Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.5325/pacicoasphil.56.1.0027
Méline Dumot
Richard III is the perfect Shakespearean figure to look into the clowning tradition at play in the early modern theatrical world. Richard is a wise fool, who delivers the truth under comic appearances, as well as a buffoon, “deformed, unfinish'd, sent before [his] time” (Richard III, 1.3.21), who amuses the audience. Thomas Ostermeier, world renowned director of the Schaubühne Theatre in Berlin (since 1999), presented his Richard III at the Avignon Festival (France) in July 2015. His favorite actor, Lars Eidinger, largely contributed to his success. The latter chose to play a particularly dynamic Richard, in connection with the figure of the medieval Vice. Richard's role marks the pinnacle of Eidinger's acting, with a strong emphasis on improvisation. The spectators are constantly solicited. Improvisation is the perfect form of communication for the clown who mocks his audience and adapts to the conditions of live performance. Thomas Ostermeier, a keen reader of Shakespearean criticism, revisits the figure of the medieval Vice: he deploys twenty-first-century playing techniques in order to explore a complex Shakespearean heritage. Eidinger’s play mode is a perfect illustration of how the clown figure can be revisited to offer a new experience to twenty-first-century audiences.
{"title":"A Contemporary Clown","authors":"Méline Dumot","doi":"10.5325/pacicoasphil.56.1.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/pacicoasphil.56.1.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Richard III is the perfect Shakespearean figure to look into the clowning tradition at play in the early modern theatrical world. Richard is a wise fool, who delivers the truth under comic appearances, as well as a buffoon, “deformed, unfinish'd, sent before [his] time” (Richard III, 1.3.21), who amuses the audience. Thomas Ostermeier, world renowned director of the Schaubühne Theatre in Berlin (since 1999), presented his Richard III at the Avignon Festival (France) in July 2015. His favorite actor, Lars Eidinger, largely contributed to his success. The latter chose to play a particularly dynamic Richard, in connection with the figure of the medieval Vice. Richard's role marks the pinnacle of Eidinger's acting, with a strong emphasis on improvisation. The spectators are constantly solicited. Improvisation is the perfect form of communication for the clown who mocks his audience and adapts to the conditions of live performance. Thomas Ostermeier, a keen reader of Shakespearean criticism, revisits the figure of the medieval Vice: he deploys twenty-first-century playing techniques in order to explore a complex Shakespearean heritage. Eidinger’s play mode is a perfect illustration of how the clown figure can be revisited to offer a new experience to twenty-first-century audiences.","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41956838","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}
Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.5325/pacicoasphil.56.1.0060
J. Carr
This intimate conversation with Emmy Award winner and Tony Award nominee Keith David traverses his expansive career and the invaluable lessons he has gleaned along the way: performance craftwork, author’s intent, and finding the humanity in each character toward exploring the human condition. At the heart of his success is thoughtful artistry, which has helped him craft longevity in the television and film industry. Keith David’s perspective on the craft is deeply rooted in the text and consists in “finding a kind of engaged objectivity”—his desire and ability to tap into the tone of each story he encounters. This interview explores David’s remarkable credits from his iconic ensemble performance in Oliver Stone’s Platoon to his more recent critically acclaimed lead role in OWN’s Greenleaf, from his numerous television, feature film, and theatrical appearances, to his award-winning documentaries, animated features, video gaming, and commercials.
{"title":"Crafting Longevity","authors":"J. Carr","doi":"10.5325/pacicoasphil.56.1.0060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/pacicoasphil.56.1.0060","url":null,"abstract":"This intimate conversation with Emmy Award winner and Tony Award nominee Keith David traverses his expansive career and the invaluable lessons he has gleaned along the way: performance craftwork, author’s intent, and finding the humanity in each character toward exploring the human condition. At the heart of his success is thoughtful artistry, which has helped him craft longevity in the television and film industry. Keith David’s perspective on the craft is deeply rooted in the text and consists in “finding a kind of engaged objectivity”—his desire and ability to tap into the tone of each story he encounters. This interview explores David’s remarkable credits from his iconic ensemble performance in Oliver Stone’s Platoon to his more recent critically acclaimed lead role in OWN’s Greenleaf, from his numerous television, feature film, and theatrical appearances, to his award-winning documentaries, animated features, video gaming, and commercials.","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47177066","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}
Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.5325/pacicoasphil.56.1.0007
J. Williams
In referencing Rena Fraden’s 2001 Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theatre for Incarcerated Women and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.’s 2013 Black Medea: Adaptations in Modern Plays, I suggest that transposing Euripides’s myth into modern black contexts often endows ancient Greek drama with epistemological primacy, whether seeking the “universal” redemption it has long exemplified, or resisting that primacy through the return to a “past” or “heritage” foreclosed by the catastrophe of racial slavery. My critique is not of the substance of the works these two books showcase, all of which constitute important contributions to theater activism. Rather, I aim to expose the transpositional limits of the figure of Medea, whose racial marking (to which I suggest Euripides hints, whether consciously or not), while signifying as stranger/outsider, is often obscured by a gendered, geographical and/or existential “othering,” rather than recognized as a plight of ontological proportion. As such, a blackened Medea can appear to possess the (structural) capacity afforded by her godly, supra-subject position. But what are the incalculable depths of her subjection and dishonor when her blackening pitches her “being” into an ontological dilemma that neither catharsis, nor the intervention of a deus ex machina can recuperate?
{"title":"Medea’s (Black) Cast:","authors":"J. Williams","doi":"10.5325/pacicoasphil.56.1.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/pacicoasphil.56.1.0007","url":null,"abstract":"In referencing Rena Fraden’s 2001 Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theatre for Incarcerated Women and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.’s 2013 Black Medea: Adaptations in Modern Plays, I suggest that transposing Euripides’s myth into modern black contexts often endows ancient Greek drama with epistemological primacy, whether seeking the “universal” redemption it has long exemplified, or resisting that primacy through the return to a “past” or “heritage” foreclosed by the catastrophe of racial slavery. My critique is not of the substance of the works these two books showcase, all of which constitute important contributions to theater activism. Rather, I aim to expose the transpositional limits of the figure of Medea, whose racial marking (to which I suggest Euripides hints, whether consciously or not), while signifying as stranger/outsider, is often obscured by a gendered, geographical and/or existential “othering,” rather than recognized as a plight of ontological proportion. As such, a blackened Medea can appear to possess the (structural) capacity afforded by her godly, supra-subject position. But what are the incalculable depths of her subjection and dishonor when her blackening pitches her “being” into an ontological dilemma that neither catharsis, nor the intervention of a deus ex machina can recuperate?","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43261867","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}
Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.5325/pacicoasphil.56.1.0078
Melanie Masterton Sherazi
The transnational flows of cultural capital generated by African American artists working in postwar Rome, with its thriving film industry and where many performers found ample work in the culture industries, remain largely unexamined. An exploration of the film Anna’s Sin (1952), through its core cast members’ careers and key scenes, demonstrates desegregationist and antifascist cultural work in the postwar Italian cinema and complicates divisions of high and popular culture. The film’s active attempts at undoing binarisms of race, class, gender and culture—however incomplete—emerge from the period’s mounting political struggles for greater social freedoms and mobilities. These dynamics play out on screen in a postwar Roman milieu but are inextricably wrapped up with the US Black freedom struggle. Through its main characters’ lives, both on and off screen, Anna’s Sin juxtaposes the struggles of racialized and gendered subjects. The film projects on screen new modes of relationality, particularly through its central interracial love story, presenting its viewers with new possibilities for seeing and being in the world. With an eye toward the then utopic horizon of the 1960s, such postwar filmic work made anticipatory claims upon its transnational audiences to imagine and to activate better, more expansive futures.
{"title":"Projecting Liberation in Postwar Italian Cinema","authors":"Melanie Masterton Sherazi","doi":"10.5325/pacicoasphil.56.1.0078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/pacicoasphil.56.1.0078","url":null,"abstract":"The transnational flows of cultural capital generated by African American artists working in postwar Rome, with its thriving film industry and where many performers found ample work in the culture industries, remain largely unexamined. An exploration of the film Anna’s Sin (1952), through its core cast members’ careers and key scenes, demonstrates desegregationist and antifascist cultural work in the postwar Italian cinema and complicates divisions of high and popular culture. The film’s active attempts at undoing binarisms of race, class, gender and culture—however incomplete—emerge from the period’s mounting political struggles for greater social freedoms and mobilities. These dynamics play out on screen in a postwar Roman milieu but are inextricably wrapped up with the US Black freedom struggle. Through its main characters’ lives, both on and off screen, Anna’s Sin juxtaposes the struggles of racialized and gendered subjects. The film projects on screen new modes of relationality, particularly through its central interracial love story, presenting its viewers with new possibilities for seeing and being in the world. With an eye toward the then utopic horizon of the 1960s, such postwar filmic work made anticipatory claims upon its transnational audiences to imagine and to activate better, more expansive futures.","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46275009","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}
Pub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.55.2.0191
Warshawsky
{"title":"“One God, One People, and One Law”","authors":"Warshawsky","doi":"10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.55.2.0191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/PACICOASPHIL.55.2.0191","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":"55 1","pages":"191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70869727","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}
Pub Date : 2020-04-02DOI: 10.5325/pacicoasphil.55.1.0083
Prevots
Abstract:The later poetry of Bernard Vargaftig (1934–2012) can pose challenges even to the advised reader. Mystical inner landscapes, strings of abstractions, and missing links in the semantic chain within and between brief lines make for variations that only partially resolve to recognizable themes. One means of examining such verse is to recognize his status as a survivor of wartime anti-Semitism who still faces the trauma of time spent in hiding during the Occupation. Another is to unpack the interplay of signs set into motion. The present analysis highlights spiritual-religious currents as further interpretive possibilities. It posits that Vargaftig’s interest in Talmudic traditions provides insights into his aims and methods. Far from asserting the presence of religious dogma, it explores how Judaic culture features in his writing, motivating him to engage with texts, alterity, and the sacred in significant, life-changing ways. It uses Comme respirer (2003) as a primary source, along with Marc-Alain Ouaknin’s Le Livre brûlé (1986) and Lire aux éclats (1989) as overviews of Talmudic history and interpretation. Commentary emphasizes excerpts from poems and interviews, as well as Judaic cultural, historical, and philosophical perspectives, in order to elucidate how Vargaftig’s ideas and techniques foreground the sacred.
{"title":"Eros and Poetic Ties to Talmudic Traditions in Bernard Vargaftig’s Comme respirer","authors":"Prevots","doi":"10.5325/pacicoasphil.55.1.0083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/pacicoasphil.55.1.0083","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The later poetry of Bernard Vargaftig (1934–2012) can pose challenges even to the advised reader. Mystical inner landscapes, strings of abstractions, and missing links in the semantic chain within and between brief lines make for variations that only partially resolve to recognizable themes. One means of examining such verse is to recognize his status as a survivor of wartime anti-Semitism who still faces the trauma of time spent in hiding during the Occupation. Another is to unpack the interplay of signs set into motion. The present analysis highlights spiritual-religious currents as further interpretive possibilities. It posits that Vargaftig’s interest in Talmudic traditions provides insights into his aims and methods. Far from asserting the presence of religious dogma, it explores how Judaic culture features in his writing, motivating him to engage with texts, alterity, and the sacred in significant, life-changing ways. It uses Comme respirer (2003) as a primary source, along with Marc-Alain Ouaknin’s Le Livre brûlé (1986) and Lire aux éclats (1989) as overviews of Talmudic history and interpretation. Commentary emphasizes excerpts from poems and interviews, as well as Judaic cultural, historical, and philosophical perspectives, in order to elucidate how Vargaftig’s ideas and techniques foreground the sacred.","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":"55 1","pages":"101 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47519571","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}
Pub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.5325/pacicoasphil.55.1.0005
Jenkins
{"title":"Is Religiosity a Black Thing?","authors":"Jenkins","doi":"10.5325/pacicoasphil.55.1.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/pacicoasphil.55.1.0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41712,"journal":{"name":"Pacific Coast Philology","volume":"55 1","pages":"5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70869782","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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