Pub Date : 2023-07-28DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000131
Naphtaly Shem-Tov
Shimella (‘stork’ in Amharic) is an Israeli community theatre of Ethiopian Jews residing in Netanya and directed by Chen Elia. Shimella was founded in 2010, and has produced four different performances focusing on the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel. Ethiopian Jews suffer from racism and discrimination in all areas of life, including housing, employment, education, and healthcare. These issues surfaced in Shimella’s performances, and the political aspect of Shimella’s performances therefore ranges from performing critical protest against the attitudes of the Israeli state and society toward Ethiopians, to a utopian performative moment, which emotionally and physically dramatizes the community’s desired future.
{"title":"Shimella Community Theatre of Israeli-Ethiopian Jews","authors":"Naphtaly Shem-Tov","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X23000131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X23000131","url":null,"abstract":"Shimella (‘stork’ in Amharic) is an Israeli community theatre of Ethiopian Jews residing in Netanya and directed by Chen Elia. Shimella was founded in 2010, and has produced four different performances focusing on the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel. Ethiopian Jews suffer from racism and discrimination in all areas of life, including housing, employment, education, and healthcare. These issues surfaced in Shimella’s performances, and the political aspect of Shimella’s performances therefore ranges from performing critical protest against the attitudes of the Israeli state and society toward Ethiopians, to a utopian performative moment, which emotionally and physically dramatizes the community’s desired future.","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"223 - 242"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43252349","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 : 2023-07-28DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X2300012X
Tomasz Kubikowski
Disabled for the last nine years of his life, Konstantin Stanislavsky struggled to verbalize his artistic experience and record it in writing. This experience mostly concerned acting, itself extremely hard to conceptualize and explain, and, to his mind, the core of human existence. Stanislavsky looked for the proper literary vehicle to contain this abundance. Initially, he hoped he had found adequate means in the form of the educational novel – the Bildungsroman. However, in the course of his writing, he gradually abandoned this form, as well as any literary aspirations he may have had. What we can find in An Actor’s Work are only remnants of the original concept. Nevertheless, they are still present. Looking closer at these ruins can bring interesting insights into the aura and mood of Stanislavsky’s theorizing about art.
{"title":"Stanislavsky’s Failed Bildungsroman","authors":"Tomasz Kubikowski","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X2300012X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X2300012X","url":null,"abstract":"Disabled for the last nine years of his life, Konstantin Stanislavsky struggled to verbalize his artistic experience and record it in writing. This experience mostly concerned acting, itself extremely hard to conceptualize and explain, and, to his mind, the core of human existence. Stanislavsky looked for the proper literary vehicle to contain this abundance. Initially, he hoped he had found adequate means in the form of the educational novel – the Bildungsroman. However, in the course of his writing, he gradually abandoned this form, as well as any literary aspirations he may have had. What we can find in An Actor’s Work are only remnants of the original concept. Nevertheless, they are still present. Looking closer at these ruins can bring interesting insights into the aura and mood of Stanislavsky’s theorizing about art.","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"216 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49265329","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 : 2023-07-28DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000180
Daniel Nield
Edward and Farrier’s second edited volume turns attentions to historical drag with a collection of examples ranging from nineteenth-century Japan via Barbados to the ‘FunPubs’ofNorthernEngland and panto in Belfast. Reflecting the first volume’s desire to investigate lesser-known drag practices, these fifteen chapters act to illuminate and preserve the historical and cultural multiplicity of drag. Despite the range of examples, overarching themes do emerge. Jacob Bloomfield’s investigation of ex-service men performing drag after the Second World War counterpoints Isabelle CoyDibley’s detailed examination of the Japanese allfemale Takarazuka Revue. While they stand at the opposing ends of queening and kinging practice (to say nothing of stylistic and cultural differences), both cases are set against heavily patriarchal societies but can promote themselves as ‘family fun’ due their heavily staged nature. This acceptability, though, only highlights the limitations of drag, as the Japanese women are encouraged to renounce their masculine roles to be dutiful wives and mothers once again. The importance of staging is foreshadowed in Penny Arcade’s foreword when she recalls the impact of Billy Hansen. Billy was a young man who won the tri-state drag competition in Hartford, Connecticut, by eschewing the fashionable impressions of Hollywood stars and embracing his ability to pass as a woman without makeup and go shopping, complete with lady wallet. Hansen’s victory indicated a shift in the dragworld from entertainment, as seen in Bloomfield andCoyDibley’s chapters, to also embrace a more selfaware and political drag. As with the first volume, this collection has sought to represent many facets of drag. Farrier’s own chapter on the importance of kinging is an important one that, along with Isabelle CoyDibley’s, points to the different challenges faced by kings when performing drag within a patriarchal system. While drag has developed a subgenre of lifelike imitation, in the art of kinging a difficult and politically charged tightrope is being walked where imitation often tellingly stops short of a lifelike imitation of the hegemonic male. Complicating drag further is Nando Messias’s powerful narrative, which explores the intersections of drag, race, and cultural variations of gender expression from a first-person perspective. Nick Ishmael-Perkins follows by peeling away the layers of Mother Sally, the ‘undersexed and hypersexual’ character of Barbadian carnival, revealing her to be a contested character that negotiates with the competing interests of folklore tradition, carnival, colonialism, Christianity, tourism, and shifting social attitudes to the LGBTQ movement. Meanwhile Simon Dodi’s chapter on camp as a culturally contested and evolving phenomenon that traces four approaches, from Sontag’s aesthetic reading to Meyer’s camp as strategic performance, is a particular highlight of the volume. This chapter is arguably a key by which to unlock the po
{"title":"Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier, eds. Drag Histories, Herstories, and Hairstories: Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 2 London: Methuen Drama, 2021. 215 p. £67.50. ISBN: 978-1-350-10436-5.","authors":"Daniel Nield","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X23000180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X23000180","url":null,"abstract":"Edward and Farrier’s second edited volume turns attentions to historical drag with a collection of examples ranging from nineteenth-century Japan via Barbados to the ‘FunPubs’ofNorthernEngland and panto in Belfast. Reflecting the first volume’s desire to investigate lesser-known drag practices, these fifteen chapters act to illuminate and preserve the historical and cultural multiplicity of drag. Despite the range of examples, overarching themes do emerge. Jacob Bloomfield’s investigation of ex-service men performing drag after the Second World War counterpoints Isabelle CoyDibley’s detailed examination of the Japanese allfemale Takarazuka Revue. While they stand at the opposing ends of queening and kinging practice (to say nothing of stylistic and cultural differences), both cases are set against heavily patriarchal societies but can promote themselves as ‘family fun’ due their heavily staged nature. This acceptability, though, only highlights the limitations of drag, as the Japanese women are encouraged to renounce their masculine roles to be dutiful wives and mothers once again. The importance of staging is foreshadowed in Penny Arcade’s foreword when she recalls the impact of Billy Hansen. Billy was a young man who won the tri-state drag competition in Hartford, Connecticut, by eschewing the fashionable impressions of Hollywood stars and embracing his ability to pass as a woman without makeup and go shopping, complete with lady wallet. Hansen’s victory indicated a shift in the dragworld from entertainment, as seen in Bloomfield andCoyDibley’s chapters, to also embrace a more selfaware and political drag. As with the first volume, this collection has sought to represent many facets of drag. Farrier’s own chapter on the importance of kinging is an important one that, along with Isabelle CoyDibley’s, points to the different challenges faced by kings when performing drag within a patriarchal system. While drag has developed a subgenre of lifelike imitation, in the art of kinging a difficult and politically charged tightrope is being walked where imitation often tellingly stops short of a lifelike imitation of the hegemonic male. Complicating drag further is Nando Messias’s powerful narrative, which explores the intersections of drag, race, and cultural variations of gender expression from a first-person perspective. Nick Ishmael-Perkins follows by peeling away the layers of Mother Sally, the ‘undersexed and hypersexual’ character of Barbadian carnival, revealing her to be a contested character that negotiates with the competing interests of folklore tradition, carnival, colonialism, Christianity, tourism, and shifting social attitudes to the LGBTQ movement. Meanwhile Simon Dodi’s chapter on camp as a culturally contested and evolving phenomenon that traces four approaches, from Sontag’s aesthetic reading to Meyer’s camp as strategic performance, is a particular highlight of the volume. This chapter is arguably a key by which to unlock the po","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"280 - 280"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46922868","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 : 2023-07-28DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X23000155
Sam Haddow
This article examines Antonin Artaud’s ‘Theatre and the Plague’ in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic and through the Ancient Greek term stasis, which describes a civil war between domestic and public spaces. Once initiated, it was believed that this conflict would spread from household to household like a contagion; city states thus implemented draconian measures in the name of preventing stasis. Giorgio Agamben argues that such measures were embedded in subsequent theories of the state, fuelling ever more oppressive policies throughout history. Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ energizes a force comparable to this stasis, both in terms of its latency and its contagiousness, activating dormant conflicts in the individual that are expressed through networks of infection and create frontiers of shared resistance to institutional authority. ‘Theatre and the Plague’, read through the lens of stasis, can thus offer valuable contributions to current debates around biopolitics, particularly those seeking collective forms of agency during and beyond the current pandemic.
{"title":"Artaud’s Civil War: ‘Theatre and the Plague’ in the Time of Covid-19","authors":"Sam Haddow","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X23000155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X23000155","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Antonin Artaud’s ‘Theatre and the Plague’ in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic and through the Ancient Greek term stasis, which describes a civil war between domestic and public spaces. Once initiated, it was believed that this conflict would spread from household to household like a contagion; city states thus implemented draconian measures in the name of preventing stasis. Giorgio Agamben argues that such measures were embedded in subsequent theories of the state, fuelling ever more oppressive policies throughout history. Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ energizes a force comparable to this stasis, both in terms of its latency and its contagiousness, activating dormant conflicts in the individual that are expressed through networks of infection and create frontiers of shared resistance to institutional authority. ‘Theatre and the Plague’, read through the lens of stasis, can thus offer valuable contributions to current debates around biopolitics, particularly those seeking collective forms of agency during and beyond the current pandemic.","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"262 - 271"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45886191","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 : 2023-05-01DOI: 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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