Theatre Movement Research Articles

A beautiful pageant: African American theatre, drama, and performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927

Introduction: African American Performance in the Harlem Renaissance PART ONE: 1910-1918 Men in Black and White: Race and Masculinity in the 1910 Heavyweight Championship Fight Exoticism, Dance, and Racial Myths: The Choreography of Aida Walker and Ethel Waters The Pageant is theThing: Black Nationalism and The Star of Ethiopia PART TWO: DRAMA Walter Benjamin and the Lynching Play: Allegory and Mourning in Angelina Weld Grimke's Rachel Migration, Fragmentation, and Identity: Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck and the Geography of the Harlem Renaissance The Wages of Culture: Alain Locke and the Folk Dramas of Georgia Douglas Johnson and Willis Richardson PART THREE: 1918-1927 The Banner of Freedom: Marcus Garvey and the Performance of Black Nationalism Whose Role Is It, Anyway?: Charles Gilpin and the Harlem Renaissance 'What Constitutes a Race Drama and How May We Know It When We Find It?': The Little Theatre Movement and the Black Public Sphere 'Shuffle Along' and the Quest for Nostalgia: Black Musicals of the 1920s Conclusion: The End of 'Butter Side Up'

Theatre, History, and National Identities (review)

The social pressure to define art and artists by national identity is a political legacy of post-1848 Romanticism. Tracing national theatre history is, in turn, problematic because it depends on the determination of national identity. Theatre, History, and National Identities is a compilation of eleven essays dealing with the origin and consequences of creating theatre in the historical context of four modern nations—Finland, Ireland, Israel, and the United States. The book grew out of a summer symposium initiated in 1995 by Pirkko Koski, Professor of Theatre Research at the University of Helsinki. The essays reflect the diverse concerns of the scholars, ranging from the evolution of national theatre movements in Finland, Ireland, and Israel to theories of national theatre historiography, aesthetics, ideology, to the very nature of national identity/identification representations. Authorial approaches vary. Some trace the evolution of theatrical institutions, others analyze specific productions, still others deal with the thematic content of plays, and others yet with individual actors, playwrights, or impresarios who have contributed to national theatre development. All examine how language, social discourse, and common signifiers delimit theatre history in terms of a national context.

Some Thoughts on the Little Theatre Movement in Kansai

Some Thoughts on the Little Theatre Movement in Kansai

An Episode of a Local Theater : Kazuo Dan's Theatrical Company "Sango-za" and the Theater Movement in Fukuoka(<Special Issue>Is There Something Like "Literature of the 1940s"?)

An Episode of a Local Theater : Kazuo Dan's Theatrical Company "Sango-za" and the Theater Movement in Fukuoka(<Special Issue>Is There Something Like "Literature of the 1940s"?)

Rethinking Feminism, Stanislavsky, and Performance

Since the mid-1990s, a series of books devoted to reconsiderations of acting, informed by contemporary critical and performance theory, has begun to challenge longstanding ideas about actor training and technique. Acting (Re)Considered: Theories and Practices (1995), Feminist Theatre Practice (1999), and Method Acting Reconsidered: Theory, Practice, Future (2000), as their titles suggest, reflect new engagements with the interplay of theory and practice. These texts provide particularly compelling evidence, among a number of important debates, of current thinking about and by women actors regarding the intersections of feminism and theatre. These works are equally significant, however, for their reflections of received understanding about feminist theory and performance. In other words, they are not only works about acting but also documents demonstrating how feminist theory of the last half century has been understood and applied in the theatre. For purposes of my analysis here, I want to focus specifically on these works' discussions of the Stanislavsky System and the Method (at times conflated) as techniques for actors, as well as on their sense of these techniques' impact on feminist performance practice. We know that many actors and directors—male and female—were rejecting older styles and beginning to explore new performance modes in the latter part of the nineteenth century, simultaneous with the emergence of other aspects of theatrical modernism. Nevertheless, the techniques developed by Stanislavsky and those strongly influenced by him have come to dominate our historical and practical understanding of acting, especially in the United States. It has become a commonplace assumption that resistance to these traditions spurred women artists into the feminist theatre movement from the 1960s forward.

Transculturating Politics, Realism, and Experimentation in 1960s Buenos Aires Theatre

Three auspicious premieres attested to an international “sixties” presence in the Argentinean capital. The Sala Planeta produced Jean-Claude Van Itallie's America Hurrah! under the direction of Carlos Gandolfo, an influential leader of the 1950s Buenos Aires independent theatre movement. Premiering as well at the Planeta was Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloan, directed by Alberto Ure, soon to travel to the United States to study the work of the Open Theatre, the Performance Group, and the Theatre of the Ridiculous. Shortly after his return to Buenos Aires, Ure would become known for his own psychodramatic performance techniques. The cast of Entertaining Mr. Sloan included Eduardo Pavlovsky, an actor who was rapidly establishing himself as one of Buenos Aires's important “absurdist” playwrights. A third production launched the Equipo Teatro Payró; their staging of Megan Terry's Viet Rock would run for three years and 409 performances. The production's director and Payró cofounder, Jaime Kogan, soon became one of Buenos Aires's most respected independent theatre directors, and its principal actors went on to successful independent and commercial theatre, television, and film careers. The legendary Argentine rock band Manal performed the production's music.

‘King Lear’ as an Experimental Musical: the Japanese Production of ‘Ria O’

The avant-garde Japanese company Ban'yu Inryoku was formed following the death in 1983 of the inspirational writer and director Shuji Terayama, who has subsequently become a cult figure. This article explores his influence – both limiting and liberating – on the production by one of the founders of the company, his disciple J. A. Seazer, of an experimental musical version of King Lear, as Ria O. Douglas Kerr places the production – seen in England during the Japan Festival of 1991 – within the context of evolving attitudes towards the avant-garde theatrical movement in Japan during the late 'sixties, notably as modified by the national trauma of the gas attack in Tokyo of 1995. Adapting Shakespeare was a break with the Terayama tradition of presenting only works collectively created by the ensemble – and it also made their work more accessible to the intercultural festival circuit. Explicated by the printed synopsis which forms a ‘map’ of the play for its audiences, the production also used Brechtian signboards to signal the titles of scenes, while being predicated also on the ‘representation of the inner and the outer experience’ which was Artaud's perception of Balinese performance. Lear himself was in this sense the entranced dancer, depending on the guidance of his supporters. Douglas Kerr, who explores here the tensions between the cultural elements employed and between the ideological pulls for conservatism and for social change, is currently an advanced PhD student at Stanford University in American Literature. His interests include Performance Poetics and Buddhism in contemporary American poetry.

Concerned Theatre Japan: The Graphic Art of the Japanese Theatre, 1960-1980 (CD-ROM) (review)

CONCERNED THEATRE JAPAN: THE GRAPHIC ART OF THE JAPANESE THEATRE, 1960-1980 (CD-ROM). By David G. Goodman. Krannert Museum and Kinkead Pavilion. Champaign: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998. $34. Tokyo of the 1960s and 1970s is David G. Goodman's Paris, his moveable feast. Experiencing Goodman's CD-ROM, Concerned Theatre Japan: The Graphic Art of the Japanese Theatre, 1960-1980, is like dining with him and being well satisfied. suspect that many theatre scholars have been either too busy or too entrenched in traditional methods to make better use of new electronic media in teaching and in presenting their research, especially in light of what may be the most attractive and effective way to convey information for the use of students and other scholars. Goodman presents a shining example of what to emulate and build upon. He and his digital team have created a beautifully graphic and informative digital record, a work of art in its own right that will provide others with not only an excellent reference work but a tool for the expanded classroom experience. Seven years in the making, this CD-ROM--inspired by the short-lived but memorable journal Concerned Theatre Japan, which Goodman founded and edited--features a collection of more than seventy posters documenting modern Japanese theatre of the 1960s and 1970s. These posters were a component of the touring exhibition of the same name as the CD, originally mounted at the Krannert Museum of the University of Illinois during the winter of 1998. The works represent modern Japanese art itself: visually stunning designs indicative of the zeitgeist of postwar Japan and issues of postmodernity. In these iconic posters, images of pop culture, rock music, consumerism, Japanese history, and American political and commercial hegemony--as well as advertising strategies, obsessions with the West, and the essential loss of Japanese spiritual identity--are all woven into stunning tapestries of paper and ink. Concerned Theatre Japan as an interactive CD-ROM continues Goodman's work on documentation and analysis of this period with layered images, video clips, text, essays, and a lavish virtual museum of poster art of the Japanese underground theatre (angura). The experience of entering this CD-ROM is quite dramatic. That is to say, it embodies the hushed excitement and expectation of attending the theatre. A deep black frame fades into a textural brown that opens elegantly, with bold taiko (drums), a woman singing I fell in love with a man with no chin, and her stage whisper: cheezu o hitosara (a plate of cheese). Then comes a stentorian silence. With a wave of the cursor, the left-hand contents unscroll. The obvious first choice seems to be to click onto an overview of the period. The viewer learns that the 1960s in Japan was a time of unprecedented theatrical renaissance. At the cutting edge of the avant-garde was angura, rebellious spawn of the shogekijo (little theatre movement) and gutai (artistic forerunner of American happenings). It was a time of remarkable collaboration. Members of Suzuki Tadashi, Betsuyaku Minoru, and Ono Hiroshi's Waseda Little Theatre; Satoh Makoto, Kushida Kazuyoshi, and Saito Ren's Black Tent and Freedom Theatres; Kara Juro's Situation Theatre; Terayama Shuji's Tenjo Sajiki; Maro Akaji's Dairakudakan--all shared their political and artistic aspirations in close camaraderie with graphic designers Yokoo Tadanor Tomita Shin'ichiro, Kushida Mitsuhiro, Hirano Koga, Oyobe Katsuhiro, Uno Akira, and others. Although the posters had little marketing effect for the productions they advertised, they were performances in themselves--stunning montages of alternating social imagery and histo rical moment, East and West, eroticism and the agonized flailings of the impotent. Their posters are alive with color, text (as in newspaper ads), and movement. There is no shying away from the grotesque, masochistic, and misogynistic themes of the art and the theatre of the period. …

Theatrical Movements During the Period Between 1960-1970

Theatrical Movements During the Period Between 1960-1970

Hamlet and the Baker's Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics

Hamlet and the Baker's Son is the autobiography of Augusto Boal, inventor of the internationally renowned Forum Theatre system, and 'Theatre of the Oppressed' and author of Games for Actors and Non-Actors and Legislative Theatre. Continuing to travel the world giving workshops and inspiration to teachers, prisoners, actors and care-workers, Augusto Boal is a visionary as well as a product of his times - the Brazil of military dictatorship and artistic and social repression and was once imprisoned for his subversive activities. From his early days in Brazil's political theatre movement to his recent experiments with theatre as a democratic political process, Boal's story is a moving and memorable one. He has devised a unique way of using the stage to empower the disempowered, and taken his methods everywhere from the favelas of Rio to the rehearsal studios of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Trevor Griffiths: Politics, Drama, History (review)

Reviews469 extent) social life. It also covers the subject ofsymbolic display and legitimation ofpower very succinctly. It is less clear, however, whether its method advances the analysis of any of these topics much beyond the boundaries it had already reached. Garrett Fagan The Pennsylvania State University Stanton Garner Jr. Trevor Griffiths: Politics, Drama, History. Theory/Text/Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Pp. vi + 317. $49.50. Stanton Garner's book provides a thoroughly researched, carefully articulated, and timely look at a playwright whose politically committed work for stage, film, and television over the last thirty years has made him one of the most successful and respected socialist playwrights writing in Britain today. Like many writers of his generation, Trevor Griffiths was actively involved in the New Left movement of the early sixties and an articulate presence during the alternative theater movement of the seventies. Yet while others were making waves with experimental work on the aesthetic fringe, Griffiths was developing his own brand of critical realism for film and television—"strategically penetrating" more culturally dominant forms of entertainment to reach the widest possible audience. As Garner notes, Griffiths's working-class background , and the "educations" provided by a decade ofsocial activism in Britain , influenced Griffiths's choice of form and subject matter, including his intense personal engagement with the history, politics, and psychology of the Left. Garner's book does not, however, offer the familiar summaries of postwar British theater. The focus of this book is on Griffiths's own success as playwright and screenwriter, one now capable of voicing the contradictions and possibilities of the current historical moment because ofthe subtlety, intelligence , and flexibility of his politically informed dramatic practice. Despite the fact that most ofhis work has been published, Griffiths is still most well known among U.S. theater scholars as author of 77ie Party, written in 1972 forthe NationalTheatre, and Comedians ( 1974), one ofthe most heavily read, produced, and translated British plays ofthe decade. More recently, however , Griffiths has regained critical attention with The GulfBetween Us: Or, the Truth and other Fictions (1992), a moving political response to the Gulf War; Thatcher's Children (1993), his portrait of the eighties' generation; and 470Comparative Drama Hope in the Year Two, a play using Danton's death to explore the possibility of hope in the face of revolutionary failure. Garner's book is timely and important for American theater scholars, for not only does he analyze Griffiths's early and lesser-known plays, but, spending equal time with plays and series produced for television and film, he notes in the process just how important the latter is for understanding the development and significance of Griffiths's most recent work. Garner also makes good use of the rich archive of unpublished material collected at the British Film Institute and personal interviews with the author. The resulting "history" offers a more complete portrait of Griffiths's literary career than anything published to date. Writing a literary-historical account of a playwright who usually has several projects going at once, in different mediums, and with varying degrees of control over the final product, presents an organizational challenge that Garner handles well. The book maintains a clear linear chronology, which is important for a political playwright whose work is always, at some level, a response to the present. Moreover, Garner uses Griffiths's own intellectual interests —in the historical analysis ofpolitical situations, in the limits and necessity of individual agency, and in the possibilities of realism for a postmodern theater practice—to shape his material and provide connections across works in different media. An astute critic, Garner is careful to treat individual works on their own merits. His evenhandedjudgments help to circumvent the pattern so typical ofliterary biography in which early plays are inevitably portrayed as undeveloped or uneven compared to later, more complex and interestingwork. Nevertheless, the book's argument gains strength as it moves forward, especially as Garner recovers Griffiths's less public work ofthe eighties to show clear influences on the latest and least analyzed plays. Garner himself stakes out a claim for the importance ofrevisiting a playwright who, for many, is more associated with the energy...

On the origin of the Komedie Stamboel. Popular culture, colonial society, and the Parsi theatre movement

On the origin of the Komedie Stamboel. Popular culture, colonial society, and the Parsi theatre movement

From the Greek mimes to Marcel Marceau and beyond: mimes, actors, Pierrots, and clowns: a chronicle of the many visages of mime in the theatre

Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: On the Meaning of Mime and Pantomime Major Developments of the Art of Mime in the Occident and Orient Exponents of Twentieth-Century Mime Schools and Movement Styles Part One: Mime through the Ages 1 Mime, First Language and Art: Mime in Greece and Rome 2 Mimes and Jongleurs of the Middle Ages 3 Origins of the Commedia Dell'Arte and the Theatres de la Foire 4 Gaspard Deburau and the Pierrots of the Nineteenth Century 5 English Pantomime 6 Mime and Movement in German, Russian, and Italian Theatre 7 Exit Pierrot. Enter Georges Wague Part Two: Twentieth-Century Mime 8 Etienne Decroux, Father of Corporeal Mime 9 Jean-Louis Barrault 10 Marcel Marceau 11 Jacques Lecoq 12 Mimes of Twentieth-Century Europe 13 Mime and Movement Theatre in North America 14 Women's Voices in Mime 15 Movement and Silence in Modern and Postmodern Verbal Theatre 16 Whither Mime? Appendixes A School and Centers for Movement Training B Archives, Resource Centers, and Artist Directories Periodicals and Publications Library and Museum Collections Pantomime and Mime Scripts and Bookshop Collections Festivals C Filmography Works Consulted and Cited Index About the Author

The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia, 1862–1919. By Gary Thurston. Northwestern University Press Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Edited by, Gary Saul Morson et al. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Pp. xii+374. $59.95.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Popular Theatre Movement in Russia, 1862–1919. By Gary Thurston. Northwestern University Press Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Edited by, Gary Saul Morson et al. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Pp. xii+374. $59.95.Lynn MallyLynn MallyUniversity of California, Irvine Search for more articles by this author University of California, IrvinePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 72, Number 4December 2000 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/318593 Views: 10Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Theatre Museum of Repertoire Americana

Sarah Blackstone is Chair of the Department of Theatre at Southern Illinois University and serves on the Advisory Board for the Theatre Museum of Repertoire Americana. Neil and Caroline Schaffner started collecting memorabilia from the repertoire theater movement during the 1950s. They dreamed of one day establishing a museum that would display their collection and other items connected with this wide-spread popular entertainment form. In 1973, with the help of the Midwest Old Settlers and Threshers Association, and endless hours of effort, their dream was realized in the small town of Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. Since that time, the Museum of Repertoire Americana has prospered, and it currently houses an impressive collection of uniquely American research materials. Dedicated to preserving the rural theatrical heritage of the Midwest, the Museum has materials related to opera houses, circle stock companies, Uncle Tom shows, showboats, and tent shows of all descriptions. I offer here a brief description of the collection, together with information about the National Society for the Preservation of Tent, Folk, and Repertoire Theatre and the annual Theatre History Seminar this organization holds at the Museum each April.

The Second Phase of the National Theatre Movement in Ghana

The Second Phase of the National Theatre Movement in Ghana

Japan As Dystopia: Kawamura Takeshi's Daisan Erotica

In the 1960s, the angura (underground) theatre movement was a site of radical culture. But by the 1980s and '90s, angura was co-opted. Even so, there is some critical and transgressive post-angura theatre worth noting, most especially Kawamura Takeshi's Daisan Erotica.

Twentieth-century literary movements dictionary: a compendium to more than 500 literary, critical, and theatrical movements, schools, and groups ...

Twentieth-century literary movements dictionary: a compendium to more than 500 literary, critical, and theatrical movements, schools, and groups ...

Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays (review)

Seventh Generation marks a milestone in a journey from silence to voice. The anthology is the first collection of Native American plays by American and Canadian authors to be published by a prominent press. The seven plays that comprise the book represent the variety of theatrical work in contemporary Native theatre, from the beginning of the Native theatre movement in the 1970s to the present.

The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia, 1862-1919. By Gary Thurston. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998. xii, 374 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $59.95, hard bound.

The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia, 1862-1919. By Gary Thurston. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998. xii, 374 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $59.95, hard bound. - Volume 59 Issue 1