bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Aboriginal Presence in Canadian Theatre and the Evolution of Being Canadian
Authors: Peters Helen
Published: January 2009

Skylight Theatre's productions of Shakespeare'sThe Tempestin Earl Bales Park in Toronto (1987 and 1989) situated Prospero on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia, set the action during the late eighteenth-century voyages of Captain James Cook—the period of the area's colonization—and cast Ariel and Caliban as Haida Indians, Canadian Aboriginal people.
Trial as Theatre in the Russian Revolution
Authors: Stites Richard
Published: January 2009

In an extraordinary passage ofThe Mind and Face of Bolshevism, the Hungarian journalist and philosopher, René Fueloep-Miller, made this observation in the 1920s on the innate theatricality of the Russian people:

If a Russian recounts an incident in company, in his political club, or even in the street, he does not for long confine himself to verbal description. Suddenly, he sends a gesture into space, like an arrow from a bow, at the same time giving a cue to another in the circle, who immediately becomes an actor in the drama. Though at first the whole thing looks like a very excited discussion, soon many emphatic gestures and words creep in and an increasing number of bystanders begin to take part in the scene. Suddenly the recital takes living form: chairs and tables are shifted with a few touches, and soon stand in a particular relation to each other and to the events being enacted. Men and things are now subject to new and different laws. Those taking no part look on in astonishment and soon become an audience, just as the story, which was at first merely related, becomes reality and attains complete actuality in the people acting and the improvised scenery … This lasts as long as the anecdote enacted, then the company at once returns to ordinary life … and the members of the circle sit smoking and talking again in their former quiet tones as if nothing had happened.
Des coulisses de l'histoire aux coulisses du théâtre: la dramaturgie québécoise et la Crise d'octobre
Authors: Lafon Dominique
Published: January 2009

On 8 October 1990 a ceremony of remembrance took place at the Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui (Montreal) to commemorate the political crisis which, twenty years earlier, had shaken Quebec. The 1970 ‘October Crisis’ remains, to this day, a sensitive subject of Québécois history entirely oriented, as we know, towards the national question. The kidnapping, on 5 October 1970, of the English commercial attaché, James Richard Cross, by the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec), followed on 10 October, by the kidnapping of Pierre Laporte, the Quebec Minister for Labour and Immigration, marked the climax of a movement which had been trying, since 1963, to turn the ‘peaceful revolution’ into armed insurrection. On 17 October Laporte's body was found in the boot of a car, and the terrorists were arrested before the end of the year. In exchange for Cross's liberation some were allowed to go into exile to Cuba; the others were jailed, but all were freed in the early 1980s.
‘Where Does It Hurt?’: Genocide, the Theatre and the Human Body
Authors: Skloot Robert
Published: January 2009

Our desire for a humane future, for a future diminished in violence and enhanced in human possibility, insists that every means possible be used to warn and work against genocidal activity. Political scientists, historians, psychologists and others have their disciplinary agendas when they seek to sound the genocidal alarm, and to prevent the eruption of wholesale slaughter. I am concerned with the arts and how they contribute to moving us ‘toward the understanding and prevention of genocide’, specifically how the art of theatre can be used for the purpose of creating a world less violent and more protective and supportive of human life.
War and Its Surrogates: Male Combat Sports and Women's Roles
Authors: Ranald Margaret Loftus
Published: January 2009

War and the military life have traditionally been perceived in most cultures as a sacrosanct ex-periental world devoted to masculine maturation and bonding. By definition both these traditionally male organizations have until now excluded women, treating them as objects to be despised (if not feared), and also the target of active opposition. Note, for instance, the gleeful celebrations among cadets when Shannon L. Faulkner, the first woman admitted (after court order) to The Citadel, a single-sex military college in Charleston, SC, decided after one week in August 1995 that she could not survive the harassment, hi refusing to admit her the institution had claimed that her presence ‘would undermine a proud and legitimate tradition dedicated to molding the minds, bodies and spirits of young men’. The counter argument was that she was being denied equal opportunity to take part in ‘a unique academic environment that requires on-campus residence and that is being built around a system of hardship, competition and bonding, […and] also a lifetime of countless, less tangible benefits’. Such was also the basis of the US Supreme Court's majority opinion written by Ruth Bader Ginsberg (1996) mandating the admission of women to the Virginia Military Institute. Though now federal government supported service academies admit women, nostalgia still exists in certain quarters for the days when the comment, ‘If the army had wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one’ summed up the distinctly peripheral position held by wives, who were, and are still, classified as ‘dependants’. But now women are in the United States Armed Forces, in command positions and certain combat units, as well as in the medical corps. The transition is difficult.
An Unknown Portrait of Tiberio Fiorilli
Authors: Aliverti Maria Ines
Published: January 2009

Tiberio Fiorilli (1608–1694), son of the great Neapolitan actor and playwright Silvio Fiorillo, became famous in the role of ‘Scaramouche’ as the leading actor of the Théâtre Italien in Paris. In spite of his importance as a theatrical manager in France and in Italy, his life and personality have long remained a mystery. Dressed in his black suit, is how Molière depicted Scaramouche in the first verse of Le Sicilien ou l'amour peintre. Only recently has Fiorilli's theatrical career become the subject of serious investigation, and new documents are helping to clarify his image.
Actor-authors of the Commedia dell'arte: The Dramatic Writings of Flaminio Scala and Giambattista Andreini
Authors: Molinari Cesare
Published: January 2009

In 1880, the first modern editor to publish a collection of commedia dell'arte scenarios noted, not without surprise, that ‘the earliest professional actors were almost all writers as well’. ‘Almost all’ is perhaps an exaggeration. Yet the literary production of comic players, and particularly that of the second and third generation of actors, is impressive for its quantity as well as its variety. It ranges from Giovan Paolo Fabbri's Capitoli alla Carlona and Adriano Valerini's historically important essay on the beauties of Verona, to the Rime of Isabella Andreini, in which she established a dialectic connection between the art of writing and that of the theatre:

If you will read one day

my neglected verses, don't be taken in by

these feigned ardours

I am used to playing in dramatic love scenes

with such insincere passions

with lying and mock expressions.

I unfold the Muses' high furores

sometimes weeping in false sorrow

sometimes singing with false pleasure.
La Virtu et la volupté. Models for the Actress in Early Modern Italy and France
Authors: Scott Virginia
Published: January 2009

In 1982 Ferdinando Taviani proposed in Il segreto della commedia dell'arte that the earliest known actresses in Italy may have been drawn from the ranks of the courtesans, the oneste meretrici, forced from Rome after the Council of Trent (1545–63) by papal reforming zeal. This hypothesis has been affirmed by several other scholars in Europe and the United States and is becoming widely accepted not just as a feasible theory but as gospel, the exclusive conduit through which women entered the western theatre.
The Idea ofCommediain the Twentieth Century
Authors: Anderson Michael
Published: January 2009

The truth of Shaw's dictum that ‘those who can, do, and those who can't, teach’, is questioned by the history ofcommedia dell'artein the twentieth century, in which research, practice and teaching are inextricably bound together. The significance ofcommedia'sinfluence on the modern stage lies precisely in the fact that the nature ofcommediacannot be defined objectively but is mediated through research and stage practice. We have to deal, therefore, not so much withcommediaitself as with an ‘idea’ ofcommedia, a phrase I have borrowed from Kenneth Richards and Laura Richards.
Foreword
Authors: Bouvier Hélène
Published: January 2009

On stage, in the wings, in the audience and outside: these are the spaces ethnologists and anthropologists traverse in the practice of fieldwork and writing—metaphorically, as participant-observers within a given community, or literally, if they study theatre forms.

Immersion in another community or society (with the consequent blurring of exoticism), purposeful distancing in time and space (rivalling with empathy generated by field presence), systematic investigation of selected themes, and constant striving to have theory inform data and perceptions of the objects of study—all these aspects of the anthropological method can be applied, in a given society, just as effectively to theatre as to those institutions (matrimonial, political, economic or religious, among others) usually studied by ethnologists. A circumscribed object, but one with complex implications for individuals and groups, theatre is a sophisticated, often useful means of access to understanding society, or at least a key to reading the combinatory diversity of a community's functioning, its history, its material production and technology, its cognitive orientations. Building on the necessary contextual analyses revealing the social, political and economic underpinnings of theatre forms, developing the concept of an expressive or aesthetic system in which theatre is but one element interacting with other artistic productions or practices within a given society, and testing the concept through intercultural comparison, the horizons for theatre anthropology are broad enough.

Attempting a more modest beginning, this special issue seeks to portray a special moment, a meeting between anthropology and theatre in a fertile, though underdeveloped field of study, with contributions from both anthropologists and theatre scholars.
Ludruk Revisited: An Epistolary Interview with James L. Peacock
Authors: Peacock James L. , Bouvier Héléne
Published: January 2009

Hélène Bouvier (HB): How did you first become interested in theatre?

James L. Peacock (JLP): Most interesting to me, though perhaps less interesting to anyone else, is the question, ‘Why should I, the son of an engineer (one feature shared with Victor Turner whose mother, however, was an actress), study theatre?’ I had no background in it, and I had hardly even seen a play before I went to Java. I think I know a source. It is during World War II, my father is preparing to invade Normandy, while my mother, my sister and I have moved in with her widowed mother in rural Alabama. My mother's sister, a concert pianist, and her sister's son had also moved in because the sister's husband, also a pianist, was also overseas. This boy and my sister play act. I don't. I make things. Every morning I put on my shorts (nothing else, no shoes, no shirt) at the crack of dawn and go outside to play in the yard, especially the ‘sand pile’ where I construct forts and tunnels. (The one dream I remember is of finding a soldier I lost in the sand: my absent father, perhaps?) While my cousin and sister play, sometimes I watch. We grow up. He goes to New York and becomes an actor and musician. I become an anthropologist.

I have never acted in a play (except a pornographic skit in my college fraternity, in which I was a great success among the ‘brothers'), but I have always stared at people (today, women, but when I was growing up, men), and I would draw them, not while looking at them but later, alone—as teenager cartoon fantasies, like the Phantom or Superman, except more human.
Talking About Pornography, Talking About Theatre: Ethnography, Critical Pedagogy, and the Production of ‘Educated’ Audiences ofEtta Jenksin Madison
Authors: Wolf Stacy
Published: January 2009

Theatre studies and anthropology have much to say to each other. Both are disciplines which describe a culture's practices through its performances, whether on stage or in everday life. Both seek to explain the significance of performative choices in their reflection, refraction, and revision of cultural values. This essay participates in the conversations between theatre and anthropology through critical pedagogical theory. It looks at a theatrical performance—a production ofEtta Jenksat the University Theatre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in February 1992—in anthropological terms, to consider the relationships between theatre, the university, and the production of politicized, educated, emancipated spectators.

My first assumption is methodological—that theatre studies can greatly benefit from a consideration of anthropological tools like ethnography, and from anthropological habits like a vigilant articulation of the participant-observer stance which theatre criticism masks. My second assumption is theoretical—that theatre spectators are active producers of meaning, and that reception studies offers a significant and rich area for theatre studies. An anthropological perspective enables me to choose a local site—a university theatre—which theatre studies tends to relegate to a dismissable amateurism, and to work with the perceptions of introductory level students—which scholarly theatre studies all but ignores. My third assumption is pedagogical—that critical literacy must now move beyond print literacy.1

James Clifford reminds us that all ethnographic accounts are created by ‘powerful “lies” of exclusion and rhetoric'.2In my attempt, here, to fashion a persuasive text which invites the reader in, I knowingly rewrite the students’ responses toEtta Jenksin my analysis of their reception.
Dramatized Spaces Between History and Anthropology
Authors: Konigson Elie
Published: January 2009

The starting point for this brief study (which is a summary of several others) is simple: it is not so much in the location of the theatrical site as in the whole of the constructed spaces in which it is situated, that we glean what few insights there are into the evolution of theatrical space.

In Greece, in Rome, then in the Western world of the late Middle Ages, the primary dramatic site has always been an urban one, so that we could assert, paradoxically, that the question of the origins of the theatrical space is less a matter for theatre studies than an aspect of town planning!

Thus if we are to analyse the theatre we must analyse the town. In any case, the two poles between which the destiny of dramatized spaces is played out can be seen in the morphological unit which dominates the history both of the forms of the urban environment and the individual habitat and of the evolution of the theatrical space itself. In effect there exists an original space, a sort of matrix at the heart of the lived space of the urban/residential area, within which human enterprise includes, from the outset, activity which is generally dramatic: the hall-courtyaid-square,1 a complex of spaces which are identical in morphological, functional and symbolic terms and which is differentiated only by the built environment within which it is inscribed, provides a framework within which are carried out all the collective activities connected with the habitat and the urban area.
A Note on La Champmeslé and Mlle Desmares
Authors: Brooks William , Yarrow P. J.
Published: January 2009

In our article ‘Neglected evidence about the actor Michel Baron (1653–1729)’, which appeared in Theatre Research International, 18, 3 (1993), 173–76, we quoted a letter from Madame to Baron Von Hading (foot of p. 174). Madame refers to the actress Mlle Desmares, a prominent member of the French company in the early eighteenth century. The first part of the quotation was as follows:

He did not think of it after the death of the king, but la Desmares [an actress of the Comédie-Française], perceiving that no one was going to see them any more, came to the conclusion that they would fare better if Baron were back in the company, and she persuaded him.

The king died in 1715, and the incident described occurred in, or shortly before, 1720.

After the proofs were corrected and returned, an error crept in which dismayed us greatly. Our parenthesis, ‘an actress of the Comedie-Française’ was replaced by another: ‘better known as la Champmesle’. We did not sanction this amendment, and it is wrong. So much so, in fact, that it looks like carelessness and ignorance on our part, the apprehension of which may tell against acceptance of our findings and objective critical appreciation of our conclusions. We are therefore most grateful to the Editor for allowing us to insert this correction, which we believe to be important.

The actress known as La Champmeslé, Marie Desmares, died in 1698. She was the wife of the actor Champmeslé, whose name she took, and she was probably the greatest actress of her generation; she was also the celebrated mistress of Racine.
Encoding Female Sexual Desire on the Egyptian Stage
Authors: Haring-Smith Tori
Published: January 2009

When sexuality is a formally censored topic on the stage, how can one represent this fundamental human desire? For centuries, Western playwrights have used sex in highly coded language so that it is simultaneously acceptable and titillating. But Nehad Gad, one of Egypt's most prominent writers in the late twentieth century, and the only Egyptian woman to have her plays translated into English for publication, devised her own method to mention that taboo subject. She filled her plays with the desire for commercial goods—an important topic in this increasingly materialistic country. But for her characters, men and women alike, the desire to acquire and exchange commercial items is also a means of expressing sexual desire.
Japanese Deconstructions of the Female Body
Authors: Mezur Katherine
Published: January 2009

H Art Chaos stands out from other Japanese performance troupes as it performs against traditions. The troupe is a all-woman ensemble directed by a woman whose aim is to wage war on the culturally constructed Japanese female body. Oshima Sakiko, the director, and Shirakawa Naoko, the main solo performer, combine their visions of violence to extract the most precise gesture, exact timing, flawless shape, and perfect prop to project those images to rigorous excess. They focus on a kind of distortion and extreme manipulation of the female body which evokes painful kinaesthetic sensations. Their choreography produces discomfort, strain, and anguish through frantic, wrenching movement which aims at stressing the performer's body to the point of explosion or dismemberment. While their movement is based in modern, jazz, and ballet dance idioms, they push the stereotyped and classic vocabulary beyond pretty lines and feel-good sensations. They take technique to the point of excess in order to undo its forms They play with the overt meanings of props and costumes and destabilize those readings, like metaphors in a waking dream where their daily meaning drops out.
Foreword
Authors: Bryant-Bertail Sarah
Published: January 2009

The articles in this issue are concerned with the analysis and theory of theatre performance. Little more than a generation ago, theatrical performance scholarship was an oxymoron and theatre history was concerned only with the description and chronology of performance rather than its theory or analysis. Theories of performance by directors and other artists occupied a nebulous territory between the aesthetics of genre and the anecdotal. Meanwhile books on theatre craft existed alongside theatre histories and anthologies of ‘drama’, with each treated as if it were an independent realm. Anthologies introduced plays as literary texts to be interpreted and contextualized, and the printed play alone was recognized as a legitimate object of inquiry. Performance was too ephemeral to be a proper artefact, much less a proper text. Yet for traditional literary scholars, even the printed play was not a truly primary text; instead, the source of the play was always located elsewhere, in a more authoritative and more academically institutionalized discourse. The play was only an example or concretization of another discourse: biographical, philosophical, theological, psychological, or historical. To be sure, performance descriptions were sometimes given in anthologies, and in the case of canonized writers like Shakespeare or Ibsen, even performance histories could be found. But performance analysis and theory only appeared if the playwright had also published it, as did Strindberg or Brecht, or if a recognized movement had claimed the playwright as one of its own, as with naturalism, expressionism or Theatre of the Absurd.

This situation was understandable considering that theatre studies had once been housed within departments of literature.
Préface
Authors: Bryant-Bertail Sarah
Published: January 2009

Les articles dans ce numéro sont consacrés à l'analyse et la théorie de la représentation théâtrale. Jusqu'à ces dernières années la notion d'études théâtrales était un oxymore et, dans le meilleur des cas, l'histoire du théâtre se contentait de décrire et d'établir la chronologie des représentations. La théorie de la mise en scène occupait une place incertaine entre le discours esthétique et l'anecdote. Les études sur l'art du théâtre côtoyaient livres d'histoire et anthologies de théâtre sur les rayons des bibliothèques, sans qu'il y ait dialogue entre eux. Les anthologies présentaient les pièces de théâtre comme des textes littéraires à interpréter et à replacer dans leur contexte historico-littéraire; et seule l'œuvre imprimée était considérée digne d'étude. On considérait que la représentation théâtrale était trop éphémère pour constituer une véritable œuvre d'art, encore moins un texte authentique. Même la pièce imprimée ne constituait pas le véritable texte primaire, le discours académique en situant toujours la source ailleurs. Une pièce n'était en définitive qu'une illustration ou une concrétisation d'un autre discours: biographique, philosophique, théologique, psychologique ou historique. Il y avait bien des descriptions de représentations dans certaines anthologies et, pour des auteurs canonisés tels Shakespeare ou Ibsen, il existait même une histoire des représentations les plus importantes. Mais, en général, il n'y avait théorie ou analyse de la représentation que si l'auteur en avait publié une, tels Strindberg ou Brecht, ou si le dramaturge faisait partie d'un mouvement esthétique tel que le naturalisme, l'expressionisme, le Théâtre de l'Absurde, etc…

Cet état de fait s'explique aisément puisque les Etudes Universitaires Théâtrales furent longtemps rattachées aux départements de littérature.
Topography of Representation
Authors: Kobialka Michal
Published: January 2009

Representation carries a promise of a performative act. As Mark Taylor observes, in contrast to the so-called constative utterances which describe facts, a promise realizes ‘a state of affairs that did not exist prior to the language event’ or, as is the case here, prior to the events unfolding in a theatrical or any other space. Such an act signifies that the ‘I’ or ‘we’ making a promise understands or knows the problem or the text, plays the part of the agent authorized by a convention or its systems to execute a promise, and the act requires that representation assumes the function of reality maker that produces the real by simulating verisimilitude. For this process to be complete, the mode of operation needs to be clearly delineated by cultural or social practices and institutional structures that safeguard the promise, its execution, and its use.

Even though the general tenets are still dominant in everyday practice, the concept of representation has been championed and problematized ever since the fragmentation and the split within the subject became evident in the twentieth century. The ‘I’ and ‘we’ ceased to be valued as universally defined nouns. As a corollary, the promise of representation was no longer able to express the subject's desire to impose linear transfer and ideological order upon both human beings and the objects of their creation (theatre and drama). Once the subject was undone, the order of representation disseminated into pieces scattered throughout space. It became dispersed in contradictory meanings, which now could be assigned to objects that had been kept outside of its boundaries.
‘What, has this thing appeared again tonight?’
Authors: Rokem Freddie
Published: January 2009

Performance analysis and performance theory have to deal in one way or another with the relationships between the written dramatic text and the stage performance of that text. The point of departure for most discussions of this issue is that the drama text through its staging is ‘translated’ or ‘transformed’ into a performance text but since the ontological status of the written and performed texts are fundamentally different it is virtually impossible to set up a clearly delineated hermeneutic procedure through which the new, ‘translated’ work of art, the performance text, can be analysed on the basis of the dramatic source text alone. It is quite evident, moreover, that the staging of a certain text is both a completely independent work of art, presented by live actors for an audience in the total context created especially for that performance and an ‘interpretation’ of another independent work of art, the dramatic text. The performance itself thus creates a special form of intertextuality where the words assigned to the characters on the printed page of the written text are spoken by the actors on the stage. The behaviour of a certain character on the stage is a specific realization of a potential range of meanings which that character contains in the source-text on the printed page.

Since the two texts are so fundamentally different any attempt to judge the adequacy of the ‘new’ work of art, the performance text, mainly in relation to the dramatic text is doomed to run into insurmountable hermeneutic difficulties.
Comparative Performance Semiotics: The End of Ibsen's A Doll's House
Authors: Törnqvist Egil
Published: January 2009

When analysing drama performances in the widest sense of the word, it seems sensible to distribute the large number of signifiers (signifiants) transmitted to the recipient (the spectator and/or the listener) over five codes: (1) language, (2) culture, (3) medium, (4) directorial and (5) actorial signals.
A Computer Reconstruction of Richelieu's Palais Cardinal Theatre, 1641
Authors: Williford Christa
Published: January 2009

A small, anonymous grisaille(Figure 1)from the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris is among the more familiar images of seventeenth-century French theatre history. It depicts Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII, and other members of the royal family at the theatre. The setting for the scene is the Grande Salle of Richelieu's Parisian home, the Palais Cardinal. Designed by the palace architect Jacques Lemercier and completed in 1641, this theatre was among the first purpose-built proscenium theatres in France. In the 1660s it became the site of the public performances of Molière's most successful plays; after the playwright's death, it housed the Paris Opéra until a fire destroyed it in 1763.
Eighteenth-Century Swiss Peasant Meets Bard: Ulrich Bräker's A Few Words About William Shakespeare's Plays (1780)
Authors: Erne Lukas
Published: January 2009

Britain began making Shakespeare her national poet early in the eighteenth century, and Germany followed suit a few decades later, progressively turning ‘unser Shakespeare’ into one of three national poets, with Goethe and Schiller. As early as 1773, Johann Gottfried Herder included his essay on ‘Shakespear’ in a collection entitled Von Deutscher Art und Kunst. The drama of the ‘Sturm und Drang’, which Herder's collection programmatically inaugurated, appropriated what Goethe (Götz von Berlichingen), Schiller (The Robbers) and their contemporaries (mis)understood to be Shakespeare's dramatic technique. By the end of the century, the assimilation had advanced far enough for August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the famous translator of seventeen of Shakespeare's plays, to indulge in no slight national chauvinism: ‘I am eager’, he writes in a letter to his cotranslator Ludwig Tieck, ‘to have your letters on Shakespeare.… I hope you will prove, among other things, that Shakespeare wasn't English. I wonder how he came to dwell among the frosty, stupid souls on that brutal island? … The English critics understand nothing about Shakespeare.’ Even though Tieck failed to prove that Shakespeare was not of English birth, the conviction that Shakespeare was best understood by German rather than by English critics only grew in the course of the nineteenth century. Appropriately, it was in Germany that the first periodical devoted exclusively to Shakespeare, the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, was founded in 1865. Fifty years later, the German novelist Gerhart Hauptmann could still claim that ‘there is no people, not even the English, that has the same right to claim Shakespeare as the German. Shakespeare's characters are a part of our world, his soul has become one with ours: and though he was born and buried in England, Germany is the country where he truly lives.’
Violence et révolte des femmes dans le théâtre de Marguerite Yourcenar, Nathalie Sarraute et Marguerite Duras
Authors: Terneuil Alexandre
Published: January 2009

In their plays, Yourcenar, Sarraute and Duras repeatedly portray women who oppose men, sometimes violently. Drawing on several examples, this paper aims to define a typology of female characters by analysing the double theme of violence and revolt. Some women find themselves imprisoned both by men and by their epoch; all they can do is to submit to the system put in place by society, against which they struggle in vain for freedom. After an initial submission to the rules of society, they are impelled towards a more or less successful revolt and this allows them to find fulfilment through rebellion. In the case of Yourcenar, woman resists as best she can; despite everything, her happiness is found in revolt and especially, perhaps, in revenge. In the case of Sarraute, the emergence and development of the Sarrautian ‘tropism’ becomes both an act of affirmation for the female character and an act of struggle against the other, the male. Woman, for Duras, is hi a position of quasi-imprisonment by two psychic spaces which occupy her totally: both violence and revolt are expressed through the body, its behaviour and its sexual pleasure. But there is also a contained violence, already filtered by an attempt, sometimes vain, to express it through words. However, many of the lines spoken by these women demonstrate a clear self-awareness through violence which is either contained or which can explode in a bid for freedom.
“N'est-on pas tous pareils?”: Nathalie Sarraute and the Question of Gender
Authors: Minogue Valerie
Published: January 2009

In Nathalie Sarraute's Ici (1995), the textual voice is attacked for using ‘on’ instead of ‘je’, and masculine agreements instead of feminine. That voice, in characteristic Sarrautean fashion, justifies its practice with the words: ‘N'est-on pas tous pareils?’, explaining that ‘C'est pour faire participer, pour mettre tout le monde “dans le coup”’. At the level of the tropisms, those movements at the very edge of consciousness which Sarraute has made the foundation and substance of all her writing, we are, she claims, all alike: ‘sur un plan précis, à un niveau égale-ment précis, nous nous ressemblons tous’, irrespective of sex, creed or colour. Sarraute's interest is attached to

ce qui est propre à tous, à quelque chose qui me paraît exister absolument chez tout le monde, qui n'est pas propre aux femmes, pas propre aux hommes, pas propre aux Noirs, aux Blancs, aux Jaunes … J'essaie de saisir quelque chose qui me parait d'ordre général.
Stage Management, Dramaturgy and Spatial Semiotics in Shakespeare's Dialogue
Authors: Fitzpatrick Tim
Published: January 2009

This article examines the ramifications of the hypothesis that encoded in the dialogue of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre texts are precise indications for the actors as to then-entrance and exit points, and that such indications constitute a stage management system, a dramaturgical system and a system of spatial semiotics which might invest these movement patterns with thematic or semiotic significance. Such a suggestion, that we may be able to access a range of ‘spatial’ meanings from an understanding of original performance conditions, is likely to be viewed with some scepticism by Shakespearian scholars of a literary orientation, so strong is the word-based tradition of analysis and interpretation. Yet this is the suggestion that underlies this work: that, complementing the verbal signification of the texts there may also be a verbally inscribed spatial semiotic which provides an additional range of meanings—and that such possible semiotic functions ride upon pragmatic stage management patterns which governed entrances and exits and the rhythms of the original performance context. It is argued that when the texts are interrogated in this light they reveal precise, consistent and coherent traces of such systematic indications in regard to the onstage-offstage spatial relationships operating in performance.
The Birth of theHanamichi
Authors: Haruo Suwa
Published: January 2009

Of all the various features associated with the kabuki theatre, few are as well known outside Japan as thehanamichi, the raised runway joined to the stage at the actors' right and proceeding through the auditorium to a curtained room at the rear. Used for major exits and entrances, it is also the site of important acting sequences. Because thehanamichibrings actors and spectators into close proximity without abandoning a stage-auditorium relationship similar to that in Western proscenium theatres, it has been of considerable interest to international theatre artists. Although its aesthetic and practical uses have been described in various Western sources, little attention has been paid to thehanamichi'sorigins. Among Japanese scholars, there is nearly as much contention surrounding this question as there is among Western scholars regarding the origins of the proscenium arch, the Elizabethan theatre's alcove, or the classical Greek theatre's use of a raised stage.
François Delsarte: A Codification of Nineteenth-Century Acting
Authors: Taylor George
Published: January 2009

In 1875 George Henry Lewes published the following analysis of William Charles Macready's acting:

Whenever he had an emotion to depict he depicted it sympathetically and not artificially; by which I mean that he felt himself to be the person, and having identified himself with the character, sought by means of the symbols of his art to express what that character felt; he did not stand outside the character and try to express its emotions by the symbols that had been employed for other characters by other actors.
Bells and Alarm Clocks: Theatre and Theatre Research at the Millenium
Authors: Shevtsova Maria
Published: January 2009

Space, as Einstein has taught us, has no limits, and time is relative to where you are moving and the speed of light. Our millenium, then, is only a speck in eternal space. It is, nevertheless, a point relative to which we are positioned and on which we place a limit—a date—so that our actions may be chronicled, measured, and brought to some sort of completion, thus releasing us from living forever in the present. Yet, notwithstanding our ability to construct, contain and count time, somewhere someone has made a slip, for there is a ‘glitch’ in the system that still prevents millions of computers from recognizing the year 2000, by which devilry we are sent back to less than zero, to zero twice, 00. This error may well have disastrous consequences, although it would be preferable not have any of them happen—hospital operations failing, aeroplanes losing their bearings and going down in apocalyptic spectacles that are considered appropriate for a millenial ending. is as if this error might be interpreted as a token of what Jean Baudrillard, in a different context that has nothing to do with computers, sardonically suggests may be our desire to wipe out history, even, perhaps, to start again from scratch. Baudrillard's is, of course, one of multiple theses on the ‘end of history’ and millenial nothingness that have emerged, not least via the theatre, with the approach of the twenty-first century.
Disruptions in Representation: Anne Bogart's Creative Encounter with East Asian Performance Traditions
Authors: Lampe Eelka
Published: January 2009

The avant-garde theatre director Anne Bogart has made her name in the U.S. theatre community through her deconstructions of modern classics such as the musical South Pacific (1984), Cinderella/Cendrillon (1988) after Massenet's opera, Büchner's Danton's Death (1986), Gorki's Summerfolk (1989), William Inge's Picnic (1992), as well as through her idiosyncratic and original dance/theatre ‘compositions’ developed collabortively with her company, the Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI). Prominent among such compositions have been 1951 (1986) on art and politics during the McCarthy era, No Plays, No Poetry (1988) on Brecht's theoretical writings, American Vaudeville (1991), and The Medium (1993) on the writings of the Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan. Bogart has been acclaimed for her astute directing of the work by contemporary playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, Charles Mee Jr. and Eduardo Machado.
The Strange and the Familiar: Intercultural Exchange between African and Caribbean Theatre
Authors: Okagbue Osita
Published: January 2009

In the heart of the forest, Makak and his companions endeavour to come to terms with their blackness/Africanness before they can return to their Caribbean island purged of their sense of exile and alienation. The scene captures the psycho-physical pull which Africa exerts on most Caribbean peoples of African descent, an attraction which has coloured both the way of life and forms of cultural expression in the Caribbean. But more significantly, this play (and scene in particular) was my first contact with African-Caribbean theatre which I recognized as familiar, but also one mixed with a certain strangeness and foreignness. Here was a group of characters—black, of course—who spoke in a dialect of English that was very close to the pidgin of my Nigerian society, but who were very different from the Nigerian man in the street. Their racial anguish—the subject of much Caribbean literature and theatre—struck a responsive chord in me, but it definitely was not my anguish because the experience which had produced these characters was totally alien to me. However, beyond this mixture of strangeness and familiarity, was the strange familiarity of the form which Walcott employs in articulating this peculiar experience of slavery. Makak has embarked upon a journey home, albeit in his dream, with a group of other people to Africa. Symbolically, it is a rite of passage and a return to his origins and it is here that the curious mixture of foreignness and familiarity throws up a dramatic structure that is both African and Caribbean and which has led me on a search for the ‘own’ in the ‘foreign’.
Orientalia, Orientalism, and The Peking Opera Artist as ‘Subject’ in Contemporary Australian Performance
Authors: Sussman Sally , Day Tony
Published: January 2009

As brochures for the January 1996 Sydney Festival blare out ‘Feel the Beat. Feel the Heat!’ to draw the crowds of summering Sydney folk to performances of the National Dance Company of Guinea (already appropriated and stamped with approval by reviewers in San Francisco and London, who are quoted on the same flyer), the chairman and former artistic director of Playbox Theatre in Melbourne, Carrillo Gartner, worries about the strength of popular Australian opposition to Australia's expanding links with Asia. In an article on the holding of the 14th annual Federation for Asian Cultural Promotion in Melbourne, Gartner fears that ‘there are people in this community […] thinking that […] it is the demise of all they believe in their British heritage’. The focus of the article, though, is not the promotion of Asian culture but how to overcome Asian indifference to Australia and the problem of bringing Australian artists to the notice of Asian impresarios and audiences. Australian cultural cringe wins out over Australian Asia-literate political correctness. In another corner of the continent the director and playwright Peter Copeman has been attempting to replace ‘the Euro-American hand-me-downs and imitations’ of mainstream Australian theatre with a theatre project which explores ‘attitudes of the dominant Anglo-Celtic and the Vietnamese minority cultures towards each other, using the intercultural dialectic as the basis of dramatic conflict’.
‘A Mess of Russians left us but of late’: Diplomatic Blunder, Literary Satire, and the Muscovite Ambassador's 1668 Visit to Paris Theatres
Authors: Jensen Claudia R. , Powell John S.
Published: January 2009

In October 1672, a highly select audience in Moscow witnessed the court's first theatrical production, a setting of Artakserksovo deistvo (The Play of Ahasuerus) based on the biblical story of Esther. A month later, in contrast, Parisians would witness the escalating rivalry between Molière and Lully—as the former continued to capitalize on their tragédie-ballet, Psyché (with Lully's music), while the latter prepared to launch his first French opera, Les Fêtes de l'Amour et de Bacchus (with Molière's lyrics).1 At first glance there would seem to be little connection between the fledgling Muscovite theatre at Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich's court, which in the event was to be closed down at his death only four years later, and the public theatres of Paris with their lyrical offerings of comédies-ballets, tragédies-ballets and, most recently, pastoral opera. Yet the two are linked in many ways, some subtle and some obvious, and the influences are both mutual and unexpected.
Blood, Thunder and Theory: The Arrival of English Melodrama
Authors: Shepherd Simon
Published: January 2009

One of the surest ways of registering disapproval of a play or a performance is to dismiss it as ‘melodramatic’, thus invoking a whole network of mistaken dramatic values and improper practice. In arts reviews, classrooms and text books, ‘melodrama’ recurs as the ‘other’ of ‘proper’ realist drama. InEnglish Drama: A Cultural History, we describe the critical history of melodrama as ‘The Unacceptable Face of Theatre's importance and seriousness. One of the most influential interventions came from Peter Brooks, whoseMelodramatic Imaginationpropounds two arguments in favour of melodrama'scultural centrality: first, Brooks shows how Diderot and Rousseau anticipated the French form of melodrama, then he makes connections between melodramatic gesture or sign and the work of Saussure or Barthes. My aim here is to develop the case further by suggesting that, in the case of English melodrama, the practice of the form as it emerged was very far from being non-intellectual, out of control or stupid. Indeed the dramatists themselves were well conscious of what they were doing formally: not only intelligence but also self-reflection were there from the start.
The Corporeality of the Actor's Body: The Boundaries of Theatre and the Limitations of Semiotic Methodology
Authors: Rozik Eli
Published: January 2009

In recent years, it has been widely suggested that the bodily presence of the actor (and actress) on stage marks the limits and limitations of the semiotic approach to theatre and determines the need for a more complex methodology of research.
A Dream Play on the Opera Stage
Authors: Lewenhaupt Inga
Published: January 2009

On 15 September 1992 one of the most important new operas written in Scandinavia had its opening night at The Royal Opera House, Stockholm. The opera, based on Strindberg's A Dream Play, libretto and music by Ingvar Lidholm, was long awaited and surpassed the highest expectations. The score has a prelude and two acts, (duration two hours and twenty minutes, pause excluded) and requires a large orchestra, an extended percussion section, mixed chorus, children's chorus and fifteen roles.
A‘Play’-within-the-Play: The Opening of Strindbere's The Father
Authors: Törnqvist Egil
Published: January 2009

Strindberg's Fadren/The Father (1887) opens with an episode — relating to the orderly Nöjd — which is a little drama in itself. We are immediately introduced to an intricate situation which moreover is said to have universal application. Rarely has a dramatist been able to involve his audience so quickly in the action unfolding before their eyes. The opening of The Father excellently illustrates Strindberg's view that theatre should be a weapon aimed at our deepest emotions.
Genetic relationship in southern African Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus isolates: evidence for occurrence of reassortment
Authors: BURT F. J. , PAWESKA J. T. , ASHKETTLE B. , SWANEPOEL R.
Published: January 2009

Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is a tick-borne viral zoonosis widely distributed in Africa, Asia and eastern Europe. Reassortment of CCHF genome segments has been shown to occur in nature. We therefore investigated the genetic relationship of southern African isolates using partial sequence data for each RNA segment, S, M and L, and comparing the tree topologies constructed using a neighbour joining method. A total of 21 southern African isolates were studied. The incongruencies which were identified in S, M and L sequence datasets involved group switching implying reassortment for 15 isolates. A higher fatality rate occurred in patients infected with isolates which had apparently acquired M segments from a group in which predominantly Asian strains are usually found. This suggests that reassortment may affect the pathogenicity of the virus.
Investigation of a Q fever outbreak in a rural area of The Netherlands
Authors: KARAGIANNIS I. , SCHIMMER B. , VAN LIER A. , TIMEN A. , SCHNEEBERGER P. , VAN ROTTERDAM B. , DE BRUIN A. , WIJKMANS C. , RIETVELD A. , VAN DUYNHOVEN Y.
Published: January 2009

A Q fever outbreak occurred in the southeast of The Netherlands in spring and summer 2007. Risk factors for the acquisition of a recentCoxiella burnetiiinfection were studied. In total, 696 inhabitants in the cluster area were invited to complete a questionnaire and provide a blood sample for serological testing of IgG and IgM phases I and II antibodies againstC. burnetii, in order to recruit seronegative controls for a case-control study. Questionnaires were also sent to 35 previously identified clinical cases. Limited environmental sampling focused on two goat farms in the area. Living in the east of the cluster area, in which a positive goat farm, cattle and small ruminants were situated, smoking and contact with agricultural products were associated with a recent infection. Information leaflets were distributed on a large scale to ruminant farms, including hygiene measures to reduce the risk of spread between animals and to humans.