THEATRE SURVEY最新文献

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.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

[It] may be that never before in my life have I had to meet such a trial as I am undergoing today.

Early in 1850, Charles Dickens went to the Victoria Theatre in Lambeth. One of several theatres sited close to the bridges linking the southern bank of the Thames with the north, the Vic was a prominent neighborhood institution catering to a mostly working-class audience. Launched in 1818 as the Royal Coburg Theatre, a move designed to coincide with the opening of Waterloo Bridge, its investors’ hopes of drawing a more upmarket crowd were largely disappointed. Visiting the theatre in 1820, William Hazlitt was distressed to find Junius Brutus Booth among an ill-assorted and noisy throng, and in 1831 Edmund Kean was reduced to haranguing the “unmitigated brutes” gathered before him. Pelted with orange peel and nutshells, he still drew his nightly fee of £50. Although research by Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow has revealed an audience more varied than once assumed, upon the changing of its name in 1833, the Victoria's core clientele was more or less established, as indeed was its reputation for the bloodier aspects of popular drama. It had also experienced regular changes of management, sudden spells of closure, and periodic clashes with the authorities. Suitably enough for what follows, by 1840, the Vic was judged to have suffered “more vicissitudes” than any other theatre in London.

In the winter of 1845–6 the United States Army languished on the border waiting for an opportunity to provoke what would be the Mexican–American War, or, as the Mexicans would come to call it, La Intervención Americana. To break the dull monotony, the army turned to theatre. In January, Second Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant was cast as Desdemona in a production staged for the troops and the local community. Grant would later be the victorious general in the Civil War and the eighteenth president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. He was not yet that person. In 1846 he was a twenty-four-year-old, newly commissioned officer, only three years out of the US Military Academy. His peers, a cohort of junior officers who would become the senior military leadership on both sides of the Civil War, were also actors in the production, as well as its producers. The anecdote is humorous in large part because the Grant of national record and memory is the least Desdemona-like figure anyone can conceive. It has been repeated multiple times across the nineteenth century and still holds in the imagination almost two hundred years later.

The jokes that stick in people's minds are the ones they don't quite get.

One day in 2018, I arrived at Playwrights Horizons in New York City excited to see a new play by Lindsey Ferrentino called This Flat Earth. I did not know much about the story aside from the fact that it had teenage actors playing teenager characters, but I quickly realized that it was about two teens trying to make sense of a recent mass shooting event as their school. The most striking part of this experience was watching Ella Kennedy Davis playing a thirteen-year-old white girl named Julie who takes out her anger, grief, and confusion about this senseless violence on those around her. Davis spent much of the play on the emotional limits of anguish, screaming, crying, and shaking to the point where she continued to do so throughout the curtain call. Both my discomfort with the actor's obvious distress, and my genuine dislike for the whiny, sad, one-dimensional role—whose main characteristic is her ignorance of previous school shootings—were enough to distract me from the play itself. But what created this distancing effect? I first thought of Bert O. States's phenomenological observation that children onstage often break our illusion of the theatrical world, but I noted that my phenomenological response was distinctly different from what I feel when I see children acting onstage. Instead of wondering if the actor understood the play she was in, I instead feared she understood all too well.