CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"Project Nationalism and Theatre in Contemporary India","authors":"A. SenGupta","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2021.2007897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.2007897","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The nation as performed by the state has found either endorsement or criticism on the stage in postindependence India. The decolonization drive, undertaken during the 1950s, aimed at identifying performance forms that would define what ‘national theatre’ would be for a free India and thus help reclaim the ‘Indian’ cultural ethos. Nation in contemporary Indian theatre is as much a thematic trope as a question of form – but both critical of the previous postcolonial-nationalist tendency to institutionalize through theatre an Indian culture in sync with the state narrative of nationhood. Twenty-first century theatre in India is largely experimental, moving far beyond the thematization of issues to their presentation in forms that are ‘inter-artistic exchange’ (Lehmann) and partake of performance-making protocols from domestic as well as global theatre practice. The present study discusses two theatrical productions – The Antigone Project (2003-4), directed by Anuradha Kapur and Ein Lall, and Work in Progress: A Nationalism Project (2018), directed by scenographer Deepan Sivaraman. The former is the artist’s reaction to the 2002 post-Godhra riot (called ‘pogrom’ by many); the latter critiques the distortion of the idea of modern India, prompting readings from the country’s Constitution. Although centered on these two productions, the essay quickly meanders through a couple more contemporary performances in the second section to demonstrate through the diversity of forms the shift in the relationship between politics and theatre, especially when it comes to the performance of nationalism.","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45236033","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}

{"title":"Editorial 32.1","authors":"Maria M. Delgado, Maggie Gale, B. Lease, Caridad Svich, Sarah Thomasson, B. Chow","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2022.2015189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2015189","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47802303","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}

{"title":"The Węgajty Theatre: From Collectivity to Participation","authors":"Joanna Kocemba-Żebrowska, Magdalena Hasiuk-Świerzbińska","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2021.2007898","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.2007898","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article charts the evolution of one of the most significant Polish non-institutional theatres, the W#ęgajty Theatre. We focus not only on the artists’ interests, forms, and methods of work on performances, but also on the organizational structure of the theatre and its ensemble. This analysis of the team ethic underpinning W#ęgajty’s working practices and its evolution reveals how some of its transformations are specifically connected to social changes in Poland during the reconstruction of the political system in recent decades, as well as broader global contexts. The document analyzes two main aspects of the W#ęgajty Theatre: its tity as a constellation of creators and collaborators and the evolution, over more than twenty years, of the group’s working process in realizing theatre performances.","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45500061","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}

{"title":"‘Who Cares?’: The Neoliberal Problem of Performing Care in Immersive and Participatory Play","authors":"Jenna Stephenson","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2021.2007900","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.2007900","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract By using audiences as co-creators of their own experience, participatory theatre becomes imbricated in neoliberal labour practices, characterized by a D-I-Y ethos. At the same time, co-creative audiences are positioned at the privileged centre of a customized, intimate experience that is not only by me, but also for me, and about me. This article explores the tensions between the negative drag of entrepreneurial downloading and the hopeful possibilities for an artistic environment of attentive care. Through analysis of Good Things To Do, a performance created by Christine Quintana and the Good Things collective, it is argued that the dual ontology of theatrical performance, surfaced here through a slippery playful metatheatricality, renders the nature of audience labour ambiguous, assigned an uncertain status between the actual world into the fictional world, between work and play. The playfulness of this ambiguity opens space and potential to escape the sticky web of a neoliberal framework.","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47361533","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}

{"title":"Theatre in Market Economies","authors":"Hillary Miller","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2022.2063545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2063545","url":null,"abstract":"mentally changed the internal logic, characterization, and role category configuration of the plays. Genre management along the traditional/modern divide, with hybridization (in ganju’s [Jiangxi opera] case) and purification (in huju’s [Shanghai opera] and Cantonese opera’s cases) as the two main strategies, arbitrarily yet fundamentally changed the genres’ foundational repertoire, performance practices, and stage dramaturgy. The decentralization of the performer in theatre creation – the format of creative method – detached regional genres closely associated with popular entertainment (such as pingju [Ping opera]) from its folk roots and eventually diminished theatre of scenario forms (such as huocixi [‘live-line’ drama] troupes in Tianjin and tongsu huaju [popular spoken drama] in Shanghai). Last but not least, the transformation of star-centered troupes to stateowned companies – a formal change in xiqu’s ecosystem – directly led to its separation from market forces and a shift in their function from professional entertainment to bureaucratic organs prioritizing state, diplomatic, and military entertainment missions. A text-based approach has largely continued to dominate theatre studies and theatre history studies, giving priority to scripts, theories, and the researcher’s interpretation of scripts and theories. This is evidenced in the current Chinese theatre history and historiography. Transforming Tradition offers an excellent example of how a study of theatre history can include examinations of both textual products and the practitioner’s voice and body, and how such appraisals can effectively enhance each other. Through detailed performance analysis of song, speech, body language and their interactions with musical accompaniment – in a variety of audio and visual sources – Liu helps the reader gain insights into how a subtle change in vocal registration can help reveal a character’s internal world, how a master performer uses facial expressions and hand gestures to convey the hidden meaning of her lyrics, and how a comparison and contrasting of different versions of stage practices can illustrate the process of transformation during the xiqu reform. As we follow Liu’s meticulous descriptions and analyses of the practitioners’ voices and body languages, we learn not only what to watch and how to listen, but also the aesthetics and joy of appreciating xiqu. Transforming Tradition is a must-read for educators, researchers, students, and general readers who are interested in Chinese theatre history, Chinese cultural studies, theatre historiography, and the interplay between art and politics.","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43730285","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}

{"title":"Staging Beckettian Minds: Umwelt and Cartesian Stage Space in Beckett’s Plays","authors":"O. Beloborodova, James Little","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2021.1969559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1969559","url":null,"abstract":"While working on his production of Endgame in the Schiller Theater in 1967, Samuel Beckett outlined his view of theatre work to his production assistant Michael Haerdter: ‘One turns out a small world with its own laws, conducts the action as if upon a chessboard’. This ‘small world’ could be described as an Umwelt, drawing on biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s early twentieth-century concept of the Umwelt as ‘an organism’s model of the world’. Our article contends that a central aspect of Beckett’s theatre Umwelt is the proscenium stage, which frames so many of his stage images. Such a framing device is present from Beckett’s early writing for the theatre: on the first page of his first compositional notebook for his first completed play Eleutheria, he sketched a diagram of a box set (HRC SB MS 3/2, 01r), a performance space that played an ever-present role in his theatrical imagination. What affordances did such a stage space offer Beckett as playwright and theatre director? This article contends that Beckett’s progressive subversion of the proscenium in his late theatre is key to his questioning of Cartesian mind-world dualism. Undoubtedly, the mind-world nexus is one of the key features of Beckett’s oeuvre in general, and of his stage plays in particular. His engagement with – and subversion of – such dualist philosophy of mind must be seen in terms of his career-long struggle with the Cartesian subject-object relationship, the struggle that also marks his aesthetics in prose and that received due attention in his critical writings and letters. On both levels, a gradual yet consistent departure from Cartesian subject-object and mind-world dualism will be noted and illustrated by chronologically arranged case studies from 1. Quoted in Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as Practical Playwright and Director, from Waiting for Godot to Krapp’s Last Tape (London: John Calder, 1988), 231.","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49110176","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}

{"title":"Editorial 31.4","authors":"B. Chow, Maria M. Delgado, Maggie Gale, B. Lease, Sarah Thomasson, Caridad Svich","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2021.1990471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1990471","url":null,"abstract":"This issue of Contemporary Theatre Review is published at what many had hoped would be the tail-end of the COVID-19 pandemic and the moment of possibility for a kind of ‘return’ to what some might refer to as ‘normal’. Of course, the reality is that the pandemic is likely nowhere near its tailend, and for many, its reverberations continue to cause loss and devastation on a large scale, particularly in the global south. For theatre and performance, the knock-on effect of the pandemic is now at a new stage to some extent: across different parts of the globe, elements of the industry have rallied around to salvage as much from the threat of collapse as possible; theatres in some countries are re-opened and a new generation of works are in preparation; austere modes of production have been brought to the fore. Old ‘favourites’ have been re-launched in order to provide some reliable economic underpinning as compensation for the virtual halting of the theatre-making machine, now being re-booted. Many things in the field of theatre and performance have been changed by the pandemic, not least, many of the existing labour-force have been slow to return to theatre, having been thrown into unemployment overnight and finding, even during a pandemic, less precarious work elsewhere. Many have also used the time to think about what we do, how we do it and why, and whilst this is not a themed issue of the journal, there are shared currents across the articles around issues of new ways of approaching cultural production, new ways of validating labour, and new representations on stage. The pandemic has forced many of us to think differently about process and there is a great deal in this issue which concerns itself with the complexities of process as much as product. Whilst Dorota Semenowicz is concerned with the breaking of the fictional frame in theatre focusing on a performance set in a slaughterhouse, and the ensuing public outcry and withdrawal of funding the performance created, Olga Beloborodova and James Little re-examine the use of the disembodied voice in Samuel Beckett’s late plays in production. Here, the world on the stage is almost shrunk to the level of Beckett’s proposed ‘small world with its own laws’. In each article then the, at times, contentious relationship offered up and explored in performance between the fictional and the real is the direct focus of enquiry. With a socially oriented lens, Melissa Poll looks at questions and representations of indigeneity in Canadian performance through Contemporary Theatre Review, 2021 Vol. 31, No. 4, 387–389, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1990471","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46228024","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}

{"title":"Backpages 31.4","authors":"Maria M. Delgado, M. P. Holt, D. Bradby","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2021.1970912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1970912","url":null,"abstract":"Backpages is an opportunity for the academy to engage with theatre and performance practice with immediacy and insight, and for theatre workers and performance artists to engage critically and reflectively on their work and the work of their peers. This issue features two special sections curated by Maria M. Delgado: one of them reflecting on the ten-year anniversary of the passing of eminent scholar and Editor of this journal David Bradby, and another on the passing of translator and scholar Marion Peter Holt.","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47929083","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}

{"title":"Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance","authors":"Elizabeth Moroney","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2021.1968587","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1968587","url":null,"abstract":"Sonia Massai’s Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance takes a historical approach to artfully chart the reception and treatment of accents, both regional and national, in Shakespearean performance and their evolution over the last 400 years. The book is the first critical study of its kind that engages with the impact of ‘marked voices on the production and reception of Shakespeare in performance’ in order to ‘activate a different interpretation of the fictive worlds of the plays and to challenge a traditional alignment of Shakespeare with cultural elitism’ (3). Massai masterfully takes the reader on a journey through time, starting with twenty-first century contemporary attitudes and drawing on contemporary case studies, before skillfully working back to the early modern period. This structure works well as Massai is able to offer a thorough grounding in the cultural and political baggages attached to accents before exploring how Shakespeare’s plays sounded to contemporary audiences. This in turn allows her to evaluate how differently some of his characters and plays could have been interpreted by those original audiences. It also enables Massai to foreground in specific terms how this important work speaks loudly to our contemporary moment when the power of accents is beginning to be questioned on English stages. Each of the four chapters gives focus to a different time period in order to examine and challenge ‘the social and cultural biases that have informed those ingrained assumptions about what sounded acceptable and what sounded unacceptable’ on the Shakespearean stage (13–14). As such, Massai explores critical moments when ‘accents took on urgently political and fiercely local connotations’ at times of extreme social and political pressure and reform, and how those dynamic shifts have affected, and continue to affect, the reception of Shakespearean productions (14). By giving focus to the ‘local’, Massai is able to provide a rich cultural specificity to her ‘alternative stage history’ which interrogates the acoustic rather than the visual or textual elements of production (14). Throughout, the relationship between Shakespeare, accents, and cultural elitism and legitimacy is interrogated. In doing so, Massai consistently and rightly reminds the reader of the importance of challenging these long-held prejudices and stigmas, and thus ensures that her work is more than an academic study but a vital, urgent, and powerful call-to-arms for theatre-makers and academics alike: ‘maybe the time has come for us to look at and listen to Shakespeare, and each other, as if “we had eyes [and ear] again”’ (206).","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41613817","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}

{"title":"Share Your Work: Lola Arias’s Lecture Performance Series and the Artistic Cognitariat of the Global Pandemic","authors":"C. Unger","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2021.1976166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1976166","url":null,"abstract":"Working from the premise that lecture performances produced online during the 2020 lockdown have further heightened the form's similarities to academic and managerial labour in post-Fordist economies, this essay examines the online lecture performance series 'My Documents/ Share your Screen' curated by Lola Arias and hosted by a coalition of theatres and performance spaces in Germany. Featuring the work of prominent artists, such as Rabih Mroué, Tim Etchells, and Tania Bruguera, the series offers the chance to examine how lecture performances participate in what Tom Holert calls the 'epistemization of art' within the global knowledge economy. I discuss how the lecture performances in the series problematised and tried to resist the commodification and hegemonisation of knowledge under cognitive capitalism. Drawing on Liam Gillick's conception of the artists as the 'ultimate freelance knowledge worker', I argue that lecture performances are emblematic of a cultural market that mobilises artistic processes as artistic products and has them stand-in for more financially and temporally costly productions. As the global pandemic has put these conventional productions on hold, this moment presents an ideal opportunity to investigate artists as cognitive workers and to appreciate the ramifications that surround their status as such.","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41953017","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}