Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2022.2118730
H. Huber
Abstract The management of the coronavirus crisis of 2020 required immediate and top-down decisions, which contradicts the bottom-up philosophy of the non-curated Festival OFF d’Avignon. As a consequence, the loose organizational structure risked breaking apart and every theatre director acted autonomously by either cancelling the scheduled programme, creating online alternatives, or organising independent micro-festivals. The events of 2020 demonstrate that the non-curated festival is composed of multiple independent theatres following their own artistic orientation and business model. The OFF d’Avignon is, in fact, a festival of festivals.
{"title":"Micro-Festivals on the Fringe: The OFF d’Avignon in 2020","authors":"H. Huber","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2022.2118730","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2118730","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The management of the coronavirus crisis of 2020 required immediate and top-down decisions, which contradicts the bottom-up philosophy of the non-curated Festival OFF d’Avignon. As a consequence, the loose organizational structure risked breaking apart and every theatre director acted autonomously by either cancelling the scheduled programme, creating online alternatives, or organising independent micro-festivals. The events of 2020 demonstrate that the non-curated festival is composed of multiple independent theatres following their own artistic orientation and business model. The OFF d’Avignon is, in fact, a festival of festivals.","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"247 - 252"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41778013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2022.2117806
B. Lease, J. Pather
Abstract In this interview with Bryce Lease, Jay Pather discusses the multiple festivals he curates in South Africa, the Netherlands, and France. These include Infecting the City Public Art Festival, the ICA Live Art Festival, Afrovibes, and Season Africa 2020. Focusing on African contexts for performance and congregation, Pather discusses the challenges and opportunities for collaboration and audience engagement during the Covid pandemic, as well as the uneven forms of ecological activism between the global North and South.
{"title":"The Importance of Congregation","authors":"B. Lease, J. Pather","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2022.2117806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2117806","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this interview with Bryce Lease, Jay Pather discusses the multiple festivals he curates in South Africa, the Netherlands, and France. These include Infecting the City Public Art Festival, the ICA Live Art Festival, Afrovibes, and Season Africa 2020. Focusing on African contexts for performance and congregation, Pather discusses the challenges and opportunities for collaboration and audience engagement during the Covid pandemic, as well as the uneven forms of ecological activism between the global North and South.","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"288 - 295"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49567226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2022.2117803
Kris Nelson
Abstract The London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) is a biennial festival of theatre, performance, and cultural events. The organisation also supports year-round activity in London. LIFT was founded by Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal, with the first festival in 1981 hoping to ‘challenge British theatre and open a window on the world’. It has been a significant force in internationalising the UK theatre scene over the past 40 years.
{"title":"LIFT’s Shifts: Concept Touring & Times of Precarity","authors":"Kris Nelson","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2022.2117803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2117803","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) is a biennial festival of theatre, performance, and cultural events. The organisation also supports year-round activity in London. LIFT was founded by Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal, with the first festival in 1981 hoping to ‘challenge British theatre and open a window on the world’. It has been a significant force in internationalising the UK theatre scene over the past 40 years.","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"310 - 318"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44608020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2022.2118733
Shona McCullagh, Sarah Thomasson
Abstract Shona McCullagh, Artistic Director of Auckland Arts Festival, Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki, speaks to Sarah Thomasson about her experience of festival programming during the pandemic and the challenges and opportunities artists and festivals in Aotearoa will face in the future.
摘要奥克兰艺术节艺术总监Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Shona McCullagh向Sarah Thomasson讲述了她在疫情期间的艺术节编程经验,以及艺术家和艺术节在未来将面临的挑战和机遇。
{"title":"The Power of Disruption: The Future Is Creatively Vibrant at Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki (Auckland Arts Festival)","authors":"Shona McCullagh, Sarah Thomasson","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2022.2118733","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2118733","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Shona McCullagh, Artistic Director of Auckland Arts Festival, Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki, speaks to Sarah Thomasson about her experience of festival programming during the pandemic and the challenges and opportunities artists and festivals in Aotearoa will face in the future.","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"319 - 322"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45013375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2022.2068870
David Calder, Broderick Chow, Maria M. Delgado, Maggie B. Gale, Bryce Lease, Caridad Svich, Sarah Thomasson
There is a dialogue between different conditions of our time(s) in this issue of Contemporary Theatre Review. While some of the articles examine productions presented in a pre-COVID world, issues of catastrophe, challenge, and change run through a consideration of how these stagings work and why they matter. COVID may have exposed fault lines and gaps in twenty-first century culture(s), but the articles here show how particular concerns have been manifest across a range of theatrical media. Intersections can be identified across a range of themes – catastrophe, COVID, Catholicism, Cyborgs, and Copresence. All have implications on how reality/ies are articulated and explained and how the relationship between self and other is forged. Joanna Mansbridge’s focus on a dramaturgy of extinction in her examination of Kris Verdonck’s Conversations (at the end of the world) and SOMETHING (out of nothing) articulates how these productions present a view of extinction through human figures sidelined and displaced by animated landscapes. The result is a contemplation of how extinction may not here signify termination but rather the end of a particular and limited singular idea of the human subject. Ultimately, the article moves beyond the dominant frame of a single narrative to look at more complex ways of envisaging what might be seen as ‘progress’ or evolution. Contemporary climate crisis theatre in the UK is the focus of Alexander Watson’s article. With clear resonances to how Mansbridge engages with the Anthropocene, there is a focus on how the pieces Watson covers have engaged with and sought to expose the tensions and anxieties in the wider public sphere about climate change. The focus on Ella Hickson’s Oil (2016) is positioned within a wider body of productions that demonstrate broader connections to the issues that Mansbridge highlighted in her discussion of Verdonck’s Conversations (at the end of the world) and SOMETHING (out of nothing). The focus in both pieces on performative affect and material expense points to wider currents in contemporary scholarship engaging with climate change, environmental politics, and an understanding of the relationship between time, space, action, and human agency. Providing a consideration of the stage production of Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour (2015), Lee Hall’s adaptation of Alan Warner’s novel Contemporary Theatre Review, 2022 Vol. 32, No. 2, 121–123, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2068870
{"title":"Editorial 32.2","authors":"David Calder, Broderick Chow, Maria M. Delgado, Maggie B. Gale, Bryce Lease, Caridad Svich, Sarah Thomasson","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2022.2068870","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2068870","url":null,"abstract":"There is a dialogue between different conditions of our time(s) in this issue of Contemporary Theatre Review. While some of the articles examine productions presented in a pre-COVID world, issues of catastrophe, challenge, and change run through a consideration of how these stagings work and why they matter. COVID may have exposed fault lines and gaps in twenty-first century culture(s), but the articles here show how particular concerns have been manifest across a range of theatrical media. Intersections can be identified across a range of themes – catastrophe, COVID, Catholicism, Cyborgs, and Copresence. All have implications on how reality/ies are articulated and explained and how the relationship between self and other is forged. Joanna Mansbridge’s focus on a dramaturgy of extinction in her examination of Kris Verdonck’s Conversations (at the end of the world) and SOMETHING (out of nothing) articulates how these productions present a view of extinction through human figures sidelined and displaced by animated landscapes. The result is a contemplation of how extinction may not here signify termination but rather the end of a particular and limited singular idea of the human subject. Ultimately, the article moves beyond the dominant frame of a single narrative to look at more complex ways of envisaging what might be seen as ‘progress’ or evolution. Contemporary climate crisis theatre in the UK is the focus of Alexander Watson’s article. With clear resonances to how Mansbridge engages with the Anthropocene, there is a focus on how the pieces Watson covers have engaged with and sought to expose the tensions and anxieties in the wider public sphere about climate change. The focus on Ella Hickson’s Oil (2016) is positioned within a wider body of productions that demonstrate broader connections to the issues that Mansbridge highlighted in her discussion of Verdonck’s Conversations (at the end of the world) and SOMETHING (out of nothing). The focus in both pieces on performative affect and material expense points to wider currents in contemporary scholarship engaging with climate change, environmental politics, and an understanding of the relationship between time, space, action, and human agency. Providing a consideration of the stage production of Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour (2015), Lee Hall’s adaptation of Alan Warner’s novel Contemporary Theatre Review, 2022 Vol. 32, No. 2, 121–123, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2068870","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"121 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42236516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2022.2047031
Jihay Park
Abstract It is only recently that VR has become one of the most sought out technologies to create a narrative experience. However, as David Z. Saltz points out, ‘scholars and practitioners have yet to settle on a name to describe performances that incorporate digital media’. In this article, I extend Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s concept of ‘cyborg theatre’ to the three technological retellings of Shakespeare – To Be With Hamlet, Hamlet 360, and The Under Presents: Tempest – and demonstrate immersive VR theatre as a site where the possibilities of shifting subjectivity materialize. The first section explores the nature of VR in theatre through its central function. Focusing on my experiences of the productions, I explore the cyborgean intersections in VR theatre via the sense of immersion, and highlight how the immersive power of VR incites reflections on the impact of new technologies on the body and the subject of the audience. Based on an examination of immersion, the second section focuses on the audience’s embodied subjectivity and argues immersive VR theatre as a site where alternative corporeal and technological configurations could be tested out. I am especially interested in how sensory immersion in VR, unlike existing claims on it, relates to the materiality as well as the imitative representation of a fictional world.
直到最近,VR才成为最受欢迎的创造叙事体验的技术之一。然而,正如David Z. Saltz所指出的,“学者和实践者还没有确定一个名称来描述包含数字媒体的表演”。在这篇文章中,我将Jennifer Parker-Starbuck的“电子剧院”概念扩展到莎士比亚的三部技术重播作品——《与哈姆雷特在一起》、《哈姆雷特360》和《底层呈现:暴风雨》——并展示了沉浸式虚拟现实剧院作为转移主体性的可能性实现的场所。第一部分通过VR的核心功能来探讨其在戏剧中的本质。我以自己的作品体验为中心,通过沉浸感来探索VR戏剧中的半机械人交叉点,并强调VR的沉浸感如何激发人们对新技术对身体和观众主体的影响的思考。基于对沉浸感的考察,第二部分侧重于观众体现的主体性,并认为沉浸式VR剧院是一个可以测试替代物质和技术配置的场所。我对VR中的感官沉浸感特别感兴趣,不像现有的说法,它与物质性以及虚构世界的模仿表现有关。
{"title":"Shakespeare in Cyborg Theatre: Immersive VR Theatre and the Cyborg-Subject","authors":"Jihay Park","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2022.2047031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2047031","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract It is only recently that VR has become one of the most sought out technologies to create a narrative experience. However, as David Z. Saltz points out, ‘scholars and practitioners have yet to settle on a name to describe performances that incorporate digital media’. In this article, I extend Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s concept of ‘cyborg theatre’ to the three technological retellings of Shakespeare – To Be With Hamlet, Hamlet 360, and The Under Presents: Tempest – and demonstrate immersive VR theatre as a site where the possibilities of shifting subjectivity materialize. The first section explores the nature of VR in theatre through its central function. Focusing on my experiences of the productions, I explore the cyborgean intersections in VR theatre via the sense of immersion, and highlight how the immersive power of VR incites reflections on the impact of new technologies on the body and the subject of the audience. Based on an examination of immersion, the second section focuses on the audience’s embodied subjectivity and argues immersive VR theatre as a site where alternative corporeal and technological configurations could be tested out. I am especially interested in how sensory immersion in VR, unlike existing claims on it, relates to the materiality as well as the imitative representation of a fictional world.","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"177 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42311598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2022.2047033
K. Jacobson
Abstract Taking Jordan Tannahill’s play rihannaboi95 as case study, this article examines the ways in which digital theatre forms cultivate a unique spectator experience of perceived realness. Specifically, this article examines how the conventions of the YouTube video carry over and impact the audience experience of rihannaboi95, a theatrical monologue told in the style of a YouTube confessional. rihannaboi95 concerns a young person named Sunny (username rihannaboi95), who uploads videos of himself lipsyncing and dancing to Rihanna songs online. When his videos go viral in his high school community, he is subject to intense bullying from his peers and homophobia from his own family. From the form’s portability – able to be viewed on a personal laptop or phone in one’s private home – to the use of a live chat room in which audience members may talk to each other and the performer throughout the show, this article argues that the frameworks for viewing this piece encourage a unique form of empathetic participation from its audience. Using ideas of intimacy, affect, and realness, as well as audience responses, this piece investigates how the show’s virtual co-presence works to pervade the real-world, and thus uniquely crafts an experience that both feels real to its audiences and in turn encourages real contributions from those audiences.
{"title":"The Pervasive Real: Virtual Co-Presence in Jordan Tannahill’s YouTube Play rihannaboi95","authors":"K. Jacobson","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2022.2047033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2047033","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Taking Jordan Tannahill’s play rihannaboi95 as case study, this article examines the ways in which digital theatre forms cultivate a unique spectator experience of perceived realness. Specifically, this article examines how the conventions of the YouTube video carry over and impact the audience experience of rihannaboi95, a theatrical monologue told in the style of a YouTube confessional. rihannaboi95 concerns a young person named Sunny (username rihannaboi95), who uploads videos of himself lipsyncing and dancing to Rihanna songs online. When his videos go viral in his high school community, he is subject to intense bullying from his peers and homophobia from his own family. From the form’s portability – able to be viewed on a personal laptop or phone in one’s private home – to the use of a live chat room in which audience members may talk to each other and the performer throughout the show, this article argues that the frameworks for viewing this piece encourage a unique form of empathetic participation from its audience. Using ideas of intimacy, affect, and realness, as well as audience responses, this piece investigates how the show’s virtual co-presence works to pervade the real-world, and thus uniquely crafts an experience that both feels real to its audiences and in turn encourages real contributions from those audiences.","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"191 - 205"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44108513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2022.2063544
Xing Fan
{"title":"Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s","authors":"Xing Fan","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2022.2063544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2063544","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"206 - 207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44501524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2022.2047034
J. Mansbridge
Abstract Among the challenges posed by the Anthropocene, perhaps none has been more central than redefining ‘the human’ that this epoch seems to name. It is no secret that the European liberal subject has been the directing force of the Anthropocene and the model from which a global humanity, and its globalising technology, has been envisioned. This essay begins by bringing together a diversity interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives to ask: does the Anthropocene mark the realisation of this homogenous human subject, or its end? Extinction seems constitutive of a climate narrative dominated by a Euro-American imaginary, wherein a fixation on endings suggests the anxieties – and the possibilities – of that imaginary coming to an end as a globalising worldview. Two recent performances by Kris Verdonck / A Two Dogs Company, Conversations (at the end of the world) (2017) and SOMETHING (out of nothing) (2019), imagine extinction through scenarios depicting human figures displaced and overtaken by sentient landscapes. Composed of synthetic materials and activated by bio-technical forces, these landscapes scale down a computational planet, embodying an accumulated history of technological progress and human interventions in environments. Extinction, in these works, is not the end, however, but rather the slow dying out of a singular idea of the human subject, if not its singular narrative of technological progress
在人类世带来的挑战中,也许没有比重新定义这个时代似乎命名的“人类”更重要的了。众所周知,欧洲自由主义主体一直是人类世的主导力量,也是全球人类及其全球化技术被设想的典范。本文首先从跨学科和跨文化的角度出发,提出这样一个问题:人类世标志着同质的人类主体的实现,还是它的终结?灭绝似乎是由欧美想象主导的气候叙事的组成部分,在这种叙事中,对结局的执著表明了这种想象随着全球化世界观的终结而走向终结的焦虑和可能性。克里斯·弗东克/ A Two Dogs Company最近的两场表演《对话(世界末日)》(2017)和《虚无》(2019)通过描绘人类被有感情的风景取代和超越的场景来想象灭绝。这些景观由合成材料组成,由生物技术力量激活,缩小了一个计算行星,体现了技术进步和人类对环境干预的积累历史。然而,在这些作品中,灭绝并不是终结,而是人类主体的单一观念的缓慢消亡,如果不是它对技术进步的单一叙述
{"title":"Dramaturgy of Extinction: Sentient Landscapes, Spectral Bodies, and Unthought Worlds in Kris Verdonck’s Conversations (at the end of the world) and SOMETHING (out of nothing)","authors":"J. Mansbridge","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2022.2047034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2047034","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Among the challenges posed by the Anthropocene, perhaps none has been more central than redefining ‘the human’ that this epoch seems to name. It is no secret that the European liberal subject has been the directing force of the Anthropocene and the model from which a global humanity, and its globalising technology, has been envisioned. This essay begins by bringing together a diversity interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives to ask: does the Anthropocene mark the realisation of this homogenous human subject, or its end? Extinction seems constitutive of a climate narrative dominated by a Euro-American imaginary, wherein a fixation on endings suggests the anxieties – and the possibilities – of that imaginary coming to an end as a globalising worldview. Two recent performances by Kris Verdonck / A Two Dogs Company, Conversations (at the end of the world) (2017) and SOMETHING (out of nothing) (2019), imagine extinction through scenarios depicting human figures displaced and overtaken by sentient landscapes. Composed of synthetic materials and activated by bio-technical forces, these landscapes scale down a computational planet, embodying an accumulated history of technological progress and human interventions in environments. Extinction, in these works, is not the end, however, but rather the slow dying out of a singular idea of the human subject, if not its singular narrative of technological progress","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"124 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48139848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2022.2047032
M. Inchley
Abstract This article explores the role of music in forms of ‘becoming’ in the adaptation of Alan Warner’s novel The Sopranos (1998) for the stage by Lee Hall as Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour (2015). Telling the story of six choirgirls’ visit to Edinburgh for a choir competition, a musical strain in Warner’s novel ameliorates the ‘reprofuturity’ felt by the girls as a pressure leading with deathly inevitably to maternity and small-town conformity (Freeman 2007). In OLPS, the girls perform their own stories as a ‘gig’ incorporating both classical music and cover versions of the songs of popular UK band ELO, affording them opportunities to subvert oppressive gender roles, to deploy music’s erotic and affective charges, and to become musical dramaturgs of their own stories. As a musical play, the author argues, OLPS was a sonorous and affective event that staged the girls’ negotiations with normative pressures through flows of desire which were immanent, fluid and ongoing. Within theatre’s neoliberal and patriarchal economies, its performers deployed musical practices in ways that realized a sense of their own creative potential. In addition to drawing from the materialist feminism of Rosi Braidotti (2002) for its working definition of ‘becoming’, the article uses approaches from feminist and queer musicologists (McClary 1991: Citron 1993; Cusick 2003; Peraino 2013) to explore music’s embodying, relational and temporal processes. In so doing, it points to the usefulness of feminist and queer musicology to performance studies in regard to its interest in the staging of subjectivities and social relations.
{"title":"‘Mr. Blue Sky’ in the West End: Becoming Musical in Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour","authors":"M. Inchley","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2022.2047032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2047032","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the role of music in forms of ‘becoming’ in the adaptation of Alan Warner’s novel The Sopranos (1998) for the stage by Lee Hall as Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour (2015). Telling the story of six choirgirls’ visit to Edinburgh for a choir competition, a musical strain in Warner’s novel ameliorates the ‘reprofuturity’ felt by the girls as a pressure leading with deathly inevitably to maternity and small-town conformity (Freeman 2007). In OLPS, the girls perform their own stories as a ‘gig’ incorporating both classical music and cover versions of the songs of popular UK band ELO, affording them opportunities to subvert oppressive gender roles, to deploy music’s erotic and affective charges, and to become musical dramaturgs of their own stories. As a musical play, the author argues, OLPS was a sonorous and affective event that staged the girls’ negotiations with normative pressures through flows of desire which were immanent, fluid and ongoing. Within theatre’s neoliberal and patriarchal economies, its performers deployed musical practices in ways that realized a sense of their own creative potential. In addition to drawing from the materialist feminism of Rosi Braidotti (2002) for its working definition of ‘becoming’, the article uses approaches from feminist and queer musicologists (McClary 1991: Citron 1993; Cusick 2003; Peraino 2013) to explore music’s embodying, relational and temporal processes. In so doing, it points to the usefulness of feminist and queer musicology to performance studies in regard to its interest in the staging of subjectivities and social relations.","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":"32 1","pages":"162 - 176"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42521588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}