to stay; they represent the irruption of the outside world and reality into the timeless and nearly mythical initial setting. From now on, we are back in the real world, and when the Man returns to the beach in the third and last part after the friends have left, the dialogue is anchored in the social, racial, and historical reality of an island whose secret is to be revealed. We are gradually understanding why a beach that was yesterday open to the world is banned today, why the Woman no longer has the right to stay on the Shores of the World. The first part of this article examines how a power conflict linked to the possession of territory progressively evolves into...

Iluzjonistyczne scenografie teatralne jako gatunek malarstwa dekoracyjnego Technika wykonania na przykładzie dekoracji francuskich teatrów dworskich

The paper presents material aspects of creating a particular type of decorative painting, that is an illusionistic theatre stage setting. Developed to suite the needs of the stage of Italian type in 17th century, for over two centuries they have made the frame for theatre and opera performances in Europe. The brief outline of the history of illusionistic repertoire decorations is discussed, the catalogue of elements they consisted of as well as technical requirements they had to meet. The principles and subsequent stages of execution of painted stage decorations in 18th and 19th centuries on example of French decorations, with the materials, their application and the tools used being characterised.

The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain (review)

Reviewed by: The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain Leigh K. Mercer Keywords Spain, Nineteenth Century, Theater, Copyright, Authorship, Lisa Surwillo, The Stages of Property, Leigh K. Mercer, The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain, the Middle Class Lisa Surwillo. The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Scholars have long argued that the entanglements presented on the stages of nineteenth-century Spanish theaters revealed the concerns and anxieties of a burgeoning middle class. In her recent book, Lisa Surwillo offers a unique departure from questions of stage and performance to address another set of bourgeois concerns—those behind-the-scenes legal and economic interests that altered the course of Spanish theater. Surwillo charts the development of literary property in Spain, arguing that there are three distinct stages of copyright for Spanish theater. Drawing on vast archival research of newspapers from contemporary Madrid, government archives, and original play editions, Surwillo outlines the evolution of the theater from an institution grounded in spectacle to one built on publication and reading, thereby explaining the birth of the modern Spanish author. Surwillo’s premise is that the history of printing Spanish plays and the publication standards associated with this practice speak volumes on the state of the nation. Particularly, she distinguishes the establishment of the derecho de autor from that of copyright in the Anglo Saxon tradition to stress the importance of the personality of the poet in Spain above and beyond the value of the text and control of its reproduction. On numerous occasions, Surwillo returns to a particular incident, that of the premiere of El trovador in 1836, when the anonymous [End Page 249] playwright Antonio García Gutiérrez became the first author to be called to the stage after a performance and recognized with a standing ovation. For Surwillo, this sea change signals the beginning of a first period of literary property in Spain, as it begat a public campaign for copyright law in the public sphere and eventually led the monarchy to enact a first copyright decree in 1837. Surwillo deftly ties this shift to a parallel one occurring in the political economy, that of Mendizabal’s order to disentail the property of the Catholic Church and the land reforms that resulted from this process. Building upon the foundational moment of literary property law, Surwillo examines the new literary marketplace fostered by copyright throughout the remainder of the century. Chronicling the newfound conception of authorship as an alienable good, the altered relationship between dramatic poets and their publishers, the rise of the figure of the editor as literary baron, and the implications of new forms of publication, particularly the Galerías dramáticas, allows Surwillo ample opportunity to examine the formation of a national culture through theater. Furthermore, some of Surwillo’s greatest insights are offered when tracing the connections between the development of literary property in Spain and other cultural revelations of the nineteenth-century. Her suggestion that the creation of the art gallery and the redesign of the commercial shop window are parallel developments to that of the literary marketplace both broadens the scope of the book and highlights how in the nineteenth century modernizing processes regularly crossed or transcended traditional boundaries. Finally, Surwillo even returns to questions of performance to show how ideas of authorship and the concept of copyright came full circle and began to alter how Spanish plays were performed, as directors and actors were forced to increasingly respect the primacy of the fixed text in the latter half of the century. Overall, The Stages of Property is clearly written and very well organized. Eight pages of illustrated documentation and a meticulously crafted appendix containing petitions and royal decrees on literary property accompany Surwillo’s text. While the book’s main focus is on the processes of commercialization and industrialization that affected nineteenth-century Spanish theater, and therefore the bulk of Surwillo’s documentation is drawn from press clippings and the historical archive, the inclusion of more material from plays of the day would have served to strengthen her argument. Plays from the Romantic period particularly, including El trovador but also Don Juan Tenorio and...

Ballroom, boogie, shimmy sham, shake: a social and popular dance reader

This dynamic collection documents the rich and varied history of social dance and the multiple styles it has generated, while drawing on some of the most current forms of critical and theoretical inquiry. The essays cover different historical periods and styles; encompass regional influences from North and South America, Britain, Europe, and Africa; and emphasize a variety of methodological approaches, including ethnography, anthropology, gender studies, and critical race theory. While social dance is defined primarily as dance performed by the public in ballrooms, clubs, dance halls, and other meeting spots, contributors also examine social dance’s symbiotic relationship with popular, theatrical stage dance forms.Contributors are Elizabeth Aldrich, Barbara Cohen-Stratyner, Yvonne Daniel, Sherril Dodds, Lisa Doolittle, David F. García, Nadine George-Graves, Jurretta Jordan Heckscher, Constance Valis Hill, Karen W. Hubbard, Tim Lawrence, Julie Malnig, Carol Martin, Juliet McMains, Terry Monaghan, Halifu Osumare, Sally R. Sommer, May Gwin Waggoner, Tim Wall, and Christina Zanfagna.

TRÊS PARADIGMAS PARA A CENOGRAFIA: Instrumentos para a cena contemporânea

Procurando analisar os instrumentais disponíveis para a cenografia na contemporaneidade, e observando momentos da história da encenação teatral, o texto apresenta três paradigmas principais: a abordagem da arte como representação mimética, a abordagem da arte como linguagem e a abordagem da arte voltada para o processo de percepção do espectador.

Wind Loads for Temporary Structures: Making the Case for Industrywide Standards

Engineers are well versed in designing and building structures to comply with applicable codes. But one crucial area where we lack definitive regulatory guidance is for temporary structures. Engineers constantly ask themselves the question, Is this structure as safe, as wind-resistant, and as cost-effective as we can make it? Local building codes, preferences of the equipment owner, and the engineer’s own professional judgment all factor into the equation, but we need more than an ad hoc system for determining wind-load thresholds for all types of temporary structures. We need industrywide standards that not only govern the safety of these structures, but also balance costs with safety benefits. Temporary structures encompass a wide range of items such as concert and theatrical stages, tents, public art projects, temporary roofs and shade structures, lighting and speaker towers, temporary grandstands and bleachers, and many other facilities. Some building codes require temporary structures to comply with the wind-load guidelines applied to permanent buildings, and others leave this to the discretion of the building official. Accordingly, engineers are designing temporary structures to be strong enough to withstand once-a-century hurricanes when in fact these structures will be used for only a short period—sometimes just a day or two. If a hurricane were approaching, though, you would not erect a temporary structure, nor would you have it sheltering people during a heavy storm. In fact, strong winds would likely keep people away from the event altogether and may well prompt event owners to cancel or postpone the event. In any case, the most these structures are likely to face is a thunderstorm, but absent other guidelines, the building codes apparently require us to design for hurricanes, which needlessly drives up costs without increasing safety. Building codes define the design loads that structures are subject to in a gamut of environmental conditions—wind, rain, snow, varying temperatures, or earthquake. For wind loads, nearly all states and municipalities have adopted codes that incorporate ASCE 7, which sets parameters for minimum design loads on buildings. Most building codes, however, do not specify requirements for temporary structures, whose lifespan ranges from one day to several months. IBC 2006 states that structures erected for less than 180 days as temporary, but does not provide further guidance. Engineers may then look to another standard, ASCE 37, which addresses design loads on permanent structures under construction—short term, similar to temporary structures. ASCE 37 incorporates provisions for adjusting wind loads to lower them for short-term exposure during construction for up to five years, which is relevant here because temporary structures typically are erected for six weeks or less. Based on this standard, the wind load applied to a structure under construction for less

The Matter with de Clérambault: On the Baroque Obscene

In Gilles Deleuze's terms, the Baroque is not limitable to a particular historical period of art, but instead manifests more a mode of thinking, an operation of traits. The fold, for him, is its persistent figure, and it is in an attempt to investigate the meanings and proliferations of Deleuze's attention to that form that this article turns to an interpretation of G. G. de Clérambault, an early-twentieth-century psychiatrist for whom drapery possessed especially potent fascinations. Interested in particular in the undulations of display, spectacle, and concealment that the concept of drapery contains, the article brings three broader contexts to its analysis: the pleasures of deception afforded by the cinema; the spirit-world material, or “stuff,” of ectoplasm séances and their often theatrical stagings; and, lastly, in reference to Deleuze's mentioning of an “Islamic Baroque,” the operations of veiling.