Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1974693
P. de Senna, Foivos Dousos, Fil Ieropoulos, Richard Pfützenreuter
ABSTRACT This article offers a reflection on the authors’ curation of (Dousos and Ieropoulos) and participation in (de Senna and Pfützenreuter) The Garden of Dystopian Pleasures, a performance festival that took place at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2018. Dousos and Ieropoulos present their thoughts around the need to curate such an event in the first place, discussing the context within which they operate, the Athenian art scene, while making the case that ambiguity as a political and poetical tool must not be surrendered to the right. De Senna and Pfützenreuter discuss their experiences in creating and performing right-wing personas that blur the lines between what is real and what is performed; engaging in strategies of overidentification, they initiate a discussion around the ethics and role of critical artistic practice in response to contemporary right-wing radicalisation and aesthetics. Mirroring the curatorially experimental nature of the festival, the contributors speak from multiple positionalities. As such, the structure and tone of the article attempt a destabilisation of the form of a conventional academic paper, avoiding an overall, singular summing-up of the positions presented, and allowing for shifts in register.
本文回顾了2018年在雅典美术学院举办的(de Senna and pfendenreuter)反乌托邦快乐花园(the Garden of Dystopian Pleasures)表演节的策展和参与过程。Dousos和Ieropoulos首先围绕策划这样一个事件的需要提出了他们的想法,讨论了他们运作的背景,雅典的艺术场景,同时提出了作为政治和诗歌工具的模糊性不能屈服于权利的情况。De Senna和pfpf岑罗伊特讨论了他们在创造和表演右翼人物角色方面的经验,这些角色模糊了真实与表演之间的界限;他们采用过度认同的策略,围绕伦理和批判艺术实践的角色展开讨论,以回应当代右翼激进化和美学。反映了电影节的策展实验性质,贡献者从多个角度发言。因此,文章的结构和语气试图打破传统学术论文的形式,避免对所呈现的立场进行全面、单一的总结,并允许在语域上发生变化。
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Pub Date : 2021-07-29DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1959182
Cole Remmen
ABSTRACT In this work, I intervene in discussions of robot performance, pointing to a history of a performance mode I classify as ‘robot camp’ that, in offering techniques that overcome potential affective repulsion to these near-human machines, shifted the trajectory of the relationship between humans and robots. I first invoke ideas of theatre artists Edward Gordon Craig and Oriza Hirata, along with theatre scholar Louise LePage’s reinterpretation of Judith Butler’s ‘performativity’, in order to offer a consideration of the robot as a performer. This leads to a reframing of Steve Dixon’s ‘metallic camp’ in conversation with Masahiro Mori’s concept of the uncanny valley (and through a return to Susan Sontag’s foundational ‘Notes on “Camp”’), through which I theorize the performance strategy of robot camp. I trace robot camp throughout the history of performative robot portrayals, primarily early twentieth-century automaton exhibitions and Elizabeth Meriwether’s contemporary science fiction play Heddatron, foregrounding how techniques of robot camp have been successfully employed to overcome affective uneasiness toward the robot (i.e., manifestations of the uncanny valley); in doing so, I highlight how live theatre has shaped public engagements with and imaginings of the robot from its early origins.
在这项工作中,我介入了对机器人性能的讨论,指出了一种我归类为“机器人阵营”的性能模式的历史,这种模式通过提供技术来克服对这些接近人类的机器的潜在情感排斥,改变了人类与机器人之间的关系轨迹。我首先引用了戏剧艺术家Edward Gordon Craig和Oriza Hirata的想法,以及戏剧学者Louise LePage对Judith Butler的“表演性”的重新诠释,以提供机器人作为表演者的考虑。这导致在与Masahiro Mori的恐怖谷概念的对话中重新构建Steve Dixon的“金属阵营”(并通过回归Susan Sontag的基础“关于“阵营”的笔记”),通过它我将机器人阵营的表演策略理论化。我追溯了整个机器人表演的历史,主要是20世纪早期的自动机展览和伊丽莎白·梅里韦瑟的当代科幻小说《海德顿》,展望了机器人营地的技术如何成功地克服了对机器人的情感不安(即恐怖谷的表现);在此过程中,我强调了现场戏剧如何从早期起源就塑造了公众对机器人的参与和想象。
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Pub Date : 2021-05-26DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1932076
Marta Villalba-Lázaro
ABSTRACT While Victorian classical burlesque has been traditionally dismissed as low culture for both, its insouciant treatment of classical mythology and its inability to raise serious social issues, this article focuses on Robert Brough’s Medea to demonstrate that his burlesque and its performance constitutes a fascinating example of a product of popular culture that discusses Victorian socio-political matters. Based on Brough’s political mindset, this paper reads his classical burlesque using a heterotopic perspective to analyse its potential to discuss Victorian paradigms of class, gender and racial divisions, even if it did it using music, puns, anachronisms and vulgar jokes.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1916280
Harriet Curtis
This is my first editorial as a new editor for Studies in Theatre and Performance. I am grateful to be joining this team at a key moment in re-shaping the priorities of theatre and performance studies in line with or in response to urgent global cultural, economic, and socio-political shifts. Studies in Theatre and Performance has always encouraged a variety of voices and perspectives in theatre and performance studies, and I, too, am committed to maintaining and expanding that through self-reflexive and field-wide reflections on the past, present, and future shape of the discipline as we continue to teach, research, and live through a period of uncertainty. The six articles collected in this issue offer a range of approaches to performance as a social practice that explores the liminal and the transformational. The authors elaborate on moments of pleasure, enchantment, grief, and mourning drawn out by and through performance, offering analyses of plays and performances emerging from navigating the joys and contradictions of everyday life. Matched by their rootedness in the material present, the articles also make connections to shifting historical narratives, reverence to ancestral pasts, the opening up of transformational spaces between the real and the ethereal, and performance’s ontological suspension of the rational. Each touches on the politics of temporality, on cycles of living from childhood, parenthood, illness, death, and beyond, each time returning to the will to life, to survival, and the possibilities in performance of staging life’s intricacies. Gloria Nwandu Ozor, Ciarunji Chesaina, and Masumi Odari’s article focuses on the Odo masquerade ritual of the Umulumgbe – a community in the South Eastern subtribe of the Igbo of Nigeria – representing the return of ancestors to the world of the living and the means through which actors represent the dead through imitation. The authors characterise the work of the Odo according to the division of labour, between those who administer and promote justice, and those who enforce laws, promote peace, and discourage physical conflict. Ultimately, though the focus of the Odo masquerade is on justice, peace, and conflict-resolution, analysed here as a social drama with a civic function, the authors also emphasise the Odo as a death ritual, whereby the dead are reunited with the living, transitioning from the spiritual to the physical. The themes of division, unity, conflict resolution, and community are continued in David Overend and Oliver Heath’s article, which focuses on The Majority, performed at the National Theatre in 2017. Conceived in response to the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016, the audience’s use of voting technology is integral to the play’s structure. Prompted to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a series of propositions ranging from the seemingly mundane to the morally complex, the article focuses on the performance’s use of audience participation – the performance of
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Pub Date : 2021-05-03DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1912489
Freya Verlander
ABSTRACT '(Skin)Aesthetics (First Manifesto)' offers an introduction to my new performance theory and method of performance analysis: ‘(skin)aesthetics’. In the spirit of a manifesto, I outline the theoretical development of (skin)aesthetics as an approach and its objectives. (Skin)aesthetics focusses on the spectator’s skin as an active and reciprocal site of engagement in the performance environment. It considers the way that other materials, and senses, represent or emulate the skin and the tactile sense, as well as investigating how the spectator’s skin-based experience might be manipulated to communicate meaning in performance environments. It asks how spectators might be drawn into empathetic relation with others through such skin-based experiences.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-23DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1917873
J. Rowson
ABSTRACT Over the past twenty years, a collection of theatre makers in Russia have staged suppressed and marginalised voices to engage with the political and social realities of contemporary Russia. The work of these innovative theatre practitioners has been collated under the idiom of New Drama (Novaya Drama). Previous studies of New Drama have placed an emphasis on the role of the text and the playwright’s dynamic use of contemporary language. While acknowledging that these are important features of the New Drama repertoire, this article provides an alternative approach by examining the work of Pavel Pryazhko. This article explores Pryazhko’s The Soldier (Soldat, 2011), in the context of the Second Chechen War and Vladimir Putin’s revivification of the military in the public sphere. Through a detailed study of The Soldier in performance, this article contends that the production’s content and form is vital in generating an oppositional discourse about the role of the military in contemporary Russian society. Pryazhko’s eschewal of traditional notions of theatrical language and dialogic interaction in The Soldier disrupts the audience’s expectations of what a theatre performance is, and subsequently facilitates a wider dialogue about the Kremlin’s privileging of the military in Russia.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-19DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1917187
Aténé Mendelyté
ABSTRACT Samuel Beckett’s stage play That Time offers an aesthetic exploration of the paradoxical and deconstructive nature of identity and selfhood where the ability of narrative acts to express and capture a preexistent, originary identity is put into question. That Time implies that there is no such core identity and that any identity is constituted by performing and narrating one’s selfhood, thus questioning the hierarchy of the signifier and the signified. In this essay, I therefore read this play alongside Judith Butler’s notions of performativity, citationality, and subject formation in order to explore That Time’s constitution of the self and to show that Beckett’s play and its performance present a perfect instance of how narrative, to use Butler’s description, can bespeak its own impossibility, i.e., to deconstruct itself at the moment of its construction. I aim to reveal some key intersections between That Time and Butler’s thought since the former allows one to aesthetically experience her philosophical ideas and the latter aids in better articulating the complexity of the play’s performance.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-09DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1913322
Miriana Lausic
ABSTRACT This article develops an analysis of flamenco performance and religious processions in Andalusia by deploying and extending Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of drawing, using the results of extensive ethnographic field research completed by the author among the Roma community in southern Spain. The article demonstrates how the Gitano body becomes a corpus of drawing, in Nancy’s sense, through a performance of tracing. The logic of this trace entails an originary intermingling of time and space, as well as a structural overlapping of the animate and the inanimate. Far from being purely abstract, such tracing is read as the choreographed self-portraiture of the Gitano community itself. The author argues that the performers and ethnographic researcher meet and intersect in a shared space of extension. In this sense, the tracing of flamenco bodies parallels the performative dimension of auto-ethnographic writing.
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Pub Date : 2021-03-26DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1902139
Ana Fernández-Caparrós
ABSTRACT This comparative essay analyses the dramatic representation of horses in two early twenty-first-century American plays by Sam Shepard and Sarah Ruhl. Both plays bring a horse figure onto the stage as a prop and couple it to human characters fashioned by the iconography of the American cowboy. While both plays rely heavily on the symbolic power of horses and trope the animal, thus failing to achieve a portrayal of animality initially capable of challenging traditional humanist forms of representation, a close analysis of the materiality of equine presence on the stage shows the overlooked yet essential dramatic function horses have in these plays; that, far from being static symbols, they intervene decisively in the construction and cultural perception of space, gender and values of evolving American cowboy cultures; that their presence contributes to an appreciation of the potential of the horse-human partnership; and that, bringing to the stage their historical heritage as inhabitants of the American frontier, their presence contributes to the reconceptualization of borders making boundaries between humans and animals more permeable.
{"title":"Horses and Cowboys on the Contemporary American Stage: The Horse as Prop in Sam Shepard’s Kicking a Dead Horse and Sarah Ruhl’s Late: a cowboy song","authors":"Ana Fernández-Caparrós","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1902139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1902139","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This comparative essay analyses the dramatic representation of horses in two early twenty-first-century American plays by Sam Shepard and Sarah Ruhl. Both plays bring a horse figure onto the stage as a prop and couple it to human characters fashioned by the iconography of the American cowboy. While both plays rely heavily on the symbolic power of horses and trope the animal, thus failing to achieve a portrayal of animality initially capable of challenging traditional humanist forms of representation, a close analysis of the materiality of equine presence on the stage shows the overlooked yet essential dramatic function horses have in these plays; that, far from being static symbols, they intervene decisively in the construction and cultural perception of space, gender and values of evolving American cowboy cultures; that their presence contributes to an appreciation of the potential of the horse-human partnership; and that, bringing to the stage their historical heritage as inhabitants of the American frontier, their presence contributes to the reconceptualization of borders making boundaries between humans and animals more permeable.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78254419","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 : 2021-03-07DOI: 10.1080/14682761.2021.1895543
D. Overend
ABSTRACT This article reflects on a series of wild experiments in literal field sites. It develops a practice-based methodology that aims to identify, perform and assert wild presences and unruly processes, playfully engaging with vibrant and dynamic ecologies. To explore these concerns ‘in the field’, a series of research trips were undertaken in the United Kingdom between 2017 and 2020, including repeated visits to Knepp Wildland Project in West Sussex and Bamff Estate in Perthshire. These locations were chosen due to their engagement with rewilding as an experimental mode of ecosystem management. Rewilding is explored here as a process-driven approach to conservation that offers a potential model for transdisciplinary artistic research. Adopting and adapting its methods through a combination of place writing, collaborative performance making and site-specific art, a creative practice is developed that prompts collaborative ways of working in response to the ecologies, conceptualisations and performances of these field sites. Aiming to bring something back from the field into the academy, the article argues for a (re)wilding of disciplinary knowledge exchange. It concludes with a call for wild epistemology, proposing that research in specific field sites can be informed by an artistic practice that is entangled, unsettling and continually practiced.
{"title":"Field works: wild experiments for performance research","authors":"D. Overend","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1895543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1895543","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article reflects on a series of wild experiments in literal field sites. It develops a practice-based methodology that aims to identify, perform and assert wild presences and unruly processes, playfully engaging with vibrant and dynamic ecologies. To explore these concerns ‘in the field’, a series of research trips were undertaken in the United Kingdom between 2017 and 2020, including repeated visits to Knepp Wildland Project in West Sussex and Bamff Estate in Perthshire. These locations were chosen due to their engagement with rewilding as an experimental mode of ecosystem management. Rewilding is explored here as a process-driven approach to conservation that offers a potential model for transdisciplinary artistic research. Adopting and adapting its methods through a combination of place writing, collaborative performance making and site-specific art, a creative practice is developed that prompts collaborative ways of working in response to the ecologies, conceptualisations and performances of these field sites. Aiming to bring something back from the field into the academy, the article argues for a (re)wilding of disciplinary knowledge exchange. It concludes with a call for wild epistemology, proposing that research in specific field sites can be informed by an artistic practice that is entangled, unsettling and continually practiced.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82485620","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}