Theatre Historiography Research Articles

PAINTING HISTORY: PICTURE, WITNESS, AND ANCIENT HISTORIOGRAPHY

ABSTRACTThis article treats an analogy that is used persistently in the history of historiography: the equation of historiography with painting and the identification of the historiographer with the painter. In examining the conceptual stakes of this (auto)identification, the article mobilizes the analogy in order to explore larger issues of historical theory and, through the prism of historical painting, reflects on the problem of representation and narrativist approaches to history as text. The article argues that the historiographic desire surfacing in a comparison with painting does not concern painting's ability to capture the past; rather, it concerns its ability to capture the viewer. Opening with a brief survey of the ut pictura historia analogy in the history of historiography, the article makes this claim by analyzing historiographical engagements with the analogy in antiquity (turning to Herodotus and Polybius) and by exploring ancient history painting itself (offering pride of place to the Alexander Mosaic). In thus engaging with the theory of historiography via concrete historical material, the article leverages a historical episode of interaction between textual media and visual media to find that they are structured by the same simple desire that continues to exert its force today: the desire to see for oneself.

Recovering Virginie Gireaudeau: Race, Language, and Representation on the American Stage

Abstract: This article recovers the life and career of Virginie Gireaudeau, one of the first African American actresses to appear in a major North American theater. Performing in New Orleans in 1826, she played the female lead in two tragedies, supported by a group of white professional actors and actresses from France. But despite Gireaudeau’s obvious significance for American theater historiography, her story has not yet found its way into theater criticism or history. The article suggests that Gireaudeau’s marginalization is symptomatic of an American “national” theater historiography that is largely focused on the anglophone stage. Drawing on a multilingual approach and the careful analysis of a range of newspaper accounts and notarial records, the article argues for the inclusion of non-English-language voices and materials. It demonstrates how broadening our perspective in this way can provide new insights into the life and work of underrepresented performers while enhancing our understanding of the complexity of early American theater as a whole.

Inheritance and Enhancement: Brodale's Historiographical Theory and the Shaping of the Historical Narrative of Education

Inheritance and Enhancement: Brodale's Historiographical Theory and the Shaping of the Historical Narrative of Education

Staging Theatre Historiography: The Afterlives of Ottoman Armenian Drama in Contemporary Turkish Public Theatre

In the last twenty years, memory has gained broader attention in Turkey's social, cultural and political arena. In line with this movement, independent and subsidized theatres produced plays engaging with Armenian history through diverse political and aesthetic agendas. Among these works, public and state theatre productions remained mostly invisible in theatre scholarship due to their ambiguous position that does not directly align with the framework of political theatre. This article examines the adaptation of the Ottoman Armenian playwright Hagop Baronian's Adamnapuyj aravelyan (1868) as Şark Dişçisi (The Oriental Dentist) (2011) by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality City Theatres (İBBŞT). While promoting confrontation with the past, Şark Dişçisi eliminates the crucial political insights of its source text and their ramifications for contemporary demands for historical justice regarding the 1915 Armenian Genocide. The intersection of revisionist theatre historiography and broader political dynamics in the adaptation process reveals the ambivalences of post-Genocide memory work in Turkey.

Chinese Volley Fire and Metanarratives of World History

Abstract: Volley fire with gunpowder weapons is often seen by modern scholars as one of the important innovations which allowed Europe to politically dominate other cultures and societies. Many historiographical theories, of the kind Lyotard termed metarécits , “metanarratives,” have attempted to explain this phenomenon. Recently, compelling evidence has emerged that other civilizations also practiced the technique, most notably China. This article brings together existing and new evidence that volley fire with firearms was developed and practiced in China long before it appeared in Europe and challenges several of the grand narratives of European exceptionalism. This new evidence shows that the volley fire technique arose in China primarily as a reaction to domestic and foreign (semi-)nomadic cavalry threats, belying geographically deterministic accounts, which suggest that sophisticated infantry tactics with firearms would not arise in states bordering the steppe. This article will also challenge the claim that volley fire in Europe benefitted from its emergence in a competitive system of states undergoing a tradition-challenging Renaissance. I call for a reconsideration of the innovative potential of Eurasian land empires bordering the steppe, and stress the importance of studying political contingencies and cultures of innovation in shaping world history.

The Art of Acting Up: Johann Friedrich Löwen and the Genesis of German Theatre Historiography

Johann Friedrich Löwen is generally considered to have written the first history of the German theatre, though scholars rarely discuss his role as a historian and are typically drawn instead to his program for establishing a national theatre. This article will examine his contributions to the historiography of the German theatre in the eighteenth century. His Geschichte des deutschen Theaters represents a substantial break in how German theatre historiography was written and conceptualized, as he favoured an actor-centred narrative instead of a catalogue of plays and playwrights, setting genre trends that would be felt for decades. In a move unexpected for a dedicated reformer of the theatre, however, Löwen depicts the history of German actors in a resoundingly negative light. Such an approach reveals that Löwen views the creation of historical narratives not only as a means for recording the past, but also for attesting to the urgency of theatre reform.

A Missing Piece of the Collage: The Stage Practice in the National Theatre Movement

Drawing on the idea of “history as collage,” this article looks at the stage performances in the National Theatre Movement that have been shunted aside in modern Chinese theatre historiography, in an attempt to shed light on understanding the development of modern Chinese theatre as a nonlinear, heterogeneous, and stochastic process. Despite current studies devoted to the National Theatre Movement, the movement’s theatrical engagements have not received enough scholarly attention. In fact, there were a total of three performances throughout the course of the movement, one in New York and two in Beijing. These productions deserve more probing scrutiny as they add a practical dimension to our understanding of the National Theatre Movement as having juxtaposed theoretical abstractions with empirical realities. Through historical archival research, this article finds that the National Theatre Movement ventured into a new approach to theatre production that relied on the combination of the formal elements of “masses, lines, and colors” as the main means to decorate the stage. This production method was proposed by Yu Shangyuan through “dynamic intertextuality,” that is, “proactive engagement with and adaptation of previous texts,” in this case the work of Sheldon Cheney, one of the staunch proponents of the American New Stagecraft Movement. It was based on Cheney’s depiction of the aesthetic theatre that Yu Shangyuan proposed an antirealistic theatrical paradigm and directed the three performances in accordance with this new scheme. The examination of the stage practice of the National Theatre Movement reveals the close connection between the National Theatre Movement and the New Stagecraft Movement, mapping out a neglected terrain in modern Chinese theatre historiography that encourages new directions and interests.

The Stanislavsky-Grotowski lineage: part I

ABSTRACT The connection between Konstantin Stanislavsky and Jerzy Grotowski is often overlooked or underplayed because there are substantial distinctions between them in terms of practices and approaches. In Part I of this essay, I examine Grotowski’s reflections on the significance of Stanislavsky’s final experiments for his own artistic research, I identify key points of connection between the Russian and Polish directors’ respective investigations of performance processes, and I foreground these convergences as particularly consequential in the context of the often-divergent genealogies of twentieth century theatre historiography. In Part II, I explore the implications of the Stanislavsky-Grotowski lineage for contemporary performance research in light of current explorations of embodied experience in neuroscience and phenomenology.

Prilozi Đorđa Maletića estetici glume

The paper examines the contribution of Đorđe Maletić to the aesthetics of acting. Maletić was a prominent figure in Serbian theater life in the second half of the 19th century, but recently he has been unjustifiably relegated to the margins of domestic theater historiography and theatrology. First, his general aesthetic views are presented, in which he relied eclectically on various sources, mainly on Lessing, Schiller, and Hegel. Subsequently, his thoughts on acting and acting creativity, present in various writings published in the period from 1847 to 1884, are presented and interpreted. Considering these findings, it emerges that Maletić was not only a transmitter of European theatrical achievements into the cultural environment of Serbia but also that he showed a high level of independence in thinking about theater and dramatic art, especially in thinking about the phenomenon of acting. His characterization of the actor as "incarnated beauty, the idea of the beautiful, assumed physicality", who manifests the idea of beauty "on himself, so that he is both a thought and a material for the expression of thoughts, he both acts and is acted upon" - represents the most complete aesthetic interpretation of acting and acting creativity that we can find in the history of Serbian theater thought of the 19th century.

Surulimalai based on the Theory of Historiography

The Western Ghats of India have been declared by UNESCO as one among the world’s heritage site in 2012. It plays an important role in changing the seasonal conditions of India and it causes rainfall in India. Chaturagiri Mountain, the mountain where the eighteen Siddhar Perumans formed a community and lived, and the Surulimalai, are located in the Western Ghats. Surulimalai is located near the Kambam valley in Theni district. The water falls in Suruli waterfall never dries up throughout the year, in contains two division, first fifty feet down and then twenty feet down. Flow of water is neither slow nor fast but moderate. Kanagi temple is located about five to six miles away from Surulimalai. On the basis of field research, the history of the Surabi river, ashrams, Imayagiri Siddhar cave, Bhutanarayana Siddhar ashram, Suruli Velapar place, etc. are found in Surulimalai based on the following stories mentioned in Arikesari Nallurth Thalapurana, the story of Phulanandeeswarar temple located in Chinnamanur, and the story of the Pandya kings, etc. This review article explains about the position, the theory, and the difference between one cult and another cult.

The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought by S. E. Jackson

Reviewed by: The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought by S. E. Jackson Ellwood Wiggins The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought. By S. E. Jackson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2021. Pp. xiii + 232. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 9781640140868. S. E. Jackson's fascinating monograph opens by connecting Nietzsche's "Problem of the Actor" to his problem with women (1). This brilliant move heralds her exploration of the centrality of gender to performance and performers in fin-de-siècle Germany. Actresses are not just a side issue or specialized topic when it comes to modernist theater. The questions posed by performing women instead point to the most pressing theoretical and practical issues of the day. Jackson's book is a veritable treasure trove of materials, narratives, and perspectives from German-language sources around 1900. It should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in gender, performance, or theater history in German modernism. The Problem of the Actress successfully straddles intellectual history and theater historiography by showing how intimately related conceptual debates (about issues as seemingly disparate as femininity and temporality, for instance) were to influential stage performances in the early 1900s. In the process of this back and forth between pseudo-philosophical publications (such as the repulsive misogynist Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter) and "paratheatrical writing" (production reviews, memoirs, and metatheatrical fiction), the book unfolds a striking cultural history of Wilhelmine Germany. Especially impressive is the way Jackson has marshaled a rich collection of little-known (and never-translated) contemporary treatises on acting and reviews of performances to paint a thickly textured portrait of the age. The first two chapters lay out the conceptual oppositions that both animated theoretical debates and constricted the practical conditions of female performers. These are followed by three chapters that use close readings of texts and performances to open up explorations of wider themes. All five chapters explore the creation of identity as a site of negotiation between heteronomous subjects who must respond to the ineluctable gender expectations of others. One admirable strength of the book is the way it weaves the longer tradition of German performance history into its lively account of Wilhelmine theater. Jackson [End Page 579] clearly demonstrates her reliance on previous scholarship about women in performance in the long eighteenth century both as methodological models for her own project and to outline the powerful continuities between acting traditions. Too often studies of modernism present the era as radically new and fail to notice the prevalence of older forms of thought even in what seem to be reactions against the past. Jackson avoids this trap by tracing the transformations of established paradigms in the new age. Her frequent citations of Mary Helen Dupree's groundbreaking study of Enlightenment and Romantic actress-writers, The Mask and the Quill (Bucknell University Press, 2011), in particular, show how abiding were the paradoxical demands of naturalness and artifice constructed around performing the feminine. In many ways, Jackson's study can be read as an exciting sequel to Dupree's, carrying the same incisive and sensitive readings of women's performance and women's writing forward into the next century. It is heartbreaking to see how little had changed for women in the intervening years. Jackson sums up a 1928 novel by the actress Tilla Durieux, for instance, by saying that it "presents the obligatory performance of femininity as destructive for women" (149). This quote could easily function as a precise digest of Mary Wollstonecraft's argument in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). But Jackson's acknowledgement of continuity simultaneously allows her to showcase even more precisely the very real novelties in intellectual concepts and theatrical practice that make the early twentieth century such a momentous era in European history. This achievement of the book becomes most evident in the final chapter. By focusing on the actress Gertrud Eysolt's 1903 performance of Elektra, Jackson persuasively shows how the character and in fact the entire drama would have been inconceivable without the actress's creative contributions. In a way, the book invites a recasting of the three-way antagonism between actor, writer, and director—all...

The historian is present: live interactive documentary as collaborative history

ABSTRACT Historical narratives seek to give us a shared reality, argued through recourse to evidence. Both impulses are under threat in the Age of the Anthropocene. This article introduces Live Interactive Documentary, a ‘performance dissemination’ model for history that deploys digital tools to merge cinema and lecture into a new form. It is designed to respond to Hayden White’s challenge in ‘The Burden of History’ and Bruno Latour’s call to gather as a bulwark to misinformation and the manipulative, political cooption of postmodern scepticism. Live Interactive Documentary creates a spectacle of archive and expertise, injected with post-postmodern values of polyphony and audience exchange, grounded in the local. This essay describes the form that I piloted with a team that includes historian Robert Nelson and composer, musician and media artist Brent Lee. Live Interactive Documentary is a model of ‘moving (image) history’ that seeks to cross boundaries between practice and theory, as well as history, film, multimedia performance art and participation. This hybrid cinema model draws upon theories of historiography, film and new media. It digitises earlier models of theatre and film exhibition and responds to the challenges of the Anthropocene by prioritising negotiation, complexity and gathering face-to-face in the real space of our analogue world.

Lost in the Past: Emotions, History and International Relations

Lost in the Past: Emotions, History and International Relations

Can Theatre Repair Damaged Urban Fabric? Toward a “Thick” Description of Haifa’s Wadi Salib Theatre Center

This article explores roles of theatre as an urban cultural institution in Haifa’s politics, urban order, and spatial imagination—a “wounded city” (Till, 2012) infused with Jewish and Palestinian histories. The case study is the theatre center in Wadi Salib, founded in 1983 in a repurposed Palestinian building. The author proposes a theatre historiography of crises, dimming hopes, and even failure that temper the sense that theatre-makers can enact change, reconcile community wounds, and spark critical discourse. The article explores the theatre center through three spatial dimensions: the historic building and its location, the theatrical space, and then the repurposed Al-Pasha Complex building as a ruin. The author demonstrates how the center’s activity exposed both the wounded urban fabric and the theatre’s institutional inability, even when partly funded by the municipality and the state, to be an active, sustainable agent and partner in reconciliation and healing.

Shakespeare Through Decolonization

Abstract In this article, I ask what Shakespeare’s position is in the ongoing debate about how we present our cultural past today. This debate includes not just efforts to decolonize curricula in universities, but broader polemics within the culture/heritage sector and higher education, notably a right-wing backlash against scholarly efforts, in universities and elsewhere, to re-evaluate, and recontextualize Britain’s past. I note that the construction of Shakespeare as the ‘Bard’ was itself instrumentalized within the British colonial project, as a national poet and as an icon of white heritage and excellence: the conception of the man as Bard is, I argue, endemic to coloniality. Contemporary theatre historiography has markedly de-centralized Shakespeare, and I suggest that we need to introduce further consideration of race, identity and early modern constructions of ‘otherness’ into its wide-ranging theatrical reconstruction of the past. I finish with a few strategies as a way of decolonizing Shakespeare and/or early modern literature.

Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater by Theresa J. May

Reviewed by: Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater by Theresa J. May Morgan Grambo EARTH MATTERS ON STAGE: ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT IN AMERICAN THEATER. By Theresa J. May. Routledge Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance series. New York: Routledge, 2020; pp. 310. Earth Matters on Stage: Ecology and Environment in American Theater is a dynamic calling in of the American theatre to serve as an imaginative, empathetic, and multivocal advocate against environmental destruction, environmental racism, and climate change through ecodramaturgy. Theresa May's book, which can accurately boast of being the "first book-length ecocritical study of the American theater," engages dozens of theatrical works produced between 1871 and 2015. Earth Matters on Stage is a significant, powerful text primarily due to May's approach: thoughtful readings and analyses of each piece of theatre in relation to the prevailing environmental ethos of the era it is presented in, ranging from complicity in environmental degradation (explicit onstage through the mid-twentieth century, at least) to the emergence of a counter-discourse onstage advocating for a relational, interconnected ecological viewpoint and advancing efforts for environmental justice and decolonization. May is the author of Salmon Is Everything (2019) and co-founder/artistic director of the EMOS Ecodrama Playwrights Festival. Her eco-critical text is densely populated with frameworks and ways of knowing drawn from a small but burgeoning community of ecodramaturgy artists and scholars, including Wendy Arons, Una Chaudhuri, Downing Cless, Nelson Gray, and Sarah Standing. Earth Matters on Stage defines the practice of ecodramaturgy as trifold: "(1) examining the often invisible environmental message of a play or production, making its ecological ideologies and implications visible; (2) using theater as a methodology to approach contemporary environmental problems (writing, devising, and producing new plays that engage environmental issues and themes); and (3) examining how theater as a material craft creates its own ecological footprint and works both to reduce waste and invent new approaches to material practice" (4). While May does not focus this book's efforts on producing materially sustainable theatre, she has made resources on this topic available elsewhere, including as one of the authors of "Ecocriticism in Theatre and Performance Studies: A Working Critical Bibliography (1991–2014)" on the Theater Historiography website. Utilizing close readings of various approaches (structural, thematic, character analysis, origins, staging, and so on), May calls forth the environmental messaging of seventeen plays from the past 150 years within seven chapters. In chapter 1, she considers Horizon by Augustin Daly (1871) and Wild West: The Drama of Civilization by William F. Cody (1886), pieces of theatre that support military occupation of Indigenous land and promote white supremacy and ecological violence through the extermination of people and animals. In the second chapter, May analyzes The Girl of the Golden West by David Belasco (1905) and The Great Divide by William Vaughn Moody (1906). These plays serve as apt metaphors for a reclamation of the "biblical garden," calling forth semblances of the Judeo-Christian Garden of Eden as a reason for expansion and land-management strategies (8). The conservation and preservation movements reflected in these plays depicts a "utilitarian or scenic" binary thinking with continuing impacts on the environmental policies of the United States (8). Chapter 3 is concerned with technology and industrial capitalism, the source of the exponential growth of resource mismanagement on this continent. May considers Dynamo by Eugene O'Neill (1929) and the Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspaper's Triple-A Plowed Under (1938) and Power (1937). In the latter texts, May points to the interlocked nature of the welfare of workers and society to the welfare of the land. Shifting approaches, in chapter 4 May considers a possible call and response between two pieces: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1943) and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949). Her analyses show the former as a celebration of settler-pioneers, the termination of tribal sovereignty and the seizure of tribal lands, and a clear post–World War II antiradical standpoint, while revealing the latter as a "warning about the mental and spiritual, as well as environmental, impacts of consumer capitalism" (9). May amplifies the growing dissonance at this time in the...

UKRAINIAN IDEA OF THE END OF XVIII – EARLY XIX CENTURY: HISTORIOGRAPHICAL UNDERSTANDING BY DOMESTIC RESEARCHERS

One of the important factors of national development is the historical memory of the people, accumulated in historiography. Here are reflected the actuality of the study of the Ukrainian idea of the end of the XVIII - beginning of the XIX century, its reflection in the domestic historiography. Scientists need, first of all, to rethink critically the whole array of modern literature, the concepts, that are show in it, thoughts and views, that contribute to the accumulation of historical knowledge, their further development and to revise emotional publications written at a low scientific level, that do not meet the requirements of time, the current state of historiographical theory and practice. The creative heritage of figures, who stood at the origins of the process of Ukrainian national revival, developed theoretically the national idea, contributed to the active awakening and maturation of the national consciousness of Ukrainians are in the field of view of modern researchers. The author used chronological-problematic, historical-comparative, system-structural, periodization, descriptive research methods in the article. The work is complex and interdisciplinary. Its conceptual foundations are based on the traditional sciences: history, political science, sociology, as well as on new ideas of the history of science, historiosophy, ethno-state studies.

Indagaciones en torno al significado del oro en la cultura mapuche

This paper is part of an interdisciplinary project of which one of the objectives is the identification of gold extracting sites south of the city of Concepción. It develops the hypothesis, put forward by archaeological studies, of possible gold mining by the Incas or even earlier, as opposed to an historiographical theory which claims that the Incas did not cross the Biobio river. Against this background, and considering that in the sixteenth century mapudungun was spoken in a much larger area than the one covered by our project, i.e. Araucania, we inquire on the conspicuous presence of the word milla (gold) in Mapudungun, and the extent of its significance in mapuche society, a society that, according to records, does not seem to have given gold the symbolic and material importance it had in Andean cultures. We undertake a review of the state of the question and systematize linguistic data provided by the lexicons and other texts, in an attempt to resolve, as much as possible, the uncertainties surrounding the word milla and the cultural significance of gold in mapuche society.

On the history and historiography of the “South China School”

The South China School is currently an influential academic school in China, and its scholarship methods and practices are worthy of attention and discussion. The formation of the South China School is rooted in the tradition of “downward-looking” and interdisciplinary scholarship since the construction of the liberal arts at Sun Yat-sen University, and is inspired by the theories and methods of Fu Yiling and Liang Fangzhong in the study of Chinese social and economic history. On this basis, the School has actively absorbed the historiographical theories of the Western annals school, and formed a common philosophy of scholarship through long-term cooperation and exchange with overseas scholars. The formation of the South China School is closely related to the changes in Chinese society and its academic trends in the last hundred years, which reflect certain common features of Chinese historiography from tradition to modernity. Exploring the formation process of this school should be of some significance for the development of contemporary Chinese historiography.

STRANGE FUTURES, NEW SUBJECTS

ABSTRACTIn History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon offers a groundbreaking examination of the historical sensibility centered on unprecedented change that has coalesced since the mid‐twentieth century. Simon provides a compelling analysis of this new sensibility and deftly distinguishes it from the progressive philosophies of history that had reigned prior to its emergence. He also develops a crucial theoretical apparatus for registering the unprecedented in both historical ontology and historiographical theory. Chief here is his theory of “history as a disrupted singular,” which marks the unprecedented's disruption of any ontologically stable historical subject and reveals the future and the past to be not our own but the domains of different and alien subject formations. From this philosophical‐historical foundation, Simon also provides a novel theorization of historical writing and historical experience that accounts for the overlapping registers of presence and absence that define our encounters with the past. Along with these innovations, Simon's book reorients former assumptions about historical change, historical subjectivity, and historical experience while revealing the extent to which the unprecedented‐focused historical outlook dominates our relationship with the future. It also raises questions (directly and indirectly) about politics, continuity, and rupture that theorists of history must embrace.