Theatre Practice Research Articles

Between Reality and Society: Lee Kuohsiu’s Far Away from Home

Abstract This paper presents the argument that the practice of modern theatre constitutes a crucial method for reorienting the particular traumas of the Chinese diaspora in contemporary Taiwan. In particular, it offers a close reading of Far Away from Home (西出陽關, Xichu yangguan, 1988) by Taiwanese playwright Lee Kuohsiu (李國修, 1955‒2013) and its performance archive of 2004. Lee deploys theatre as a negotiating space in which to reflect the social formations, identities, and history of Taiwan in the late 1980s—a period that saw Taiwan’s complicated relationship with China become the subject of intense scrutiny as the Cold War came to an end and the pressures of rapid globalisation mounted.

From Grassroots to Systems Change: Art for Social Justice

Art for social justice has long challenged notions of whose stories are told, how, and by whom, positioning it as a key body of practice to combat neoliberalism and other structures of domination. In the global struggle for liberation, art and social justice practices must be contextualized, requiring approaches and pedagogy that address the cultural landscapes in which they are rooted. Against this backdrop, the artivist-authors explore two questions: 1) In what ways do practices in the arts and social justice differ and intersect across cultural contexts? and 2) What lessons can be gleaned from grassroots and systems-level approaches to arts for social justice? Here, three vignettes, explored through Chicane testimonios and story circles rooted in Black and Indigenous theater practice, elucidate approaches to building creative justice in the landwaters colonized into Colombia, Rwanda, and the United States. Across these three vignettes, questions of practice and lessons learned emerge.

A Wilder Joyce: Influence, Borrowing, Appropriation, Theft

This article re-examines the unintended consequences of American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder’s lifelong passion for the work of James Joyce, as Wilder was writing what would become his second Pulitzer Prize winning play, The Skin of Our Teeth, while in the midst of ‘unriddling’ Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake. Subsequently, accusations of plagiarism arose from two major Joyce scholars, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, who not only questioned the borrowings of a particular playwright in creating a new artwork for the stage but also challenged the practices of commercial theater and contemporary theories of originality and textuality. Exploring The Skin of Our Teeth as an intertext, on the other hand, simultaneously validates Campbell and Robinson’s initial assessment and encourages a rethinking of Wilder’s commitment to Joyce as both a scholar and something of a collaborator. Such a shift would allow the critical community to ask theoretical questions about how this ‘collaboration’ works to afford accessibility and so opens Finnegans Wake to a wider audience. Wilder might thus be seen as offering something like a thematic catalogue to the novel in parallel to the ‘theme keys’ he outlined in his Joyce journals. Such recalibration would reposition Wilder’s contributions, not only as an American playwright but as a pioneering critic and crusading intellectual: a European-focused writer wholly in the American grain, an avant-garde champion like his compatriot Edmund Wilson, one who could recognize, invoke, and engage simultaneously with the European avant-garde and the American theatrical and critical traditions.

Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud

Performing in Public: Ethics of a Site-Specific Theatre Practice

Performing in Public: Ethics of a Site-Specific Theatre Practice

Writing from the Margins: Re-framing Teresa Deevy’s Archive and her Correspondence with James Cheasty c.1952–1962

This essay explores a unique set of documents, comprising letters and postcards, sent by Teresa Deevy to her friend and fellow Waterford playwright, James Cheasty. To date, Deevy’s correspondence has not been considered separately from her dramatic texts, nor has Cheasty’s work received scholarly attention. Taking a feminist theatre historiographic approach, the essay theorizes the challenges of working with women’s archives, Deevy’s in particular, and conceptualizes the Deevy-Cheasty correspondence as high status research documents that raise Deevy’s archival profile. The thematic analysis of the material focuses on Deevy‘s role as Cheasty’s mentor and illuminates her engagement with Irish theatre practice of the 1950s and 60s. The essay reveals previously unknown aspects of her personal and professional life and contributes new insights relevant to scholars, practitioners, archivists, and students that redirect prevailing narratives concerning Deevy’s ambitions as a playwright and her involvement with Irish theatre practice post 1940.

The Thornton Wilder Encyclopedia

The Thornton Wilder Encyclopedia

SILENCE AS THE RHETORIC OF RESISTANCE IN HEISNAM KANHAILAL’S THEATRE PRACTICE

The theatre practice of Heisnam Kanhailal and his cocreator of performance, Heisnam Sabitri is less of words, speeches and dialogues than found in conventional proscenium theatre. Both Kanhailal and Sabitri believe that theatre has a language of its own and that language is not necessarily a language of verbal communication. In their theatre, action is expressed more through body movements, physical gestures and sounds than through spoken words as they believe that non-verbal silent communication of a theatrical action or feeling is more powerful than the spoken ones. This unusual mode of theatrical narrative has helped Kanhailal to form a rhetoric of resistance against various forms of socio-political injustice that Manipur has historically gone through. The articulation of theatrical communication in his plays occurs happens more through silence, gestures, and sounds than through conventional verbal communications. He was creating in Manipur what his contemporary Pinter was creating in England, much at the same time, much in the same line, much with the same motif although with much difference in their context and artistic execution.

Iconic 21st Century Activist "T-Shirt and Tote-Bag" Combination Is Hard to Miss These Days!

Iconic 21st Century Activist "T-Shirt and Tote-Bag" Combination Is Hard to Miss These Days!

Ashray and Shushrusha

In this essay, drawing on the case study of Kolkata-based blind theatre groups Blind Opera (est. 1995) and Anyadesh (lit. ‘a different country’, est. 2006), I argue that performance can effectively provide embodied care to oppressed individuals and their communities in the Global South— united by poverty, lack of state support, infrastructural inaccessibility and other intersectional factors. Blind Opera, and Anyadesh have done pioneering work in exploring theatre as medium for care for the visually impaired. The essay looks at the work of these two groups as one instance among many in the Indian context, where in recent years, theatre or performance has emerged as a major site for dispensing care in marginal communities afflicted by systemic neglect, exploitation, oppression or conflict. Focusing particularly on the practice that has evolved at Blind Opera and Anyadesh, I try to untangle some of the core principles. I identify and explore two key vernacular conceptual categories Ashray and Shushrusha (care/willingness to listen) that have been central to embodied care-practice in the two groups. Discussing Blind Opera and Anyadesh’s work as an instance of marginal embodied care practice in the Global South, I argue, provides a critical counter weight to prevalent Eurocentric and universalist discourse around applied theatre or performative care practices. It is an equally important intervention within discourse around disability and performance which has hitherto focused mostly on examples from Anglo-American or European context.

Dramaturgy of Response-ability

Taking the recent relational turn in the discussion on care as a point of departure this contribution aims to ask: What are ways of a critical artistic practice that take care seriously as a challenge to the theatre apparatus, its aesthetic, its dramaturgy and to the way it thinks-with bodies, objects, materiality and more-than-human ways of existence? In which ways can performance find other modes of representation for that which matters within the theatrical frame but that usually exceeds its paradigm of visibility? By focusing on the performance Living Matters (2019) by German artist Eva Meyer-Keller, the article explores relational ways of thinking-with in the apparatus of theatre while interrogating its scopic regime for its exclusions and blind spots. In the performance, where grapes mutate into fluorescent deep-sea monsters under the eye of the microscope and where tampons perform cell division, scientific processes are interrogated rigorously as to their normative structures and presuppositions – but in such a way that consistently takes into account the theatrical peepshow apparatus in which the work unfolds. The article argues for a dramaturgy of response-ability which problematizes the purportedly ‘neutral’ frame of the black box, its objectifying gaze and the way it constructs objects and viewing subjects. Relationality is thereby understood not as a mere thought experiment, but as a theatrical practice of response-ability towards, with and by (more-than-human) accomplices.

The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought by S. E. Jackson

Reviewed by: The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought by S. E. Jackson Ellwood Wiggins The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought. By S. E. Jackson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2021. Pp. xiii + 232. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 9781640140868. S. E. Jackson's fascinating monograph opens by connecting Nietzsche's "Problem of the Actor" to his problem with women (1). This brilliant move heralds her exploration of the centrality of gender to performance and performers in fin-de-siècle Germany. Actresses are not just a side issue or specialized topic when it comes to modernist theater. The questions posed by performing women instead point to the most pressing theoretical and practical issues of the day. Jackson's book is a veritable treasure trove of materials, narratives, and perspectives from German-language sources around 1900. It should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in gender, performance, or theater history in German modernism. The Problem of the Actress successfully straddles intellectual history and theater historiography by showing how intimately related conceptual debates (about issues as seemingly disparate as femininity and temporality, for instance) were to influential stage performances in the early 1900s. In the process of this back and forth between pseudo-philosophical publications (such as the repulsive misogynist Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter) and "paratheatrical writing" (production reviews, memoirs, and metatheatrical fiction), the book unfolds a striking cultural history of Wilhelmine Germany. Especially impressive is the way Jackson has marshaled a rich collection of little-known (and never-translated) contemporary treatises on acting and reviews of performances to paint a thickly textured portrait of the age. The first two chapters lay out the conceptual oppositions that both animated theoretical debates and constricted the practical conditions of female performers. These are followed by three chapters that use close readings of texts and performances to open up explorations of wider themes. All five chapters explore the creation of identity as a site of negotiation between heteronomous subjects who must respond to the ineluctable gender expectations of others. One admirable strength of the book is the way it weaves the longer tradition of German performance history into its lively account of Wilhelmine theater. Jackson [End Page 579] clearly demonstrates her reliance on previous scholarship about women in performance in the long eighteenth century both as methodological models for her own project and to outline the powerful continuities between acting traditions. Too often studies of modernism present the era as radically new and fail to notice the prevalence of older forms of thought even in what seem to be reactions against the past. Jackson avoids this trap by tracing the transformations of established paradigms in the new age. Her frequent citations of Mary Helen Dupree's groundbreaking study of Enlightenment and Romantic actress-writers, The Mask and the Quill (Bucknell University Press, 2011), in particular, show how abiding were the paradoxical demands of naturalness and artifice constructed around performing the feminine. In many ways, Jackson's study can be read as an exciting sequel to Dupree's, carrying the same incisive and sensitive readings of women's performance and women's writing forward into the next century. It is heartbreaking to see how little had changed for women in the intervening years. Jackson sums up a 1928 novel by the actress Tilla Durieux, for instance, by saying that it "presents the obligatory performance of femininity as destructive for women" (149). This quote could easily function as a precise digest of Mary Wollstonecraft's argument in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). But Jackson's acknowledgement of continuity simultaneously allows her to showcase even more precisely the very real novelties in intellectual concepts and theatrical practice that make the early twentieth century such a momentous era in European history. This achievement of the book becomes most evident in the final chapter. By focusing on the actress Gertrud Eysolt's 1903 performance of Elektra, Jackson persuasively shows how the character and in fact the entire drama would have been inconceivable without the actress's creative contributions. In a way, the book invites a recasting of the three-way antagonism between actor, writer, and director—all...

Theatre is Not Built for Equity: Considering Intersectionality and Disability in Theatre Practice and Design

Pour les organismes de théâtre, la pandémie de covid-19 constitue une occasion de réflexion et de considération de leurs pratiques d’accessibilité et de soins au sein de leurs espaces et de leurs démarches. Cet article conjugue les approches de la justice pour les personnes avec un handicap à celles de la conception universelle et la conception axée sur les valeurs pour proposer une nouvelle conception de réaménagement des espaces théâtraux au Canada dotés d’avant-scènes prolongées. Ces concepts s’ajoutent à des recherches existantes sur l’accessibilité et l’intersectionnalité en démontrant comment la pratique théâtrale actuelle des personnes avec un handicap au Canada peut guider la conception et l’utilisation des espaces théâtraux au pays. En outre, les notions présentées répondent aux exigences d’un réexamen important de la façon dont les espaces théâtraux sont employés au Canada, car peu de compagnies théâtrales accordent la priorité à l’accessibilité au-delà de ce qui est exigé par la loi.

The Big Short's Incoherence, Documentary Aesthetics, and Use of Direct Address

<i>The Big Short</i>'s Incoherence, Documentary Aesthetics, and Use of Direct Address

Spatial projection: extended perception for theatre creators through the practice of Chinese martial arts

The practice of Zhōngguó Wuˇshù 中国武术, the Chinese martial arts, can train us to project our imaginations and felt senses into the empty space around our bodies. Developing this skill of spatial projection, we transfer the sensitivity we have at close tactile and visual range to spaces beyond our reach. We learn to experience the empty space around us as though it were a positive object or substance. In this article, I propose a pathway to spatial projection moving from solo martial movement or tàolù 套路, to the martial partner games of tuī shǒu 推手 or ‘pushing hands’, and nián jiàn 黏剑 or ‘sticking sword’. The possibilities of perception and action these practices reveal can be shared as aesthetic innovations, appealing to the imaginations of our eventual audiences. Drawing on my martial and theatrical practices on the one hand, and a detailed study of Chinese cultural history on the other, I share methods and perspectives that develop spatial projection for the benefit of creators, performers, teachers, and scholars.

Suprematic Techniques in Theater Sketches of Ukrainian Artists of the 1920s

The purpose of the article is based on the need to study the sketches of theatrical costumes in the works of Ukrainian artists of the 1920s. The research is done from the point of view of suprematism stylistics applications one of the avant-garde trends. In that context, it is considered as required to track and compare examples of its appearance in different art projects of that time. This allows determining possible sources of suprematic inspirations appearance in Ukrainian theatrical artifacts. The art learning methods were complexly applied in order to solve the given goal. Those methods are related to the concept analysis of K. Malevytch about features of constructiveness, pointlessness, and dynamics in painting, and the possibility of their application in spatial art projects. This approach creates new possibilities for the understanding of the new metaphorical nature of the theatric character, his symbiosis with avant-garde performance fraction, its common anthropology. The formation of the scenic costume as a metaphor woven from pointlessness by lines and segments combination. This is how the new reality of the stage character in the sketch arose. Its interpretation in conjunction with new text and new casual life. The novelty of the research is based on the complex selection of art projects related to the spreading of the Suprematism ideas among which theatrical practices are important. The conclusions of the article form a semantic chain of phenomena related to the development of Suprematism ideas. Due to the school of the Suprematism followers formation, a community of followers of that trend emerged in Soviet art in the early 1920s. The ideas of Suprematism were broadcast and became known as a result of their activities. Parallel and very similar by the form discoveries occurred at the subconscious level in various fields of arts. Among them, there are sketches by artists from the Berezil Theater by Anatoly Petritsky, in which Suprematic techniques were used. Key words: suprematism, suprematic reception of theatrical sketch, supergraphics, drawings in sketch, stencil drawing.

Sense Of Meanings: A Deconstructive Lens On Time, Space And Opposites In The Film The Host (2016) Directed By Miranda Pennell

Deconstruction has been used in theater practice and performance art since the 1960s -1970s as a strategy to guide viewers to observation of things and people in and around the performance practice, questioning meaning and its making. This paper proposes that deconstruction is relevant and of value to screendance practitioners for the way in which it supports the challenging of dominant narratives, and invites us to notice and question fixed truths, including our own. For the purpose of my argument I will focus on a film, The Host (2016) by Miranda Pennell, a film made from archive images, which are deconstructed by the filmmaker as part of her narrative making. Among the numerous studies and contributions Derrida has made within philosophical debate, I will focus solely on his theory of deconstruction of text and meaning to contextualize the deconstructive approach adopted by Miranda Pennell in her film The Host (2016). Pennell’s approach includes her research into the narrative of the film. This inclusion gives the film a performative attribute, which I argue to be a point for considering the film a work of screendance. The combination of the archive material and Pennell’s approach to it, allows her to shift between various possible truths that cohabit within a broad spectrum of time and space. In the words of Trinh T. Minh-ha in “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning” from Theorizing Documentary edited by Michael Renov: To compose is not always synonymous with ordering to persuade, and to give the filmed document another sense, another meaning, itis not necessarily to distort it. If life’s paradoxes and complexities are not to be suppressed, the question of degrees and nuances isincessantly crucial. Pennell’s deconstructive approach favors the consideration of such “degrees and nuances” when presenting her narrative, constructing meaning that is complex in its subtleties and implications by pairing opposite concepts and looking at their relation and their relation to herself and others. In The Host (2016) this pairing is consistent throughout the film, openly inviting viewers to question what is being shown. Through a close analysis of The Host, contextualized both with reference to Derrida and to the wider field of screendance, I conclude that a deconstructive approach offers filmmakers and screendance practitioners interested in reinterpreting archive materials through film editing the opportunity to expand choreography to another discipline. As a screendance practitioner, I find that this opens up a world of narrative possibilities, and this is reason enough to shine more light on works that do so.

The Phonological Department of the Institute of Artistic Culture under the Direction of I.G. Terentiev

In the early 20th century, the avant-garde formation in Russia had one significant feature that helped science and art to interact productively throughout the 1920s. The feature was the creation of educational institutions and research institutes, which provided working space for avant-garde artists, theorists, philosophers and practitioners. These people were expected to create a new science of experimental art. Igor Terentiev, a member of the radical futuristic group “41°”, headed the Phonological Department of the Institute of Artistic Culture (INHUK, from 1925 — the State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINHUK)) for less than a year (from October 1923 to March 1924), but his theoretical work was reflected in theatrical practice. This research aims at presenting all the spectrum of searches and the specifics of the GINHUK Phonological Department on the basis of archival documents. The object of the research is the programs of the Department and the lectures of its members. The article focuses on the diversity of the Department’s research program, which was not limited to sound studies alone. The flexibleness of sound substance was equated to the concept of cogitative activity. Sound was considered as a “physical phenomenon” in musical and artistic contexts, and not only as a musical phenomenon, but also as an artistic device and a propaganda tool. The Department presented and discussed lectures on Zaum, noise music, theatrical material, compared the characteristics of the poetry of A.V. Tufanov, K.D. Balmont, V.V. Khlebnikov, discussed the opportunities for artistic work in the sphere of speech and sound. For Igor Terentiev, the most important subject of study was Zaum. On the basis of it, he wanted to develop a universal and international language. The article attempts to reconstruct the general directions of the Department’s work, to formulate a characteristic of its activities, as well as to analyze, for the first time, previously unpublished program theses of its employees.

Theatre Meets Quantum Physics: René Pollesch’s Theatre for the Age of Technoscience

This article looks closely at how the German director René Pollesch incorporates quantum physics into his theatrical practice. I argue that the double-slit experiment that Pollesch refers to in his play Probleme Probleme Probleme (2019) is key to understanding his non-representational theatre. I analyze the deep implications of this experiment for his theatre with respect to two aspects: (1) I highlight the fact that his interest in the writings of feminist and philosopher of science Donna Haraway is connected to a critique of representational theatre with its specific conceptualization of “the Human” as a Cartesian subject; and (2) in line with feminist and physicist Karen Barad, I discuss how the double-slit experiment, understood as a queer phenomenon, helps Pollesch rework central categories of drama and representational theatre. Subsequently, this allows me to conclude that Pollesch continues Bertolt Brecht’s project of a political “theatre for the scientific age” under new conditions. His theatre is a political theatre for the “technoscientific age” where “the Human” as opposed to its “Others” no longer exists. The term diffraction is key for understanding my analysis because it functions as an analytical tool that connects the aforementioned aspects. Moreover, it also describes my method of making visible the pattern that comes into being when Pollesch meets the double-slit experiment, or, more generally speaking, when theatre meets quantum physics.

Tēvāram: Worshipping Gods on Stage

Abstract Building on the idea of “ritual quotation,” this article offers a new perspective on rituals enacted within contemporary theatrical performances in South India. Drawing from an existing corpus and reproduced in a different framework, the ritual tēvāram is embedded in a broad web of intertextual relationships comprised not only of items of repertoire and prescriptive manuals, but also of elements of ritual practices, shared beliefs, claims of social status, and ongoing negotiations between individual imagination and collective expectations. Usually a Nampūtiri domestic ritual, tēvāram is also carried out within Kūṭiyāṭṭam performances. Through a detailed analysis, I argue that the enactment of tēvāram on stage is not merely the stylized reproduction of a religious service, but it is rather an integral part of the narrative and aesthetic body of the theater practice. The performative and textual milieu of tēvāram creates scope for variations that modify both the plot and the tēvāram ritual itself. Kūṭiyāṭṭam-tēvāram thus becomes a transformative action and a tool of negotiation in the positioning of individuals within the social matrix.