THEATRE SURVEY最新文献

The preface of Bill Butler and Elin Schoen's 1979 skating instruction manual, Jammin’, teems with encouragement, but offers one slight warning. Welcoming his first-time skaters, Butler tells the reader, “chances are, once you've roller-discoed, you won't want to stop. You'll want to stay on wheels. And there's no reason why you shouldn't, even if you're not in a rink.” With the tagline “[everything you need to know to get up and boogie down!],” Jammin’ begins with “skating the rail”—a necessary means for first-timers to establish balance, appreciate the tempo of the rink, and learn to control the skates beneath them. Butler then goes on to describe couples skating, group skating, and dancing in place, each of which articulates a relationship to tempo and “the beat,” to the other individuals in the rink, and the contradictions of the rink itself. Jammin’ therefore proposes a practice of emphatic improvisation that is decidedly nonlinear and centers an expressive practice. Jammin’ also cites the logistics and pleasures associated with skating as a community. These logistics and pleasures include everything from “dealing with other people” to “how to become a disco dazzler in one minute flat.” Butler tells us the secret of both is, simply put, to relax.

W. B. Yeats's dramatic career was transformed in the 1910s through a series of collaborations in London. In an essay from the period, “Certain Noble Plays of Japan,” he writes: “I have invented a form of drama, distinguished, indirect and symbolic.” This form, like many other modernist inventions, is better understood as something else, in this case the alchemy of his earlier work, some eclectic influences, and the contributions of his American, English, French, and Japanese collaborators. Together, this group of artists drew on Irish mythology, the occult, the continental avant-garde, and—as often has been stressed—Japanese noh. Originally, the “Certain Noble Plays” essay was published as an introduction to a related noh project, Ezra Pound's liberal completion of Ernest Fenollosa and Hirata Kiichi's incomplete translations. There have been at least four book-length studies on the relationship between Yeats and noh, as well as many theses and articles. It remains an exemplum of transnational modernist theatre.

Quickly Ascending to Heaven,
Hermaphrodite Beauty
of the celestial magic,
You descend to animate
Angelic aura,
alone in your clear, eternal beauty
all other beauties stand before you.
While ANNA's voice,
In Deidamia converses,
a musical passage dissolves
in the aura, a most divine ray
although enclosed within an earthly veil,
it knows the harmony of heaven on earth.1

Utopia might always prove impossible. But it should not be entirely abandoned as a concept, or as a goal toward which work might be directed. It is hard to see how meaningful change could arise without at least some sense of utopian possibility. The architectural historian Nathaniel Coleman argues in this vein that simply “making-do with reality may be compensatory, but limits possibility, transforming apparent pragmatic agency into its capture by enclosing realism.”1 Dealing with reality—often enough by making do—while keeping an eye on more magical possibilities has sometimes appeared, and has certainly been claimed, as the founding experience of making theatre. Theatres have seemed unique places where much might happen. If they are indeed special places, able to achieve special things, then they are not simply ebullient, but like Foucault's “heterotopias” able to combine dissident elements at the margins. Even when viewed at considerable historical distance, theatrical companies can appear truculent, wayward, and unsettling, even when they remain exploitative, manipulative, hierarchical—as many utopias are.2 Inequities and exclusions based on race, sexuality, gender, and class are not absent from theatrical life. Coleman's point, however, is really to argue that that it ought to be possible to imagine sites and patterns of work that are not already foreclosed by the demands of the market, the law, or other forms of curtailment. It should be equally possible to imagine people coming together, bringing their skills, and working out how they might be combined. Reality and its utopian antithesis might then valuably contradict and coalesce. The combination is never easy. Imperatives, financial and otherwise, loomed large over theatres in Georgian England, as they do today. But improvisation and collective effort could both respond to and yet resist such downward pressures, to make something that is at least potentially dissident, as much a way of working as the work produced.

In June 2022, after a two-and-a-half-year COVID-19 hiatus, I joyfully returned to Europe for a research trip. My purpose was to develop further my next monograph on queering animal symbols, specifically investigating the history of the Dalecarlian (Dala) horse [Dalahäst]. Dala horses are brightly painted wooden toys that were carved and decorated by farmers through the long Swedish winters as early as the seventeenth century. Thereafter, Dala horses became a national icon and symbol of Sweden at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. Scheduling also allowed me to attend Midsommar (Midsummer) celebrations in Dalarna (Dalecarlia) County,1 Sweden (Fig. 1). This is the region not only where Dala horses first appeared, but also where many of the traditions surrounding the folkloric, highly theatrical, and now de facto Swedish national holiday of Midsommar most likely originated.

In 2015, I traveled to Havana with the support of an ASTR Targeted Areas Research Grant to work on processing the physical materials of the Photographic Archive of Tablas-Alarcos Press (hereinafter the Tablas-Alarcos archive or collection). The Tablas-Alarcos archive is a unique collection because it exists not in a traditional research institution, but in the offices of a state-run press dedicated to the performing arts. Also, it consists of materials that have been saved after critics, researchers, and editors have completed the process of publishing their work. Much more than photographs, this collection also contains programs, unpublished manuscripts, and various theatre ephemera from all over the globe and in multiple languages.1