Theatre Piece Research Articles

Bandit: Here to Haunt You! On Why I Became an Émigré Theatre Maker

Summary The article employs concepts of time lag, inspired by Ernst Bloch, and ghost and haunting, borrowed from Jacques Derrida. It also draws on Svetlana Boym’s and Vilém Flusser’s vision of the émigré and on Dominick LaCapra’s and Slavoj Žižek’s interpretations of trauma. The analysis is also informed by Karen Jürs-Munby’s and Cathy Caruth’s views on trauma and its representation in theatre. This critical apparatus is put into motion in the particular context of BANDIT: a theatre project developed in the UK by two Romanian émigré theatre-makers. The main focus is on exposing links between the references to trauma contained in the theatre piece BANDIT and the makers’ self-imposed artistic exile in the UK. The article seeks to answer the following question: what has pushed us, the makers of BANDIT, to leave our native country and what is our (new) role (as artists) in the country of emigration? The discussion is carried out within the wider context of the vast waves of Romanian emigration to Western Europe (after the fall of the Iron Curtain). The article critiques the troublesome relation of the contemporary Romanian society to its Communist past and the apparent inability and/or unwillingness to deal with the repressed/traumatic memories of that past. Analysis of BANDIT as performance of lingering trauma also references the historical Percentages agreement between Stalin and Churchill—the informal agreement that established spheres of influence in Europe at the end of the Second World War. Identifying the Iron Curtain as the epicentre of traumatic memory for Eastern Europeans, the discussion about BANDIT also makes a reference to Communist crimes against political prisoners committed in Romanian prisons in 1951–1952, put in parallel with the toxic EU referendum campaign in the UK in 2016. Underpinned by Derrida’s thinking, the article explains how the Romanian émigré-artist (as a paragon of the Romanian / Eastern European émigré in general) has to fashion herself into a ghost that haunts the adoptive culture, using artistic exile as a platform for processing the traumatic memories of an unresolved past.

Le Plancher de Jeannot

This is the story of Jeannot based on a number of tragic events that predated his disease, a paranoid delirium shared by his older sister, their seclusion and the denial of their mother's death, after which the engraving of his room's wooden floor was realized and just before he died. This interview with the neuro-psychiatrist Guy Roux relates the discovery of this piece of work and the very first exhibitions in the psychiatric circles. The acquisition by the laboratory Bristol-Myers Squib triggered many cultural events with a broad media exposure so it was received with a great enthusiasm. The setting of the floorboard at hospital Sainte-Anne in Paris initiated by Pr Jean Pierre Olié was greeted by several comments of which some criticisms. Multiple novels and pieces of theatre were inspired by this story.

Between the Stage and the Street: Art and Artifice in Giordano Bruno’s Candelaio

The Italian Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno’s only literary work, the comedy titled Candelaio published in 1582, has been interpreted through a comparative analysis with either his philosophical writings or with other plays from the tradition of the commedia erudita. In this article, I focus on the Candelaio’s textual strategies by drawing on the analytical categories of dissonance and deflection in order to demonstrate how Bruno’s theatrical piece can be viewed as a polemical statement on aesthetics. The introductory peritexts of the work set the key parameters for reading his text as a conscious play on conventionality and thus provide the interpretive framework for disentangling the complex meanings embedded in the dramatic action of the five acts that follow. Ultimately, the comedy aims to question representational practices through an engagement with the debate over the nature and function of art and artifice that invested all of the arts during the Cinquecento.

“Kno’ You’re Wally”: Reinventing Slavery, Family, and Nation in Pauline Hopkins’sPeculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad

Pauline Hopkins’s Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad (1879) is a musical drama about a fugitive family transitioning from bondage to freedom. In her first theatrical piece produced, an ambitious Hopkins appropriates multiple performative and literary traditions – concertized spirituals, blackface minstrelsy, melodrama, the anti-slavery novel, slave narratives, and so-called Lost Cause literature – to reimagine enslavement experience. This essay examines how a young artist–activist blends and balances competing artistic forms while also pursuing the personal and national politics of gendered and generational transformations. On a personal level, Hopkins’s drama explores how a male fugitive discovers his value within family, how female fugitives reconsider popular archetypes like “Mammy” and “Topsy,” and how “new” citizens articulate individual conceptions of national belonging. Writing during the “radical” phase of US Reconstruction, Hopkins also interjects her fugitive family into national debates on how to memorialize the past, reconcile in the present, and reconstitute for the future.

Mambembaria: perspectivas sobre a democratização da arte teatral

Neste trabalho, aborda-se o projeto cultural 1ª Edição da Oficina MAMBEMBARIA de Teatro cuja proposta é abraçar ensino, pesquisa e extensão por meio de atividades de teatro e formação de consciência corporal. O projeto é idealizado pelo petiano e ator Renato Vieira em coletivo com todo o grupo PET-PPC, com a ideia de difundir o fazer teatral na cidade de Jaguarão e região. A proposta é que, além da comunidade acadêmica, a comunidade externa participe desta atividade e se familiarize com a arte de atuar. Propõe-se uma peça teatral voltada para a rua, espaços públicos e livre para todas as idades. Relatamos esta experiência acadêmica e através dela demonstraremos o olhar de produtores culturais, com análise de pontos estratégicos para sanar déficits do desejo teatral, uma necessidade de arte que procuramos problematizar modelos de fomento que são atribuídos a coletivos e companhias.

A Metatheatrical Reading of Baroque and Neobaroque Texts: Entremés del retablo de las maravillas (1615) and De donde son los cantantes (1967)

This article examines the diachronic use of metatheater in Cervantes’s Entremés del retablo de las maravillas (1615) and “La Dolores Rondón,” the second tale in Severo Sarduy’s novel, De donde son los cantantes (1967). Both works are structured as a play-with-in-a-play, including the internal theatrical pieces and the external debates, where the authors problematize literary language/representation in their respective times. This article further explores the organizational differences between metatheatrical Baroque and Neobaroque texts. In the Entremés, two charlatans trick a group of villagers fearful of the “limpieza de sangre” into seeing marvelous scenes. This Baroque play suggests the omnipresence of the Spanish Empire, while criticizing the trendy performance of comedia nueva in Cervantes’s time. “La Dolores Rondón,” by comparison, fails to deliver a coherent piece of theater. Following the tradition of the Cuban “choteo,” the characters humorously demonstrate that all “realities” are fictional and that the text progresses without the guidance of chronological or poetic order. Sarduy’s Neobaroque narrative seeks to break away from authoritative literary discourse and to repudiate the logocentrism embedded in Latin American epistemology.

The Co-Active Therapeutic theatre model: A manualized approach to creating therapeutic theatre with persons in recovery

Therapeutic theatre is the intentional use of the process and performance of a theatrical piece with specific therapeutic goals and intentions for an identified population. Study and replication of this modality may benefit from manualization. This article presents an outline of a manualized approach called The Co-Active Therapeutic theatre (CoATT) model, which has been used as a successful intervention for individuals post-intensive treatment who are working towards independent recovery from eating disorders, aphasia and substance use disorders. This preliminary instruction of CoATT emphasizes a solution-focused, manualized process to support recovery and operationalize therapeutic theatre in the service of empirical research.

Marko Marelli’s vision of “Turandot” by Giacomo Puccini

Marko Marelli’s vision of “Turandot” by Giacomo Puccini

Zlatko Paković's Vox Dei – Civil Disobedience as an Embodied Text: The Impact of Different Types of Spaciality on Semioticity of a Performance

This paper deals with the corporeality of a performance and its place in the process of the emergence of meaning, following a case study of a Serbian theatrical piece Vox Dei – Civil Disobedience. Performance is constituted by bodies brought together by a certain purpose and temporal and spatial coordinates, and it is more and more often now decoded by the feedback loop performers and participants form in specific kinds of spatiality. Artistic corporeality defies objectivization, therefore the relational aesthetics is needed instead of an idealistic one to investigate the materiality of these performances. Using this theoretical framework, the analysis of the two different performances of the same dramatic text from the recent Serbian political theater production will tend to examine the nature of political potential of bodily co-presence in artistically and socially different environments and its implications for the semioticity of the given embodied text. Article received: April 5. 2019; Article accepted: June 10, 2019; Published online: September 2019; Original scholarly paper

THE BENEFITS OF ARTBOTS ACTIVITIES IN EDUCATION & SOCIETY

The aim of this research is to present the benefits of working with artbots in education and to investigate further benefits for society. The methods which are implemented in order to reach this aim are related to children's and other audiences' participation in contemporary art practices as well as educational activities which involve artbots. The se practices and activities are rich and diverse ranging from drawing with artbots (with or without coding) to producing small-scale theatrical pieces, happenings and films . However, all the activities presented in this paper are interdisciplinary and involve or connect the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) fields. Another common characteristic of all the activities is that they communicate human values through messages of love and peace as well as through references to beauty, harmony, festivity, mobility, interconnectedness and other qualities of the contemporary living conditions. Which are the learning outcomes and what impact do these practices and activities have on the audiences? In order to give an answer to these questions it is important to take into consideration the different age and social groups as well as the contexts where these activities take place. It is also interesting to see these activities through and beyond STEAM education by highlighting the implementation of the Arts as a way to blaze new trails for fostering creative and innovative thinking. The artbots activities presented in this paper can be easily carried out in various intercultural, intergenerational and interdisciplinary contexts and they can bring together people by bridging many kinds of gaps. This means that artbots activities are a promising field of research and creation in education with multiple opportunities for original activities which benefit education and society

Review: Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History, by Rebecca Harris-Warrick

Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History , by Rebecca Harris-Warrick. Cambridge Studies in Opera. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xx, 484 pp. In the mid-1700s, notorious rake Giacomo Casanova attended a performance of Andre Campra's Les fetes venitiennes (1710) at the Paris Opera. His reactions varied from amusement (the backdrop placed the bell tower and the ducal palace on the wrong side of Saint Mark's Square) to boredom induced by Campra's music. Most noteworthy to him, however, was the enthusiastic response of the audience to the dancer Louis Dupre, marked by total silence during his appearance and vigorous applause upon its conclusion. According to Casanova, his French companion explained this reverence by stating, “Such is the power of beauty and goodness, of the sublime and the truth to nature which penetrate the soul. … This is true dance.”1 Although the French passion for dance has long been acknowledged by scholars, histories of French Baroque opera have primarily pursued an ideological or evolutionary approach to the development of the genre. No previous work on French Baroque opera has fully addressed the tutued elephant in the room—the pervasiveness of dance within these genres. Rebecca Harris-Warrick's Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera seeks to redress this omission, tracing developments from 1672 (the premiere of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Cadmus et Hermione ) to 1735. Harris-Warrick's thesis is that dance, far from being a supplemental or incidental aspect of French Baroque musical theater, is in fact fundamental to its dramaturgy, and that those parts of a …

Merrie Arcadia: staging the pastoral in the age of the Clarion socialist movement

This article examines the way in which classical pastoral and contemporary socialist influences were combined in an archetypally Edwardian piece of commercial theatre. The Arcadians (1909) is the exemplary musical comedy of the period. A seemingly trivial production, it has received scholarly interest for its enormous commercial success and portrayal of modernity. Nevertheless, its relationship to antiquity has received little attention. Furthermore, the production has not been discussed in relation to the thought of the Clarion socialist movement, to which the show’s librettist, Alexander M. Thompson, and producer, Robert Courtneidge, were connected. This article argues that socialists’ understanding of the natural world and their ongoing dialogue with classical antiquity informed the production’s adoption of the pastoral tradition within a profoundly modern and commercial performance genre. The interplay of the performance form with the show’s thematic content both reflects the pastoral tradition and exposes some of the tensions between commerce and utopianism. It also demonstrates that apparently quite superficial examples of classical reception are worthy of investigation.

Ultima 2018, Oslo

Unfolding over ten days in September 2018, this year's edition of Ultima was centred on the theme of migration, with a focus on both music and people. In his preface to the festival programme, Thørbjorn Tønder Hansen, the new artistic director, writes, ‘The borders of contemporary music are happily eroding, and the scene is in constant flux’. Responding to the multiple pressures of asylum seekers in Europe, demographic inequities in the representation of artists and composers, and the growing collective sense that ‘New Music’ is on the cusp of some kind of significant re-orientation, Hansen and his curatorial team produced a significant accomplishment by bringing together such a varied selection of programming. The range of installations included symphonic work; multi-channel acousmatic pieces with live diffusion to performance pieces with new applications of technology; and experimental theatre pieces set inside the black box or at a rugged outdoor setting far beyond Oslo's city limits. Ultima tipped its cap to just about anything that could set foot within the expanded terrain of ‘music composition’ today.

On the Aesthetics and Working Process of Elena Mendoza’s Music Theatre

In this paper, I will address basic aesthetic assumptions of the music theatre of Berlin-based Spanish composer Elena Mendoza and will outline the strategies of her working process in which she combines traditional score writing with a collaborative approach known from contemporary theatre or dance. I will discuss these issues referring to her two major music theatre pieces: Niebla after the novel by Miguel de Unamuno (premièred in Dresden in 2007), and La Ciudad de las Mentiras based on four short stories by Juan Carlos Onetti premièred at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2017. As co-author of these two pieces, I give insight into our collaboration and decision-making process. In so doing I write within the methodological framework of autoethnography and participant observation.

STORIES FROM MY YOUTH: THEATER BASED ON LIFE HISTORIES OF LGBTQ OLDER ADULTS WHO LIVED IN SAN FRANCISCO AND THE BAY AREA DURING THE AIDS EPIDEMIC

STORIES FROM MY YOUTH: THEATER BASED ON LIFE HISTORIES OF LGBTQ OLDER ADULTS WHO LIVED IN SAN FRANCISCO AND THE BAY AREA DURING THE AIDS EPIDEMIC

From Gypsyland With Love

My review of the 2017 theater piece, Roma Armee, focuses on its attempt to decolonize the stage and denounce the complicity of cultural institutions – in this case, the theater, with its typical fetishization of Roma as exotic nomads and the simultaneous perpetuation of racist stereotypes of Roma as criminals and undesirables. I focus on storytelling as a methodology that has the power to elevate the voices of underprivileged groups, and claimthat Roma Armee, with its unapologetic Roma-ness, undeniable coolness, and overall brilliance, is much more than an elegant j’accuse directed at skewering antigypsyism. Rather, it provides a timely addition to current debates about the social responsibility of art and the possibilities for the effective decolonization of the regimes of representation that govern art institutions and, as such, should be seen as a unique contribution to the ongoing process of radical self-rebranding exercised by Roma activists and cultural producers.

“More Aerial, More Graceful, More Perfect”: Madame Vestris’s Oberon, Victorian Culture, and the Feminized Fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1840–1914

“More Aerial, More Graceful, More Perfect”: Madame Vestris’s Oberon, Victorian Culture, and the Feminized Fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1840–1914 Marija Reiff (bio) In most modern productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s king and queen of the fairies have a volatile, passionate relationship that is rooted in the sexual chemistry of two powerful figures colliding. This explosive dynamic is particularly alluded to in visual portrayals of Oberon, in which the king of the fairies is often teeming with masculine virility. Consider, for example, recent portrayals of the fairy king: from a bare-chested Rupert Everett in the 1999 movie version to a bare-chested John Light in the 2013 Globe production to a bare-chested David Harewood in Julie Taymor’s 2013 filmed staged version, Oberon is a warrior who is formidable, sexy, and abounding with machismo. Yet it was not always this way. From 1840 until 1914, with only a couple of minor exceptions, women always played Oberon (Williams 93). This trend was originated by Lucia Elizabeth Vestris in a highly influential production in 1840 at Covent Garden wherein she cast herself as the King of Shadows. Vestris, better known to her contemporaries as Madame Vestris, was an actress-turned-producer-and-manager who ran theatre companies at the Olympic and Covent Garden, and she was a bona fide celebrity of the Romantic and early-Victorian stage. Vestris’s portrayal proved influential, and for almost seventy-five years, no American or English production featured a man in the role (Norwood xvii). Vestris’s production is notable not only for instating the convention of all-female fairies but also for regenerating interest in Dream as a viable piece of live theatre. This change in precedent is particularly noteworthy as Dream is now one of the staples of repertory companies and Shakespearean festivals (Griffiths, Introduction 1). However, after the Restoration, in 1660, Shakespeare’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream fell out of popular favour, and it was performed only in fragments (Griffiths, “Neglected” 386). The reasons for its disappearance from the post-Restoration stage and its reinstatement in 1840 as a live theatrical piece filled with female fairies are directly related. In both instances, concerns about the viability of mortal humans playing non-mortal fairies ran rampant. Throughout the centuries, [End Page 251] fairies had become extensively romanticized, and it was impossible to stage Shakespeare’s full script with its faulty, flawed, and feuding fairies. However, with the proliferation of fairy extravaganzas in the 1830s and 1840s, especially as they contained abundant references to Shakespeare,1 producers found it imperative to return to Shakespeare’s original script. By making the fairies women, Vestris capitalized on the associations among women, children, and supernaturality, thus allowing her to portray idealized nineteenth-century fairies. Yet as these fairy portrayals became increasingly feminized, they also became progressively more childlike, pure, and naive. Though modern scholars are keen to see feminist undertones in Vestris’s production—for example, Elizabeth Schafer writes that “the production presented a very suggestive image of female power” and that it brought “traditional notions of femininity and masculinity . . . provocatively to the fore” (198, 199), and Gary Jay Williams adds that it “addressed the patriarchal Victorian culture in complex, fascinating ways” (93)—this enthusiasm is tempered by its contemporary reception. Throughout the Victorian and early Edwardian age, the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream were the objects through which the era’s anxieties about innocence, idealism, passivity, and femininity were debated, and Vestris’s self-fashioned and gender-bending performance was indicative of the nineteenth-century impulse both to idealize and infantilize women. However, this valorization and patronization of Vestris’s Oberon was moderated by the history of the breeches role—an acting role wherein an actress wearing tight-fitting breeches played a man’s part—including Vestris’s personal history in breeches roles, to hint at the power and sexuality of Shakespeare’s fairy king. Vestris’s feminized Oberon thus showcased the contradictions and complexities of Victorian society regarding the display of the female body, and Vestris’s performance worked on two different and contradictory levels through capitulating to feminine idealization...

Ajalooline müüt Jaan Kaplinski draamas „Neljakuningapäev“ [Historical Myth in Jaan Kaplinski’s "Day of the Four Kings"

Ajalooline naidend voimaldab end žanrina erinevalt tolgendada – nii sužeepohise rekonstruktsiooni kui ka kaasaegse allegooriana. 1960.–1970. aastate eesti draamas kasutasid mitmed autorid umberutleva moistukone vormi, et kasitleda teemasid, mille otsene valjendamine olnuks keeruline voi isegi voimatu. Uht kujukamat naidet pakub siin Jaan Kaplinski draama „Neljakuningapaev“, milles 1343. aasta Jurioo ulestousu sundmused on asetatud kaasaegse suvilapeo konteksti. Tekkinud paralleel osutus sedavord konekaks, et naidendi esmalavastus Tallinna Draamateatris 1977. aastal peaaegu maha vaikiti ning sisuliselt isegi keelustati. Kumme aastat hiljem Eesti NSV Riiklikus Noorsooteatris lavale joudnud „Neljakuningapaeva“ uustolgendus, mis lahtus uksnes valisest sundmusekujutusest, ei omandanud aga esmalavastusele ligilahedastki tahendust. Seega eeldab ajalooline muudidraama tolgendajatelt nii allegooriale sobivat kunstilist nagemust kui ka selle kontseptuaalselt veenvat lahtimotestamist. Votmesonad: muudidraama, Jurioo ulestous, Jaan Kaplinski, ajalooline muut, allegooriline draama ----------- This paper examines the phenomenon of historical myth, presented in the form of a piece of theatre. Jaan Kaplinski’s historical and allegorical drama Day of the Four Kings is presented as a prime example. The play is based on a well-known historical event, namely the brutal murder of ancient Estonian chiefs by German conquerors during the rebellion of 1343 (St. George’s Night Rebellion). As Estonian theatre researcher Piret Kruuspere has noted, during the 1970s, re-tellings of national history on the Estonian theatre stage were clothed in metaphors, allusions and secret codes – Aesopian language. In addition to this secret code, the author of Day of the Four Kings used a kind of doubling, placing historical events into the setting of a contemporary house party. This change of perspective causes some degree of alienation as well as amplifies the essential allegorical message of the drama. Representing the real run of historical events, the play is effectively communicating with a contemporary audience, dealing with the problems and themes closely connected with contemporary society. In addition to its allegorical meaning, the play underlines the importance of maintaining ethnical and archaic values and warns against sacrificing these in return for short-time utilitarian purposes. The allegory of the play was even too obvious, so that the first production of the play (in 1977) was practically banned by the official powers of Soviet Estonia. Contrary to the first stage performance of the play, the second attempt – which took place a decade later – was an unfortunate example of the disappearance of the mythical dimension of the drama. This kind of poor production was no longer able to overcome the historical-cultural and national psychological contradictions inherent in the play. The analysis is mainly based on reviews of the play from the period as well as the social and cultural conditions in existence when the theatrical versions were staged. It is easy to conclude that during the process of producing this kind of stage play, it is far more fruitful to accent all kind of allusions and allegorical metaphors than to simply follow the formal development of the external plot. If the mythical dimension disappears, the message of the play loses its essential meaning. Keywords: mythology, mythical drama, St. George’s Night Rebellion, Jaan Kaplinski, historical myth, national myth, deconstruction, allegorical drama

Fissuras do real: desvios da mimese na dramaturgia brasileira contemporânea

Com base na abordagem de quatro obras, Apocalipse 1,11, do Teatro da Vertigem, Agreste e Projeto Body Art, de Newton Moreno, e Amores surdos, de Grace Passô, pretende-se reconhecer proposições de inserção de elementos desviantes do real ou do referencial de representação no teatro contemporâneo. Nesse sentido, as obras lidabym, cada qual com uma poética particular, com elementos estranhos que marcam desvios de comportamento, provocando assim um deslocamento quanto à composição da mimese teatral, e aproximam-se das percepções da realidade social em suas múltiplas marginalizações e formas de leitura. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n47a1171

«Og det er ikkje vits i å seie noko» – om Jon Fosses "Eg er vinden"

I Am the Wind is one of the last works Jon Fosse wrote for theatre. The piece was first staged during the Bergen Festival in 2007. Even though it was only a few years later that Fosse declared the end of his dramatic career, his playwriting with this play is clearly moving on its way out of the theatre and into a borderland between thought and action; it manifests an extremely subjective and the physical presence in which items from Fosse’s poetry are more clearly seen. In this article, I want to read I Am the Wind primarily as a theatre piece, that is, a text written for the stage, and emphasize the use of poetic elements. The piece’s sections of dialogue revolve around existential and individual psychological questions at the boundary of the banal; it thematizes both the need and the fear of loneliness. It also deals with nature’s magical attraction to humans and with the importance of silence on several levels. The work stages the death wish of late modern humanity, and provides lyrical and language-philosophical interpretations of this, which I wish to read into the apparently simple plot of the piece.
 I Am the Wind can be described through a number of features that also characterize both earlier and later pieces of Fosse’s writing. Simply put, the play is about two people’s voyage to the open sea in a boat; one of the characters jumps overboard and commits suicide. The situation in the play takes place either in the head of the one who witnesses the suicide, or there is a meeting between the two characters after death. Either way, this is a basic situation which assumes that the expectations of a realistic stage action are to be set aside. But what is the reason why Fosse shifts his piece against a dramatic zero point? What is the purpose of reducing the stage expression to a lyrical outline that almost destroys the theatrical form? Fosse often opts for silent moments in his pieces. I Am the Wind is an infinite and enigmatic boat trip that requires us to look at the play as a landscape without being forced to define it in words: for the words disappear during the boat trip; they are taken and gone with the wind; “there is no point in saying anything.”