Theatre Movement Research Articles

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This contribution is a record—apparently—of a presentation about the function and effects of dramatic performance within communities. It lurched from the Covid pandemic and the British government’s ‘levelling-up’ project back, over a century earlier, to the beginnings of the municipal and amateur theatre movements. These latter produced some of the earliest formulations of the idea that participation in performance-making enables self-expression and a sense of fellowship, thus building community. But, as Granville Barker, one of its greatest proponents, warned, this same activity, where it’s not rooted in the ‘hearts’ of people is merely a professional product, not ‘vital’. Which produces a dilemma for an author asked to take a live event, shared among participants, and substitute for it a journal article, civic, perhaps, but not necessarily vital. (This article is published in the thematic collection `The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)

On the Genesis of the Epic Code in the Aesthetics of the Sakha Theater

The novelty of the research lies in the literary analysis of the performances of the Sakha theater, the definition of epic content in modern stage works. For the first time, the material of the creative rethinking of Western European, Russian and Yakut drama on the ways of forming an aesthetic manifesto of the national theater is summarized. The purpose of the study is to identify the epic code as a key that reveals the role and mission of the Sakha theater in the spiritual culture of the people. The objectives of the research include: 1) to reveal the functionality of the local content of Western European drama by W. Shakespeare, E. T. A. Hoffmann and B. Brecht, whose plays made it possible to creatively decipher the code of the epic heritage of the Sakha people; 2) consider the interaction of theater and prose in the experience of director's staging. The research used methods of historical, literary, comparative and contextual analysis. The study revealed the process of theater's movement towards a synthesis of classical and epic theatrical art. The significance of working with the prose works of P. Oyunsky, S. Kurilov, Ch. Aitmatov as a conceptual part of the manifesto of the Yakut theater is assessed.

Book review: Trina Nileena Banerjee, Performing Silence: Women in the Group Theatre Movement in Bengal

Trina Nileena Banerjee, Performing Silence: Women in the Group Theatre Movement in Bengal. Oxford University Press, 2021, 354 pp., ₹1795 (Hardbound). ISBN 978-0-19-012770-1.

Dumpster Divers and Award-Winners: FRIGID on the Fringe of the Fringe

FRIGID NY was the second Fringe Festival to emerge in New York City, following the successful FringeNYC. Unlike FringeNYC, FRIGID adheres to the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals, which includes using a lottery system (rather than adjudication) and allows participating artists/companies to keep their box office. This paper presents an overview of FRIGID NY, contextualizing it within the history of the Off-Off Broadway and Indie Theatre movements, and provides a case study of a production at FRIGID NY, demonstrating that FRIGID NY is on the Fringe of the Fringe.

NGOs and the Neo-Liberalization of Political Theatre in Pakistan: Ajoka’s Surrender to the Politics of Rights

The neoliberal enterprise of NGOs has transformed the left-leaning politics of the political theatre movement in the Punjab region of Pakistan. Commencing in the 1980s, this theatre acted as a vibrant movement of the Left, challenging the brutal military dictatorship of General Zia. At a later stage, its politics changed to the neoliberal politics of NGOs, giving way to economics and the agenda of international donor organizations of the Global North. This article demonstrates the turn-around of theatre company Ajoka’s recent production Saira aur Miara (2019) and focuses on the production’s politics, together with its text, design, and performance modes in aesthetic terms. A materialist and context-specific political approach examines to what extent class struggle and leftist ideas inform this company’s ideological imaginings and how much it has moved away from its original political position. It indicates the tensions and contradictions that have been created during this change and because of it.

Practice and Contest: Research into Small theatre Movement in Peking

Practice and Contest: Research into Small theatre Movement in Peking

A Critical Analysis of Mark Ravenhill’s The Cane: Hegemonic Subjects’ Revolt against Authority

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the hegemonic approach taken toward students in the British education system in the past from the perspectives of both the students and the teachers within the framework of structure and superstructure and to search for the erroneous disciplinary beliefs prevalent then. Mark Ravenhill chooses The Cane for the title of his play ironically, a choice which draws attention to the cane as a punishment tool employed by the authority to exercise its hegemony, and to the deficiencies of the previous educational system. Turning into a display of hegemonic power and authority, this punishment act will be analysed through the term hegemony, believed to have been given its final meaning by Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist theorist. To Gramsci, this term is defined as the sovereign demonstrating its supremacy through ideological devices/techniques in institutions such as schools and churches, where large numbers of members present in civil society. The Cane (2019) by Mark Ravenhill, a pioneer of In-yer-face movement in British theatre, is the product of a flawed discipline-based hegemonic practice England used in the past when ideologies produced theses and antitheses, based on a chain of events revolving around a chain of mistakes.

Performing Silence: Women in the Group Theatre Movement in Bengal. By Trina Nileena Bannerjee. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xxv + 354. ₹1795 Hb.

Performing Silence: Women in the Group Theatre Movement in Bengal. By Trina Nileena Bannerjee. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xxv + 354. ₹1795 Hb.

Betsuyaku Minoru’s Artful Ambiguity

Abstract: Betsuyaku Minoru was a leading luminary of Japan’s ground-breaking angura (underground) theatre movement, his influence extending over 60 years. His signature style, marked by spare staging, absurdist situations and dialogue, abundant humor, and purposeful ambiguity, is reminiscent at times of Samuel Beckett. He builds ambiguity into the structure of his plays, provoking spectators to question the identity of the characters and, ultimately, themselves. Godot Came , taking off from the end of Beckett’s famous piece, is a prime example of his work.

“All that I Am Craving Is the Talk”: Collaboration, Translation and Lady Gregory’s Workhouse Ward

ABSTRACT Central to the collaborative dynamics of the Irish Revival, Lady Gregory had a particularly fruitful working relationship with Douglas Hyde (Dubhghlas de hÍde), whose plays she translated and, in many instances, co-authored. This article takes as its case study Gregory’s 1908 play The Workhouse Ward, which arose out of a dramatic scenario she provided to Hyde as the basis for his Teach na mBocht (1903) – translated by Gregory as The Poorhouse (1903). By studying Gregory’s scenarios and draft translations alongside the various published versions, the article responds to Hélène Buzelin’s call for a “process-oriented kind of research” into translation practice. Through this genetic approach, the article allows us to better understand how language and gender politics shaped key plays of the Irish national theatre movement and argues that future editions of Gregory’s and Hyde’s works should include all plays in which each author had significant creative input.

Actors as Co-Creators in Contemporary Latvian Theatre

In Latvian theatre, the last decade has been a time of significant changes regarding the working methods of independent theatre movements. Two of the oldest independent theatres in Riga – Dirty Deal Teatro and Ģertrūde Street Theatre – have become a centre for various theatre productions, therefore moving towards the model of state repertoire theatres. Meanwhile, in recent years, several new theatre companies and creative groups have appeared in the field. Theatre troupe KVADRIFRONS, formed by four young actors having just graduated from the Latvian Academy of Culture, as well as the theatre company esARTe, led by director and teacher Elmārs Seņkovs and the ‘scandalous’ young actors trained in the so-called puppet theatre course at the Latvian Academy of Culture, – these are just a few examples of the new creative formations in Latvian theatre. While in repertoire theatre the creative process mostly lies on the shoulders of the stage director, the aforementioned theatre companies highlight the importance of the actor as co-creator – both in the artistic (devised theatre methods), and the administrative process (actors as managers, etc.). Has the profession of actor changed from performer to administrator? How does the administrative status of the newly founded theatre companies influence the work of freelance actors? How has the status of the actor changed in today’s society? The research tackles the topic of actor as co-creators focusing on the examples and experiences of new independent Latvian theatre companies and including significant social, as well as aesthetical aspects.

Shaw in America (Bernard Shaw on the American Stage: A Chronicle of Premieres and Notable Revivals)

Shaw in America (Bernard Shaw on the American Stage: A Chronicle of Premieres and Notable Revivals)

The Unknown Adaptation of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: Amateur Theatre, Film Avant-garde, and the Magic Lantern

The Unknown Adaptation of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: Amateur Theatre, Film Avant-garde, and the Magic Lantern Anna Kovalova (bio) In December 1932, the Rochester Community Players (RCP), one of the oldest continuously operated amateur theatre organizations in America, premiered A Christmas Carol, an adaptation of the famous story by Charles Dickens. This innovative production included scenes “on screen”: Scrooge’s visions of the past were presented as films projected during the performance. These films were made with the involvement of Dr. James Sibley Watson, Jr. and Melville Webber, key figures in the history of American avant-garde cinema. Adaptations of Charles Dickens’s works have become a wide field of study; there are many excellent books and articles on how Dickens has been adapted in theatre and in cinema.1 Some of these works are focused on A Christmas Carol in particular, but none seems to mention the Rochester version. In Dickens Dramatized, by H. Philip Bolton, the fundamental reference for the dramatic versions of Dickens’s works, there is a list of 357 adaptations of A Christmas Carol staged in 1844–1984 (Bolton 237–67), but the RCP adaptation is not included in this list. The same can be said about the list of “Notable Film, Television, and Radio Adaptations of A Christmas Carol” compiled by Richard Kelly (233–37), as well as the more detailed filmography in Fred Guida’s monograph, A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations (171–232). One might expect that, thanks to the involvement of Watson and Webber, the RCP production would interest historians of the American film avant-garde rather than Dickens scholars. However, although the revolutionary films by Watson and Webber, The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933), have become classics of world avant-garde film, and have [End Page 208] received considerable attention from critics and scholars,2 not much has been written about the directors’ biographies and their other work in cinema.3 The only widely available source on the films of Sibley Watson that mentions the RCP Christmas Carol is the scrapbook compiled by his mother, Emily Sibley Watson, which contains clippings from newspapers and magazines as well as documents related to various productions (“Scrapbook”). The research in the present article on the RCP Christmas Carol is based on newspapers and archival collections in Rochester, and the principal source is the reel of the film preserved at the George Eastman Museum. Unfortunately, this print does not contain any sound records. Thanks to newspapers, we know that the film scenes from the RCP Christmas Carol were talkies: The visions of old Scrooge appear before one’s eyes–scenes of his childhood, his school days and events in his career which haunt his memory as they are recalled in the ghostly visitations. This illusion, which gives realism to the scenes, could not have been done a few years ago, before moving and sound pictures were made practical. (“Christmas Carol to Begin”)4 By investigating this film, I will try to trace its place both in the history of Dickens adaptations and in the American film avant-garde. It was an experimental adaptation that looked both forwards and to the past, a theatre production and a talking film combining the latest technical innovations with traces of archaic forms of media, such as magic lantern projections. The RCP Christmas Carol: Its Creators and History The Rochester Community Players were a part of the Little Theatre Movement in the United States. Since the 19th century, more and more small theatres involving amateurs had opened up, this tendency becoming even stronger in the 1910s and 1920s, when motion pictures began to take a considerable amount of the “big” theatres’ audience.5 “Little theatres” opened up all around the country, and many books were published for people who wished to take part in the movement one way or another.6 Clarence [End Page 209] Stratton’s guide, Producing in Little Theatres, first published in 1921, was in its sixth edition by 1930. In Rochester, NY, there had been various attempts to set up an amateur theatre. In the 1910s there were The Little Theatre of Rochester, founded...

Playing the Police with the Agitprop Troupes of Weimar Germany

Germany's amateur agitprop theatre movement produced some of the most popular, pervasive, and politically contentious art in the Weimar Republic, not least because of the way performers inserted themselves into the fabric of working-class life with the unequivocal intention of politicizing audiences. Germany's first agitprop troupes formed within youth clubs affiliated with the Communist Party (KPD) around 1925, but the movement quickly grew beyond established club culture, with troupes sprouting up “like mushrooms,” as one critic of the period put it. By 1929 police estimated there were about two hundred self-proclaimed agitprop troupes spread across Germany, all pursuing a transparently aggressive political agenda: to turn the theatre into a site of revolutionary class struggle. If the Weimar period saw an unprecedented mixing of art and politics, agitprop took this tendency to the extreme by declaring theatre to be a weapon in the hands of the proletariat. As the slogan of the 1931 International Meeting of Agitprop Troupes in Cologne put it: “Workers’ theatre is class struggle.”

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.

From the Editor

From the Editor Siyuan Liu This issue starts with two long-planned articles in ATJ’s “founders of the field” series that started with two clusters of articles in 2011 (28.2) and 2013 (30.2), followed by a number of “founding mothers” articles between 2014 and 2017 (31.1, 32.2, 33.2, 34.1), continuing in this issue with Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei’s profile of Betty Bernhard and Julie Iezzi’s article on Jonah Salz. Sorgenfrei focuses on Bernard’s extraordinary capacity in discovering and promoting aspects of Indian performance to the world through fundraising and sponsoring international engagements by India artists, students training and productions of India plays with Indian artists at Pomona College, as well as several research-based films and videos, all of which made Bernard, as Sorgenfrei puts it, “an important influencer well before that concept became a social media meme.” The second “founder” article, written by Julie Iezzi, focuses on Jonah Salz, who stands out, in comparison to other founders profiled in this series, as a Western theatre director, producer, teacher, scholar, and translator primarily based in an Asian country, in his case Kyoto, Japan. Among Salz’s wide-ranging accomplishments, Iezzi focuses on his co-founded Noho Theatre Group that has produced hundreds of shows and toured internationally over forty years; his co-established Traditional Theatre Training (TTT) program that since 1984 has trained hundreds of artists in noh, kyōgen, and nihon buyō; and his research and publications, most notably as editor-in-chief of A History of Japanese Theatre, a monumental achievement via international collaboration. These two pieces are followed by six articles covering both traditional and modern theatrical forms in East, South, and Southeast Asia, starting with two articles on modern Chinese spoken drama huaju. In “History as Farce and the Intellectual as Comedian: Li Jing’s Metahistorical Drama Comedies from the State of Qin,” Andreea Chirita analyzes contemporary Chinese playwright Li Jing’s 2017 [End Page iii] metahistorical play Qinguo xiju (Comedies from the State of Qin). After a survey of historical plays that turned into metafiction in the post-Mao era, Chirita focuses on “the dramatic techniques used by Li Jing to articulate the role of the intellectuals as comedians and spiritual healers in contemporary China and their power to debunk and rethink history from a perspective that challenges the country’s political status quo.” The second article on huaju offers new evidence on China’s National Theatre Movement of the mid 1920s that has prompted several recent publications, including one in ATJ (33.1). In her “A Missing Piece of the Collage: The Stage Practice in the National Theatre Movement,” Barbara Jiawei Li discusses three productions of the movement, starting with one in New York’s International House that is generally believed to be the impetus for the movement’s transition back to China. Li’s discussion is made possible by a newly discovered contemporaneous report. She also draws our attention to the close relationship between the National Theatre Movement’s performance focus and the American New Stagecraft Movement. The next two articles also focus on East Asia, starting with Tove Solander’s “Mortal Bromance: Homoeroticism on the Takarazuka Stage,” which also offers a new take on a familiar topic. Through close reading of original productions, Solander challenges current framing of the revue’s main appeal as female homosociality, arguing instead for the productions’ specific invocation of male homoerotic themes. In the next article, titled “Yakiniku Dragon as Prophecy and Reflection,” Seungmoo Paik analyzes the success of a 2008 joint Korea-Japan production in both countries, about the sufferings of a Zainichi (Koreans in Japan) family as part of the forced migration during Japanese occupation (see the play’s translation in ATJ 31.1). Refuting Korean reviews’ excessive admiration of the production as expression of guilt by the Korean people, Paik’s analysis focuses on the son’s suicide as emblematic of national yearning for a real father figure and the dispersion of the three daughters to South Korea, North Korea, and Japan as offering a solution to end the bondage of the war in East Asia. Moving on to India, Prateek’s “Towards a Definition...

Women's Justice: Alan's Wife and the Defense of Silence

Abstract: Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell's Alan's Wife (1893) shocked its first audiences with the brutality of the piece, but the play holds greater historical interest for its fusion of nineteenth-century theatrical approaches. The Naturalism associated with the independent theater movement is apparent in the debates about eugenics, capital punishment, and women's roles embedded in the piece, but Robins and Bell also borrow from commercial melodrama the device of the silent heroic character. In the final scene, Jean Creyke does not speak until her closing monologue, responding instead solely through eloquent gesture. The choice of gestural rather than spoken language draws on the moral certainty of melodrama to impart a political argument, anticipating the performance-based methods of the campaign for women's suffrage.

Theatre of Anger: Radical Transnational Performance in Contemporary Berlin by Olivia Landry

Reviewed by: Theatre of Anger: Radical Transnational Performance in Contemporary Berlin by Olivia Landry Sophie Nield (bio) Olivia Landry. Theatre of Anger: Radical Transnational Performance in Contemporary Berlin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. Pp 256 + 8 b/w illus. $79. This book opens with a book burning. In May 2016, as part of the two-day event Desintegration: A Congress on Contemporary Jewish Positions at the experimental performance space Studio Я, directly opposite the site of the infamous 1933 Nazi book-burning on Unter den Linden, a copy of the (newly re-available) Mein Kampf was torn into fragments and fed into the fire by Jewish American artist Daniel Kahn. This powerful image is the starting point for a rich and detailed study of the possibilities and potentialities of anger as a mode of politicised contemporary theatre practice. Focusing on seven key theatre pieces performed in Berlin between 2006 and 2017, Olivia Landry identifies and tracks "a form of theatre in which minoritized subjects perform anger and perform in anger," speaking out against social injustice, racism and prejudice in "an open and aggressive refusal to integrate into an unjust society" (4). Theatre of Anger explores the work and ideas of a generation of writers and theatre makers drawn from the "post-migrant" theatre movement, making a persuasive case for the centring of anger as an illuminating interpretive framework. The selection comprises Schwarze Jungfrauen (Black Virgins), 2006; Weissbrotmusik (White Bread Music), 2010; Verrücktes Blut (Mad Blood), 2010; Telemachos, 2013; Aufstand – Monolog eines wütenden Künstlers (Rebellion: Monologue of an Angry Artist), 2014; Get Deutsch or Die Tryin', 2017; and Zucken (Twitching), 2017. Through analysis of these plays, Landry provides a rich historiography of post-migrant theatre from its inception at Shermin Langhoff's 2006 festival Beyond Belonging - Migration at the Hebbel am Ufer theatre (HAU), tracking its development as a fringe, experimental, and increasingly significant force in contemporary German theatre. Post-migrant experience—the "post-," summarised by Wendy Brown as indicating something which is "temporally over but not after" (n. 16, p. 9)—identifies the particular experience of second- and third-generation people of migrant heritage, who nevertheless are still identified and treated as migrants within a supposedly "host" culture. Central to the analytical perspective of the book is the concept of "desintegration (de-integration): a rejection of integrational, assimilative narratives in favour of an investment in 'affirmative anger'" (7). It is important to note that Landry does not propose the theatre of anger as synonymous for post-migrant theatre. Rather, the term "theatre of anger" identifies a strategic re-constellation of minoritized voices away from a perpetual relation to the "centre," and it is by re-aligning the lens through which these works [End Page 424] are read that they become open to the rich and productive analysis. In this way, the theatre itself is re-proposed as a politicised space for action; one which opens possibility for the recuperation and political application of anger itself as both performative strategy and consciously affirmative practice. The book is organised in seven chapters: fluent and detailed introductory and concluding sections frame the central work of the book, which comprises a philosophical history of anger, a series of rich and complex case studies, and an extended interview with playwright Sasha Marianna Salzmann. Landry's "defence of anger" (chapter 1) provides a thorough-going intellectual and conceptual history though which to read the theatrical work. Brecht's formally-realized anger is important here, but it is the thought and work of feminist scholars of color—in particular the writings and political ideas of Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed, and bell hooks—which are threaded most foundationally through the book. Subsequent chapters extend particular questions of violence, exclusion, religious identity, and disenfranchisement through the selected plays. The plays discussed are drawn from a number of distinct theatrical modes. The theatre of anger is not a particular style, but a particular attitude: the mobilization of anger as a productive affective force. Landry chooses plays that "do something riveting with affirmative forms of anger at a time and in a political climate when this affect is often otherwise perceived as negative and only capable of leading...

On the history of the university theatre: A reading in the theatrical movement of King Saud University in the period from 1974 to 2000

On the history of the university theatre: A reading in the theatrical movement of King Saud University in the period from 1974 to 2000

Специфіка відображення українського театрального життя Північної Буковини на сторінках щоденника «Час» (Чернівці, 1928–1940 рр.)

The article explores the coverage of theatrical topics in the inter-war Bukovyna periodicals. The research was based on the Chernivtsi daily newspaper «Chas». The general trends and genres that authors addressed most frequently were analyzed. The main topics that revealed the features of the contemporary theater movement in Bukovyna were highlighted. The authors of theater-critical publications were identified. The author indicated that special attention was paid to the problems of uniting the Ukrainian Chernivtsi theater troupes into one representative national theater and the modernization of the theater repertoire. The study has confirmed that, among the variety of genres, play reviews prevailed. Keywords: theatrical topics, Chas newspaper, Northern Bukovyna, «Ukrainian Theater» in Chernivtsi, theatre troupe, play review.