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Constituting the first comprehensive look at Ruth Maleczech's work,
Jessica Brater's companion is a landmark study in innovative
theatre practice, bringing together biography, critical analysis,
and original interviews to establish a portrait of this Obie-award
winning theatre artist. Tracing Maleczech's background, training,
and influences, the volume contextualizes her work and the founding
of Mabou Mines within the wider landscape of American avant-garde
theatre. It considers her performances and productions, revealing
both her interest in making ordinary women important onstage, and
her predilection for resurrecting extraordinary women from history
and finding their resonances within a contemporary theatrical
context. Brater considers Maleczech's investment in redrawing the
boundaries of what women are allowed to say, both on stage and off,
and shows how her commitment to radical artistic and production
risks has reshaped the contours of a contemporary theatrical
experience. Highlights of the volume include discussion of
productions such as Mabou Mines' Lear, Dead End Kids, Hajj, Lucia's
Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, Red Beads, and La Divina
Caricatura, as well as a close look at Maleczech's final
work-in-progress, Imagining the Imaginary Invalid.
Drawing on rich interdisciplinary research that has laced the
emerging subject of drag studies as an academic discipline, this
book examines how drag performance is a political, socio-cultural
practice with a widespread lineage throughout the history of
performance. This volume maps the multi-threaded contexts of
contemporary practices while rooting them in their fabulous
historical past and memory. The book examines drag histories and
what drag does with history, how it enacts or tells stories about
remembering and the past. Featuring work about the USA, UK and
Ireland, Japan, Australia, Brazil and Barbados, this book allows
the reader to engage with a range of archival research including
camp and history; ethnicity and drag; queering ballet through drag;
the connections between drag king and queen history; queering
pantomime performance; drag and military veterans; Puerto Rican
drag performers and historical film.
Beckett and nothing invites its readership to understand the
complex ways in which the Beckett canon both suggests and resists
turning nothing into something by looking at specific, sometimes
almost invisible ways in which 'little nothings' pervade the
Beckett canon. The volume has two main functions: on the one hand,
it looks at 'nothing' not only as a content but also a set of
rhetorical strategies to reconsider afresh classic Beckett problems
such as Irishness, silence, value, marginality, politics and the
relationships between modernism and postmodernism and absence and
presence. On the other, it focuses on 'nothing' in order to assess
how the Beckett oeuvre can help us rethink contemporary
preoccupations with materialism, neurology, sculpture, music and
television. The volume is a scholarly intervention in the fields of
Beckett studies which offers its chapters as case studies to use in
the classroom. It will prove of interest to advanced students and
scholars in English, French, Comparative Literature, Drama, Visual
Studies, Philosophy, Music, Cinema and TV studies. -- .
This study explores the ways in which playtexts have evolved in
relation to the sociocultural and cognitive conditions of a
mediatized age, and how they, in form and content, respond to this
environment and open up new critical possibilities in text and
performance. The study combines theatre and media theory through
the innovative concept of 'mediatized dramaturgy' and offers
conceptual reflections on the ways in which a playtext negotiates
the new reality of contemporary culture. The book scrutinizes the
form of playtexts and works through the exchange between text and
performance by exploring contemporary works such as Simon
Stephens's Pornography, Caryl Churchill's Love and Information, and
David Greig's The Yes/No Plays, and their selected productions.
Offering a pioneering intervention that expands discussions about
the mediatization of theatre, and new playwriting, Mediatized
Dramaturgyproposes areas for discussion that appeal to researchers,
audiences and practitioners with an interest in the sub-field of
media and performance, and British and North American drama and
theatre. Media technologies and their socio-cultural repercussions
have increasingly influenced theatre, particularly since the
ubiquitous prevalence of digital technologies from the 1990s
onwards. Consequently, new modes such as digital and intermedial
theatre have come to populate and transform the theatre practice
and scholarship. In this changing theatrical landscape, what has
happened to plays in the historically text-oriented British
theatre? How has playtext changed in an age of theatre marked by
mediatization and its possibilities?
Beckett is acknowledged as one of the greatest playwrights and most
innovative fiction writers of the twentieth century with an
international appeal that bridges both general and more specialist
readers. This collection of essays by renowned Beckett scholar
Enoch Brater offers a delightfully original, playful and intriguing
series of approaches to Beckett's drama, fiction and poetry.
Beginning with a chapter entitled 'Things to Ponder While Waiting
for Godot', each essay deftly illuminates aspects of Beckett's
thinking and craft, making astute and often surprising discoveries
along the way. In a series of beguiling discussions such as 'From
Dada to Didi: Beckett and the Art of His Century', 'Beckett's
Devious Interventions, or Fun with Cube Roots' and 'The Seated
Figure on Beckett's Stage', Brater proves the perfect companion and
commentator on Beckett's work, helping readers to approach it with
fresh eyes and a renewed sense of the author's unique aesthetic.
'An eloquent, witty and erudite collection of essays that
illuminates Beckett's drama and prose fiction from a number of
complementary perspectives. Brater's precise explication of the
interwoven tropes of language and mise-en-scene is combined with a
fine grasp of the overarching structure of work ... to create a
rich and suggestive series of reflections on Beckett's aesthetics.'
- Robert Gordon, Professor of Drama, Goldsmiths, University of
London
Authenticity is one of the major values of our time. It is visible
everywhere, from clothing to food to self-help books. While it is
such a prevalent phenomenon, it is also very evasive. This study
analyses the 'culture of authenticity' as it relates to theatre and
establishes a theoretical framework for analysis. Daniel Schulz
argues that authenticity is sought out and marked by the individual
and springs from a culture that is perceived as inherently fake and
lacking depth. The study examines three types of performances that
exemplify this structure of feeling: intimate theatre seen in
Forced Entertainment productions such as Quizoola! (1996, 2015), as
well as one-on-one performances, such as Oentroerend Goed's
Internal (2009); immersive theatres as illustrated by Punchdrunk's
shows The Masque of the Red Death (2007) and The Drowned Man (2013)
which provide a visceral, sensate understanding for audiences;
finally, the study scrutinises the popular category of documentary
theatre through various examples such as Robin Soan's Talking to
Terrorists (2005), David Hare's Stuff Happens (2004), Edmund
Burke's Black Watch (2007) and Dennis Kelly's pseudo-documentary
play Taking Care of Baby (2007). It is specifically the value of
the document that lends such performances their truth-value and
consequently their authenticity. The study analyses how the success
of these disparate categories of performance can be explained
through a common concern with notions of truth and authenticity. It
argues that this hunger for authentic, unmediated experience is
characteristic of a structure of feeling that has superseded
postmodernism and that actively seeks to resignify artistic and
cultural practices of the everyday.
Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of
History takes up the urgent need to think about temporality and its
relationship to history in new ways, focusing on theatre and
performance as mediums through which politically innovative
temporalities, divorced from historical processionism and the
future, are inaugurated. Wickstrom is guided by three temporal
concepts: the new present, the penultimate, and kairos, as
developed by Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Antonio Negri
respectively. She works across a field of performance that includes
play texts by Aime Cesaire and C.L.R. James, and performances from
Ni'Ja Whitson to Cassils, the Gob Squad to William Kentridge and
African colonial revolts, Hofesh Schechter to Forced Entertainment
to Andrew Schneider and Omar Rajeh. Along the way she also engages
with Walter Benjamin, black international and radical thought and
performance, Bruno Latour, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's
logistics and the hold, and accelerationism. Representing a
significant contribution to the growing interest in temporality in
Theatre and Performance Studies, the book offers alternatives to
what have been prevailing temporal preoccupations in those fields.
Countering investments in phenomenology, finitude, ghosting,
repetition, and return, Wickstrom argues that theatre and
performance can create a fiery sense of how to change time and
thereby nominate a new possibility for what it means to live.
What do we watch when we watch war? Who manages public perceptions
of war and how? Watching War on the Twenty-First-Century Stage:
Spectacles of Conflict is the first publication to examine how
theatre in the UK has staged, debated and challenged the ways in
which spectacle is habitually weaponized in times of war. The
'battle for hearts and minds' and the 'war of images' are fields of
combat that can be as powerful as armed conflict. And today,
spectacle and conflict - the two concepts that frame the book -
have joined forces via audio-visual technologies in ways that are
more powerful than ever. Clare Finburgh's original and
interdisciplinary interrogation provides a richly provocative
account of the structuring role that spectacle plays in warfare,
engaging with the works of philosopher Guy Debord, cultural
theorist Jean Baudrillard, visual studies specialist Marie-Jose
Mondzain, and performance scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann. She offers
coherence to a large and expanding field of theatrical war
representation by analysing in careful detail a spectrum of works
as diverse as expressionist drama, documentary theatre, comedy,
musical satire and dance theatre. She demonstrates how features
unique to the theatrical art, namely the construction of a fiction
in the presence of the audience, can present possibilities for a
more informed engagement with how spectacles of war are produced
and circulated. If we watch with more resistance, we may contribute
in significant ways to the demilitarization of images. And what if
this were the first step towards a literal demilitarization?
In a context of financial crisis that has often produced a feeling
of identity crisis for the individual, the theatre has provided a
unifying forum, treating spectators as citizens. This book
critically deals with representative plays and playwrights who have
stood out in the UK and internationally in the post-recession era,
delivering theatre that in the process of being truthful to the
contemporary experience has also redefined theatrical form and
content. Built around a series of case-studies of seminal
contemporary plays exploring issues of social and political crisis,
the volume is augmented by interviews with UK and international
directors, artistic directors and the playwrights whose work is
examined. As well as considering UK stage productions, Angelaki
analyses European, North American and Australian productions, of
post-2000 plays by writers including: Caryl Churchill, Mike
Bartlett, Dennis Kelly, Simon Stephens, Martin Crimp, debbie tucker
green, Duncan Macmillan, Nick Payne and Lucy Prebble. At the heart
of the analysis and of the plays discussed is an appreciation of
what interconnects artists and audiences, enabling the kind of
mutual recognition that fosters the feeling of collectivity. As the
book argues, this is the state whereby the theatre meets its social
imperative by eradicating the distance between stage and spectator
and creating a genuinely shared space of ideas and dialogue, taking
on topics including the economy, materialism, debt culture, the
environment, urban protest, social media and mental health. Social
and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain demonstrates that
such contemporary playwriting invests in and engenders moments of
performative reciprocity and spirituality so as to present the
audience with a cohesive collective experience.
In a context of financial crisis that has often produced a feeling
of identity crisis for the individual, the theatre has provided a
unifying forum, treating spectators as citizens. This book
critically deals with representative plays and playwrights who have
stood out in the UK and internationally in the post-recession era,
delivering theatre that in the process of being truthful to the
contemporary experience has also redefined theatrical form and
content. Built around a series of case-studies of seminal
contemporary plays exploring issues of social and political crisis,
the volume is augmented by interviews with UK and international
directors, artistic directors and the playwrights whose work is
examined. As well as considering UK stage productions, Angelaki
analyses European, North American and Australian productions, of
post-2000 plays by writers including: Caryl Churchill, Mike
Bartlett, Dennis Kelly, Simon Stephens, Martin Crimp, debbie tucker
green, Duncan Macmillan, Nick Payne and Lucy Prebble. At the heart
of the analysis and of the plays discussed is an appreciation of
what interconnects artists and audiences, enabling the kind of
mutual recognition that fosters the feeling of collectivity. As the
book argues, this is the state whereby the theatre meets its social
imperative by eradicating the distance between stage and spectator
and creating a genuinely shared space of ideas and dialogue, taking
on topics including the economy, materialism, debt culture, the
environment, urban protest, social media and mental health. Social
and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain demonstrates that
such contemporary playwriting invests in and engenders moments of
performative reciprocity and spirituality so as to present the
audience with a cohesive collective experience.
Authenticity is one of the major values of our time. It is visible
everywhere, from clothing to food to self-help books. While it is
such a prevalent phenomenon, it is also very evasive. This study
analyses the 'culture of authenticity' as it relates to theatre and
establishes a theoretical framework for analysis. Daniel Schulz
argues that authenticity is sought out and marked by the individual
and springs from a culture that is perceived as inherently fake and
lacking depth. The study examines three types of performances that
exemplify this structure of feeling: intimate theatre seen in
Forced Entertainment productions such as Quizoola! (1996, 2015), as
well as one-on-one performances, such as Oentroerend Goed's
Internal (2009); immersive theatres as illustrated by Punchdrunk's
shows The Masque of the Red Death (2007) and The Drowned Man (2013)
which provide a visceral, sensate understanding for audiences;
finally, the study scrutinises the popular category of documentary
theatre through various examples such as Robin Soan's Talking to
Terrorists (2005), David Hare's Stuff Happens (2004), Edmund
Burke's Black Watch (2007) and Dennis Kelly's pseudo-documentary
play Taking Care of Baby (2007). It is specifically the value of
the document that lends such performances their truth-value and
consequently their authenticity. The study analyses how the success
of these disparate categories of performance can be explained
through a common concern with notions of truth and authenticity. It
argues that this hunger for authentic, unmediated experience is
characteristic of a structure of feeling that has superseded
postmodernism and that actively seeks to resignify artistic and
cultural practices of the everyday.
Readers and acolytes of the vital early 1950s-mid 1960s writers
known as the Beat Generation tend to be familiar with the prose and
poetry by the seminal authors of this period: Jack Kerouac, Gregory
Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, and many others. Yet
all of these authors, as well as other less well-known Beat
figures, also wrote plays-and these, together with their
countercultural approaches to what could or should happen in the
theatre-shaped the dramatic experiments of the playwrights who came
after them, from Sam Shepard to Maria Irene Fornes, to the many
vanguard performance artists of the seventies. This volume, the
first of its kind, gathers essays about the exciting work in drama
and performance by and about the Beat Generation, ranging from the
well-known Beat figures such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, to
the "Afro-Beats" - LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Bob Kaufman, and
others. It offers original studies of the women Beats - Di Prima,
Bunny Lang - as well as groups like the Living Theater who in this
era first challenged the literal and physical boundaries of the
performance space itself.
Readers and acolytes of the vital early 1950s-mid 1960s writers
known as the Beat Generation tend to be familiar with the prose and
poetry by the seminal authors of this period: Jack Kerouac, Gregory
Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, and many others. Yet
all of these authors, as well as other less well-known Beat
figures, also wrote plays-and these, together with their
countercultural approaches to what could or should happen in the
theatre-shaped the dramatic experiments of the playwrights who came
after them, from Sam Shepard to Maria Irene Fornes, to the many
vanguard performance artists of the seventies. This volume, the
first of its kind, gathers essays about the exciting work in drama
and performance by and about the Beat Generation, ranging from the
well-known Beat figures such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, to
the "Afro-Beats" - LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Bob Kaufman, and
others. It offers original studies of the women Beats - Di Prima,
Bunny Lang - as well as groups like the Living Theater who in this
era first challenged the literal and physical boundaries of the
performance space itself.
Constituting the first comprehensive look at Ruth Maleczech's work,
Jessica Brater's companion is a landmark study in innovative
theatre practice, bringing together biography, critical analysis,
and original interviews to establish a portrait of this Obie-award
winning theatre artist. Tracing Maleczech's background, training,
and influences, the volume contextualizes her work and the founding
of Mabou Mines within the wider landscape of American avant-garde
theatre. It considers her performances and productions, revealing
both her interest in making ordinary women important onstage, and
her predilection for resurrecting extraordinary women from history
and finding their resonances within a contemporary theatrical
context. Brater considers Maleczech's investment in redrawing the
boundaries of what women are allowed to say, both on stage and off,
and shows how her commitment to radical artistic and production
risks has reshaped the contours of a contemporary theatrical
experience. Highlights of the volume include discussion of
productions such as Mabou Mines' Lear, Dead End Kids, Hajj, Lucia's
Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, Red Beads, and La Divina
Caricatura, as well as a close look at Maleczech's final
work-in-progress, Imagining the Imaginary Invalid.
Talk-show confessions, online rants, stand-up routines,
inspirational speeches, banal reflections and calls to arms: we
live in an age of solo voices demanding to be heard. In The
Contemporary American Monologue Eddie Paterson looks at the
pioneering work of US artists Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, Anna
Deavere Smith and Karen Finley, and the development of solo
performance in the US as a method of cultural and political
critique. Ironic confession, post-punk poetry, investigations of
race and violence, and subversive polemic, this book reveals the
link between the rise of radical monologue in the late 20th century
and history of speechmaking, politics, civil rights, individual
freedom and the American Dream in the United States. It shows how
US artists are speaking back to the cultural, political and
economic forces that shape the world. Eddie Paterson traces the
importance of the monologue in Shakespeare, Brecht, Beckett,
Chekov, Pinter, O'Neill and Williams, before offering a
comprehensive analysis of several of the most influential and
innovative American practitioners of monologue performance. The
Contemporary American Monologue constitutes the first book-length
account of US monologists that links the tradition of oratory and
speechmaking in the colony to the appearance of solo performance as
a distinctly American phenomenon.
Bertolt Brecht's reputation as a flawed, irrelevant or difficult
thinker for the theatre can often go before him to such an extent
that we run the risk of forgetting the achievements that made him
and his company, the Berliner Ensemble, famous around the world.
David Barnett examines both Brecht the theorist and Brecht the
practitioner to reveal the complementary relationship between the
two.This book aims to sensitize the reader to the approaches Brecht
took to the world and the stage with a view to revealing just how
carefully he thought about and realized his vision of a
politicized, interventionist theatre. What emerges is a nuanced
understanding of his concepts, his work with actors and his
approaches to directing. The reader is encouraged to engage with
Brecht's method that sought to 'make theatre politically' in order
to locate the innovations he introduced into his stagecraft. There
are many examples given of how Brecht's ideas can be staged, and
the final chapter takes two very different plays and asks how a
Brechtian approach can enliven and illuminate their production.
Ultimately, the book invites readers, students and theatre-makers
to discover new ways of apprehending and making use of Brecht.
Bertolt Brecht's reputation as a flawed, irrelevant or difficult
thinker for the theatre can often go before him to such an extent
that we run the risk of forgetting the achievements that made him
and his company, the Berliner Ensemble, famous around the world.
David Barnett examines both Brecht the theorist and Brecht the
practitioner to reveal the complementary relationship between the
two.This book aims to sensitize the reader to the approaches Brecht
took to the world and the stage with a view to revealing just how
carefully he thought about and realized his vision of a
politicized, interventionist theatre. What emerges is a nuanced
understanding of his concepts, his work with actors and his
approaches to directing. The reader is encouraged to engage with
Brecht's method that sought to 'make theatre politically' in order
to locate the innovations he introduced into his stagecraft. There
are many examples given of how Brecht's ideas can be staged, and
the final chapter takes two very different plays and asks how a
Brechtian approach can enliven and illuminate their production.
Ultimately, the book invites readers, students and theatre-makers
to discover new ways of apprehending and making use of Brecht.
A Student Handbook to the Plays of Arthur Miller provides the
essential guide to Miller's most studied and revived dramas.
Authored by a team of leading scholars, it offers students a clear
analysis and detailed commentary on five of Miller's plays: Death
of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons
and Broken Glass. A consistent framework of analysis ensures that
whether readers want a summary of the play, a commentary on the
themes or characters, or a discussion of the work in performance,
they can readily find what they need to develop their understanding
and aid their appreciation of Miller's artistry. A chronology of
Miller's life and work helps to situate his oeuvre in context and
the introduction reinforces this by providing a clear overview of
his writing, its recurrent themes and how these are intertwined
with his life and times. For each play the author provides a
summary of the plot, followed by commentary on: the
contextthemescharactersstructure and languagethe play in production
(both on stage and screen adaptations)questions for studynotes on
words and phrases in the text The wealth of authoritative and clear
commentary on each play, together with further questions that
encourage comparison across Miller's work and related plays by
other leading writers, ensures that this is the clearest and
fullest guide to Miller's greatest plays.
To what extent is theatre a contagious practice, capable of undoing
and enlivening people and cultures? Theatres of Contagion responds
to some of the anxieties of our current political and cultural
climate by exploring theatre's status as a contagious cultural
force, questioning its role in the spread or control of medical,
psychological and emotional conditions and phenomena. Observing a
diverse range of practices from the early modern to contemporary
period, the volume considers how this contagion is understood to
happen and operate, its real and imagined effects, and how these
have been a source of pleasure and fear for theatre makers,
audiences and authorities. Drawing on perspectives from medicine,
neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, law and affect
theory, essays investigate some of the ways in which theatre can be
viewed as a powerful agent of containment and transmission. Among
the works analysed include a musical adaptation and an
intercultural variation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet; a
contemporary queer take on Hamlet; Grand Guignol and theatres of
horror; the writings and influence of Artaud; immersive theatre and
the work of Punchdrunk, and computer gaming and smartphone apps
When Martin Esslin published The Theatre of the Absurd in 1961 he
caught the pulse of Western drama as it burst into bold and
surprising new forms after the Second World War. Around the Absurd
is the first book to examine the history, impact, and legacy of
that theater. In provocative essays by leading critics from both
sides of the Atlantic (including Jan Kott, Herbert Blau, Katharine
Worth, Theodore Shank, and Benedict Nightingale), this forum
carries forward Esslin's seminal work by surveying the theater
terrain both before and after that time. Featuring original studies
of Maeterlinck, O'Neill, Ionesco, Beckett, Pinter, Fornes, and the
international scene of performance art, this timely collection
details the key role of the absurd in the transformation from a
modern to a postmodern repertory. Around the Absurd will appeal to
scholars, students, and critics of the dramatic arts as well as to
the theater-going public.
Presenting a rigorous critical investigation of the reinvigoration
of the political in contemporary British theatre, Ecologies of
Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre provides a fresh
understanding of how theatre has engaged with precarity, affect,
risk, intimacy, care and relationality in recent times. The study
makes a compelling case for reading precarity as a 'sticky'
theatrical trope which carries the potential to re-animate our
understanding of identity politics and responsibility for the lives
of Others in an age of uncertainty. Approaching precarity as an
ecology cutting across various practices, themes and aesthetics,
the book features a comprehensive selection of theatre examples
staged in the UK since the 1990s. Works by debbie tucker green,
Alistair McDowall, Complicite, Simon Stephens, Stan's Cafe, Mike
Bartlett, Caryl Churchill, The Paper Birds, and Belarus Free
Theatre are put in dialogue with interdisciplinary feminist
vocabularies developed by Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant
and Isabell Lorey. In focusing on areas such as children and youth
at risk, human rights, environmental ethics and the politics of
debt, the study makes a vital contribution to the burgeoning field
of politics and theatre in the 21st century.
This book explores the ways that council estates have been
represented in England across a range of performance forms. Drawing
on examples from mainstream, site-specific and resident-led
performance works, it considers the political potential of
contemporary performance practices concerned with the council
estate. Depictions of the council estate are brought into dialogue
with global representations of what Chris Richardson and Hans
Skott-Myhre call the 'hood', to tease out the specific features of
the British context and situate the work globally. Katie Beswick's
study provides a timely contribution to the ongoing national and
global interest in social housing. As the housing market grows ever
more insecure, and estates are charged with political rhetoric,
theatre and socially engaged art set or taking place on estates
takes on a new potency. Mainstream theatre works examined include
Rita, Sue and Bob Too and A State Affair at the Soho Theatre, Port
at the National Theatre, and DenMarked at the Battersea Arts
Centre. The book also explores the National Youth Theatre's Slick
and Roger Hiorns' Seizure, as well as community-based and resident
led performances by Fourthland, Jordan McKenzie, Fugitive Images
and Jane English.
What do we mean when we describe theatre as political today? How
might theatre-makers' provocations for change need to be
differently designed when addressing the precarious
spectator-subject of twenty- first century neoliberalism? In this
important study Liz Tomlin interrogates the influential theories of
Jacques Ranciere to propose a new framework of analysis through
which contemporary political dramaturgies can be investigated.
Drawing, in particular, on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Lilie
Chouliaraki and Judith Butler, Tomlin argues that the capacities of
the contemporary and future spectator to be 'effected' or
'affected' by politically-engaged theatre need to be urgently
re-evaluated. Central to this study is Tomlin's theorized
figuration of the neoliberal spectator-subject as precarious,
individualized and ironic, with a reduced capacity for empathy,
agency and the ability to imagine better futures. This, in turn,
leads to a predilection for a response to injustice that is driven
by a concern for the feelings of the subject-self, rather than
concern for the suffering other. These characteristics are argued
to shape even those spectator-subjects towards the left of the
political spectrum, thus necessitating a careful reconsideration of
new and long-standing dramaturgies of political provocation.
Dramaturgies examined include the ironic invitations of Made in
China and Martin Crimp, the exploration of affect in Kieran
Hurley's Heads Up, the new sincerity that characterizes the work of
Andy Smith, the turn to the staging of the spectators' 'other' in
Developing Artists' Queens of Syria and Chris Thorpe and Rachel
Chavkin's Confirmation, and the community activism of Common
Wealth's The Deal Versus the People.
Robert Lepage and Ex Machina's theatricality is inter-disciplinary
and inter-cultural, and, inevitably, characterised by intense
hybridity. These complex features - while the source of an
internationally celebrated theatrical innovation, and considerable
pleasure for audiences - have nevertheless also prompted notable
criticism. Robert Lepage / Ex Machina: Revolutions in Theatrical
Space reads against the grain of criticism, providing readers with
a fresh, practice-based and critical perspective by arguing that
these innovative aesthetic practices operate simultaneously as
positive cultural principles. Drawing directly on case studies of
process and a wide range of productions, and building from in-depth
interviews, this book intertwines theoretical and practical
concerns, weighing them in balance, and, in doing so, produces for
the reader a new critical perspective on Robert Lepage and Ex
Machina. Through the course of his analysis, James Reynolds
illustrates that underpinning the inter-disciplinary eclecticism of
Ex Machina's practice is a profound engagement with social,
cultural and political difference. Running through the work is a
drive to create performances built around a principle of
contradiction, through which audiences can apprehend difference in
its myriad, infinite forms. Consequently, Robert Lepage / Ex
Machina explores this embracing of difference in all its depth and
complexity, opening a key way for readers to develop both their
practical and theoretical appreciation of this practice. At the
same time, the discourse around this vital, forward-looking
practice is rebooted, not only by re-thinking its contribution to
the vocabulary of drama and theatre, but also through revealing and
assessing the critical discourse it initiates through performance.
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