Theatre House Research Articles

Perkembangan Istana Budaya Sebagai Sebuah Panggung Negara di Malaysia (1999–2019)

Since the establishment of Istana Budaya (IB) in 1999 as the national theatre house of Malaysia, its function has changed from a production house to a receiving house. Up to 2019, IB had been administered by six different ministries and led by five different directors. Both these changes have influenced the type of performance and production mode at IB as a world class performing arts centre. In the field of theatre management, this article studies IB under the sub-field of management of a performing arts institution. This article focuses on the reason for a performing arts institution to change its function and how this change has influenced its’ operation as a national theatre. Thus, this article aims to answer the question “How does the changes of ministry and the leadership of IB influence its production mode as the national theatre?”. Data for this study were obtained by employing the historical approach and oral history method. The data were obtained from books, journals, theses, annual reports, meetings’ minutes and policy papers. Furthermore, interviews were conducted with some of the former directors and senior officers of the national theatre. Two major findings that were obtained from this study are the function of the national theatre transformed in accordance with the ministry that led the organisation. Visionary and adept leaders ensured its operation and productivity achieved the national theatre’s vision and mission. For the past two decades, the ministry responsible for the national theatre and its leadership had influenced its operation mode and productivity as the national performing arts institution of Malaysia.

COVID-19 POLITICIZED: A STUDY IN DAVID HARE'S BEAT THE DEVIL

The theatre is a communal activity: a play is written by a playwright, directed on a stage by an artist, and performed by a number of actors for audience who attend a theatre house. Such incorporation never abides by the strict rules of quarantine and social distancing enforced by national and world authorities. Hence, the closure of theatres and people's shunning such activities. But neither artists nor playwrights have easily given in: they have creatively sought novel techniques of presentation irrespective of different locations of director, actor, and audience. The well-known English playwright David Hare is one of a number of playwrights who have resorted to employ the advanced applications of technology, especially in the field of computer and its utilities, to help in bringing the "theatre" to the audience's places. In this one-act play, Hare exploits his personal experience with Govid-19 to storm his harsh critiques of the political system; hence, the use of the "personal" to criticize the "political." The analogy between his own "sickness" and the "failure" of the political systems to successfully deal with the Govid crisis and its disastrous effects recalls Hare's interest in criticizing the authorities' improper treatment of domestic issues, which poses as a distinctive motif of early plays. This paper is indeed an attempt to explore Hare's dramatic and ironic employment of the Govid disaster

The East as a Theatre House of Suffering: ‘Suffering’ Scholarship and the Orientalist Bind

The East as a Theatre House of Suffering: ‘Suffering’ Scholarship and the Orientalist Bind

Heterogeneity in demand for performances and seats in the theatre

Studying the heterogeneity of consumers allows to price the product differently for consumer segments or groups of a product. In this paper, we estimate a model of aggregate demand for Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre focusing on the heterogeneity in price effect on demand for tickets on different performances and seats. We estimate the parameters of demand function using censored quantile regression that accounts for the limited capacity of the theatre house. We reveal the price effect variation across different types of theatrical productions and seats with lower elastic demand on ballets and for seats of higher quality.

Space in the 20th Century Theatre: 2. Determination, Consequence and Assumption

BACKGROUND: Interaction of literature, visual and performing arts as well as media, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, has substantially transformed the technical and artistic resources the theatre uses.AIM: The aim of this study is to present determination, consequence and assumption as parts of Space in the 20th Century Theatre.MATERIAL AND METHODS: Three aspects of the architecture were described in details: determination, consequence and assumption of the space in the 20th century theatre.RESULTS: The idea of theatre is conveyed through houses, books, research documents, history and theory, but it is also conveyed through "theatre people". This concept, can be and must be understood the two ways: as a guideline for a highly heterogeneous and inarticulate "global tribe", and at the same time, as the common name for members of a particular theatre - the theatre as a troupe, or theatre as a movement, but mostly the theatre as an institution of what we often call "the theatre house".CONCLUSION: The causal system of relationships between the theatre house, theatre people and theatre as an idea (or the idea of theatre) is the central theme of my understanding of the definitions, values and purpose of theatre.

Space in the 20th Century Theatre: 1. Theatre and Architecture

AIM: The aim of this study is to present the state of the theatre and architecture as a part of Space in the 20th Century Theatre.MATERIAL AND METHODS: Three aspects of the architecture were described: theatre in the typology of architectural objects, theatre as a programme in architecture, and theatre as an art form.RESULTS: Theatre has never been, nor could it ever become a subject independent of architecture. Correspondingly, the stage space is not, and should not be a separate issue, the subject of "consultants", but a crucial and equally worthy part of the complex, rich and consistent structure of the theatre house - as a whole. The theatre house in its entirety becomes a public facility and begins to develop its central function in the city. From this point of view, it is not only that the theatre has not lost its traditionally dominant urban position, on the contrary, that position is constantly evolving.CONCLUSIONS: Theatre, based on interpersonal communications in real space and real time, provoking our experiences on the borderline between reality and illusion, and constantly questioning those boundaries, can possibly discover the "otherness of the real world", that is to "change the nature of the individual, in order to change the essence of the world".

Experiential documentation in pervasive performance: the democratization of the archive

The use of digital media has impacted both contemporary performance practices and performance documentation strategies. ‘Pervasive performance’ is an emergent genre born out of the convergence of the fields of ubiquitous computing, experimental game design and performance. This genre can be defined as mixed-media events that combine gameplay with performance and are used as a platform for potential collaborative art-making in public spaces. Pervasive performances engage audiences in massive participatory events that use the city as playground and its fabrics as material for play. This genre poses numerous challenges to performance documentation due to its participatory, mobile and distributed nature. First, it forces the creation of alternative strategies for performance capture (collection of material) outside the theatre house of multiple and mobile subjects. Second, it implies a change of paradigm from documenting objects to documenting experiences. My experience documenting the case study of Chain Reaction in 2011 to propose alternative solutions to these challenges is used to discuss the value of such collaborative archives. My hypothesis is that in a situation where participants are increasingly documenting their own actions across platforms in the mediasphere, practitioners can foster the transformation of the participant into documenter as part of the cultural event through game design strategies. This way, the inclusion of the ordinary person in the archive brings us closer to democratic culture and an empowerment of the cultural agent.

Not One to Toot Her Own Horn(?): Melba Liston’s Oral Histories and Classroom Presentations

In a 2008 NPR Jazz Profile, Nancy Wilson narrates a pivotal moment in Melba Liston's youth when Louis Armstrong recognized talents of sixteen-year-old trombonist in Lincoln Theatre house band and encouraged her to take a solo. Wilson states: But shy, soft spoken trombonist has always been more interested in writing music, than in playing and The next voice we hear is that of a much older Liston reflecting back: didn't want to solo. I didn't even desire to. No, No, No. I was not solo type. This is kind of response Liston often gave to interviewers and band leaders on topic of soloing. It is often interpreted as an expression of her shy, modest demeanor, and sometimes as a gendered decline of masculinized subject position of jazz soloist. (1) Her solos in performance, and on record, then, become occasions for audiences, fellow musicians, and scholars to marvel at this introverted player, who preferred to remain in background, but whose talent was so great that she could, when pressed, overcome her reticence to produce a brilliant solo. In this article, we listen carefully--not to Liston's trombone solos on record (which also deserve dedicated scholarship)--but to what she said about her work and life in jazz. We construct our archive for this paper out of tellings for which audio recordings are available: a selection of class presentations, oral histories, and interviews between 1973 and 1996. We listen across Liston's many tellings of her life to hear how she renavigated and renegotiated--in face-to-face interaction--situated encounters with jazz ideals in tension with one another. Our close listening not only opens new perspectives on Liston's understanding of her life and career but also helps us to tune in to fuller understandings of multiple dimensions of jazz practice, jazz historiography, and jazz archive. We also argue that listening to her oral navigations of a life in jazz-as-work suggests methodologies for jazz knowledge production in writing and archive building, which are employed by us in this coauthored article, and also by Melba Liston Research Collective as a working group in-progress. Listening Guide Before we embark on our tour of aural engagement with Liston's audio-recorded life-story tellings, we would like to highlight some of questions and approaches that emerged as especially exciting to us. We begin with a consideration of how Liston's tellings engage a critical interplay between ideals of jazz as a collaborative endeavor and jazz as a soloist's art. What can her experiences--and narrative and performative strategies for telling them to others--teach us about gendered jazz sociality in jazz-as-work? What can this teach us about jazz-as-history? How can they help us to listen to other jazz oral as jazz interactions and how might they intervene in ways we practice and interpret jazz oral history? What do they tell us about the role of personal memory in construction of public [national] histories (Cvetkovich 2003, 57)? How do these ways-of-telling help us to understand range of social and institutional interventions created across these instances? And how does listening aurally and to multiple tellings help us to envision modes of jazz life-story telling, not only beyond hagiography, but beyond transcription? And how might Liston's emphasis on collaborative aspects of jazz-as-work bring nuance, affect, and dynamic interaction into our collaborative work as jazz historians, oral historians, ethnographers, ethnomusicologists, educators, and archivists? The interview scenarios we examine generally compel Liston to compose a narrative of her life and career in music. If way a jazz musician references melodic contours of a standard says much about her or his artistic priorities, process, and style, we can similarly learn from ways in which Liston riffs across presentations and oral on contours of professional guideposts that appear across narrative events. …

Consuming passions: The aesthetics of cultural consumption in Calixto Bieito's Don Giovanni (2001)*

A great house, a strange one, in the heart of the city. Nightfall, going to the opera. Changing worlds. Trading the working world for one of fantastic, fleeting leisure. Climbing giant staircases. […] Entering the opera. Passing one by one through the gates of ritual; buying tickets, presenting them, letting oneself be guided by a woman who opens the doors, penetrating the heart. […] in this architecture can be read a whole, no longer existent world. The ghosts of a society wander here in a dream […]. Opera is the place for intrigues, love affairs, glances that intersect and never meet again […]. Theatre house and stage are a match for each other, reflecting the same golden image: the long gowns, the pomp of festive bourgeois in search of a forgotten nobility, correspond to the brilliant spectacle and the stage costumes. […] The lights, slowly and imperceptibly go down. The noises of the crowd are hushed. A few coughs surface; these are people, after all. The orchestra tunes up, improvising; […]. Trompe l'oeil: the curtain goes up on a forest of gauze and wood, on a palace of cloth. Always it grows cooler when the curtain rises; a breath of air moves from the stage into the audience. And the voices begin their rise. Catherine Clément, 'Prelude,' Opera, or The Undoing of Women (3-5)

The Spatial Dimension of Theatre

The essence of theatre lies in the act of presentation. As such, it necessitates a dimension, the spectacle occupying its realm, the spectators, theirs. As in a polarity, lines of tension run between these two realms, making us far more alert than we normally are watching events in everyday life. These two realms may be constant, as in traditional theatre, where spectacle is confined to the stage and spectators to the theatre house, or they may shift, as in environmental theatre, where the spectacle is now here, now there. The two realms imply a third, the neutral ground of off-stage, where actors prepare for and retire from performance. With the ingredient of imagination added, that neutral third realm assumes potential for dramatic tension as significant as the other two. Theatre, then, multiplies these basic polarities by creating other, more specific realms for the sake of the particular tensions inherent in each play. Thus, theatre involves the presence of at least three realms: stage, house, and off-stage; it develops its dimensions by characterizing, vivifying, and multiplying the three realms.' Using these spatial dimensions, we should be able to describe the dramatic geography of any play to some advantage, allowing us to discover sources of dramatic effect that might otherwise be ignored.