THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin by Brandon Woolf
• James R. Ball III

Brandon Woolf’s Institutional Theatrics: Performing Arts Policy in Post-Wall Berlin investigates theatre that addresses and would transform the institutions that house it and the infrastructures that support it. In sum, the book proposes “a negative art of institutional dis/avowal [through which] an institution might embrace its own determinate negation [and] reckon with the particulars of its own contradictions” (14–15). Across the book’s chapters, this initial definition (a paraphrase of Theodor Adorno) develops as a subtle tool for theorizing the ways in which performance can directly and substantially participate in the making and executing of policy.

Woolf begins to elaborate this idea in his Introduction, arguing “performance functions as a performative art of policy” (20). This novel reversal of the conventional performance studies assertion that public policy is performative offers new coordinates from which to investigate, “performance’s potential to utilize the public institutions of its support to reimagine those very institutions from within” (23). The introduction begins with recent history: the protests, debates, and occupation that followed the announcement that Chris Dercon, then curator at London’s Tate Modern museum, would take over as the new director of the Volksbühne theater in the fall of 2017. Woolf’s account of these events models the methodology employed throughout the book: rigorous and detailed archival investigations combined with strategic and illuminating instances of participant observation and original interviews with key figures.

The work is organized into two parts: “State-Stages” and “Free-Scenes.” Each part is composed of two chapters; the first chapter sets the stage for the “particular policy problematic” (21) in question, and the second offers a case study of performance as policy. Chapter 1 begins with the closure of the State-Stage Complex and follows the policy debates that ensued as they moved between parliamentary sessions, backroom negotiations, public press reports, and performances throughout the Complex. For Woolf, this history is “a springboard and strategic counterpoint—a site of dis/avowal—for the chapters that follow” (31). Though rife with moments in which key participants and their performances flirted with modes of infrastructural reimagining, the events of 1993 did not produce the same art of institutional dis/avowal apparent in subsequent cases.

Chapter 2 provides the first such counterpo

Reviewed by:

• Prague Quadrennial
• Alicia Corts

While the Prague Quadrennial has been billed as a festival of design since its first iteration in 1968, part of its charm lies in how performances are integrated into the festival. The 2023 edition of the PQ—centered around the theme “Rare”—offered an array of performances that directly addressed the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic and the emotions and questions we lived through as a global community.

Promenade, conceived by Eliza Soroga, was one of the performances most overtly related to COVID-19, combining the strange bedfellows of joy and anger in the time of the pandemic. The performance took place as a walk through the Old Town of Prague from DAMU (the Academy of Performing Arts) to the Old Town Square. Each participant wore a t-shirt with a QR code for their vaccination record. As we marched through town, emotions in the crowd ranged from solemnity to excitement over new connections. There were happy babbles of conversation as we approached the square, erupting at the end of the journey in a release of anger and emotion through a collective scream. This emotional range highlighted the rare brew produced by the pandemic: the joy of reconnecting with other people, the rage produced by isolation, and the release of expressing both those emotions despite the tension between them. We obviously lack rituals to take people from isolation to reintegration into community, and the pandemic left many people in the liminal space in between. This performance was extraordinarily effective in offering a means of bringing the season of the pandemic to a close in a way that honored participants’ experiences during the worldwide crisis while also suggesting a means of reentry into post-pandemic life.

Wreck: List of Extinct Species, directed by Pietro Marullo and produced by Insiemi Irreali Company, continued to explore how the pandemic collided with what we previously thought of as a normal life. Ostensibly a production about a mythical leviathan invading a world and exposing the vulnerability of its citizens, the conceit of the show was quite simple: an enormous, inflated black plastic bag rolled about the space as performers interacted with it. The performance built steadily on the spectacle of the plastic bag. When it first appeared, moving through the gigantic Trade Fair Palace, it revealed dancers paralyzed in place, arrested by the fear of encountering the monster for the first time. The company slowly began to move as the performance progressed, seeming to overcome their initial fear but still not quite ready to interact with the plastic bag. Eventually, the company began to touch and interact with the leviathan. T

Abstract:

As a technology, theatre both absorbs and represents the technologies it deploys, and so is defined by the multiple temporalities of its instruments. The signifying embodiments, signifying materialities, and signifying narratives constitutive of theatre as rhetoric and practice articulate, depend on, and are altered by the changing emergence of a conceptual “human” (or the dispersion of a conceptual “posthuman”) inseparable from the technological inscription of its definition and representation. So, too, consensually licensing terms like “the discipline” and “the field” share with their object—particularly with that slippery congeries, the formal study of drama, theatre, and performance—a vivifying multiplicity and mobility, as well as a notable temporal instability. Like theatre, like any technology, the condition of theory, of critique, and of scholarship is a consistent struggle with passing into pastness as the inseparable trailing edge of innovation. On the occasion of the 75th volume of Theatre Journal, this brief essay reflects on the intertwined fortunes of theatre and the fashioning of the “disciplines” of its formal study, their passing implication in mutually-sustaining technologies of cultural representation.

Reviewed by:

• The Porch on Windy Hill
• Heather Grimm

In spring 2023, Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Illinois produced The Porch On Windy Hill: a new play with old music, written by director Sherry Lutken in collaboration with Lisa Helmi Johanson, David M. Lutken, and Morgan Morse, who comprised the cast. Windy Hill is a family drama following white graduate student Beckett (Morse) and his biracial Korean Appalachian girlfriend Mira (Johanson). They travel from New York to North Carolina for Beckett’s research; in North Carolina, they encounter Mira’s estranged white grandfather Gar (Lutken). The evening they spend reconnecting on the titular porch (a trope so stereotypical it is mocked in the dialogue) is punctuated by performances of the string band music that Mira remembers from her childhood and that Beckett now studies. As the play progresses, the reasons for Mira’s estrangement become clear: Gar never approved of the Korean man his daughter married, and, although he loved his granddaughter, he refused to intervene when her cousin lobbed a racial slur at her. By the end of the play, Gar’s racism is revealed to be born of cowardice, an initial discomfort he was unable to express and took too long to overcome. We are left believing that Gar understands his mistakes and will try to communicate more openly. But the liberal politics the play wears on its sleeve conceal a conservative message regarding the dramaturgical engine driving the story: its music.

Lisa Helmi Johanson (Mira), David M. Lutken (Gar), and Morgan Morse (Beckett) in The Porch on Windy Hill. Photo: Michael Brosilow.

Beckett’s interest in the music featured in the play—ranging from fiddle tunes like “Bill Cheatham” to ballads like “Birmingham Jail” and popular songs like “Columbus Stockade Blues”—often served as comic relief. He stammered out jargony questions about music changing over time, oblivious [End Page 562] to Mira and Gar’s tense reunion. When Beckett asked where Gar learned a song, Gar confesses that he doesn’t remember; he’d known it all his life. Beck-ett lamented, “Wish I had that direct connection,” celebrating Gar’s “real” connection to this music and the fact that he learned it through interactions with family, as opposed to through recordings. Although Beckett was often the clown, the production asked us to take the sentiment behind this line seriously. Though Mira responded by postulating that perhaps people in the past thought they weren’t getting the “real thing” either, the structure of the play reinforced a different message. Mira’s p

Reviewed by:

• To Be Nsala’s Daughter: Decomposing the Colonial Gaze by Chérie N. Rivers
• Rachel Kabukala

To Be Nsala’s Daughter: Decomposing the Colonial Gaze is the second book from interdisciplinary scholar Chérie N. Rivers and builds upon ideas found in her first, Necessary Noise: Music, Film, and Charitable Imperialism in the East of Congo (published under the name Chérie Rivers Ndaliko). Her most recent monograph centers on a colonial-era image of a Congolese man identified as Nsala made by English missionary and documentary photographer Alice Seeley Harris. The photograph in question features Nsala, who sits looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter, who was murdered by ABIR militia (Anglo-Belgian India Rubber company). The haunting image circulated widely as part of the Congo Reform Association’s campaign to alert the world to the atrocities taking place in King Leopold II’s Congo Free State (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC).

As a response to Harris’s photographic archive, Rivers collaboratively developed and co-taught a workshop titled “Decomposing the Colonial Gaze” as part of her work as executive director of Yole!Africa, a Congolese-led educational and cultural center in Goma, DRC. The workshop involved “recalibrating one’s imagination” to produce art that makes visible systems of power, enacting conscious and creative change (xii). Participants activated the Harris archive through their contemporary interpretations of the historical images. Some engaged in photographic reenactments. Some produced collages or manipulated reprints of the original images. All “interrupted established ways of representing and intervening in Congolese life” (xii). By highlighting the archival interventions offered by the Congolese artists, Rivers reveals a potential path forward for those seeking to decompose colonial systems and the normalized violence that is their undercurrent through critical creativity informed by Rivers’s methods of decomposing, disremembering, and re-remembering, which I return to later in greater detail.

The book is divided into seven chapters. The first serves as a brief, two-page elegy for Nsala, in which Rivers writes about how she came to work with Nsala’s image. She explains how the photograph haunted her and dedicates the book to Nsala and his daughter, sharing her hope that others might also be haunted as an antidote to inaction. The remaining chapter titles employ action verbs: to see, to decompose, to replicate, to contradict, to create, and to love. This play with language and subsequent explanation of each term’s role in decomposing

Reviewed by:

• New-Illusion
• Kyueun Kim

The lonely stage had an electric bass and an amplifier to one side, but otherwise, it was empty. Woman (Shiibashi Ayana) and Man (Adachi Tomomitsu) entered, followed by Musician (Jeong Jung-yeop), who began playing the bass softly. Woman and Man began chatting about a play that had been previously performed in the theatre; it was set in an apartment they once shared, and they performed as their past selves. Their conversation about an armchair, the only theatrical prop that remained after the previous show, subtly transitioned to a sofa in the apartment of their past. The meaning behind their words became blurred, leaving the audience to wonder whether they were discussing a play, their relationship, or both. Their conversation evoked feelings of emptiness that stemmed from endings: the closing night of a theatrical run, a break-up, the fading of youthful aspirations to “change the world.”

The premise might seem familiar from elsewhere in theatre history, but in Okada Toshiki’s New-Illusion, performers and theatrical props were conspicuously absent from the physical stage. At SOTA Studio Theatre in Singapore, the audience witnessed a life-sized, prerecorded performance projected onto two large vertical screens at center stage. The mini-malistic set was defined by these screens, set apart by a noticeable gap, and an overhead display for English supertitles, all dimmed in tune with the venue’s ambient lighting. Hidden speakers and microphones, strategically placed behind the screens, added depth to the sound. Even when the projected performers disappeared into the gaps between the screens or stepped outside the screens’ edges, the audience could still hear their footsteps and locate their movements in space. Using this careful visual and auditory dramaturgy allowed Okada to blur the boundaries between the video space and the physical venue, evoking the atmospheric illusion that performers and theatrical props were physically present on stage even though they weren’t.

New-Illusion, which premiered at Tokyo’s Oji Theater in 2022, is the most recent iteration of Okada Toshiki’s EIZO-Theater, which he has developed in close collaboration with video designer Yamada Shimpei. Deriving its name from the Japanese term eizō—an image that has been reproduced—EIZO-Theater emphasizes using video to project prere-corded performances in theatrical space. The concept of EIZO-Theater debuted with the exhibition Beach, Eyelids, and Curtains (2018), where six theatrical [End Page 564]