Pub Date : 2021-10-07DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1989226
Tsu-Chung Su
ABSTRACT The Qibla, written by the female playwright Wan-Ting Shen, is the title of the Best Play of the 2015 Taiwan Literature Award. This play, directed by Dong-Ning Hsieh, Artistic Director of Voleur du Feu Theatre, had its premiere in 2017. In her play, Shen portrays the interaction between a live-in foreign caregiver called Nadie and a Granny who suffers from Alzheimer and lives in the countryside. The purpose of this paper is to examine the three major motifs ─ migration, runaway, and pilgrimage ─ that are central to the play’s textuality and theatricality. The script and performance analysis of The Qibla are highlighted while a socio-economic and political background regarding the foreign migrant workers is provided so as to give the play a proper context. Since the three main characters, Nadie, Granny, and V-Rod, are all female subalterns who live on the margin of a society called the ‘Ocean State,’ this paper attempts to employ an anti-essentialist viewpoint derived from subaltern studies to investigate the social and biopolitical issues exposed in the play. In conjunction with this viewpoint, this paper intends to adopt the Brechtian reading to interrogate Hsieh’s directing approach and Shen’s dramaturgy.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-15DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1979337
Carmen Pellegrinelli, L. Parolin
ABSTRACT This article uses the concept of ‘mediation’ to account for the sociomateriality involved in the rehearsal of a new play. Drawing on ideas from the ‘New Sociology of Art’ that has its origins in Science and Technology Studies, we show how the sociomateriality of the rehearsal is an essential part of the process of theatre-making. It means giving to materials, bodies and matters in the rehearsal room a crucial role in the process of developing and refining a scene. Using ethnographic research methods, with particular emphasis on excerpts from video recordings, we analyse specific activities that take place in the rehearsal room to give a less anthropocentric and a more nuanced reading of the processes that contribute to the creation of a scene. Analysing the dynamics of entanglements in work practices of performance-making, we reveal the material base of the easily overlooked professional processes that constitute the craft of theatre.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-14DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1979338
Nkululeko Sibanda
ABSTRACT This article attempts to frame and examine the structuring of labour struggles from the precarious subject position of theatre workers, without isolating these struggles into the occupational sector of the creative industries in the Zimbabwean context between 1980 and 1999. In this article, I frame theatre practitioners as ‘art – workers’ and collectives such as the NTO and ZACT as mobilising and organising agencies operating within the postcolonial Zimbabwean theatre industry. On the one hand, the NTO controlled and administered purpose-built theatres, provided funding as well as organised affiliates into a unity. On the other hand, ZACT organised multi-racial Zimbabwean theatre groups into a collective, providing and mobilising financial and organisational support towards the creation of a ‘national theatre’ narrative. Deploying resource mobilisation and rational choice theories, this paper submits that NTO and ZACT mobilized and coordinated their stakeholders towards addressing the precarious work conditions in the sector. This paper argues while attempts, through theatre associations, have been undertaken to organise the creative sector, this paper submits that the precarious nature of the work, employer-employee non-distinction, lack of legal rights knowledge and fierce inter-and intra-organisational competition complicates the process of re-mobilising and organising creatives in Zimbabwe
{"title":"Theatre practitioners as unionists: art workers in post-independence Zimbabwe’s theatre sector (1980 – 1999)","authors":"Nkululeko Sibanda","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1979338","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1979338","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article attempts to frame and examine the structuring of labour struggles from the precarious subject position of theatre workers, without isolating these struggles into the occupational sector of the creative industries in the Zimbabwean context between 1980 and 1999. In this article, I frame theatre practitioners as ‘art – workers’ and collectives such as the NTO and ZACT as mobilising and organising agencies operating within the postcolonial Zimbabwean theatre industry. On the one hand, the NTO controlled and administered purpose-built theatres, provided funding as well as organised affiliates into a unity. On the other hand, ZACT organised multi-racial Zimbabwean theatre groups into a collective, providing and mobilising financial and organisational support towards the creation of a ‘national theatre’ narrative. Deploying resource mobilisation and rational choice theories, this paper submits that NTO and ZACT mobilized and coordinated their stakeholders towards addressing the precarious work conditions in the sector. This paper argues while attempts, through theatre associations, have been undertaken to organise the creative sector, this paper submits that the precarious nature of the work, employer-employee non-distinction, lack of legal rights knowledge and fierce inter-and intra-organisational competition complicates the process of re-mobilising and organising creatives in Zimbabwe","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85120766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1964850
A. Scheer, Siobhán O’Gorman
Recent scholarship has expanded upon the concept of populism as performance to include a focus on how it employs digital technologies (Baldwin-Philippi 2018). However, a relatively unexplored dimension of such discussion is the relationship between political and ‘artistic’ or theatrical performances of populism. If the latter appropriate right-wing populist discourse to potentially parody how it frames its nationalist rhetoric as an ‘appeal to “the people”’ (Canovan 1999, 3), then how do the relationships between performers and spectator-participants differ from those forged through public manifestations of populist politics? How have artists who engage with populism employed technology to increase the reach and interactivity of their performances, and how does this seek to undermine, and/or generate a troubling ‘belief’ in, the supposed ‘reality’ of such projects? This article examines two selected performances, from Austria and Estonia, that sought to engage subversively with the rise of far-right populism through arts practice developed across multiple media: Christoph Schlingensief’s Please Love Austria – first European coalition week! (2000) and Theatre NO99’s Unified Estonia (2010). These two events were exemplary in their respective engagements with increasingly technologized media to interrogate right-wing populisms in performances that drew widespread public attention, nationally and internationally. Schlingensief created an international controversy with his performance event Please Love Austria! in which a group of asylum-seekers were transported to a temporary site consisting of shipping containers located in the centre of Vienna where they would reside for 7 days. Via a dedicated website, Austrians were invited to vote out the foreigner they wished to see ‘deported’ the most. This public action, which sought to mirror the anti-immigration policies of Jörg Haider’s populist, far-right Freedom Party Austria (FPÖ), was reported worldwide to the detriment of Austria’s preferred centre-right, bourgeois national image. Ten years later, in Estonia (known for its technological advancement), Tallinn-based theatre company NO99 held a press conference announcing their largest show to date which would culminate in a public convention for an audience of 7200. This 44-day-long project involved NO99
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1974674
P. de Senna, James Hudson
Theatre and performance scholarship has exhaustively theorised the political dimensions of drama: its strategies, capacities, and materiality, with its inherent potential as a site of collision with existing assumptions and values being repeatedly emphasised. Yet, while the recent rise in right-wing nationalisms across the globe has been analysed from a variety of perspectives, and by a number of disciplines – sociology, media studies, international relations, economics, and cultural studies – little substantive attention has heretofore been given to the relationships between theatre and performance and these reactionary forces, which are often themselves presented and packaged as colliding with a liberal, mainstream consensus. And while scholarship on political theatre acknowledges that there are plays and performances that may be reactionary through a combination of form and content, comparatively little recent work has treated this notion to sustained interrogation, examined specific work in the light of it, or analysed the mechanics of its functioning in detail. This special issue stakes a claim for a scholarly appreciation of the operation of right-wing and reactionary ideological forces in relation to theatre and performance, as well as their imbrication with the very notions of ‘mainstream’ and ‘liberal’, articulating a critical appraisal of the performative appeal of the right, its strategies and subterfuges. We had set out, in the remote past that was late 2018, to situate an appreciation of the balance of political forces within an analytical framework broaching new understandings of the modes of expression, performative dimensions and affective capacities of rightwing politics as it is manifested in global theatrical, performance and performative cultures, often subsumed within capitalist value-systems. We sought to reflect on where the left had failed: how socially liberal artists and theatre makers have been incorporated into right-wing, capitalist modes of production, exhibition and consumption, presenting supposedly ‘radical’ work in venues and environments, and making use of forms that are fundamentally exclusionary, therefore mapping a terrain in which the reactionary may be perceived not only in terms of form and content, but also context. And we asked in which ways have theatre and performance ostensibly appropriated right-wing discourse in order to critique it, while at the same time offering a platform for reactionary views, through forms like parody, pastiche and overidentification. Inevitably, the period of time that elapses between proposing a special issue on a particular topic and its final publication results in something of a disparity between the world that the articles discuss and the world in which they appear. In this instance,
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1964851
A. Mahiyaria
ABSTRACT This paper examines the modes of cultural organisation that facilitate the Right-wing’s appropriation of historically Left-wing theatre practices such as the Street-theatre in New Delhi in the service of percolating Hindu-nationalism. The paper suggests that a thorough understanding of the organisation behind the creative methods for mobilisation employed by the Right-wing is indispensable if strategies of resisting co-option and building an effective opposition have to be conceived.
{"title":"Right wing and Street-theatre: from censure to co-option","authors":"A. Mahiyaria","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1964851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1964851","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper examines the modes of cultural organisation that facilitate the Right-wing’s appropriation of historically Left-wing theatre practices such as the Street-theatre in New Delhi in the service of percolating Hindu-nationalism. The paper suggests that a thorough understanding of the organisation behind the creative methods for mobilisation employed by the Right-wing is indispensable if strategies of resisting co-option and building an effective opposition have to be conceived.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91023481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1964848
James Hudson
ABSTRACT Reactionary retrenchment in UK society, including the resurgence of national chauvinism and anti-immigration sentiment, has recently stimulated explorations of right-wing politics in theatre. This article offers a reading of three recent productions that illuminate the way that reactionary politics is currently framed, explored and interrogated in UK theatre: What Shadows (2016) by Chris Hannan, Chris Bush’s The Assassination of Katie Hopkins (2018), and Rob Drummond’s The Majority (2017). The article argues that these pieces’ approach towards right-wing politics emerges from anxiety over ideological polarisation and a perceived breakdown in communication in political discourse. It suggests that this attempt to generate nuance, neutrality and complexity while dispensing criticism equally across both poles of left and right on the political spectrum implicitly works to authorise a ‘moderate’ centrist position. While the thesis of each play functions to validate a centrist position that is presumed to be automatically reasonable, the article considers the potential liabilities inherent in such dramaturgical framing in broaching topics relating to the far right and reactionary right.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1971885
Emma Willis
ABSTRACT The terror attack carried out at two mosques in Aotearoa New Zealand by a white supremacist in 2019 was intended as a spectacle for mass public consumption. Its live-stream on Facebook invited hyper-identification (akin to a first-person shooter game), exploiting the disembodied nature of digital connection. In this essay, I draw from Judith Butler’s concept of ‘hallucinatory merging’ to characterize this performativity and to suggest that both the killings and their filming were an attack on the ‘generativity’ of the assembly of bodies-in-prayer. The public response led by New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern avowedly rejected the ideology of white supremacy that motivated the attack. Her remark that ‘this is not us’ galvanized public sentiment, generating waves of public solidarity and a variety of public counter-performances. At the same time, this was a white supremacist act carried out in a settler (post-colonial) society, throwing into sharp relief the everyday performances of racial intolerance that trouble the notion that this is ‘not us,’ a point made by various communities including Indigenous Māori. In tracing the two opposed modes of performance – that of white supremacist exclusivity and a national narrative of inclusion – I reflect on their entanglement as well as their distinction.
{"title":"White supremacist performance and its refusal: a reflection on the mosque shootings in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand","authors":"Emma Willis","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1971885","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1971885","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The terror attack carried out at two mosques in Aotearoa New Zealand by a white supremacist in 2019 was intended as a spectacle for mass public consumption. Its live-stream on Facebook invited hyper-identification (akin to a first-person shooter game), exploiting the disembodied nature of digital connection. In this essay, I draw from Judith Butler’s concept of ‘hallucinatory merging’ to characterize this performativity and to suggest that both the killings and their filming were an attack on the ‘generativity’ of the assembly of bodies-in-prayer. The public response led by New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern avowedly rejected the ideology of white supremacy that motivated the attack. Her remark that ‘this is not us’ galvanized public sentiment, generating waves of public solidarity and a variety of public counter-performances. At the same time, this was a white supremacist act carried out in a settler (post-colonial) society, throwing into sharp relief the everyday performances of racial intolerance that trouble the notion that this is ‘not us,’ a point made by various communities including Indigenous Māori. In tracing the two opposed modes of performance – that of white supremacist exclusivity and a national narrative of inclusion – I reflect on their entanglement as well as their distinction.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75573080","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1964849
Joseph Dunne-Howrie
ABSTRACT Where are we in the story of British democracy? Was the 2016 EU Referendum a rehearsal for a new political system of direct democracy that ultimately benefits the far right? Or will the Internet replace the conventional machinery of government with a radical new form of network power where people discursively experiment with new political realities through aesthetic modes of social relations? This article proffers the term ‘networked participation’ to describe a conceptual model of citizenry centred on structuring meaning through the dialogic exchange of information in aesthetic environments. The political ideals of network politics inform my analysis of the complex web of connections that participants scaffold in the performances Operation Black Antler(Blast Theory and Hydrocracker 2017) and One Day, Maybe (dreamthinkspeak 2017) between identitarian ideology in Britain and competing narratives of democracy’s meaning in South Korea, respectively. This model of audience participation is proffered to develop a theory of social relations produced through a theatrical experience of digital interconnectivity.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1964818
Julia Peetz
ABSTRACT This article investigates Donald Trump’s performances of right-wing populism, contrasting these with the professional theatrical practice of US political speechwriting. The public performances of US presidents are theatrical constructions in a broad conceptual interpretation of the term: as speechwriters work to construct the presidential persona and the national audience, they abstract and fictionalize both the presidential self and the national public. The resulting presidential persona is a theatrical construction designed to appeal to an idealized national community. Much of the appeal of Trump’s populism, this article posits, lies in his efforts to eschew the professionalized theatricality of US presidential performance. Drawing on in-depth interviews the author conducted with US political speechwriters – primarily presidential speechwriters spanning administrations and campaigns from Reagan to Obama – the article seeks to account for the counter-theatrical appeal of the Trump presidency and of performances of right-wing populism more broadly. Building on the speechwriters’ specialist knowledge, the historical conditions that have allowed performances of right-wing populism to flourish are explored. The article interrogates right-wing populism’s exploitation of institutional distrust as a dominant political affect and its undermining of integrative concepts of the nation in favour of a definition of ‘the people’ in terms of white, patriarchal nativism.
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