Theatre Practice Research Articles

‘I remember little. Almost nothing’. Participatory theatre as a means to access subjugated memories

The article presents and discusses the interdisciplinary, collaborative and participatory research project Bieżenki. Thematically, the project is devoted to the history of the so-called bieżeństwo – a migration of people from eastern Poland during the First World War, forced by the retreating Russian Army, when the Germans broke through the eastern frontline in 1915. The stories of those refugees, among whom were a number of Rus’ peasants, and within that group, women with children (the term bieżenki signifies female war refugees), make up a crucial part of the regional history that has been largely absent from public knowledge and historical discourse. Methodologically, the project is based on participatory theatre that engages non-artists both as content providers, and on-stage performers. Theatrical practice has been used to collect the marginalised memories of bieżeństwo (as they are often kept and transmitted within family circles), and present them to the wider public in the form of theatrical performance. The project has also resulted in a theoretical concept of the assemblage of memory, inspired by and grounded in the creative process, which is briefly sketched out at the end of the article.

Ubuntu aesthetics in African theatre of the South

The centrality of Ubuntu in much of African theatre of the South is well documented. Likewise, discourses that explicate the stylistics and aesthetics of African theatre abound. In this paper, we harmonize these existing theorizations on the expression of Ubuntu within African theatre and the prevailing readings of the aesthetics of such theatrical practices into the notion of ‘Ubuntu aesthetics’. The idea of Ubuntu aesthetics or the ‘aesthetics of Ubuntu’ within African theatre is not novel. However, our contribution to this discourse in this paper is to show how the unification of Ubuntu and performance aesthetics presents alternate conceptual pathways of the appreciation, appraisal, and study of African theatre praxis underpinned by an Ubuntu sensibility. To this end, this paper is an introductory attempt at institutionalizing the notion of Ubuntu aesthetics. We locate and contextualize this codification of Ubuntu aesthetics within African theatre of the South, which is representative of alternative performance and ritual practices that operate within, in-between, and beyond the conventional theatre spatial orders. As case studies, we review the theatre production Ngoma The Musical, which embodied the dynamics of Ubuntu aesthetics, alongside Brett Bailey’s Exhibit series which problematizes this notion.

Aquilina , Stefan Modern Theatre in Russia: Tradition Building and Transmission Processes (review)

SEER, 99, 1, JANUARY 2021 172 Aquilina,Stefan.ModernTheatreinRussia:TraditionBuildingandTransmission Processes. Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, London and New York, 2020. xii + 229 pp. Illustrations. Notes. References. Index. £75.00. The first thing to note is that Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama have done their author few favours in agreeing to publish this book in its present form. Stefan AquilinaisdirectorofPerformingArtsattheUniversityofMaltaandispossibly fluent in spoken English. However, his command of English literary expression leaves much to be desired, although he cannot be held responsible for the unacceptably poor level of proof reading on display. Any conscientious editor could have identified matters that should have been remedied before the book went to press. These include grammatical waywardness, stylistic anomalies, misprints and misspellings, incorrect play titles, illogical sequencing, repetitiousness and poor translation from both Russian and German, all of which seriously detract from any merits the book might otherwise possess. The author’s intellectual stamina is not in doubt but, in tending to foreground the first person singular throughout, he betrays a confidence in his own exegetical powers which should have been restrained by any competent editor or proof reader employed by the publishers who, in the final analysis, must bear the brunt of the blame for this mishandled enterprise. The book’s subtitle, with its reference to ‘building’ and ‘transmission’, deploys these terms to ubiquitous effect, but rather like a famous comment made about metaphysical poetry, they tend to be heterogeneous ‘conceits’, or concepts, ‘yoked by violence together’ — in this case often arbitrarily and confusingly. The scaffolding which upholds the ‘building’ metaphor consists of numerous academic references in support of what are often bland or unexceptional statements. These certainly illustrate the author’s wide and eclectic reading, but their proliferation tends to downgrade their significance to the point where they become a mere collage of academic touchstones made to serve as positive evaluation of what are otherwise questionable pronouncements. There is a real danger, at times, of these sources being discredited by mere association. The notion of ‘transmission’, meanwhile, assumes a variety of guises and is deployed throughout as a false marker of coherence in an otherwise fragmented and often illogical discourse, the overall effect of which is one of linguistic excess with hyperbole a substitute for direct, unvarnished statement. An example is the following taken from an endnote: ‘Historical contextualisation is a historiographical methodology that I use on occasion to unpick historical material’ (p. 199). The ostensible theme of the book concerns the development and transformation of earlier forms of theatre and theatrical practice in the special conditions prevailing in Russia and the Soviet Union during the early REVIEWS 173 part of the twentieth century. The focus is on well-known theatre directors such as Stanislavskii and Meierkhol´d, as well as less familiar theorists, polemicists and practitioners; in this instance, Valentin Smyshlaev, Platon Kerzhentsev and Asja Lacis, all three of whom are being rescued from comparative obscurity. In the case of Stanislavskii, the ‘transmission’ of his influence is linked to a German actor of the period, Ludwig Barnay, while similarly arbitrary attention is devoted to rehearsals of Ostrovskii’s play with a theatrical theme, Talanty i poklonniki (Talents and Admirers, 1881). An example of the disservice afforded the distinguished director in this latter instance can be illustrated by the bathos of the following observation on his rehearsal methods: ‘Stanislavsky spoke about acting through the images of diving into a pool, opening doors, ripping off necklaces, playing chess, riding horses, painting a wall, a swan unravelling its neck [sic] and so on…’ (p. 50). A good deal of the section on Smyshlaev and Kerzhenstsev, both of whom championed post-Revolutionary amateur theatre and the work of Proletkult, is politically tendentious and relies on translation of hitherto unavailable theoretical works by both men, the quality of which, unfortunately, does not assist an appreciation of its merits. The following revelation is attributed to Smyshlaev: ‘He opened his essay on a theoretical slant, [sic] by saying that the most significant aspects of theatre are action and dialogue’ (p. 126). The treatment of the notorious Party hack, Kerzhentsev, in the context of his earlier writings, seems part of an attempt to rescue him from the opprobrium of his association with...

Highlights from ATHE 2020: Theory and Criticism Focus Group: Spare Parts

Highlights from ATHE 2020:Theory and Criticism Focus Group: Spare Parts Yasmin Zacaria Mikhaiel (bio), Heather Barfield (bio), and Abigail Schroering (bio) In response to the 2020 ATHE conference theme "Drive," the Theory and Criticism Focus Group took up scholarly and practical explorations of the concept of "Spare Parts." This emerged from questions musings on the bits of time and space of which we have both too much and a deficit. How often during rehearsals, preparation for classes, and the writing process, do we stumble on some aspect of our research that does not fit? As scholars, how often do we eliminate tangents from our narratives? As practitioners, how often do we cut material that we love in deference to time limitations and where does that artistry go? As teachers, how often do we lament the lack of just "fifteen more minutes" or "one more class meeting," and what is it that always seems to get pushed to next class? For the "Spare Parts" roundtable series, we welcomed contributions from practitioners, educators, and scholars where we imagined ourselves to be "performative mechanics" who discard/use/replace these Spare Parts of our written and embodied texts as if they were parts of an automobile. Our pre-conference served as an exploration of what spare parts we must work to leave behind as we strive towards creating more inclusive practices. The Theory and Criticism Focus Group's preconference continues ATHE's commitment to facilitating exchange between theater practitioners, scholars, and educators. In contrast to the standard pre-conference, Theory and Criticism has created a space dedicated to the creation of brand-new work in collaboration with fellow attendees. The preconference's format—featuring asynchronous pre-work, expert presentations, and in-session writing and workshopping time—created a creative, inclusive environment in which no expertise was assumed but any expertise could be leveraged to help to collective. The pre-conference also continues ATHE and the wider field's effort to interrogate the white supremacy that undergirds how theatre practice, scholarship, and education functions in our society. The performances, presentations, and workshop sessions introduced participants to anti-racist narratives and tools that facilitated critical reflection on the power structures in the field and illuminated one step on the path toward dismantling them. Access the video at this link: https://youtu.be/sfA8dDzQuSY With a similar collaborative spirit, one Theory and Criticism workshop invited participants to put thinking in partnership into practice. In "Pair Research—A Working Roundtable," scholar Elizabeth Hunter demonstrated an online partner pairing tool. Participants were invited to post two sentences on a topic or item they would appreciate talking through for twenty minutes. After all the topics were posted, participants ranked how useful they thought they personally could be on a scale from one to five. The online tool then paired participants based on this ranking alone. This allowed for pairings outside of credentials and lowered stakes among those asking for and receiving feedback/thoughts. From here, participants had a shared forty minutes to co-think and offer feedback. In the first step, participants needed to get specific about their ask and what support they may be seeking. In the second, participants reflect on their ability to offer such. Pair Research provides for an efficient [End Page E-1] and useful manner to couple thinkers based on mutual opportunity for support, in essence fostering a productive jumping off point for participants to bounce and refine ideas. Access the video at this link: https://youtu.be/mVPdzlJGEno The panel "Fizzles, Flops, and Frustrations: Failure in Theatre History, Theory, and Practice," presented by the Theatre History and Theory and Criticism Focus Groups, centers on the possibilities of generative failures in historical performances and productions. Applying the 2020 ATHE conference themes of combustion, energy, and resilience, the panel asks what theorists and scholars might discover from antecedent blunders and disappointments that nevertheless energize a push towards a kind of resilient progress. Panelists offer encouraging insights that discern friction between theatrical attempts at innovation, precision, and dissenting new work against their preceding absence of notoriety, achievement, and appreciation. Through these examinations, we can push toward an alternate understanding of success and foster furthered inquiry. Access...

Theater in the Middle East: between Performance and Politics ed. by Babak Rahimi

Reviewed by: Theater in the Middle East: between Performance and Politics ed. by Babak Rahimi Hala Baki THEATER IN THE MIDDLE EAST: BETWEEN PERFORMANCE AND POLITICS. Edited by Babak Rahimi. London and New York: Anthem Press, 2020. 184 pp. E-book $40. Given the dearth of English-language scholarship on theatre of the Middle East, Rahimi’s Theater in the Middle East presents a much- needed scholarly yet accessible survey on the subject. The collected essays in this text explore a sample of Middle Eastern theatrical works from multiple perspectives, all while foregrounding the complex interculturality of this transcontinental region. In addition, each of the chapters in this volume stands alone as informed snapshots of the diversity of Afro-Eurasian theatre. They introduce new readers to modern and contemporary Middle Eastern performances as well as nuanced existing views on the subject by rethinking and reimagining this genre of theatre in relation to academia, politics, and transnationalism. Theater in the Middle East offers valuable resources for teaching the subject to an unfamiliar public, the need for which is highlighted in the very first chapter by Michael Malek Najjar. In it, he outlines the challenges of teaching Middle Eastern theatre in US universities and offers recommendations for navigating the complexities of the task. Najjar stresses the need to define and engage the region outside the limited frame of Mideast-US relations, which is shaped by the War on [End Page 601] Terror, the Iraq War(s), and the Arab-Israeli conflict, among others. Educators and scholars will find this chapter indispensable because it models ways of rethinking global pedagogy and collaborating with international specialists or artists in the field. It also lists numerous English-language resources for use in teaching and research, such as anthologies and critical writings, while underscoring the need to produce additional publications on the subject. The remaining chapters in this volume seem to heed Najjar’s call. The next three chapters round out the first part of the book titled “Pedagogy and Tradition” with snapshots of Iranian, Egyptian, and Moroccan performance. Rana Salimi’s chapter on late nineteenth century Qajar performances by harem women explores how Middle Eastern identities were reimagined during an era of modernization and social change. Not only does this chapter offer a concise introduction to indigenous performances like ta’zieh and bāzi, but it also rereads harem women’s performances through an agential lens and disrupts the perception of Middle Eastern women as disempowered subjects. Marvin Carlson’s following chapter on Nehad Selaiha, one of the leading theatre critics in late twentieth century Egypt, achieves a similar effect. It centers the often unacknowledged role of women as leaders in theatrical experimentation and advocates for freedom of expression in the region. Khalid Amine’s chapter also strongly features women’s voices by looking at ways in which the indigenous halqa tradition is reimagined and deployed in contemporary performance to challenge socio-political worldviews, particularly taboo subjects like sexuality and gender inequality. Most importantly, he asserts that performative hybridity in Morocco is a first step of coming to terms with postcolonial and neocolonial modernity. This critical view, echoed silently across the volume, can be applied across the transcontinental Middle East and encourages readers to view performance from this region as an innovative agential tool for countering subalternity and exploring paths toward alternative futures. Part two of the volume, titled “Politics and (Trans)Nation,” complicates this idea of agential performance by exploring its impact on Middle Eastern identity in relation to conflict, occupation, and migration. Gary English opens this section with his chapter on The Freedom Theatre in Jenin, a company in occupied Palestine. Analyzing several of their productions, he argues that the practice of theatre under both military and “mental occupation” acts as cultural resistance, allowing subaltern Palestinian actors to grapple with oppressions inflicted by both Israeli and Palestinian constraints. Continuing the focus on Israel-Palestine, Shelley Salamensky’s chapter looks at how transnational artists Sigalit Landau and Emily Jacir use [End Page 602] performance and installation art as a tool for exploring loss and displacement. She argues that their work foregrounds social construction and impermanence in its unsettling treatments of identity and homeland. Edward...

The Role of Central European Avant-garde Reviews in the 1920s (Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia)

After the collapse of four empires during World War I, several new European states emerged, with new energy, anti-military and progressive attitudes among the youth, and shared optimism for a peaceful future. A new generation of writers, poets, artists, theorists, philosophers, architects, musicians, and film makers helped revitalize the cultural life in Central European countries (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria) in the early 1920s by publishing a variety of reviews that promoted new ideas and radical forms of expression, often linked to progressive social positions and leftists political influences. In spite of different orientations and local historical, cultural, social and political conditions, they often had similar objectives and clearly expressed attitudes about multinational and cosmopolitan culture, new forms and fresh approaches, with an ideological commitment to considering culture as primarily a social issue. The review editors exchanged articles, manifestos, poems, reproductions of plastic and applied arts, methods and practices in theatre, film, music, photography and architecture. They invented new media, organized international exhibitions, performances, conferences; participated in provocative activities and discussions and often shared similar artistic worldviews. Some were successful; others were banned for political reasons, but all were important elements in avant-garde movements of the time.

Performing Commedia dell'Arte, 1570–1630 by Natalie Crohn Schmitt

MLR, .,   included chapters on the four other purgatorial terraces as well, but this, of course, would have been a monumental undertaking, far beyond the scope of the book. Given Corbett’s claim in Chapters  and  to have uncovered Dante’s implicit confession of sloth and prodigality, a reader might have expected a more explicit acknowledgement of the methodological perils of wading into the murky waters of authorial intention (not to mention authorial biography) within the context of literary analysis, but this is a small quibble for a book which so limpidly and persuasively leads the reader through the complex ethical categories of Dante’s aerlife. Aer seven centuries of commentary and exegesis it can sometimes feel as if everything worth saying about the Commedia has already been said; Corbett’s book serves as a useful reminder that the work of historicizing Dante’s poem has, in some respects, only just begun. U  O L H Performing Commedia dell’Arte, –. By N C S. London and New York: Routledge. . viii+ pp. £.. ISBN ––– –. Natalie Crohn Schmitt’s book is a welcome addition to the Anglophone historical scholarship on Commedia dell’Arte, investigating its performance features from the perspective of the literary and rhetorical traditions that constituted one of its essential premisses. Each chapter addresses an aspect of Commedia performance : improvisation, acting styles, and the use of masks. Although supporting the contention that there is no direct continuity between the historical form and any contemporary theatre practice, a final chapter entitled ‘Coda’ briefly discusses renowned contemporary theatre groups that claim to be inspired by Commedia. As a form of theatre that traverses two hundred years of European history, Commedia dell’Arte poses a challenge to any scholarly attempt at being both concise and exhaustive. When striving to capture the essence of Commedia, early twentiethcentury prominent theatre reformers such as Meyerhold and Copeau used the emphasis on physical actions as a catalyst for a new theatre aesthetics that stood the test of time. In doing so, however, they contributed to obfuscation of the literary elements of Commedia performance, which were historically at least as important as its visual and physical manifestations. By applying rhetorical discourse to the analysis of Commedia performance techniques, Performing Commedia dell’Arte, – gives due attention to the oratorical skills of its practitioners, and places the devices of improvisation, gestural code, and masks in their proper historical and cultural context. Schmitt aptly reminds us that improvisation in early modern Commedia, far from being comparable to contemporary ‘improv-comedy’, was founded on memory (p. ), with actors deriving their compositional material from mnemonic access to an ample selection of sources, ranging from classical literary texts to commonplace books (p. ). For instance, documentary evidence shows that the  Reviews Commedia ‘diva’ Isabella Andreini integrated Petrarchan lyric poetry into her own impromptu performance (p. ). By referring to the scenarios by Flaminio Scala, which were published in , Schmitt follows in the steps of previous scholarship, demonstrating how Commedia characters, including the parti ridicole of the servants and old men, needed flexible and accomplished performers. e parallel with Charlie Chaplin is apt: while easily identifiable, the characters were employed in a variety of dramatic situations and roles. By way of example, the zanni Burattino could play a servant, innkeeper, beggar, peasant, or postman (p. ). It is regrettable that access by Anglophone scholarship to the wealth of Italian studies on Commedia remains very limited. is leads to some misconceptions. For instance, Schmitt’s focus on the practice of the prestigious troupes that operated in Italy and Europe between  and  necessarily restricts the field of investigation to a theatrical practice which was contiguous with but not identical to that of piazza performers. In fact, similarly to London companies of Shakespeare’s time, these troupes operated alternately under court patronage and in indoor spaces, where they played for a paying audience mostly composed of nobility and the middle class. is point is not clarified in the book, which leads to some confusion. For example, the assumption that the different dialects used by the parti ridicole rendered their utterances barely understandable (p. ) appears to contradict the emphasis on the rhetorical force of Commedia performance. While arguing...

Staging Personhood: Costuming In Early Qing Drama by Guojun Wang

Reviewed by: Staging Personhood: Costuming In Early Qing Drama by Guojun Wang Tan Jing STAGING PERSONHOOD: COSTUMING IN EARLY QING DRAMA. By Guojun Wang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020; pp. 312. Taking costuming as a central object, Guojun Wang seeks to explore the sartorial significance embedded in dramatic texts in his monograph Staging Personhood: Costuming in Early Qing Drama. Under an interpretive framework posed by the interplay between onstage costume and offstage clothing, Wang explores multiple tensions between texts and theatre, onstage performance and offstage social context, and literary writing and individual person-hood during the period of Ming/Qing transition in Chinese history. In his introduction, “Costuming as Method,” Wang carefully defines terms central to his conceptual framework and methodology. Clothing and clothes refer to “items of apparel in society,” while costume refers to “pieces of clothes used in drama and theatre” (3). Costuming is used in reference to “the theatrical appropriation of body and clothing in drama texts, performances, and different types of visual representations” (3–4). Costuming may be understood in a narrow sense as production and stage use of costumes, and in a broad sense that includes dressing, undressing, and cross-dressing in theatrical practices (10). In the period covered by Wang’s monograph, this distinction between clothes and costumes marks the space of a heated sociopolitical struggle over the nature of the self. In classical Chinese drama before the Qing dynasty, onstage costumes were the same as social clothes, except for those adopted in historical plays. Under the nascent Manchu regime, the newly out-of-power Han Chinese, whose traditional culture placed great value on the intactness of the body to present filial piety to parents, were forced to shave their heads and change to Manchu clothing. However, theatrical costume retained the Han style of the recently collapsed Ming dynasty rather than Manchu clothing, while plays depicting current events were banned. Thus the sartorial discrepancy that motivates Wang’s study, that between Han-style costumes onstage and Manchu-style clothes offstage, was formed. To better understand this discrepancy and to interpret how early Qing dramas were presented as a result is Wang’s chief critical and historical concern. In the process, he reveals how the anxiety of “personhood,” generated from inevitable incoherent roles, identity crises, and political and cultural oppression experienced by the Han Chinese under the changing regime, may be exposed by the historian of costuming. [End Page 578] Chapter 1 explores how different audiences experienced and interpreted the sartorial discrepancy that appeared onstage and offstage in the early Qing period. Records left by spectators, including Korean envoys, Japanese officials, British diplomats, Ming loyalists, and Qing literati, are used to describe the effects of the spectacle in relation to segregation and political edicts enforced by the Manchu reign. In chapter 2, Wang delineates the complicated cultural and political dress codes across genders and ethnicities embodied in the early Qing drama Lovebird Reversal (Dao yuanyang倒鴛鴦), which depicts a young male scholar and a young lady who exchange clothes with each other to survive the Manchu invasion, before they finally redeem their original genders years later when their parents, coincidentally, arrange for them to be married. Wang argues that the disruption and restoration of social order corresponds with the destruction and restoration of gender relations in this play of cross-dressing, and the playwright structures the play within a philosophical and cosmological view of balance between the binaries of the opposites—for instance, genders and social order. The analysis of A Ten-Thousand-Li Reunion (Wanli yuan萬里圓) in chapter 3 reveals how the Confucian ethics of filial piety (paid only to parents) and political loyalty (paid exclusively to one master or one regime) were split among Han Chinese males as the orthodox Han regime was replaced by the invaded Manchus. Wang explores in depth the production history of this drama to delineate the fragmentation of theatrical costuming in relation to the identity crisis of Han Chinese as simultaneously members of a family and subjects of changing states. Chapter 4 takes up two early Qing dramas based on the historical event of Lady Hai, who committed suicide after suffering an attempted sexual assault. The plays focus...

The Queer Ethereal: Hybrid Forms and the Making of a Drag Queen

I came to drag through theatre practice. I am a trained playwright and together with my husband, Cameron Mackenzie, I run Zee Zee Theatre, a company with a mandate to share intimate and human stories, with a focus on amplifying voices from the margins. Over the years I have been working continuously to bring my drag and theatre practices closer and closer together with drag-theatre hybrids appearing in our company's season as well as club events featuring drag artists. In this article I reflect on my personal history as a theatre artist, producer, and drag performer. From this vantage point, I consider the multitude of ways that drag and theatre intersect and have enriched my own artistic practices. Bringing together diverse audiences and artists from the worlds of theatre, drag, and queer club nights, I have been privileged to witness the incredible power of collaboration between these groups. More recently, as a queer parent, I’ve seen how theatre and drag can merge to carve out new and exciting ways to bring queer performance to the ever expanding audiences of queer families. This article traces these experiences and stands as a testament to the generative power of collaboration between drag and theatre.

A Note from the Editor: Essentials

A Note from the Editor: Essentials John Fletcher As those readers who saw the original call for papers know, my initial plans for a 2021 special issue centered on the notion of intimacy. I imagined a slate of pieces about intimacy choreography on stage and screen, intimacy awareness in theatre classrooms, and intimate ruminations about the ever-fascinating transactions between performers and audiences, between dramatic events and the places that house them, and between projects that speak to and with one another across time and space. That was in March 2020. By April, it became clear that the year would turn the comfort of familiar intimacies into aching nostalgia. Remember seeing a live show in a crowded theatre? Remember reconnecting with friends over drinks at a conference or a party? Remember hugging someone? Of course, 2020–21 inflicted deeper wounds: lives snuffed out, justice undone, incomes suspended, and political stabilities frayed. Losing touch—refraining from physical closeness with others, especially indoors—only made these traumas harder to endure. The idea of essentials as a replacement special issue topic grew out of the absence of intimacy. I realized, first, that many in our society—the so-called essential workers—did not have the privilege of isolation. For people like delivery drivers, grocers, food staff, medical personnel, and custodial workers, continued contact was obligatory, often without the necessary gear to keep them safe. The pandemic reminded us again how badly we as a culture do at valuing those whose labors we depend on every day. What other essentials, I wondered, do we take for granted? I saw also how theatre artists and teachers were adapting to the prohibition on proximity. How does a live artform go remote? How do I perform a scene with you when even our smallest interactions suffer a microsecond’s time delay? How do I connect with students when all we can see of one another are glitchy Brady Bunch boxes, many of which are blank? How do I enjoy that organic exchange with colleagues about work and lives when every Zoom session feels like a strained, excuse-my-mess/children/pets/stress performance of perseverance? What remains when we have stripped away so much that we would normally define as essential to theatre, teaching, and even everyday interactions? Some pandemic lessons have proved valuable. We have all acquired an appreciation of personal boundaries, a change that intimacy-awareness specialists have long argued for. Classes and conferences (and even in some cases productions) have become much more accessible for many thanks to lowered costs, universal recording, and audio captioning. So many old practices and conventions we thought indispensable now seem optional or even retrograde. Although I like being able to handle certain interactions with Zoom, even I worry about how the technology imposes troubling renegotiations of privacy and work–life balance. On a different level, all of us are much more conscious now of the fragility of our social and political norms. Most of us, hopefully, are more careful about recognizing the injustices against BIPOC folk and others that such norms can mask. As we emerge from the pandemic, we find ourselves sad, tired, and frazzled. But I hope we have also grown wiser and defter, inoculated against certain kinds of ignorance and poised to respond to future challenges. How long will such wisdom and dexterity last, I wonder? What booster shots may be required to reinforce them? [End Page ix] The fourteen pieces in this issue each capture a bit of the stress and isolation since the pandemic began. Each essay dwells on something essential about theatrical practice, teaching, and research, and each gestures beyond the present, lifting up durable reflections and questions for us to carry out of quarantine. I love how our three peer-reviewed essays for this issue represent the different forms that “scholarship” can take in our field. Nathan Stith, Aria Gastón-Panthaki, and Rachel Morris get us started with an impressive mixed-method study, “The Theatre Industry’s Essential Workers: Catalysts for Change.” Combining quantitative and qualitative techniques, the authors provide a snapshot of the pandemic year’s impact on professional theatre workers. Yet, far from relaying a list of laments...

Theater and Society in Early Colonial Manila

This article explores the social location of theater and performance in the early colonial Philippines. While very few of the plays written and produced in Manila have survived, chronicles, letters, relaciones de fiestas, and other forms of documentation contain a wealth of references to and descriptions of performative events in the city. By studying this corpus, the article explores the multiple social uses of theater in the city and the performative practices of the different ethnic groups, religious orders, and civic authorities. Public performance usually drew large, multiracial urban masses together. On the one hand, this helped domesticate social conflict in an astonishingly diverse city by integrating, in an orderly hierarchy of public visibility, the different social and ethnic groups of Manila. On the other hand, attempts at regulation, or even prohibition, of certain theatrical practices and traditions speak to a tumultuous, perhaps unmanageable, cultural practice that allowed for dangerous forms of sociability and potential misreadings of political and religious dogma.

How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education by Scott Newstok

Reviewed by: How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education by Scott Newstok Michael Cop Newstok, Scott, How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2020; hardback; pp. 200; R.R.P. US $19.95; ISBN 9780691177083. In How to Think Like Shakespeare, Scott Newstok 'explore[s] what seem to [him] to be the key aspects of thinking, and how to hone them' (p. ix). Overlaying those aspects onto what Newstok perceives as current deficiencies in education, How to Think Like Shakespeare playfully juxtaposes early modern and contemporary habits of thought by way of wide-ranging examples from texts, practices, or institutions. While works such as Mary Thomas Crane's Shakespeare's Brain (Princeton University Press, 2001) and Lyn Tribble's Cognition in the Globe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) direct their approaches to composition and theatrical practice through scholarship in cognition, How to Think Like Shakespeare has 'deliberately short' and consumable chapters that seem geared more towards a general readership. It nevertheless reads exceptionally learnedly. Each chapter titularly calls to mind Bacon-esque themes (such as 'Of Freedom' or 'Of Constraint') and surveys examples and comments from notable authors from antiquity onwards, many of whom must surely comprise the 'common stock' for which Newstok argues in 'Of Stock'. In such material, the sense of someone [End Page 243] who might keep a commonplace book emerges, as any given page might shift from Auden to Aristotle or provide snippets from Walt Whitman's manuscripts to Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School? (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). That is, imitation and exploration are How to Think Like Shakespeare's strengths. It does not necessarily explain how Shakespeare thought or grapple with scholarship in cognition so much as it probes and demonstrates early modern habits of thought. Its range of material should appeal to a wide audience. For instance, the chapter entitled 'Of Attention' draws variously on Epictetus, More, Bacon, Shakespeare, Donne, Cowper, Darwin, Thoreau, and C. S. Lewis (among others) to demonstrate the long-standing objections to distraction and the desire for sustained attention. I question, though, the range of audience to which the book does appeal: at times the light-hearted anecdotes have the potential to alienate the people who, if I understand correctly, are likely to benefit most from this book because they do not presently reinforce, share, or understand early modern habits of thought. For example, that same 'Of Attention' chapter begins with an anecdote in which Newstok 'mutter[s] an easy prediction' to his children who are watching distracted students exit their classes. The prediction is that everyone will stare at their phones. Predictably enough, one of the students 'meanders toward us, bumps into me, recalibrates her trajectory without looking up, and continues her Roombalike text walking. My kids giggle' (p. 55), perhaps at the accuracy of their father's prediction or the behaviour of the student. While Newstok self-deprecatingly begins the next paragraph by admitting that he is 'no better than [his] students' and that he himself has been 'transfixed, zombie-like', he also finishes that same paragraph by turning his disapproval back towards teens who, 'consume a jaw-dropping nine hours of media a day—more time than they spend sleeping, much less conversing with adults' (p. 55). In anecdotes such as these, this book seems to ingratiate itself to those who are less likely to need a book geared towards a general readership. Certainly, the anecdote about being invited to speak 'as the token non-scientist—on a faculty panel about teaching and technology' (p. 70) would be familiar enough to many who work in the Humanities; one's PowerPoint failing before that presentation would be the typical naked-before-the-audience nightmare—until the anecdote's resolution happily binds all of those colleagues together over his low-tech back-up (a handout) and against a common enemy: 'When I finally stated my power-less point, I was heartened to find common cause with my colleagues from Physics and Computer Science. They're just as concerned as I am about evaporating attention spans and device-induced zombieism' (p. 71). The phrasing here, as above, seems...

Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist by Simon Grennan et al.

Reviewed by: Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist by Simon Grennan et al. Eszter Szép (bio) Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite . Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist. Manchester University Press, 2020. 272 pp, $120 Marie Duval (1847–1890) is known in comics studies circles as the artist behind the Ally Sloper strips, Ally Sloper being the first recurring character in comics. The character was invented by Charles Ross, editor of the British periodical Judy, in 1867, and Duval drew Ally Sloper strips from 1869. Interestingly, the character is central to only 15% of Duval's creative output. Sloper's peak period came after Duval stopped drawing the strip: in 1884 the character was given its own comic, Ally Sloper's Half Holiday, and was successfully commercialized. Published in the Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century series of Manchester University Press, Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist offers a detailed, contextualized rethinking of Duval's position as a cartoonist, female visual journalist, children's book author, and actress in the second part of the nineteenth century. The three authors, Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite, have previously launched the Marie Duval Archive (marieduval.org) and have published a richly illustrated popular book on Duval. Now they elaborate aspects of Duval's career in the context of Victorian cultural practices and look for connections—this way Duval's work is discussed in the context of nineteenth-century perceptions of gender, class, work, art, publishing technologies, and theatrical practices. This approach to Duval's oeuvre is complex and multidisciplinary, and the clear structure of the book helps the reader navigate this network of knowledge. To illustrate the book's approach to Duval, let me quote how the authors themselves define their project in the introduction: The book identifies Duval as an exemplary radical practitioner in a historic urban media environment, in which new professional definitions were being created for the first time, in terms of the gendering of professions, professional training and consensus, and the theorising of the roles of visual cultures, and in which new congruence between different types of media culture emerged, including performance, illustration, narrative drawing, periodicals and novels. (6) The book starts out with positioning Judy, or the London Serio-comic Journal in the nineteenth-century satire boom as a conservative journal addressing a middle-class, lower-middle-class, and working-class readership. We learn about Duval's unique approach to cartooning, which is illustrated by comparing how Judy's star cartoonist, William Boucher, and Marie Duval responded to the same issues in their work. Both of them drew the Franco-Prussian War week after week in 1870, and the section of the book where Boucher's and Duval's works are put next to each other clearly shows how witty, daring, and critical Duval's art was. We can also see that she had zero artistic training and did not follow any academic schools of drawing. Boucher's status is indicated by the number of double-page [End Page 228] spreads he was given the opportunity to fill with his drawings (Boucher: many; Duval: zero). He worked in a detailed and realistic style, favored visual metaphors and symbols (e.g., of peace, of countries) to express his commentary, focusing mainly on tragedy and death. In contrast, Duval chooses satire and takes a very cowardly Sloper to the front to report on the events for Judy and follows his adventures as he does everything to avoid the fight. This fearless nature of Duval's work gains even more in significance as the chapters map out Duval's position in Victorian entertainment culture. As a woman employee, she was masculinized; as an actress (performing mainly trouser roles) she was sexualized. This experience, according to Grennan, enabled Duval to bring the social transgression represented by the stage to the practice of her drawings. "The thrilling experience of being a woman employed to be feminine on stage was transposed to the thrilling experience of being a woman working at inhabiting the role of a man, as a visual journalist" (43). This position, as well as the masculine humor of her strips and the representation of woman employees, was an important part of...

A tekintet hatalma a színházi gyakorlatban

My paper posits the theory that we can observe a hierarchical tendency in East-Central-European theatrical practice that legitimates violence as a method. Based on this theory, I examine the hierarchical methods and hierarchical structures of a theatrical infrastructure dominated by a central gaze, furthermore I analyse statements concerning method and structure, and the language they use, in order to highlight how certain hierarchical relations appear in speech, how they are written into language.

ПЕРФОРМАНС КАК ФЕНОМЕН СОВРЕМЕННОГО ИСКУССТВА

The end of the XIXth — beginning of the XXth centuries is a special period in the history of world art culture, characterized by the emergence of such trends as modernism, post-impressionism, avant-gardism, abstractionism, cubism, surrealism and many others. The motto of XXth-century art was "Art into Life". Often new trends became a response to the demand of the mass consumer. One of them was the art of performance. Appearing as a rejection of traditional practices of painting, sculpture and theater, performance organically incorporated wellknown and new approaches and technologies that caused an alternative way of working with space and time. It should be noted that historiography focuses on materials that explore the origins of performance and installation on a global scale. The most significant are the works by American, Western European and Polish authors. At the same time, the historiographic review showed a lack of a large scientific heritage of Russian artists in the field of performance: the process of forming modern art criticism, which would reflect the later history of performance than the first half of the XXth century, is still out of the researchers' sight.

Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London by Musa Gurnis

Reviewed by: Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London by Musa Gurnis Chloe Kathleen Preedy MIXED FAITH AND SHARED FEELING: THEATER IN POST-REFORMATION LONDON. By Musa Gurnis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018; pp. 272. In Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London, Musa Gurnis offers a fascinating reevaluation of how dramatists writing for the commercial English theatre responded to the divisions within and plurality of post-Reformation Christianity. This subject has attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent years, but Gurnis’s monograph represents a unique and valuable contribution to the field. Whereas existing studies often draw binary distinctions between “Catholic” and “Protestant” authors or works, Gurnis argues for a more nuanced appreciation of the early modern theatre’s confessional range. Noting the polyvalency of contemporary English Christian identity, at a time when “subcultures of puritans, church papists, Laudians, recusants, ardent conformists, and converts” battled for the “soul” of the authorised Church (2), Gurnis explores the implications for a theatre whose playwrights, players, and paying customers came from across this confessional spectrum. On the one hand, Gurnis suggests, the fact that many early modern plays are the product of collaboration between two or more dramatists, as well as the “public” nature of the commercial playhouses, complicates the extent to which any one play might express a singular religious position. Thus these works were produced by and intended for consumption by “mixed-faith groups” of theatre professionals and playgoers (2). On the other hand, plays that featured characters of various faiths might in turn disrupt the “everyday religious orientations” of individuals by prompting them to engage imaginatively with unfamiliar confessional positions (3). Gurnis’s study evaluates the implications for post-Reformation drama’s depiction of spiritual themes and experiences, offering an informative, thought-provoking, and persuasive new perspective on this important topic. This book’s refreshing alertness to the collaborative practices of the commercial theatre and the diverse socio-religious composition of its audiences is mediated through a strong cultural materialist emphasis on theatre’s “active” relationship to and influence on the wider world (5). Specifically, Gurnis emphasizes the post-Reformation theatre’s capacity to reflect and refract existing confessional affiliations and understandings. The first two chapters contain some of the book’s richest material, as Gurnis uses archival sources to explore contemporary audience composition and the ways in which actual playgoers responded to religious elements in early modern drama. In a compelling refutation of the common assumption that most or all post-Reformation playgoers were conforming Church of England Protestants (7), chapter 1 examines the faiths of those who are known to have attended performances at the commercial playhouses. Through their range and diversity, the case studies in this section persuasively demonstrate the “de facto pluralism of the post-Reformation religious scene” (10), while Gurnis further concludes that, regardless of their own faith, these playgoers might temporarily engage with the confessional positions expressed by dramatic characters in ways that allowed for a fluid interplay between the staged play’s fictional religious culture and that of the post-Reformation [End Page 254] England in which the dramatic work was produced and experienced. Chapter 2 expands thoughtfully on this distinction between actual belief and the imaginative play that, Gurnis suggests, theatre enables. This argument is informed by recent work by Allison Hobgood, Steven Mullaney, and others on the affective dimensions of early modern playgoing, which contemporaries credited with a potentially transformative effect on the emotions of those involved. Gurnis illuminates this model’s prospective religious significance by examining recorded audience reactions to plays such as Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches, and by considering the relevance of Anglo-Spanish politics to Thomas Dekker’s Noble Spanish Soldier and the collaborative drama The Spanish Gypsy, usually attributed to Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, John Ford, and Dekker. Despite the challenges associated with assessing early audience reactions, the wealth of supporting material assembled by Gurnis enables her to compare the responses of individual play-goers to any surviving evidence about their faith, demonstrating that audience members’ reactions to performances “were not always aligned with— or the outcome of—their individual beliefs” (38). Gurnis’s...

Performing Agitation : László Moholy-Nagy and the 1924 Special Issue of MA (Today) on Music and Theater

MA [Today] reflects the heterogeneity of theater after World War I and its 1924 special issue is a comprehensive document of the avant-garde ambition to renew mise-en-scène. Although MA was not a theater journal, it regularly published dramatic texts, performance reviews and manifesto-like essays on recent forms of staging. László Moholy-Nagy supported MA and its editor Lajos Kassák from Berlin, where he got involved in staging contemporary plays and operas. This paper addresses the question why the performing arts were especially important for Kassák’s circle and examines the relationship of MA to avant-garde theater movements. It also gives a brief survey of the Musik und Theaternummer with its introduction by Kassák before engaging with the theory and practice of experimental theater in Moholy-Nagy’s oeuvre.

Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia by Bernard Bate

Reviewed by: Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia by Bernard Bate Sharika Thiranagama Bernard Bate. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern: Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia. E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, Malarvizhi Jayanth, and Constantine V. Nakassis, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. 264 pp. In 2016, when Bernard Bate passed away, he left behind a collection of texts, some chapters in finished form, some in draft, and a series of notes and fragments. Assembling these pieces, this pathbreaking book is a labor of love. It represents Barney's labor over decades of love for his work and for the Tamil language. It is also a labor of love by E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, Malarvizhi Jayanth, and Constantine V. Nakassis, who have painstakingly put together this manuscript in such seamless and brilliant fashion that it has the edge of a single author. Barney was a friend as well as an exemplary anthropologist full of life. This work is a testament to the best of what community, friendship, and love can look like. Bate's previous book, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic (2009), examined oratory within new forms of democratic praxis in South India. In Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern, Bate explores the formative pre-history of this oratory. The South Indian state of Tamil Nadu (renamed from Madras State in 1969) was formed out of political mobilizations centered around linguistic nationalism and Tamilness. For anyone who knows Tamil Nadu, the place of oration within political movements is, as A.R. Venkatachalapathy explains in his foreword to the book, undeniable. How did this communicative praxis of Tamil democracy arise? How did 20th century Tamil politics and identity become so invested in a naturalistic relationship between a vernacular Tamil and a Tamil "soul" and spirit, in what had been a profoundly heteroglossic pre-colonial South India? How did these changes relate to the Protestant homiletic sermon, a style of speech [End Page 725] propagated by Tamil missionaries? Barney's answers to these questions in this new book go to the historical heart of contemporary Tamil politics by emphasizing oration and speech as a fundamental political infrastructure of contemporary nationalism and politics. While some of the arguments in this book, such as the fashioned Tamil neo-classicism of contemporary Tamil politics (the "newness of the old" [Bate 2009:xv]), were central to Bate's first book, this second work introduces the Protestant homiletic sermon as a foundational rhetorical form—exploding many assumptions of contemporary Tamil scholarship. The role of print media—and Anderson's (1983) associated notion of print capitalism—in creating new kinds of national imaginaries, politics, and publics has, as Barney points out, been well explored. However, unlike print, the Platform—political speech—is, by virtue of its embodied sensuous form, difficult to capture in an archive, even as we know intuitively that the emotions and sentiments mobilized around speech are central to modern politics and nationalism. This book represents an effort to recover and locate political speech in specific modern forms of language that were simultaneously new and Tamil. Bate centers new forms of public speech and political practice through which politicians and orators mobilized new constituencies across class and caste into new populist and nationalist formations. There are multiple ancient Tamil genres and practices of speech, writing, performance, and theater across nearly 2,000-year-old written records. Bate argues, however, that no prior genre resembled the homiletic sermon, addressing an "undifferentiated mass of lower-status" (5), and that this uniquely new 19th century Protestant missionary form would become the heart of modern Tamil democratic praxis. To tell this story, Bate, unlike many scholars of South India, looks to both South India and northern Jaffna in Sri Lanka, understanding text, language, and tradition across the borders that contemporary scholarship still so faithfully follows. Tamil Souls "The Christians who wanted to capture souls for Jesus knew that their own texts must first have Tamil souls." (29) [End Page 726] Christian missionaries entered a South Indian and Sri Lankan (then Ceylon) world profoundly marked by multiple languages and heteroglossia that would only later be distinguished as 20th...

ЯЗЫКОВАЯ РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИЯ ТЕАТРАЛЬНОЙ ДИСКУРСИВНОЙ ПРАКТИКИ В ЖАНРЕ АНАЛИТИЧЕСКОГО ИНТЕРВЬЮ

This article considers the specifics of theatrical discursive practice as a terminological concept of modern discoursology. The article analyzes super-phrasal dialogical unities as fragments of theatrical analytical interviews. The linguistic analysis of constructions with the author's aphoristic formula shows its key role while organizing the semantic space of the super-phrasal dialogical unity.

Library Patrons: On Tour with The Shakespeare Project of Chicago

Chicago is home to two theater companies committed by name to the works of Shakespeare and to the city itself: Chicago Shakespeare Theater and The Shakespeare Project of Chicago. The itinerant nature of The Shakespeare Project of Chicago as a company with a foregrounded urban affiliation that performs primarily on suburban tour parallels the itinerant practices of early modern London theater companies. Both temporal theatrical contexts require(d) an array of support structures within the community and types of patronage for success. Both early modern theater companies and The Shakespeare Project of Chicago pursue itineracy via a patterned sequence of journeys through geographical space, creating a spatio-temporal region that exceeds the bounds of the former's ostensible location in London and/or the court and the latter's nominal home in Chicago. I argue that the common ground that exists between these theater companies that perform the same texts at a remove of four centuries and four thousand miles offers a foundation for constructing a deeper understanding of early modern theatrical company practice, patronage, and touring. Suiting the words and action to the venue and to the tastes of the theater company's patrons abide as imperatives that influence decisions from the overall aesthetic vision to the cut of the text to the stage business. Tracking these choices and the matrix of objectives governing them reveals the ways in which theater not only responds to and reflects, but also builds community, now and then.