Theatre Company Research Articles

What is my truth and who decides?: exploring viable social identity scripts and performances with latina/x artivists in an arts-based youth participatory action research troupe

This seven-month critical performance ethnographic study explores the lived experiences of Latina/x youth artivist-researchers. The data collected through participant observations, arts-based elicitation and semi-structured interviews, artifacts, and analytic memos reveal how Latina/x youth utilize artmaking to understand and construct a viable social identity. Their participation in an arts-based youth participatory action research (YPAR) project and intergenerational theatre ensemble we call Estrella Theatre (ET) company indicates how art and social justice-driven inquiry provokes reflection on the identity scripts and performances youth use in our daily lives. Findings reveal that Latina/x youth identity scripts and performances appear across personal, interpersonal, and social planes of identity where they experience identity clashes, artful identity development, new identities, and identity code-switching.

Exploring authorship and ownership of plays at the time of William Shakespeare’s First Folio

ABSTRACT In this this article I evaluate how authorship of theatre occurred in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. I explore whether individual playwrights such as William Shakespeare were viewed as authors, and thus owners, of plays at this time. I analyse the role of the Stationers’ Company as print monopolists, and the role of Elizabethan theatre companies, who took ownership of scripts for performance purposes. I examine the impact of the publication of the First Folio. I note that the publishing syndicate behind the First Folio, led by Shakespeare’s friends John Heminges and Henry Condell, had to obtain the print rights for several plays, not from Shakespeare’s estate, but from the various Stationers who had acquired publishing rights while Shakespeare was alive. Therefore, the First Folio stands as an early example, even before statutory copyright existed, of a book created via what we now describe as the ‘clearing’ of copyright licences. A consequence of the First Folio was not just the emergence of Shakespeare as the English author-figure par excellence; the First Folio coincided with a rising legal expectation that authors should be owners of dramatic texts under copyright law. Throughout the seventeenth century and into the early eighteenth century I mark how tensions between the market power of the Stationers’ Company and emerging recognition of the author’s literary property led to the first British copyright statute: the Statute of Anne in 1710.

Site-specific Performances and Community Activation: Participative Theatre in Florence Beyond Overtourism and Gentrification

The presence of site-specific theatre companies in the gentrified and overtouristic city-centre of Florence (Italy) as a form of counter-gentrification and of re-discovery of public spaces for the community is a phenomenon related to the last twenty years. This essay focuses on two specific case studies, i.e. the two local cultural associations and theatre companies Cantiere Obraz and Genius Loci Performance. On the one hand, Cantiere Obraz is rooted in the Florentine area of Oltrarno and focuses its practices on public spaces, especially green urban areas, involving teenagers and young adults. On the other side of the river Arno, the site-specific projects of Genius Loci Performance aim at rediscovering public architectures in a social perspective through workshops and immersive performances. This study benefits from the interviews conducted with the directors of both theater companies and with some of the performers of Genius Loci Performance.

Mapping Melmoth: Charles Robert Maturin in/and the World Republic of Letters

This article offers a transnational mapping of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) that links fictional narrative both to the contexts of its production and dissemination in a global literary marketplace and to its network of influence, and more particularly, its reputation and afterlife within what Pascale Casanova has influentially called ‘the world republic of letters’. It first considers Melmoth’s internal geography and the novel’s use of space in relation to Maturin’s quest for ‘literary capital’. 1 It then expands upon, in Casanova’s terms, Melmoth’s ‘ littérisation’, namely, the process by which, in spite of its often-unfavourable contemporary reception, Melmoth was transformed from a state of ‘literary inexistence to existence’ via translation and adaptation. 2 Finally, it explores Northern Irish Big Telly Theatre Company’s 2012 dramatic adaptation as evidence of Melmoth’s littérisation.

The classical drama as contested heritage in modern Greece: theatre productions from private initiatives to state projects in the 1930s

Abstract Performing classical drama at ancient venues in interwar Greece reflected the socio-cultural context of the time. The development of archaeological tourism and the perception of classical monuments as heterotopic spaces created particular political and ideological needs. Until the mid-1930s, private theatre companies and individual artists reused classical venues such as the Odeon of Herodes Atticus and the theatre of Epidaurus to stage productions that gradually attracted local, national, and international attention. But by 1936, the National Theatre began exploiting the socio-political potential of ancient theatres and classical drama festivals and state-sponsored productions dominated the Greek theatrical stage. During this period, the claims of exclusivity on the part of the National Theatre and the National Conservatoire defined their competition with private companies and shaped the course of the revival of classical drama in twentieth-century Greece.

Pericles by Fiasco Theater Company (review)

Pericles by Fiasco Theater Company (review)

A Community Telling of Pawâkan Macbeth: A Cree Takeover by Akpik Theatre Company (review)

A Community Telling of Pawâkan Macbeth: A Cree Takeover by Akpik Theatre Company (review)

Grief and Collaborative Storytelling: The Colours of Loss

ABSTRACT This article describes a novel methodology for involving the public in a creative co-produced project about grief, which invited bereaved people to work together to create a fictional story about loss and then reflect on the experience in focus groups. Devised by Crowded Room Theatre Company and researchers at the University of Bristol, the project aimed to explore the risks and benefits of collaborative storytelling about emotionally charged subjects. Thematic analysis of the focus group transcripts generated seven themes: storytelling as protective and enabling; support and understanding; new perspectives; connecting to grief and loved ones who have died; complicated emotions; workshop anxiety; and anticipating the audio story. These findings corroborate research that suggests storytelling can provide a safe space to explore and make meaning from difficult emotions and experiences; it may also appeal to bereaved individuals who are less likely to attend conventional support groups. The audio story created from the workshop recordings is available online (https://www.spreaker.com/episode/the-colours-of-loss--53334166).

NOWOCZESNE TECHNOLOGIE PROJEKCYJNE W ZABYTKOWYCH SALACH TEATRALNYCH KRAKOWA – SZANSY I ZAGROŻENIA

Along with the development of multimedia and their increasing role in producing culture, the language of performative arts have change significantly over the past few decades. However, as in the case of Krakow, Poland, many theatre companies are seated for decades in the same historic buildings, being important landmarks and protected architectural monuments. The paper sheds some light on opportunities and risks of introducing modern projection technologies into historic building. Results of reserch can be considered inspirational for artist and technicians as well as conservators and architects involved in the renovation and conservation of historic theatre halls.

Games of Collaboration

This paper looks at the theme of collaboration through the prism of game design, and especially the example of serious games. At its heart, this is a consideration of two collaborative projects between experts. The first is a current collaboration between computer scientists, game designers, and a theatre company in Scotland, in which the author is also a collaborator and the project’s ethnographer. The second is perhaps the largest and most high-profile collaborative project recently led and documented by anthropologists, Meridian 180, which aims to experiment with the norms of collaboration itself, and which has already been theorised and extensively reflected upon by one of its founders, Annelise Riles. The paper aims to put these two collaborations into some kind of conversation in order to throw each into productive relief and to ask some new questions about how we think about both the exercise of collaboration and the deliberate subversion of its norms. Keywords: collaboration, serious games, co-operation, experts, rules, friendship

Relaxed performances: supporting aural diversity and neurodiversity among classical concert audiences in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT Current discourse at the intersection between sound studies and disability studies has highlighted the phonocentric nature of conventional understandings of listening – especially in relation to engagement with classical music performance. The perpetuation of ableist notions of “normal” and “expert” listening risk overlooking multimodal and embodied listening practices of the kind advocated by aurally-diverse and neurodiverse concert audiences. In this article, we evaluate the extent to which Relaxed Performances (RPs) may offer opportunities for such diverse ways of listening, through surveying the existing provision of RPs in the United Kingdom and reviewing three examples of performances by the Graeæ Theatre Company, the English National Opera, and the BBC Proms. We conclude that further work needs to be undertaken for emergent RP practices to be codified and become widespread, but highlight the importance of this work in making classical music performance more accessible and beneficial for people who experience differences in sensory processing.

Directing change? Reflections on participatory programmes and inclusive theatres cultures

ABSTRACT Participatory programmes in theatres typically aim to amplify the voice of people less commonly involved in ‘mainstream' theatre. Past scholarship has evaluated their impact on participants but paid less attention to the reciprocal impact on the internal culture and ‘diversity climate' of theatres. Drawing on exploratory research at two leading UK theatre companies, the National Theatre and the Young Vic, we reflect first on what this tells us about the relationship between participatory programmes and the institution’s diversity climate, and second on what this might tell us about efforts to become diverse and inclusive more generally.

Deviant Devising

Devised theater genealogies too often take shape around a set of primarily white, Western “ensemble-based” theater companies and training schools working in modes that emerged in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s in response to contemporary political circumstances and eventually found acceptance in the high-brow, avant garde cultural milieu. This cowritten, copresented article works to trouble that narrative by taking up the forms of queer and trans cocreated performance associated with underground queer spaces that have been excluded from histories of devised theater (drag, burlesque, ballroom, cabaret, parties, etc.). Using three case studies written in three different voices—the Chicago Kings, Sean Dorsey Dance and Fresh Meat Productions, and The Fly Honey Show—we examine what an alternative genealogy of devising, one that centers queer and trans artists, might look like.

Incubating Incubators

Allen Kuharski provides a critical summary and expanded framing of the first neh Institute on transmitting and archiving devised physical ensemble theater in American higher education. Kuharski delineates the goals, structure, and planning of the twelve-day gathering of fifty academics, teaching artists, editors, and archivists hosted by him and Quinn Bauriedel of Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theater Company. The institute’s goal was to provide a platform for longer-term discussions of the historical, theoretical, and critical teaching of devised physical ensemble theater given the proliferation of the teaching of devising practices around the country. Kuharski also places the concerns of the institute within the larger forces challenging contemporary theater, discussing how on the one hand they seem to threaten the historic legacies of such alternative theater practices while on the other these practices may also provide our best future solutions for a vibrant and reformed American live performance practice. The article concludes with an argument for the central role of higher education in the future incubation of an innovative noncommercial American theater.

Dog Eat Dog: Staging Female Rivalry in David Johnston’s Translation of Lope’s The Dog in the Manger

Abstract: Staging female rivalry for today’s audiences presents a multiplicity of problems in producing Golden Age Spanish plays. In Lope de Vega’s El perro del hortelano, the lady Diana, Countess of Belflor, eventually wins out against her rival, her own lady-in-waiting, Marcela. A further complication arises since the love interest is the Countess’s low-born secretary, Teodoro. Stage action from Marcela’s perspective informs the main plot, the love game between Diana and Teodoro. Marcela questions: “When can honor and love ever meet” (112), a line recalling Donald Larson’s notion of feminine vergüenza that involves the Countess’s social status. I discuss David Johnston’s translation as an effort to unravel comedic enredos with contemporary language, along with the performance at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC, in 2009. The bonds of matrimony serve to bring order out of delightful theatrical chaos that in the hands of this translator becomes witty comedic action.

Yuriko Doi’s Teaching and Transmission of Noh and Kyōgen in San Francisco

<p>Yuriko Doi founded the Theatre of Yugen in San Francisco and taught American students noh and kyōgen for more than thirty years. Noh theatre, in living practice in Japan for more than six hundred years, incorporates music, dance, acting, and singing. While noh is serious and sombre, kyōgen is a comedic form traditionally performed within or between noh plays. Starting in the late 1970s, Doi’s Theatre of Yugen performed new works inspired and informed by noh as well as kyōgen in English around the US and also in Japan. Noh training ideally begins in childhood as one-on-one study with a teacher and continues into adulthood. The transmission of noh is considered to be from body (teacher) to body (student) without verbal explication. To teach students in an ensemble theatre company in California, Doi adapted aspects of the transmission process as well as aspects of the form. Doi taught the exterior qualities of movement and vocal technique and, at the same time, tried to instill a sense of noh’s interior qualities, which include time, aesthetic intensity, and art practice as a life path. While teaching noh and kyōgen, Doi wants her students to draw from all of their training and influences. She explains that trying to hide other performance traditions held in the body, such as Western acting technique, will deflate the energy of a performance. She argues that if an actor can develop a complex sense of noh they can integrate it with all of the other knowledge structures in the body, which will lead to a masterful performance. Based on a series of interviews with Doi, the treatises of noh founder Zeami Motokiyo, and recent scholarship on noh, this essay examines the practice and transmission of noh and how the art is continued and revised through Doi’s work.</p>

When pharmacy and theater collide: How diversity can develop inclusive communication skills

BackgroundEffective communication with patients and colleagues is key to a pharmacist's ability to provide effective person-centered care. Neurodivergent patients face many barriers when interacting with health professionals; increased awareness and understanding are therefore paramount to the pharmacist's role. This paper describes an innovative teaching partnership between a school of pharmacy and an inclusive theater company which aims to develop awareness and skills of undergraduate pharmacy students in relation to communicating with patients with autism and/or learning disabilities. Educational activityForum theater and role-plays were used to complement existing communication skills teaching in Years two and four of the undergraduate MPharm (Master of Pharmacy) program. The sessions were designed and delivered in partnership between academic teaching staff and a theater company of neurodivergent actors. An online evaluation form was used to obtain student feedback on these sessions (two Likert-style questions and three open format questions). Critical analysis of the educational activityOf the 241 students who attended a session in 2021, 70 (29%) provided feedback. Feedback was positive, with 99% of respondents finding the session useful. Students spoke about how they found the sessions supportive and enlightening, helping them to reflect on their own communication skills. As a result, the teaching has been developed and now expanded through all years of the undergraduate program. While conscious of challenges such as funding and finding the right partner, the authors recommend this rewarding initiative to fellow academics.

As You Like It by Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival at the Shakespeare Theatre Company Harman Hall (review)

As You Like It by Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival at the Shakespeare Theatre Company Harman Hall (review)

The Fallout of Shakespeare: Playing and Video Game Theater

Abstract: This article adopts a principle from game design theory which views "play" as a type of negotiation with (and against) the constraints of a given environment. The performances of The Wasteland Theatre Company, an amateur theater troupe staging Shakespearean texts collaboratively online using the video game Fallout 76 , are examined in light of this approach to playing. This article discusses how tensions between the Shakespearean text and the performances of The Wasteland Theatre Company coerce their audiences into active interpretation of both the game's and the performed text's content. The principle of playing as negotiation, moreover, has applicability beyond video games. Demonstrating how productions can break or bend the "rules" which their texts or settings impose, The Wasteland Theatre Company's approach foregrounds the ways in which such rule-breaking encourages audiences to actively interpret the performance.

Soon Jae Lee's King Lear by Yeonwoo Theater Company at the LG Art Center (review)

Soon Jae Lee's King Lear by Yeonwoo Theater Company at the LG Art Center (review)