Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557422000308
D. Cullen
dated; it recalls “postcolonial” analyses that attempt to validate the worth of othered artists through inaccessible accounts of their work. The postcoloniality of this volume—including its wielding of the contentious term “intercultural”—not only discounts a dominant local trend of fiery, urgent, culturally specific work on regional decolonization, but also takes away what it means—or at least, what it feels like—to embody Oceania. A lack of engagement in this book with contemporary Indigenous conceptions of family, gender, sexuality, and Pasifika youth identities —perhaps an effect of writing from outside our region—overlooks other exciting recent works, such as that of FAFSWAG, the queer, Indigenous, interdisciplinary arts collective based in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, Aotearoa. If transpasifika performance needs a poster child, FAFSWAG should be it. As Looser reinforces, allyship remains important and vital to ensuring the international dissemination of our work. But there is folly in writing about us without us: If we can’t see ourselves, are we really there? In short, we are not in this waka together, and though our courses might intersect, our destinations remain distinct.
{"title":"Actor Training in Anglophone Countries: Past, Present, and Future By Peter Zazzali. Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies. London: Routledge, 2022; pp. xxii + 229, 34 illustrations. $160 cloth, $48.95 e-book.","authors":"D. Cullen","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000308","url":null,"abstract":"dated; it recalls “postcolonial” analyses that attempt to validate the worth of othered artists through inaccessible accounts of their work. The postcoloniality of this volume—including its wielding of the contentious term “intercultural”—not only discounts a dominant local trend of fiery, urgent, culturally specific work on regional decolonization, but also takes away what it means—or at least, what it feels like—to embody Oceania. A lack of engagement in this book with contemporary Indigenous conceptions of family, gender, sexuality, and Pasifika youth identities —perhaps an effect of writing from outside our region—overlooks other exciting recent works, such as that of FAFSWAG, the queer, Indigenous, interdisciplinary arts collective based in Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, Aotearoa. If transpasifika performance needs a poster child, FAFSWAG should be it. As Looser reinforces, allyship remains important and vital to ensuring the international dissemination of our work. But there is folly in writing about us without us: If we can’t see ourselves, are we really there? In short, we are not in this waka together, and though our courses might intersect, our destinations remain distinct.","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"276 - 278"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46625099","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 : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557422000345
Marla Carlson
As most of my human contact became restricted to the Zoom screen in spring 2020, I discovered a serious limit to my capacity for looking. I also began finding it difficult to read. A ten-month headache taught me to stop taking ibuprofen and learn to manage tensions around my eyes and head as well as to shift roughly half of my reading to screenreaders and audio books. The need to restructure my own practices of seeing refocused my interest in theatre's engagement of the senses at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic destroyed people's ability to smell, prompted them to hoard toilet paper, and created a U.S. boom in bidet purchases. These personal and cultural developments coincided with revived metaphors of blindness on the pandemic stage. This article begins with a brief discussion of The Blind, an “immersive audio/visual meditation journey” that Here Arts Center produced in 2021, and then centers on Blindness, the “socially distanced sound installation” produced by the Donmar Warehouse in 2020 followed by an international tour. I wonder at the reiteration of blindness as a tragic trope, seemingly unaffected by progress in disability rights, equity, and inclusion. I wonder at the appeal of wielding any contagious illness as metaphor during a global pandemic. My analysis turns particularly upon the relation between blindness and excrement in José Saramago's novel Blindness and the effect of cleansing the theatrical installation of any shit as well as the even more surprising choice to eliminate the voices of the blind characters. A detour through medieval French farces that link blindness and excrement reveals submerged tropes at play in these performative responses to fear of diminished capacity and diminished control—everything that individuals and societies cast out in order to maintain what we call health, whether literal or metaphorical.
2020年春天，由于我的大部分人际接触都被限制在Zoom屏幕上，我发现自己的寻找能力受到了严重限制。我也开始觉得阅读很困难。十个月的头痛让我停止服用布洛芬，学会控制眼睛和头部周围的紧张情绪，并将大约一半的阅读量转移到屏幕阅读器和有声读物上。在新冠肺炎疫情摧毁了人们的嗅觉能力，促使他们囤积卫生纸，并在美国掀起了坐浴盆购买热潮的同时，我重新调整自己的观影实践的必要性，重新激发了我对戏剧与感官互动的兴趣。这些个人和文化的发展与新冠疫情舞台上重新出现的失明隐喻不谋而合。本文首先简要讨论了《盲人》，这是一部由Here Arts Center于2021年制作的“沉浸式视听冥想之旅”，然后以《失明》为中心，这是唐玛仓库于2020年制作的一部“社交距离声音装置”，随后进行了一次国际巡演。我想知道，失明是一个悲剧的比喻，似乎不受残疾人权利、公平和包容进步的影响。我想知道在全球大流行期间，用任何传染性疾病作为隐喻的吸引力。我的分析特别关注何塞·萨拉马戈小说《失明》中失明和排泄物之间的关系，以及清除戏剧装置中任何排泄物的效果，以及消除盲人角色声音的更令人惊讶的选择。绕过中世纪的法国闹剧，将失明和排泄物联系起来，揭示了在这些对能力下降和控制力下降的恐惧的表演反应中，隐藏的比喻在起作用——无论是字面上还是隐喻上，个人和社会为了保持我们所说的健康而抛弃的一切。
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Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557422000278
George Pate
play after being immersed in a video game, with its branching narrative paths. We might, Bushnell suggests, approach it with heightened attention to the role of uncertainty and mischance, to the ways that choices shape a character’s identity, to whether tragic endings are inevitable or chosen. “While a traditional view of Hamlet focuses on the outcome as Hamlet’s assenting to his destiny to avenge his father’s death and accept his own,” she notes, “a focus on gaming . . . can make us look again at how Hamlet might be operating in a more open rather than closed world, defined by uncertainty rather than fatality” (236). Hamlet is, after all, a play whose most famous line turns on the word “or.” One of the great advantages of viewing the early modern stage in gaming terms is the framework that it provides for thinking about metatheatricality. This engaging and provocative essay collection opens by attempting to answer the question “What is a game?” but, by the time they finish, readers are also left with a range of new and surprising answers to the question “What is a play?”
{"title":"The Lines between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment By Bess Rowen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021; pp. x + 247, 1 illustration. $80 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 e-book.","authors":"George Pate","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000278","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000278","url":null,"abstract":"play after being immersed in a video game, with its branching narrative paths. We might, Bushnell suggests, approach it with heightened attention to the role of uncertainty and mischance, to the ways that choices shape a character’s identity, to whether tragic endings are inevitable or chosen. “While a traditional view of Hamlet focuses on the outcome as Hamlet’s assenting to his destiny to avenge his father’s death and accept his own,” she notes, “a focus on gaming . . . can make us look again at how Hamlet might be operating in a more open rather than closed world, defined by uncertainty rather than fatality” (236). Hamlet is, after all, a play whose most famous line turns on the word “or.” One of the great advantages of viewing the early modern stage in gaming terms is the framework that it provides for thinking about metatheatricality. This engaging and provocative essay collection opens by attempting to answer the question “What is a game?” but, by the time they finish, readers are also left with a range of new and surprising answers to the question “What is a play?”","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"288 - 290"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49220316","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 : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557422000254
Harmony Bench
Enola Gay. What keeps the image of flight aloft in the American imagination is a technophilia that conceals violence through the aestheticized and distanced act of bombing, further realized in the drone strike. The American infatuation with flight is inextricable from how it aesthetically and anesthetically wields violence that enables the American willing suspension of disbelief that we are not performing violence ourselves. Despite these issues, Magelssen should be commended for focusing on this topic with sensitivity. Throughout, he thoughtfully engages with performance studies to connect the specificity of the historical archive with contemporary culture and politics. He takes seriously the ways in which flight has not only been central to the American cultural imagination, but also how that figuration is fundamentally shaped by disciplinary regimes of race, gender, and nation. In so doing, Magelssen effectively makes the case for flight’s centrality to America’s image of itself, with performance as one of its foundational elements.
{"title":"Theater as Data: Computational Journeys into Theater Research Miguel Escobar Varela. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021; pp. viii + 222, 21 illustrations, 13 datasets, 4 code samples, 4 videos. $75 cloth, $29.95 paper, Open Access e-book.","authors":"Harmony Bench","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000254","url":null,"abstract":"Enola Gay. What keeps the image of flight aloft in the American imagination is a technophilia that conceals violence through the aestheticized and distanced act of bombing, further realized in the drone strike. The American infatuation with flight is inextricable from how it aesthetically and anesthetically wields violence that enables the American willing suspension of disbelief that we are not performing violence ourselves. Despite these issues, Magelssen should be commended for focusing on this topic with sensitivity. Throughout, he thoughtfully engages with performance studies to connect the specificity of the historical archive with contemporary culture and politics. He takes seriously the ways in which flight has not only been central to the American cultural imagination, but also how that figuration is fundamentally shaped by disciplinary regimes of race, gender, and nation. In so doing, Magelssen effectively makes the case for flight’s centrality to America’s image of itself, with performance as one of its foundational elements.","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"284 - 286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48445394","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 : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557422000205
Alessandro Simari
formance’s location and duration. Part 1 also includes a chapter on Tadeusz Kantor by Magda Romanska (Chapter 6), as well as one by Edith Cassiers, Timmy De Laet, and Luk Van den Dries (Chapter 3) that examines Guy Cassiers’s and Romeo Castellucci’s notebooks and creative processes, both of which will easily complement courses examining these international artists’ work. Cassiers, De Laet, and Van den Dries aptly note that genetic theatre studies—research examining the genesis of a performance—tends to focus on scripts and text-based material, thus clinging “to characteristics that are foundational of classical drama, forsaking the expanded aesthetics that typify postdrama” (34). The chapter highlights how even a performance’s preparatory materials contribute to its form. Part 2 investigates the impact of different social contexts on performance. In Chapter 8, for example, Andrew Friedman considers the curation of avant-garde performance festivals, in which performers may disrupt or exploit one another’s work. In Chapter 9, Ryan Anthony Hatch considers the gallery setting of David Levine’s Habit using Lacanian analysis. Kate Bredeson, in Chapter 10, extends Lehmann’s theory to the contemporary French scene, which was underrepresented in Postdramatic Theatre, by linking it to Bruno Tackels’s concept of “set writing” (148). And, in Chapter 11, Yvonne Hardt considers reperformances from dance archives. The case studies in Part 2 illuminate how postdramatic theatre is not simply shaped by the dramaturgical choices of the artistic team but is also influenced by the broader social context in which it is presented. As with Lehmann’s original book, it is impossible to capture the full range that postdramatic forms may take. However, Postdramatic Theatre and Form offers a strong variety of case-study analyses that will encourage readers to consider more fully the extent to which a multitude of formal elements within a performance’s dramaturgy and its social context work to shape the overall meanings of a piece. In focusing specifically on form, the book extends Lehmann’s ideas into fruitful theoretical territory, simultaneously adding more recent performances to the discussion. The book consequently can ably serve to supplement and renew studies on postdramatic theatre sixteen years after Lehmann’s original publication.
演出的地点和持续时间。第1部分还包括Magda Romanska关于Tadeusz Kantor的一章（第6章），以及Edith Cassiers、Timmy De Laet和Luk Van den Dries的一章，其中考察了Guy Cassiers和Romeo Castellucci的笔记本和创作过程，这两个章节都将很容易补充考察这些国际艺术家作品的课程。Cassiers、De Laet和Van den Dries恰当地指出，基因戏剧研究——研究表演起源的研究——倾向于关注剧本和基于文本的材料，从而坚持“古典戏剧的基础特征，放弃了后戏剧的扩展美学”（34）。本章重点介绍了即使是表演的准备材料也是如何影响其形式的。第二部分调查了不同社会背景对表演的影响。例如，在第8章中，安德鲁·弗里德曼考虑了先锋表演节的策展，在先锋表演节中，表演者可能会破坏或利用彼此的作品。在第9章中，Ryan Anthony Hatch运用拉康分析法对David Levine的《习惯》的画廊设置进行了思考。凯特·布雷德森（Kate Bredeson）在第10章中，将莱曼的理论与布鲁诺·塔克斯（Bruno Tackels）的“场景写作”概念联系起来，将其扩展到当代法国场景，而这在后戏剧剧院中是代表性不足的（148）。在第11章中，Yvonne Hardt考虑了舞蹈档案中的曲目。第二部分的案例研究阐明了后戏剧不仅是由艺术团队的戏剧选择塑造的，而且还受到更广泛的社会背景的影响。正如莱曼的原著一样，不可能捕捉到后戏剧形式的全部内容。然而，《后戏剧戏剧与形式》提供了各种各样的案例分析，鼓励读者更充分地考虑表演戏剧化及其社会背景中的多种形式元素在多大程度上影响了作品的整体意义。在具体关注形式方面，这本书将莱曼的思想扩展到了富有成果的理论领域，同时在讨论中增加了更多的近期表现。因此，在莱曼最初出版16年后，这本书可以有力地补充和更新对后戏剧的研究。
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Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557422000229
J. McAllister
ideologies and does so with real teeth. Theatre companies who pursue the kind of important, necessary, and revolutionary work for which Rowen advocates should be aware of the risks that come from a system that invests the author with virtually unchecked omnipotence. One day it would be nice to see a theatre company fight one of these cease and desists on the grounds that they had, in fact, followed the stage directions, but such a fight would need to be planned and well-funded, as intellectual property cases can cost millions to litigate. In the meantime, any theatre company or student director stirred or moved by Rowen’s effective arguments and calls to action—a highly likely possibility given Rowen’s passionate writing style and effective rhetoric—should operate with an awareness of the very real imbalances in legal power in the contemporary theatre landscape.
{"title":"Beckett beyond the Normal Edited by Seán Kennedy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020; pp. ix + 155. $100 cloth, $24.95 paper, $100 e-book.","authors":"J. McAllister","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000229","url":null,"abstract":"ideologies and does so with real teeth. Theatre companies who pursue the kind of important, necessary, and revolutionary work for which Rowen advocates should be aware of the risks that come from a system that invests the author with virtually unchecked omnipotence. One day it would be nice to see a theatre company fight one of these cease and desists on the grounds that they had, in fact, followed the stage directions, but such a fight would need to be planned and well-funded, as intellectual property cases can cost millions to litigate. In the meantime, any theatre company or student director stirred or moved by Rowen’s effective arguments and calls to action—a highly likely possibility given Rowen’s passionate writing style and effective rhetoric—should operate with an awareness of the very real imbalances in legal power in the contemporary theatre landscape.","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"290 - 292"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49042444","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 : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557422000126
A. Sansonetti
{"title":"The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays Edited by Leanne Keyes, Lindsey Mantoan, and Angela Farr Schiller. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; pp. xi + 444. $100 cloth, $34.95 paper, $31.45 e-book.","authors":"A. Sansonetti","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000126","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"242 - 244"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47766683","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 : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040557422000072
Mattie Burkert
Stock characters named “Nobody” and “Somebody” were mainstays of British performance culture in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Playbills and newspaper advertisements show that these roles were popular with audiences in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, as well as on the regional stages. Men and women alike took on these personae to deliver songs, prologues, and epilogues, often as part of benefit performances where they chose their most crowd-pleasing roles to maximize ticket sales. Some of the pieces spoken by Nobody and Somebody were popular enough to make their way into print, excerpted in novels and miscellanies. The duo appeared in George Alexander Stevens's wildly popular Lecture on Heads (1764), which traveled across the Atlantic to stages in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York, continuing to be performed in the early Republic until the nineteenth century. Offstage, the figures were staples of visual culture; as Terry Robinson has shown, audience awareness of these figures from Romantic-era political cartoons formed an important backdrop for Mary Robinson's theatrical afterpiece Nobody (1794).
{"title":"Nobodies and Somebodies: Embodying Precarity on the Early Modern English Stage","authors":"Mattie Burkert","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000072","url":null,"abstract":"Stock characters named “Nobody” and “Somebody” were mainstays of British performance culture in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Playbills and newspaper advertisements show that these roles were popular with audiences in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, as well as on the regional stages. Men and women alike took on these personae to deliver songs, prologues, and epilogues, often as part of benefit performances where they chose their most crowd-pleasing roles to maximize ticket sales. Some of the pieces spoken by Nobody and Somebody were popular enough to make their way into print, excerpted in novels and miscellanies. The duo appeared in George Alexander Stevens's wildly popular Lecture on Heads (1764), which traveled across the Atlantic to stages in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York, continuing to be performed in the early Republic until the nineteenth century. Offstage, the figures were staples of visual culture; as Terry Robinson has shown, audience awareness of these figures from Romantic-era political cartoons formed an important backdrop for Mary Robinson's theatrical afterpiece Nobody (1794).","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"205 - 232"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44921302","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 : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1017/s0040557422000035
Anticipation is an energy that can enliven or evacuate a moment. It tells us to look forward to what is to come, but it can also keep us from sitting with the specificity of the present, moving us too hastily from the significance of what is right in front of us. As scholars of performance history, we are trained to look for the most meaningful change over time, the specialness of specific moments. The authors in this issue document and interpret the past in order to weave skillful bridges toward the present, sometimes illuminating, without falling into teleological framings, the ways that artists and critics of the past anticipated some of the most pressing concerns of contemporary times. Rebecca Kastleman opens this issue with a study that uplifts Zora Neale Hurston’s foresight as both a performance theorist and a leader in university-based theatre practice. Building upon the work of other Hurston scholars, she identifies the ways that Hurston’s creative practice, particularly after the termination of Charlotte Osgood Mason’s patronage, worked expansively to uplift the artistry of Black life across media and social spaces. Kastleman adds to the movement to recognize Hurston as part of the genealogy of American performance theory, providing a foundation for our understanding of precisely how relationships between participants and audiences constitute performance events. Hurston’s deployment of her anthropological training shed light on the interpersonal, institutional, and communal dimensions of social relationships, developing a framework that extends toward the ways in which subsequent articulations of performance theory evolved a scalar model of representational efficacy in the construction of social meaning. In addition, her work within university settings provided spaces where she could both refine her personal craft as a writer and theorist, and also contribute to a vision of what arts curricula at the collegiate level could and should include. In the first half of the twentieth century, Hurston was advocating for the well-rounded course offerings that many of us continue to implore our campus leaders to fund! Bradley Rogers offers a biographical contribution that highlights the signal influence of Otto Harbach upon what we now appreciate as “integrated” musical theatre. Harbach entered the field at a time when musical comedy was a disaggregated assortment of musical numbers and narrative, with no deep sense of connection between the two that would maintain an audience’s connection to the story’s emotional through line. Instead, Harbach leveraged his extensive training in (and subsequent employment as an instructor of) elocution and oratory to advance a more holistic approach to the musical, deploying songs to advance rather than interrupt the narrative, and did so quite early in the twentieth century, years before the theatrical works that are most commonly celebrated as achieving this formal synthesis. Rogers’s essay reasserts Harbach’s
{"title":"Anticipation","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0040557422000035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0040557422000035","url":null,"abstract":"Anticipation is an energy that can enliven or evacuate a moment. It tells us to look forward to what is to come, but it can also keep us from sitting with the specificity of the present, moving us too hastily from the significance of what is right in front of us. As scholars of performance history, we are trained to look for the most meaningful change over time, the specialness of specific moments. The authors in this issue document and interpret the past in order to weave skillful bridges toward the present, sometimes illuminating, without falling into teleological framings, the ways that artists and critics of the past anticipated some of the most pressing concerns of contemporary times. Rebecca Kastleman opens this issue with a study that uplifts Zora Neale Hurston’s foresight as both a performance theorist and a leader in university-based theatre practice. Building upon the work of other Hurston scholars, she identifies the ways that Hurston’s creative practice, particularly after the termination of Charlotte Osgood Mason’s patronage, worked expansively to uplift the artistry of Black life across media and social spaces. Kastleman adds to the movement to recognize Hurston as part of the genealogy of American performance theory, providing a foundation for our understanding of precisely how relationships between participants and audiences constitute performance events. Hurston’s deployment of her anthropological training shed light on the interpersonal, institutional, and communal dimensions of social relationships, developing a framework that extends toward the ways in which subsequent articulations of performance theory evolved a scalar model of representational efficacy in the construction of social meaning. In addition, her work within university settings provided spaces where she could both refine her personal craft as a writer and theorist, and also contribute to a vision of what arts curricula at the collegiate level could and should include. In the first half of the twentieth century, Hurston was advocating for the well-rounded course offerings that many of us continue to implore our campus leaders to fund! Bradley Rogers offers a biographical contribution that highlights the signal influence of Otto Harbach upon what we now appreciate as “integrated” musical theatre. Harbach entered the field at a time when musical comedy was a disaggregated assortment of musical numbers and narrative, with no deep sense of connection between the two that would maintain an audience’s connection to the story’s emotional through line. Instead, Harbach leveraged his extensive training in (and subsequent employment as an instructor of) elocution and oratory to advance a more holistic approach to the musical, deploying songs to advance rather than interrupt the narrative, and did so quite early in the twentieth century, years before the theatrical works that are most commonly celebrated as achieving this formal synthesis. Rogers’s essay reasserts Harbach’s ","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"135 - 137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42269159","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}
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