THEATRE SURVEY最新文献

One of the world's most enduring and successful cultural diplomacy organizations, the British Council (BC) has played a prominent role in promoting and exporting British theatre, literature, and language across the globe since its founding in 1934. A key component of the BC's self-proclaimed remit of “forging links between Britain and other countries through cultural exchange,” the organization's Drama Division has over its lifetime worked to sponsor and facilitate the overseas touring of a significant number of British theatrical enterprises, exporting both large-scale national company productions with substantial casts and a repertoire of shows, as well as individual actors, directors, and academics embarking on speaking tours. From the stage, renowned actors and star names such as Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Vivien Leigh, Peggy Ashcroft, and John Gielgud were routinely chosen by the BC to appear in series of “theatrical manifestations,” serving in dual capacities both as actors in productions and ambassadors for a nation—the word “manifestation” being the BC's own preferred terminology used to refer to the export of a cultural event during the middle of the past century. Yet unlike comparable accounts of the relationship between the Arts Council and theatre, we possess no systematic study of the BC's involvement in this field, meaning that fundamental questions about the nature, range, and impact of the BC's cultural activity remain unanswered. Indeed, until comparatively recently, the history of the BC has failed to generate much scholarly interest at all, but the nature of its imbrication within British theatrical culture in particular remains severely occluded.

How much is enough? The relevance of this question comes from individual expectations regarding value. What is value and how does it manifest through our daily interactions? There is a qualitative difference between the concept of value and individual and collective values. Is there such a thing as a common good when it comes to either? Values are a social construct formed through a process of analysis, dialogue, and assessment within any given community. Though each individual's value system has varying degrees of difference, an agreed-upon system of values is created within and through communication, communion, and coalition. In contemporary societies, it seems the importance of unified community values has diminished in favor of the individual due to the rise of late capitalism, consumer culture, mediatization, political polarization, and the various signposts of neoliberalism. Postdramatic scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann states, “It is a fundamental fact of today's Western societies that all human experiences (life, eroticism, happiness, recognition) are tied to commodities or more precisely their consumption and possession (and not to a discourse).” Lehmann's assertion leads me to ask some striking questions relating to the theatrical practices that guide this essay. Namely, how have large-scale social systems of the contemporary era increasingly divested from community values, instead opting for smaller and smaller factions of identification? Without belief in a larger community good, what use is democracy?

Gwendolen Bishop is a name that appears in the margins of my recent account of the English avant-garde theatre. Prior to that she barely made it even into the margins, and then often with some rather significant indecision as to how actually to spell her name. The aim of this essay is to retrieve her from the margins and bring her more centrally into view. In doing so I consciously weave together her arts practices and her personal life, for these are deeply connected. The making of an avantist culture in early twentieth-century England was done not simply by arts experiments but also by kinds of behavior that challenged dominant ideas. In our Western twenty-first century we note and make much of Edwardian behaviors that contested assumptions about gender and sexuality, but we should note, alongside that, some equally striking challenges to ideas about class. Both are apparent in the Bishop story, which I tell more or less as a biographical narrative. The danger when one recovers a person from the shadows is that, in trying to situate them among their contemporaries, one writes overmuch about those contemporaries, such that our person fades again into the mists. With our biographical focus fixed solidly on her we can, I hope, discover how Gwendolen Bishop made her very particular contribution to this exciting cultural period on the eve of modernism.

Emanating beyond the confines of academia, the poignant narrative of the renowned Turkish thespian Afife Jale has garnered widespread recognition within Türkiye. Amid a pantheon of successors, her tale stands as the most profoundly heartrending. It has been immortalized through theatrical productions and cinematic adaptations. Despite the widespread familiarity with her story, the enigmatic underpinnings of her tragedy have perpetually shrouded it in mystery. In an effort to cast light upon the chronicle of her life, a convergence of political and societal truths has emerged. Afife Jale's story, in its very essence, embodies the ideals expounded by Joan W. Scott. The realm of feminist historiography endeavors to bring prominence to women's narratives, elucidating their endeavors to champion their entitlements and autonomy within historical contexts. It seeks to delve into the causalities behind the historical obscurity that has veiled women's contributions, while also revealing the obstructions that have curtailed their authority and efficacy. This article aspires to achieve this objective by scrutinizing the careers of the first Turkish Muslim actresses, Afife Jale (1902–41) and Bedia Muvahhit (1896–1994), who commenced their artistic journeys at the onset of the twentieth century. Whereas Afife Jale's stage debut in 1920 coincided with the twilight of Ottoman rule, Bedia Muvahhit made her inaugural appearance in 1923, the very year that saw the founding of the Turkish Republic. Despite this seemingly minor difference, the professional journeys of these two actresses were characterized by stark disparities. Afife Jale bore the weight of authoritarian oppression and persecution, and her legacy remained largely overlooked, even after the Turkish Republic was founded. In contrast, Bedia Muvahhit thrived under the patronage and backing of the political elite, leading to a lengthy and prosperous career.

Reading the news about theatre in Germany during the past few years, it is hard to avoid the impression that something new is happening: a theatre culture that long emphasized politics now just as often emphasizes ethics. There were the 2022 protests in Munich over claimed anti-Semitism in the play Vögel (Birds of a Kind) by Wajdi Mouawad, which led the Metropoltheater to cancel its planned production. Nicolas Stemann and Benjamin von Blomberg tried to make programming and ensemble changes to the Schauspielhaus Zürich, which they co-led, but the institution's governing board decided not to renew their contracts amid accusations that the theatre had become too “woke” for its audiences. Most prominently, a new artistic team at the prestigious Theatertreffen festival in Berlin curated in 2023 a series of events to coincide with its traditional presentation of the year's ten “most notable” productions. These events included a “Responsibility Treffen” that looked “at how we can show our responsibility toward those who have lost the personal and structural circumstances necessary for working in the theatre.”

Since its publication in 2005, Anne Bogart and Tina Landau's The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition has provided the received narrative not only for the ways that Viewpoints training is practiced, but also for its history. In their opening chapter, the authors crucially acknowledge that they did not invent this method of training:

In 1979, Anne met choreographer Mary Overlie, the inventor of the “Six Viewpoints,” at New York University, where they were both on the faculty of the Experimental Theater Wing. Although a latecomer to the Judson scene, Mary, who had trained as a dancer and choreographer, attributes her own innovations to those Judson Church experiments. . . . Mary immersed herself in these innovations and came up with her own way to structure dance improvisation in time and space—the Six Viewpoints: Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story. She began to apply these principles, not only to her own work as a choreographer, but also to her teaching.

To Anne (and later Tina), it was instantly clear that Mary's approach to generating movement for the stage was applicable to creating viscerally dynamic moments of theater with actors and other collaborators.

In 2010 film and theatre historian David Mayer urged researchers to look to early film for evidence of continuing traditions of Victorian pantomime, arguing its “audiences tolerated, even enjoyed, the same sight-gags and hackneyed routines that amused their Victorian ancestors.” This article is a response to his challenge and in the process explores wider interconnections. The harlequinade was the portion of the pantomime that occurred after key characters from the narrative pantomime opening are transformed into Clown, Harlequin, Pantaloon, and Columbine. These stock figures, originally derived from commedia dell'arte, perform a series of comic scenes via mime, dance, and physical action rather than dialogue. Having been an important feature of Regency and Victorian pantomimes, by the end of the nineteenth century the harlequinade had largely vanished (with certain exceptions such as the Britannia Theatre), causing Clement Scott to lament that it is “a pleasure lost for ever and denied to the generation of to-day.” My contention is that there is a direct line of inheritance from the harlequinade through stand-alone comic ballets to chase scenes in early film. All demand a particular type of physical performance, choreographed fast-paced action, and humor. Uncovering the tradition allows us better to understand this form of popular amusement and see how Harlequin's antics were reinterpreted for new audiences. Starting from a seemingly unremarkable comic entertainment produced in 1871 at a minor London theatre, the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton, and bearing the intriguing title of Ki-Ki-Ko-Ko-Oh-Ki-Key, I trace its heritage as embodied culture, establishing its links to early nineteenth-century pantomime harlequinade and to simian performance, tracking the appearance of comic or dumb ballets in theatres and music halls in Britain, France, and the United States through one family of performers, the Lauris, and finally identifying the legacy of the complex trap work in silent film of the early twentieth century by examining Lupino Lane's Joyland (1929).

In the summer of 1944, Black modern dancer Pearl Primus searched for authenticity. Over the past year, she had achieved critical success for her modern dance choreography that protested racial injustice in the South, informed by a leftist political mission. However, she thought something was missing. She explained to Dance Magazine, “I had done dances about sharecroppers and lynchings without ever having been close to such things.” In search of that missing component, Primus traveled from New York City, her home since she was a toddler, to the US South. A budding anthropologist, she went to live among Southern communities as a way to retool her protest choreography and make it more authentic. Unbeknownst to them, Southern community members would be recruited by her to provide inspiration for her performances and the leftist political stance that fueled those works. In identifying authentic expressive practices of the South through her anthropological practice, transferring what she found to her choreography, and then performing that repertoire on New York stages, she would further develop her ability to instill in Northern audiences the necessity of leftist activism.

Your time has come to fly

You have no borders

With brightly colored papel picado (cut paper banners), tissue flowers, and Latin American flags festooning the performance area at San Francisco's Z Space, David Herrera Performance Company's September 2023 event, ÓRALE!, promised fun and festivity. On its surface, the performance resembled a typical dance program, with an ensemble of ten dancers performing eleven separate pieces choreographed to songs from the catalog of El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, but an exciting hybrid form of movement theatre emerged through the interplay of live music, dance, and El Vez. Built around the music and performances of Robert Lopez, who has performed as El Vez for more than thirty years, ÓRALE! offered an opportunity for an intergenerational community of artists to find themselves in El Vez's work, and for Lopez to see his own vision reflected in the interpretations of the young dancers and choreographers involved. This article considers how ÓRALE! harnesses the creative possibilities of resisting the implied disciplinary borders that too often separate music, dance, and theatre performance. We begin by discussing the creative invitation that El Vez offers, to make clear how he uses his art as a form of world building, using popular culture to critique US American society, make visible the disparate cultural traditions that exist within US American cultural forms, and to envision new ways of being. We then discuss ÓRALE! following two different through lines: process and product. The collaborative process of ÓRALE! was a site of cultural, intergenerational, and geographic exchange, inviting both performers and audience into a genre-defying performance that raised critical questions around intermediality and transtemporality in the arts. As a process very much in development, the collaboration experimented with learning through doing that led to a performance event that was at times messy and at times magical. Following Elizabeth Ellsworth, ÓRALE! was an example of “knowledge in the making,” a fluid experience through which “the self is understood as a becoming, an emergence, and as continually in the making. This . . . moves us beyond a contemporary politics of difference based in semiotics and linguistics toward an experimental ‘pragmatics of becoming’ based on making and doing.” The event embodied a Muñozian process of disidentification to bring into being a utopian present, residing in this space of becoming and of knowledge in the making to reveal the complexities of Latinx subjectivity while rejecting essentialist understandings of race, ethnicity, and culture.

The story of influential French stage director Jacques Copeau's 1917–19 residency in New York City was documented at the time by Copeau himself and subsequently analyzed by Copeau scholars.1 Copeau (1879–1949) is remembered today for his innovative, experimental theatre work in the early twentieth century; he developed core practices that became foundational for modernist stage artistry, including mime and physical theatre as well as devised theatre techniques.2 In 1913, he established his Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, breaking away from traditional ornate design practices and envisioning an ensemble of actors trained in methods comparable to those used by Konstantin Stanislavsky, although Copeau knew comparatively little of his techniques at this time.3 Copeau's “‘attempt at dramatic renovation’”4 included staging plays to be performed in repertory and maintaining modest budgets and ticket prices to secure financial stability. In these and other regards, his vision paralleled those of other modernist colleagues not only in Europe, but also in the United States, where the Little Theatre movement was already underway,5 although Copeau similarly had little knowledge of US theatre at this early moment.