Theatrical Approach Research Articles

Cola di Rienzo and the reenactment of an ancient tale – finding the Prata Flaminia in fourteenth‐century Rome

From the anonymous contemporary biographer of Cola di Rienzo (c. 1313–54), we know that the self‐declared Roman tribune engaged in a theatrical approach to the assertion of power and employed stories and symbols of the city's ancient past to reinforce his short‐lived reign. One story from Livy was a natural fit for the flamboyant Cola in staging his takeover of Rome's government in May 1347, and yet has not received scholarly attention. This was the tale of Lucius Verginius, the fifth‐century B.C.E. centurion whose attempt to thwart the debauchery of his daughter by a ruling decemvir, instigated the so‐called second plebeian secession. Two important topographical touchstones for the story were the Aventine Hill where the plebs chose their new tribunes and the Prata Flaminia, later the Circus Flaminius, where they voted to make consul elections subject to their approval. Cola di Rienzo employed both of these locations in May 1347, with the former Prata Flaminia serving as the starting point for his march to the Capitoline to seize power. This article considers the reasons Cola would employ the Verginius tale, how he knew the site of the Prata Flaminia and possible reasons its true location was later forgotten until 1960.

These people, this time, this place: a conversation about Dartington as methodology

This contribution is a conversation between Avia Moore and Sarah Hart on our experience as North American students in the MA Devised Theatre at Dartington College of Arts during the final two years of its existence. We are now PhD students in Performance Studies, at York University (Toronto) and the University of California Davis respectively. This issue of TDPT comes at a moment when the uniqueness of our Dartington experience has become a reference point for our process of reverse migration back into North American academia. We reflect on the tension between looking back and moving forward through the lens of Dartington’s Devised Theatre approach: ‘These people, this time, this place − what do they produce?’ Most significant was the cross-pollination of disciplines, diverse skills brought together in an isolated, idyllic environment that stimulated creative play. Dartington taught us a way of thinking, which we continue to cultivate. This is a self-reflexive conversation drawn from personal experiences at and beyond Dartington. We asked questions, recording and notating our conversations. We paraphrased these answers through correspondence, compiling an edited version here. Finally, responding to the peer review process, we recorded an additional conversation and integrated parts of it into our previous responses. This methodology reflects our shared and divergent perspectives, and the constant balancing act between theory and practice that we found so important to the Dartington ethos.

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

AbstractThis article offers generalised reflections on current aesthetic interests and values within the field of new music. Critical composition and postmodernism are considered for the relevance these historic positions might hold today. Then two important trends of the past decade are presented: first, music that draws attention toward the sounding shape and act of listening, reflecting the recent surge of interest in materialism across academic and artistic disciplines; and second, pieces that include aspects such as physical action, lighting and theatrical approaches to expand the possibilities of concert hall work beyond the purely sonic.

Who killed Desdemona?

Despite widely documented innovations integrating theatrical approaches into secondary school in-classroom engagement with the works of Shakespeare, evidence remains that students and teachers struggle with applying those techniques to the pedagogy of interpretation. Who killed Desdemona? introduces a clown-based approach to an interpretation of Shakespeare’s play, Othello, within a school familiar setting. The screenplay is undergirded by the theories of John Dewey and Jerome Bruner in scaffolding collaborative processes of situated and authentic learning, and integrates the social and peer-learning paradigms of Lev Vygotsky and Etienne Wenger. The screenplay introduces clown-based play and interactivity with both text and live/video attendant audience in negotiating a process of performance-in-rehearsal, where the clowns critically and irreverently unpack and interpret Shakespeare’s text through intermittent discourse and enactment.

“This Rough Magic I Here Abjure” Performativity, Practice and Purpose of the Bizarre

This paper argues that through the theatrical application of defamiliarization (ostranenie) the performer of 'bizarre' magic seeks to achieve an 'illusion of reality' which transcends the traditional performance-magic desire to deceive and rather create a long-lasting impression in the minds of the spectator that artistically confabulates, instilling a realistic memory spawned of a pretended reality. The article distinguishes 'presentational' from 'representational' theatrical approaches to argue that the 'bizarre' magician performs within a hyper-representational mode that the author terms 'paratheatre', meaning theatre and performance that the audience fails to recognize as such. Tracing the history of magic from its application among, inter alia, the priestly classes through stage magicians, this article discusses the 'bizarrist' aim to remove magic from the expectation of deception and any willing suspension of disbelief, and, via convincing storytelling, re-situate the magic moment into an atmosphere of genuine acceptance and even belief.

Staging Therapeutic Enactment with Veterans in Contact!Unload

ABSTRACT This article shares an excerpt from the research-based theatre production Contact!Unload. The play, developed with military veterans using community theatre approaches, explores experiences of veterans transitioning from active service and living with trauma-related stress injuries. The excerpt included in this article provides a theatricalized example of therapeutic enactment (TE), a central intervention of the Veterans’ Transition Project (VTP). After contextualizing both TE and VTP, the script provides a visceral example of one veteran’s experiences both in service and in a TE. This article provides an example of using TE with veterans living with traumatic stress injuries and, in doing so, demonstrates the potential of research-based theatre as a methodology for engaging in and sharing psychological research.

アジプロ隊〈メザマシ隊〉の演劇について

アジプロ隊〈メザマシ隊〉の演劇について

Future Visions: A Pre-Performative History of Infant Theatricality

As new as babies appear to be, they also have a history. This essay investigates the history of theatrical showmanship that circulated the invention of the modern baby incubator at the end of the nineteenth century. It connects this history of machinic culture to material and philosophical conceptualizations of the modern child-figure. In baby incubator exhibitions held across Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States from the late 1890s to the mid-1900s, premature infants were invested with unprecedented social sentiment; they became central commodities within evolving spectatorial practices that encompassed modern temporalities of attention and leisure. The essay uses this history to argue that the highly theatrical approach to the public display of premature infants reveals not only a transformation in the material lives of children, but a recalibration of how the social, cultural, and performative conditions of the child-figure were embodied. In closing, it turns to BR.#04 Brussels by Societas Raffaello Sanzio to show how the pre-performative spectacle activated by the not -performing incubator baby has been inherited by contemporary theatrical approaches. These legacies are most persistent in contemporary frameworks that reflect the discursive codification of infants as being outside of culture, or as naturally themselves.

The Pagan-Christian Admixture in Romeo Castellucci's Oedipus the Tyrant

In 2015, the Italian director Romeo Castellucci presented Oedipus the Tyrant at the Schaubühne in Berlin. His staging was based on the German poet-philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin's translation of 1804, which is known for its peculiar linguistic, philosophical, and theatrical approaches to Greek tragedy. In this article Keld Hyldig examines how Castellucci, in a response to Hölderlin's translation and commentaries on the tragedy, staged Oedipus as a theatrical and philosophical confrontation between religious and rational approaches to knowledge. The staging was seemingly simple, showing a group of nuns performing Oedipus in a monastery. However, the nuns’ Christian and feminine performance of the pagan and masculine tragedy was the basis of a metatheatrical complexity, which was reinforced through a film projection showing Romeo Castellucci getting tear gas sprayed in his eyes, making the relation between physical reality and fictional representation problematic. Keld Hyldig is an Associate Professor in Theatre Studies at the University of Bergen. He has published several articles about the Ibsen tradition in Norwegian theatre and is currently working on a monograph on that subject.

Philosophical Theatricality: Castellucci’s staging of Hölderlin’s Oedipus the Tyrant

In 2015, the Italian director Romeo Castellucci staged Oedipus the Tyrant at Schaubühne in Berlin. The staging was based on the German poet-philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin’s translation, which is known for its peculiar linguistic, philosophical, and theatrical approaches to Greek tragedy. The article examines how Castellucci in continuation of Hölderlin’s translation and commentaries to the tragedy, staged Oedipus as a theatrical – and philosophical – confrontation between religious and rational approaches to knowledge. The staging was seemingly simple, showing a group of nuns performing Oedipus in a monastery. However, the nuns’ Christian and feminine performance of the pagan and masculine tragedy formed the base of a metatheatrical and philosophical complexity in and between different approaches to knowledge. The philosophical complexity of the staging was reinforced through other metatheatrical elements, as for example a film projection showing Romeo Castellucci getting tear gas sprayed in his eyes, which made the relation between physical reality and fictional representation an issue.

Philosophical Theatricality: Castellucci’s staging of Hölderlin’s "Oedipus the Tyrant"

In 2015, the Italian director Romeo Castellucci staged Oedipus the Tyrant at Schaubühne in Berlin. The staging was based on the German poet-philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin’s translation, which is known for its peculiar linguistic, philosophical, and theatrical approaches to Greek tragedy. The article examines how Castellucci in continuation of Hölderlin’s translation and commentaries to the tragedy, staged Oedipus as a theatrical – and philosophical – confrontation between religious and rational approaches to knowledge. The staging was seemingly simple, showing a group of nuns performing Oedipus in a monastery. However, the nuns’ Christian and feminine performance of the pagan and masculine tragedy formed the base of a metatheatrical and philosophical complexity in and between different approaches to knowledge. The philosophical complexity of the staging was reinforced through other metatheatrical elements, as for example a film projection showing Romeo Castellucci getting tear gas sprayed in his eyes, which made the relation between physical reality and fictional representation an issue.

Embodied voices: using applied theatre for co-creation with marginalised youth

ABSTRACTIn this article, we take a strength-based approach to understand how applied theatre as a vehicle provides opportunities for embodied voices to have a positive influence on the well-being, and attitudes to health, of young people who have been ‘pushed’ to the margins. We begin by explaining the concepts of well-being, embodiment and embodied voices, and applied theatre. Following this we explore an example of a theatre project developed in Canada with Indigenous youth to illustrate how the well-being of those who might be termed ‘marginalised’ in this context, is enhanced through a process of embodied reflexivity using applied theatre approaches. Finally, we discuss challenges with this approach to working with ‘marginalised’ youth, and also present some recommendations for professionals using applied theatre for co-creation with ‘marginalised’ youth for their well-being.We share how our research led us to conclude that a commitment to the arts as a fundamental and core process for developing wellness and wellbeing is necessary. This would mean professionals associated with any programmes or projects generated to explore embodied work with young people need see the arts as a philosophical underpinning, rather than as just an additional activity that can be inserted into any programme.

Exploring and Sharing Strategies for Staging Affirmative Sexual Consent: 100 Shades of Grey and Beyond

Exploring and Sharing Strategies for Staging Affirmative Sexual Consent: 100 Shades of Grey and Beyond Charlotte McIvor (bio) During the last five years there has been an emergent shift toward affirmative consent-focused training and rhetoric as a paradigm in sexual-assault-prevention programming and law in the United States, Ireland and the United Kingdom. As Charlene Muehlenhard et al. argue regarding sexual-assault cases in universities in the United States and Canada, “Often the complaining student and accused student both acknowledge that sexual contact occurred; the issue of contention is whether this sexual contact was consensual” (458). To address this issue, educators and activists have tried to respond with better education regarding sexual consent, with an emphasis on what it is and how it is attained. Under affirmative consent standards, “no does not mean yes; silence does not mean yes; only yes means yes” (465). At the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUI Galway), where I teach, a recent survey revealed that “50% of NUI Galway students would not verbalise what they are comfortable with sexually with sexual partners” (“Smart Consent”). Educators and activists subsequently have been using a variety of programming approaches to highlight the intricacy of verbal and nonverbal cues shared between partners and how their communication is undergirded by coercive gender and sexual norms.1 This essay investigates the expanded opportunities for theatre as a mode of campus or community education around sexual assault in light of this shift toward affirmative consent. I will do so by analyzing multiple stages of the development and performance of a devised play on these themes titled 100 Shades of Grey that I co-created with multiple ensembles of undergraduate and postgraduate students at NUI Galway during 2014–16.2 I consider the relationship among affirmative sexual-consent educational paradigms, theatre, and university education at a time of heavy coverage of persistently high rates of sexual assault within educational contexts, particularly at the university level. By using the process of 100 Shades of Grey’s creation as my central case study, I identify how our various ensembles’ theatrical process of working proactively and deliberately with the discourse of affirmative consent shaped the dramaturgical structures of our play over the course of its several iterations. Based on these experiences I offer the Brechtian and feminist theatre approaches that we employed as a productive pairing with affirmative consent’s invitation to critically evaluate “sexual scripts” that underlie the dynamic of gaining and giving consent between sexual partners. Sexual scripts play out “normative cultural expectations and behaviors,” which, when isolated, make evident “the cognitive schema of a normative progression of events in a sexual encounter” (Johnson and Hoover). These scripts, as commonly understood in the social sciences literature, are highly gendered and heteronormative, as the “traditional sexual script presupposes that the man advances the sexual contact, and the woman resists and serves as the gatekeeper of sexual activity” (ibid.). Kristen Jozkowski and Zoë Peterson emphasize that affirmative consent–focused approaches must also have a critical gender dimension as “women and men are socialized to communicate and interpret consent in different ways” (518). For sexual scripts to change, sexual relations and gender norms must be viewed critically and performed with a difference. It is this challenge we attempted to stage through 100 Shades of Grey. [End Page 137] Affirmative consent’s emphasis on not only what sexual relations are but what they could be were most productively amplified by our ensemble through combining the working methods of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre (particularly its nonlinear dramaturgy) and the concrete political and aesthetic strategies of feminist performance practice. These dramaturgical frames allowed us to interrogate sexual scripts enacted by individuals from a variety of subject positions (survivor, perpetrator, bystander) and link them to a wider social and cultural context as part of a network of social relations. Our ensembles also prioritized the representation of LGBTQ and other minority sexual perspectives, including that of male survivors of sexual assault. This challenged what my various ensembles and I perceived as the heternormative bias of sexual-assault-prevention education models that we had experienced previously or studied as part of our devising process. The intersection between feminists and...

Theatrical approach: Designing human-like behaviour in humanoid robots

A key challenge in designing humanoid robots is producing natural and human-like behaviour. This study addressed this challenge by developing an instructive interface to design natural and human-like behaviour in a humanoid robot that will be helpful not only for professional robot motion designers but also for nonprofessionals. A staging method called contemporary colloquial theatre theory has been developed in the field of theatre to reproduce the natural behaviour of humans. Based on the theory, to design robot behaviour, we extracted implicit knowledge from a director’s instructions given to a robot actor in a robot theatre project, where the robot functions as an actor and interacts with human actors. This paper shows the validity of applying this knowledge extraction method by means of a public stage play entitled Night On The Milky Way Train and two short plays created for the purpose of carrying out an analysis. Our analysis produced important rules for designing the behaviour of humanoid robots. The rules were extracted in forms suited to the instructive function of the interface. In this paper, we report the results of a subjective experiment conducted to verify the effectiveness of this function. Our experimental results suggest that the rules derived are effective in improving robot behaviour.

A Critical Review of the Characteristics of Theater-Based HIV Prevention Interventions for Adolescents in School Settings.

Theater-based interventions are a viable prevention strategy for changing sexual health knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors related to HIV prevention. However, few studies have explored interventions in English-speaking, high-income countries such as the United States, Canada, or the United Kingdom. This article critically reviews the literature to identify key characteristics of theater-based HIV prevention strategies used for adolescents in school-settings in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Specifically, we identify the theatrical approach used in HIV prevention interventions, the behavioral theories that inform such interventions, and the study design and results of existing evaluation studies conducted in school settings. In the 10 articles reviewed, we found limited grounding in theory and the use of nonrigorous study design. To strengthen the evidence and practical application of theater-based HIV prevention interventions, we highlight three specific recommendations for practitioners and researchers: (1) define and operationalize the theater approach and techniques used, (2) ensure theater-based interventions are grounded in theory, and (3) conduct rigorous evaluation of theater-based interventions. These recommendations are key to strengthening future research on and implementation of theater-based interventions for HIV prevention.

Literature Review of Service Encounter Management, using Emotions Management

Background/ Objectives: The aim of this service management literature review is to identify the role of emotions during service encounter, to analyze effect of emotions on service customers and employees, and to identify ways to manage emotions for effective service encounter. Method: The review based on systematic review based on literature tracked chronologically; based on SCOPUS database. The literature is then scanned for relevance and citation counts. The themes arising in service encounter management are identified and grouped for conceptual ease. Conclusion/ Improvements: The study highlights importance of effective emotion management during service encounter. It identifies customer emotional reactions like anger, frustration, fear, hate, grief, love and joy; and indicates relationship of demographic factors with emotions. The study also uncovers effect of emotions on service employees during service encounter in terms of; emotional labor, employee burnout, emotional dissonance. Finally, the study lists ways to manage emotions using;—emotional intelligence and motivation; supervisory support; employee and customer citizenship behavior; clue management, theatrical approach and emotion script; and service recovery management. For effective customer experience, it is imperative to manage every service encounter effectively. Since services in general involve human being, emotions generated during service delivery process is a key to customer experience. Managers are advised to create customer experiences considering for emotion management. The study is a unique effort to highlight literature related to service encounter in relations using emotions. It analysis emotions related service consumers as well as service employees.

The Learning by the Creation of Event: Theatrical Approach, Interactive, Co-Operative and Individualizing Pedagogy of Project (The Case of the Artistic Carnival of the PPP in the ISET of Gabès)

In the framework of the valorization of the pedagogy of project via the development of the learning by the event, we organized a day dedicated to the fair of the Professional Project personalized by a theatrical production of outputs animated by the students accompanied. This experience based on the adoption of the active pedagogy generated interesting results in terms of satisfaction, self-confidence, positive emotions, exceeding itself, vitality, pleasure and self-realization. An event, which constitutes a clinical case of active pedagogy, worthy of the reinvestments in the future. This document will attempt to synthesize this experience in describing, student the inputs to the catalysis of the participation and by analyzing the main results generated by this event.

Into the Blind Spots – Theatrical Approaches to the Terror Attacks in Norway 22 July 2011

AbstractThis article discusses theatrical approaches to the Norwegian terror attacks on 22 July 2011, in the context of a global digital screen culture. By engaging in a close reading of two of the earliest theatrical articulations on the 22 July emergency, the author examines how specific aesthetic strategies relate to the on-going cultural trauma process. The article shows how the stage-blog-project

Restoration Plays and Players: An Introduction

Introducing readers to the key texts, theatrical practice and context of late seventeenth-century drama, David Roberts combines literary and theatrical approaches to show how Restoration plays were written, performed, received and printed. Structured according to the 'life cycle' of the dramatic text, this book reproduces extracts from twenty-four of the most influential Restoration plays to provide readers with a comprehensive and colourful introduction to the period's drama. Roberts encourages readers to look beyond a limited canon of established plays and practice, and to see how Restoration Drama has been revived and adapted on the modern stage. Restoration Plays and Players is of great interest to undergraduate and non-specialist readers of seventeenth-century drama, Restoration literature and theatre studies. © David Roberts, 2014. All rights reserved.

Exploring domestic violence and social distress in Australian-Indian migrants through community theater.

In many parts of the world, young adult women have higher levels of common mental disorders than men. The exacerbation of domestic violence (DV) by migration is a salient social determinant of poor mental health. Ecological models describe factors contributing to DV as operating at individual, family, cultural, and societal levels. We explored the interplay among these factors in an Indian community living in Melbourne, Australia, in a qualitative participatory action research study using a modified Forum Theater approach. We here present findings on connections between migration, societal factors, and social/family/cultural factors in DV. The study captured the voices of women living in the community as they describe how DV contributes to their emotional difficulties. Improved understanding of the sociocultural dynamics of DV and the associated social distress in this migrant Indian community can be used to guide the development of culturally sensitive prevention and response programs to assist migrant women from the Indian subcontinent who present with psychopathology and suicidal behaviors associated with DV.