Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000064
M. Nicholls
This article focuses on the last moments of Le Sacre du printemps, which opened in Paris on 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Concentrating on the discourse of the creative practice that brought these moments into being, it seeks to add to our understanding of Le Sacre from the evidence of those most intimately involved with this first production. Analysis of Le Sacre demonstrates the equal viability of a great variety of readings of the work. Such readings are enabled by analysis, which regards any aspect of a creative work and its best interpretation as happily unfixed and unstable. It has sometimes been accepted that the job of critics and theorists is to fix interpretations of creative works and to demonstrate conveniently closed theses about them. Creative artists are not always willing to join their critical colleagues. This was certainly the case with Le Sacre. By reading the final seven seconds of its Danse sacrale through the accounts of the work’s primary creators – composer Igor Stravinsky, designer Nicholas Roerich, and their creative intimates – this article highlights an engrossing instability of intention and interpretation. It questions the idea that Le Sacre is a sacrificial ritual in the light of how Stravinsky himself considered his work in terms of coronation and consecration.
这篇文章的重点是Le Sacre du printemps的最后时刻，它于1913年5月29日在巴黎的th tre des Champs-Élysées开业。它专注于创作实践的话语，这些话语使这些时刻成为现实，它试图从那些与这第一次生产最密切相关的证据中增加我们对Le Sacre的理解。对Le Sacre的分析表明，对该作品的各种阅读都具有同样的可行性。这种解读是通过分析来实现的，这种分析认为，创造性作品的任何方面及其最佳诠释都是不固定和不稳定的。人们有时认为，批评家和理论家的工作是固定对创造性作品的解释，并证明关于它们的方便的封闭论点。有创造力的艺术家并不总是愿意加入他们挑剔的同事。这当然是勒萨克雷的情况。通过对这部作品的主要创作者——作曲家伊戈尔·斯特拉文斯基、设计师尼古拉斯·罗伊里奇和他们的创作密友——的叙述，阅读《神圣之舞》的最后七秒，本文强调了意图和诠释的引人入胜的不稳定性。根据斯特拉文斯基自己如何从加冕和奉献的角度看待他的作品，它质疑了《圣歌》是一种祭祀仪式的观点。
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000040
Anna Duda
This article attempts to outline the most important assumptions of the work of Kokyu Studio led by Przemysław Błaszczak and Joanna Kurzyńska and based at the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław in Poland. The Studio’s educational and artistic programme is founded on the idea of a ‘place of practice’, which captures the philosophical, practical, aesthetic, and ethical horizon of the activities common to all members of the Studio. The regularity of practice, exposure to long working processes, and the improvement of the quality of movement, which are rooted in several traditions and methods of work, allow practitioners to study their own development and integrate various sources of knowledge. Reflections here also ask questions about the place and application of such a model of work in the context of contemporary challenges for actor-performer training.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000052
E. Stochino
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1923–1975) fashioned poetry, prose, cinema, and theatrical works, and how he conceived of the sacred is more thoroughly understood in relation to his working biography. Two films, The Gospel According to St Matthew and La Ricotta, together with his tragedies, overwritten on the Greek plays The Eumenides and Medea are here in focus, indicating why Pasolini drew on Mircea Eliade’s method of integrating historical, phenomenological, and hermeneutical approaches. Declaring himself a Marxist, Pasolini did not accept Eliade’s theory in full, while the two concepts that most link him to Eliade are the latter’s ‘eternal return’ and ‘hierophanies’. Pasolini had grown up immersed in the natural world of Friuli, Northern Italy, and he considered hierophanies as an immanent manifestation of the sacred in nature. In doing this, he discovered both the immensity of the archaic peasant world and the cosmogonic matrix of his religion. Pasolini’s ontological vision of being led him to define the eternal return as the cyclical time of nature, the movement of life in respect of the inscrutable laws of the cosmos and the transcendent supernatural. Cyclical time meant death and resurrection and thus the possibility of regeneration, like a seed that dies to become a plant.
Pier Paolo Pasolini（1923–1975）创作了诗歌、散文、电影和戏剧作品，他如何构思神圣的东西在他的工作传记中得到了更彻底的理解。《马太福音》和《利科塔》这两部电影，以及他在希腊戏剧《尤美尼德》和《美狄亚》中改写的悲剧，都是这里的焦点，这表明了帕索里尼为什么借鉴了米尔恰·埃利亚德融合历史、现象学和解释学方法的方法。帕索里尼宣称自己是马克思主义者，但他并没有完全接受埃利亚德的理论，而将他与埃利亚德联系在一起的两个概念是后者的“永恒回归”和“等级论”。帕索里尼是在意大利北部弗留利的自然世界中长大的，他认为象形文字是自然神圣性的内在表现。在这样做的过程中，他发现了古代农民世界的浩瀚和他的宗教的宇宙矩阵。帕索里尼对存在的本体论视野使他将永恒的回归定义为自然的周期性时间、生命在神秘的宇宙法则和超越的超自然现象中的运动。周期性的时间意味着死亡和复活，因此也意味着再生的可能性，就像种子死后变成植物一样。
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000039
Diego Moschkovich
On 22 May 1938, Stanislavsky gathered his group of eleven assistant-pedagogues at the Opera-Dramatic Studio for a last collective class. The Studio was already free for the summer vacation after the tumultuous first show of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, opened only to a small number of guests a week before. Mikhail Kedrov had rehearsed the performance with the students for the preceding three years, and it was doomed to become the first public presentation of the so-called ‘method of physical actions’. Nevertheless, the presentation brought nothing more than doubts about the work done, and Stanislavsky felt compelled to call upon the pedagogues to understand what had happened. After briefly presenting his opinion of the work that had been shown, he started to elaborate on the technical and artistic achievements of the Studio. Stanislavsky began his talk in its stenographic transcript (File No. 21179 in the Stanislavsky Fund of the Moscow Art Theatre Museum Archives) with: ‘Everything now is lost. The technique and all the rest. I don’t see any foundation … any more. You should now start by the critique of the method I have been experimenting on.’ This article analyzes Stanislavsky’s documented talk, showing that he was not convinced that he had a new methodology, let alone one that synthesized his life-long theatre experiments. It seeks to present evidence that both the Physical Action and Active Analysis methodologies derived from Stanislavsky’s thought post mortem were developed only as two possible paths from his experiments, but were not the telos of his thought.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X2300009X
Duncan Wheeler
In a post-#Me-Too/Black Lives Matter landscape, the gender- and race-politics of the Golden Age of rock have increasingly come under interrogation. Hip-hop challenging rock’s long-standing hegemony constitutes a sociological as well as a musical shift, with a production such as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s School of Rock (2015) perhaps seeming hopelessly old-fashioned in comparison with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton from the same year. This article’s close and contextualized readings of four post-Hamilton jukebox rock musicals debate two principal issues. First, the extent to which the jukebox musical is fit for purpose: creative enough to repurpose rock’s cultural patrimony for an enriching night in the theatre. Second, how and why the curation practices of the rock musical reproduce or challenge the intersectional vectors of gendered and racial oppression, which render the genre problematic.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000076
A. Bellucci
In the winter of 2020, the Jana Natya Manch (People’s Theatre Front), a political performance group and street-theatre pioneer in India, created a new kind of performance in response to current events. The Hindu-nationalist government was then implementing discriminatory laws targeting Muslims. The very constitution of India, a ‘sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic’ (Constitution Preamble) was under threat. Instead of a conventional street play, the Jana Natya Manch set up a participatory ‘game’ or ‘interactive presentation’ that brought together random and diverse audiences to act, or play, as a united people. The group put into place an inclusive experiment, rather than a didactic one, to counter exclusionary rules and address democratic deficits. Thus this Indian ‘people’s theatre’ produced ‘democratic performances’ that questioned both artistic and political representations. This article, based on fieldwork with the Jana Natya Manch, offers a script translation and an analysis of a new kind of performance developed in active circumstances.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000088
C. Grile
The SoloSIRENs Collective’s production Cessair, staged in South Dublin in the summer of 2021, represents the second production of this burgeoning company. The Collective is a community-based theatre group comprised of an all-female ensemble that has been creating together since 2019. For this production, it used the Irish myth of Cessair as a starting point to consider the female experience, and invited women from across the world to share their stories and lived experiences. Drawing on close observation of the devising process, analysis of the final production, and conversations with members of the Collective, this article argues that the production should be considered as an example of feminist performed ethnography.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-30DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X22000392
Leah Sidi
Madness, or ‘mental illness’, is a prominent theme in British cultural and political discourses today. Since the UK government declared a mental health ‘crisis’ in the early 2010s, we have seen a steady increase in reporting, commentary, and literature on madness and mental health. Beyond mainstream reporting, madness is also increasingly claimed as a political identity category by some service-user and psychiatric-survivor groups. In British theatre, the past decade has seen a renewed interest in performance explicitly thematizing pathologized mental distress and offering commentary on the adequacy ofmental health services. Venn’s book offers a welcome survey of some of the most interesting representations of mental distress on the British stage in the last thirty years as it ‘asks in what manner . . . theatre [can] act as a site of resistance against hegemonic understandings of madness’. Rather than offering a comprehensive history of madness on the twenty-first-century stage, Venn chooses examples that offer particular critiques of ‘hegemonic understandings’ of madness. The works are varied, and include such well-known plays as Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange, Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, and Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker. Alongside these are successful but perhaps less widely known performance works from individual artists Bryony Kimmings and James Leadbetter aka the vacuum cleaner, and companies such as Analogue and Ridiculusmus. Dividing the book intofive chapters, Vennpositions these works as resistances to ‘hegemonic understandings’ of psychiatric institutions, suicide, hallucination, and autobiography. Of particular interest is Venn’s reconsideration of psychiatric power in the context of decentralized, community care service delivery in Chapter 2. Theatre has a long-standing relationship with psychiatry. Nineteenth-century naturalism was shaped by the conceptualization of hysteria as an observable, performative malady located either in an asylum or a bourgeois home. The legacies of naturalism and the psychiatric asylum persist in theatrical representations of madness today. Introducing the idea of a ‘contemporary asylum’ that exists beyond a single building, Venn demonstrates how theatre can reveal the power structures which remain inherent to psychiatry in the community care era. The ‘contemporary asylum’ exerts ‘capillaries of power’which shape and limit the experiences of mental health service users. Theatre offers a practical critique of psychiatric power by revealing its structures from within, ‘situating . . . the mad body as the object of competing power structures’. The dynamics of decentralized mental health service provision have received little attention within theatre studies and the medical humanities. Venn’s analysis of the contemporary asylum is an important step in addressing this lack. The other chapters offer thoughtful readings of plays and performance works which engage in themes of hallucination
{"title":"Jon Venn Madness in Contemporary British Theatre: Resistances and Representations Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 222 p. £47.99. ISBN: 978-3-030-79782-9.","authors":"Leah Sidi","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X22000392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X22000392","url":null,"abstract":"Madness, or ‘mental illness’, is a prominent theme in British cultural and political discourses today. Since the UK government declared a mental health ‘crisis’ in the early 2010s, we have seen a steady increase in reporting, commentary, and literature on madness and mental health. Beyond mainstream reporting, madness is also increasingly claimed as a political identity category by some service-user and psychiatric-survivor groups. In British theatre, the past decade has seen a renewed interest in performance explicitly thematizing pathologized mental distress and offering commentary on the adequacy ofmental health services. Venn’s book offers a welcome survey of some of the most interesting representations of mental distress on the British stage in the last thirty years as it ‘asks in what manner . . . theatre [can] act as a site of resistance against hegemonic understandings of madness’. Rather than offering a comprehensive history of madness on the twenty-first-century stage, Venn chooses examples that offer particular critiques of ‘hegemonic understandings’ of madness. The works are varied, and include such well-known plays as Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange, Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, and Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker. Alongside these are successful but perhaps less widely known performance works from individual artists Bryony Kimmings and James Leadbetter aka the vacuum cleaner, and companies such as Analogue and Ridiculusmus. Dividing the book intofive chapters, Vennpositions these works as resistances to ‘hegemonic understandings’ of psychiatric institutions, suicide, hallucination, and autobiography. Of particular interest is Venn’s reconsideration of psychiatric power in the context of decentralized, community care service delivery in Chapter 2. Theatre has a long-standing relationship with psychiatry. Nineteenth-century naturalism was shaped by the conceptualization of hysteria as an observable, performative malady located either in an asylum or a bourgeois home. The legacies of naturalism and the psychiatric asylum persist in theatrical representations of madness today. Introducing the idea of a ‘contemporary asylum’ that exists beyond a single building, Venn demonstrates how theatre can reveal the power structures which remain inherent to psychiatry in the community care era. The ‘contemporary asylum’ exerts ‘capillaries of power’which shape and limit the experiences of mental health service users. Theatre offers a practical critique of psychiatric power by revealing its structures from within, ‘situating . . . the mad body as the object of competing power structures’. The dynamics of decentralized mental health service provision have received little attention within theatre studies and the medical humanities. Venn’s analysis of the contemporary asylum is an important step in addressing this lack. The other chapters offer thoughtful readings of plays and performance works which engage in themes of hallucination","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"81 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45772276","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 : 2023-01-30DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X22000343
Phoebe Patey-Ferguson
In 2012, London staged the Olympic Games and the associated Cultural Olympiad, which produced the ‘London 2012’ Festival, funding a wide series of events including many productions by the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). A decade on, this article considers the impact of these overlapping events during a period of unprecedented austerity in the United Kingdom, and how arts events might be considered as having colluded with the government’s own agenda. The connection between neoliberal governance, with its programme of increased privatization, rapid gentrification, and the opportunistic marketing of diversity is examined with reference to increasing nationalism through Olympiad displays, together with the increasing influence of the ‘experience economy’ as defined by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore. Phoebe Patey-Ferguson is a Lecturer in Theatre and Social Change at Rose Bruford College. This article, derived from their PhD on LIFT in its social, cultural, and political context, follows ‘LIFT and the GLC versus Thatcher: London’s Cultural Battleground in 1981’ (NTQ 141) and, in the same issue, Patey-Ferguson’s interview with LIFT’s founding Artistic Directors, Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal.
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