Abstract Following the 2022 CDE conference’s concern regarding “how theatre and the city are productively embroiled and [. . .] how contemporary Anglophone theatre has redefined [. . .] [and blurred the] borders between centre and periphery, street and stage, performer and spectator” (Garson et al.), I will focus on Tim Price’s Protest Song, which was commissioned by the National Theatre and was staged there in December 2013. Setting the play in the streets of London in front of the iconic urban space of St Paul’s Cathedral, starring a homeless main character, and transgressing the boundaries between theatrical and actual spaces, Price arguably questions conventional urban and social binaries as well as economic and social hierarchies. With the help of experimental and critical strategies, he examines the city street movement Occupy Wall Street and its repercussions. The present article analyses these strategies and asks how they represent, perform, question, and assess urban hierarchies, city street activism, and the financial sector, as they are symbolised by the (urban and mental) spaces of London as capital and London as city of capital. I will furthermore look into how Price’s strategies reframe social inequality and turbo-capitalism as well as to what extent they redefine the borders between centre and periphery, street and stage, performer and spectator.
{"title":"Criticising Capitalism in the City and on the Stage: The City Street Movement Occupy Wall Street and Tim Price’s Protest Song","authors":"Christine Schwanecke","doi":"10.1515/jcde-2023-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2023-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Following the 2022 CDE conference’s concern regarding “how theatre and the city are productively embroiled and [. . .] how contemporary Anglophone theatre has redefined [. . .] [and blurred the] borders between centre and periphery, street and stage, performer and spectator” (Garson et al.), I will focus on Tim Price’s Protest Song, which was commissioned by the National Theatre and was staged there in December 2013. Setting the play in the streets of London in front of the iconic urban space of St Paul’s Cathedral, starring a homeless main character, and transgressing the boundaries between theatrical and actual spaces, Price arguably questions conventional urban and social binaries as well as economic and social hierarchies. With the help of experimental and critical strategies, he examines the city street movement Occupy Wall Street and its repercussions. The present article analyses these strategies and asks how they represent, perform, question, and assess urban hierarchies, city street activism, and the financial sector, as they are symbolised by the (urban and mental) spaces of London as capital and London as city of capital. I will furthermore look into how Price’s strategies reframe social inequality and turbo-capitalism as well as to what extent they redefine the borders between centre and periphery, street and stage, performer and spectator.","PeriodicalId":41187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Drama in English","volume":"11 1","pages":"157 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45331734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Francis Wilker, Glauber Coradesqui, Verônica Veloso
Abstract This article introduces the concept of a walkshop, an artistic and pedagogical practice based on walking and engaging in encounters with the cityscape. Performers and participants partake in an experience that mediates other forms of relationship with the city while they circulate, contemplate, and discover its spaces, acknowledging its inhabitants and their singularities. When we focus attention on the path and the act of walking, the focus of this movement shifts away from the point that we are directed towards and becomes the journey itself. Moving in a nonfunctional manner transforms walking into an artistic, aesthetic, and political action. As our case in point for this reflection, we concentrate on Walkshop Paris which took place in the French capital on 24 June 2022 during the “Theatre and the City” conference.
{"title":"Walkshop Paris: Notes on a Creative Process with the Urban Landscape","authors":"Francis Wilker, Glauber Coradesqui, Verônica Veloso","doi":"10.1515/jcde-2023-0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2023-0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article introduces the concept of a walkshop, an artistic and pedagogical practice based on walking and engaging in encounters with the cityscape. Performers and participants partake in an experience that mediates other forms of relationship with the city while they circulate, contemplate, and discover its spaces, acknowledging its inhabitants and their singularities. When we focus attention on the path and the act of walking, the focus of this movement shifts away from the point that we are directed towards and becomes the journey itself. Moving in a nonfunctional manner transforms walking into an artistic, aesthetic, and political action. As our case in point for this reflection, we concentrate on Walkshop Paris which took place in the French capital on 24 June 2022 during the “Theatre and the City” conference.","PeriodicalId":41187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Drama in English","volume":"11 1","pages":"207 - 231"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45447489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In The Ontology of the Accident, Catherine Malabou describes the phenomenon of a “form born of the accident, born by accident, a kind of accident,” when due to a “deep cut” in a biography, the individual’s path of life trajectory splits and a “new, unprecedented persona comes to live with the former person” (1–2). This article proposes that Martyna Majok’s 2018 Pulitzer-awarded drama Cost of Living can be understood through Malabou’s extensive work on physical trauma and ruptures to the human life cycle as a result of accidents. In Majok’s work, two intertwining impositions of a new form on an old form are explored through the characters of Ani, a Polish immigrant who has become quadriplegic following a tragic car crash, and Jess, a first-generation graduate who struggles both financially and emotionally to find her place in a city hostile to immigrants. The city backdrop of the play, described by Majok as “the urban East of America” (5), acts as perimeter of and boundary to mobility, but also as a conceptual frame. The article uses Malabou’s concept of destructive plasticity to explore how the city with its inbound and outbound mobility becomes a spatial and political frame for articulating the consequences of the lack of exteriority which usually serves as a mental escape and space of existential relief.
{"title":"The Impossibility of Fleeing: The Deconstruction of Urban Space in Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living","authors":"Anna Bendrat","doi":"10.1515/jcde-2023-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2023-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In The Ontology of the Accident, Catherine Malabou describes the phenomenon of a “form born of the accident, born by accident, a kind of accident,” when due to a “deep cut” in a biography, the individual’s path of life trajectory splits and a “new, unprecedented persona comes to live with the former person” (1–2). This article proposes that Martyna Majok’s 2018 Pulitzer-awarded drama Cost of Living can be understood through Malabou’s extensive work on physical trauma and ruptures to the human life cycle as a result of accidents. In Majok’s work, two intertwining impositions of a new form on an old form are explored through the characters of Ani, a Polish immigrant who has become quadriplegic following a tragic car crash, and Jess, a first-generation graduate who struggles both financially and emotionally to find her place in a city hostile to immigrants. The city backdrop of the play, described by Majok as “the urban East of America” (5), acts as perimeter of and boundary to mobility, but also as a conceptual frame. The article uses Malabou’s concept of destructive plasticity to explore how the city with its inbound and outbound mobility becomes a spatial and political frame for articulating the consequences of the lack of exteriority which usually serves as a mental escape and space of existential relief.","PeriodicalId":41187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Drama in English","volume":"11 1","pages":"120 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43963298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Punchdrunk is often considered the pioneer within the field of immersive theatre, which “[places] the audience at the heart of the work” (Machon 22) and abolishes the distinction between stage and auditorium to merge them into one single space. Founded by Felix Barrett in 2000, the British company is known for creating detailed theatrical worlds that inhabit the space of disused buildings in which the audience is invited to roam free. Whilst most of Punchdrunk’s productions maintain a separation between the real world and the imagined world by staying within the confines of a building, Kabeiroi (2017) opens up to the busy streets of London and immerses the participants in real life. This ambulatory theatrical exploration superimposes the world of fiction onto the geography of the city, weaving a web of complex interactions between the two. How does Kabeiroi interact with the city it pervades? To what extent does the urban space inform the performance, and, conversely, does the immediate reality impact the participants’ experience and immersive feeling? Using concepts such as performance walks (Tomlin), “host” and “ghost” (McLucas), frames (Goffman), and errant immersion (Alston), this article explores the way Kabeiroi blurs the boundaries between street and stage, participants, performers, and passersby, reality and fiction.
{"title":"Punchdrunk’s Kabeiroi: Taking Immersive Theatre to the Streets","authors":"Déborah Prudhon","doi":"10.1515/jcde-2023-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2023-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Punchdrunk is often considered the pioneer within the field of immersive theatre, which “[places] the audience at the heart of the work” (Machon 22) and abolishes the distinction between stage and auditorium to merge them into one single space. Founded by Felix Barrett in 2000, the British company is known for creating detailed theatrical worlds that inhabit the space of disused buildings in which the audience is invited to roam free. Whilst most of Punchdrunk’s productions maintain a separation between the real world and the imagined world by staying within the confines of a building, Kabeiroi (2017) opens up to the busy streets of London and immerses the participants in real life. This ambulatory theatrical exploration superimposes the world of fiction onto the geography of the city, weaving a web of complex interactions between the two. How does Kabeiroi interact with the city it pervades? To what extent does the urban space inform the performance, and, conversely, does the immediate reality impact the participants’ experience and immersive feeling? Using concepts such as performance walks (Tomlin), “host” and “ghost” (McLucas), frames (Goffman), and errant immersion (Alston), this article explores the way Kabeiroi blurs the boundaries between street and stage, participants, performers, and passersby, reality and fiction.","PeriodicalId":41187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Drama in English","volume":"11 1","pages":"26 - 38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43535479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Cities and borders are interlinked by a necropolitics that is particularly pertinent on the coasts of the European continent and the settlements along its coastlines. While these borderscapes become what Achille Mbembe refers to as death worlds, refugee cityscapes turn into Fanonian zones-of-nonbeing. The play The Jungle (2017) by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, the ensuing travelling festival The Walk (2021) featuring the performative journey of the refugee girl Little Amal, and the play Lampedusa (2015) by Anders Lustgarten engage with these necrogeographies and the way in which refugees and migrants are exposed to necropower in these spaces of ontological negation. This article maps how the refugee camp builds on colonial practices of citizenship and racialisation extended to the biopolitical city, delineating the interrelation of cities and borders through necropower. It also discusses the refugee camp as necrocity and necrocitizenship while exploring theatre as a means of transgressing colonial racial capitalist (b)order in the city in the three migration performances. By bringing these performances and geographies in conversation, the article explores theatre as rebellious practice that creates spaces for the necropolitical and biopolitical to touch and to move towards a shared humanity.
{"title":"Interrelating Necrocities and Borderscapes in the Migration Performances The Jungle, Lampedusa, and The Walk","authors":"Elisabeth Knittelfelder","doi":"10.1515/jcde-2023-0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2023-0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Cities and borders are interlinked by a necropolitics that is particularly pertinent on the coasts of the European continent and the settlements along its coastlines. While these borderscapes become what Achille Mbembe refers to as death worlds, refugee cityscapes turn into Fanonian zones-of-nonbeing. The play The Jungle (2017) by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, the ensuing travelling festival The Walk (2021) featuring the performative journey of the refugee girl Little Amal, and the play Lampedusa (2015) by Anders Lustgarten engage with these necrogeographies and the way in which refugees and migrants are exposed to necropower in these spaces of ontological negation. This article maps how the refugee camp builds on colonial practices of citizenship and racialisation extended to the biopolitical city, delineating the interrelation of cities and borders through necropower. It also discusses the refugee camp as necrocity and necrocitizenship while exploring theatre as a means of transgressing colonial racial capitalist (b)order in the city in the three migration performances. By bringing these performances and geographies in conversation, the article explores theatre as rebellious practice that creates spaces for the necropolitical and biopolitical to touch and to move towards a shared humanity.","PeriodicalId":41187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Drama in English","volume":"11 1","pages":"102 - 119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48540824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Contemporary Britain is experiencing an enduring and devastating housing crisis spearheaded in 1980 by Margaret Thatcher’s introduction of the “Right to Buy” social housing and sustained by an enduring neoliberal hegemony. This article contextualises the housing crisis through data and information drawn from journalism, charities, and government. It then explores how the crisis is conveyed in two recent plays. Sh!t Theatre’s 2016 Letters to Windsor House focusses on company members Louise Mothersole and Rebecca Biscuit’s overcrowded and unsafe North London flatshare. Home is a verbatim show set in a hostel for homeless young people in East London, produced by the National Theatre and co-researched and directed by Nadia Fall in 2013. As well as exploring the shows’ narration of the devastating social and material impacts of the housing crisis, the article draws on urban theory’s concept of psychogeography alongside video documentation of both plays to explore how they affectively convey the spatial and emotional consequences of the crisis. The article shows how the spatialisation of theatre – not just its textual elements – helps articulate both the spatiality of the housing crisis in contemporary urban life in neoliberal Britain and, especially, how that spatiality feels. It makes the case for thinking psychogeographically about theatre in order to focus on the ways it braids spatial and emotional understanding – crucial factors for properly comprehending, and potentially changing, the UK housing crisis.
{"title":"A Sense of Place: Staging Psychogeographies of the UK Housing Crisis","authors":"Jen Harvie","doi":"10.1515/jcde-2023-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2023-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Contemporary Britain is experiencing an enduring and devastating housing crisis spearheaded in 1980 by Margaret Thatcher’s introduction of the “Right to Buy” social housing and sustained by an enduring neoliberal hegemony. This article contextualises the housing crisis through data and information drawn from journalism, charities, and government. It then explores how the crisis is conveyed in two recent plays. Sh!t Theatre’s 2016 Letters to Windsor House focusses on company members Louise Mothersole and Rebecca Biscuit’s overcrowded and unsafe North London flatshare. Home is a verbatim show set in a hostel for homeless young people in East London, produced by the National Theatre and co-researched and directed by Nadia Fall in 2013. As well as exploring the shows’ narration of the devastating social and material impacts of the housing crisis, the article draws on urban theory’s concept of psychogeography alongside video documentation of both plays to explore how they affectively convey the spatial and emotional consequences of the crisis. The article shows how the spatialisation of theatre – not just its textual elements – helps articulate both the spatiality of the housing crisis in contemporary urban life in neoliberal Britain and, especially, how that spatiality feels. It makes the case for thinking psychogeographically about theatre in order to focus on the ways it braids spatial and emotional understanding – crucial factors for properly comprehending, and potentially changing, the UK housing crisis.","PeriodicalId":41187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Drama in English","volume":"11 1","pages":"78 - 101"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49240211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Tanika Gupta’s neo-Victorian, postcolonial rewriting of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (2011) examines how India and Britain’s colonial history continues to shape both countries until the present day. The play is set in and around Calcutta in the years following 1861. Gupta thus not only relocates Pip’s transformation from village boy to metropolitan businessman to nineteenth-century India but also to a particularly fragile moment in the history of the British Empire: a subcontinent grappling with the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, facing the early years of the British Raj. Gupta interrogates narrow understandings of “Victorian” as located within the British Isles, explicating the contrapuntal reading practice that Edward W. Said calls for when highlighting Victorian literature’s implicit endorsement of imperialist ideologies and politics. Examining the play’s engagement with imperial power structures, this article centres on those moments that hint at the destabilisation of, if not revolt against, British rule. Gupta juxtaposes canonised narratives of undisturbed imperial hegemony with a tale of incessant colonial resistance. In doing so, she challenges those historiographical as well as fictional (neo-)Victorian texts that silence the sustained efforts and influence of anticolonial movements and that frame the history of Empire in terms of continuity rather than rupture.
塔尼卡·古普塔对查尔斯·狄更斯的《远大前程》(2011)进行了新维多利亚时代、后殖民时代的改写，探讨了印度和英国的殖民历史如何继续塑造这两个国家，直到今天。该剧以1861年后的加尔各答及其周边地区为背景。因此，古普塔不仅将皮普从乡村男孩到都市商人的转变重新定位到19世纪的印度，而且还将其置于大英帝国历史上一个特别脆弱的时刻:一个次大陆正在努力应对1857年印度叛乱的后果，面对英国统治的早期。古普塔质疑了对不列颠群岛“维多利亚”的狭隘理解，解释了爱德华·w·赛义德(Edward W. Said)在强调维多利亚文学对帝国主义意识形态和政治的含蓄认可时所呼吁的对位式阅读实践。本文考察了该剧与帝国权力结构的关系，重点关注那些暗示英国统治不稳定(如果不是反抗的话)的时刻。古普塔将未受干扰的帝国霸权的经典叙述与持续不断的殖民抵抗的故事并列。在这样做的过程中，她挑战了那些历史编纂和虚构的(新)维多利亚文本，这些文本沉默了反殖民运动的持续努力和影响，并从连续性而不是断裂的角度构建了帝国的历史。
{"title":"“Through the Pen to Begin with”: Anticolonial Resistance in Tanika Gupta’s Adaptation of Great Expectations","authors":"Marlena Tronicke","doi":"10.1515/jcde-2022-0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2022-0022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Tanika Gupta’s neo-Victorian, postcolonial rewriting of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (2011) examines how India and Britain’s colonial history continues to shape both countries until the present day. The play is set in and around Calcutta in the years following 1861. Gupta thus not only relocates Pip’s transformation from village boy to metropolitan businessman to nineteenth-century India but also to a particularly fragile moment in the history of the British Empire: a subcontinent grappling with the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, facing the early years of the British Raj. Gupta interrogates narrow understandings of “Victorian” as located within the British Isles, explicating the contrapuntal reading practice that Edward W. Said calls for when highlighting Victorian literature’s implicit endorsement of imperialist ideologies and politics. Examining the play’s engagement with imperial power structures, this article centres on those moments that hint at the destabilisation of, if not revolt against, British rule. Gupta juxtaposes canonised narratives of undisturbed imperial hegemony with a tale of incessant colonial resistance. In doing so, she challenges those historiographical as well as fictional (neo-)Victorian texts that silence the sustained efforts and influence of anticolonial movements and that frame the history of Empire in terms of continuity rather than rupture.","PeriodicalId":41187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Drama in English","volume":"10 1","pages":"283 - 301"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47820106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ian Ward. The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021, 221 pp., £80 (hardback), £75 (PDF ebook).","authors":"S. Fiorato","doi":"10.1515/jcde-2022-0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2022-0028","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41187,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Drama in English","volume":"10 1","pages":"379 - 383"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42290290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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