bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Towards an Ethnography of Rehearsal
Authors: McAuley Gay
Published: January 2009

Twenty-five years ago, the originalTheatre Quarterlypioneered the documentation of the rehearsal process in a series of ‘Production Casebooks’ which, in a wide variety of formats – dictated by the people and the facilities available for any particular production – delved pragmatically into then-uncharted territory. That such analyses are now more commonplace is thanks not only to the active participation of academics in the field of theatre studies, but also to what Gay McAuley here describes as the postmodern ‘shift in interest from the reified art object to the dynamic processes involved in its production and reception’. But the need to refine happenstance into methodology has served only to highlight the problems of observation, selection, and presentation involved – and of how to determine the degree of objectivity that is possible or desirable. The availability of video alongside audiotape and notebook provides an important additional tool – but presents its own problems of ‘editing’ and interpretation. Here, Gay McAuley, Director of the Centre for Performance Studies in the University of Sydney, compares the dilemma of the rehearsal recordist with that of the cultural anthropologist, and proposes the value of an ethnographic model in recognizing and starting to embrace if not always to overcome the difficulties which confront the involved observer. An earlier version of her paper was read at the IFTR/FIRT conference ‘Actor, Actress on Stage’, held in Montreal in June 1995.
Little Acts of Faith: Katie Mitchell's ‘The Mysteries’
Authors: Normington Katie
Published: January 2009

The success of Katie Mitchell's production ofThe Mysteriesfor the Royal Shakespeare Company has again demonstrated the appeal of the plays for a modern audience. Most revivals trim and otherwise adapt the texts of the original, sprawling cycles: but Mitchell and her dramaturg, Edward Kemp, more calculatedly addressed the problems of updating not only the texts, but also the acting style and attitudes towards the dominant issues – notably those of gender representation. The original cycles often intriguingly juxtaposed religious faith and local politics in an assertion of civic pride which none the less also acknowledged the dominance of the established Church: and in the following article Katie Normington assesses the relevance of Mitchell's production for the secular, depoliticized society of the 'nineties. Katie Normington is a freelance fringe theatre director who is currently researching the role of women in the mystery plays and lecturing in drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London.
Abstract Body Language: Documenting Women's Bodies in Theatre
Authors: Cutler Anna
Published: January 2009

In this article, the first of a sequence on the ways in which women's bodies are recorded in performance documentation, Anna Cutler offers a new conception and systematic definition of three performance documentations – the ‘Proper’, the ‘Processual’ and the ‘Residual’. She argues against traditional and literary forms of documentation (the ‘Proper’) as a means by which women and women's bodies have been and continue to be excluded from performance records, and proceeds to discuss two theoretical types of body in performance: the ‘Inscribed’ (which represents an ideologically shaped, constructed, and censored body) and the ‘Potential’ (which represents the creative and ongoing moments of change made by the body in performance). She proposes the ‘Potential Body’ as a model for performance documentation, since, though difficult to translate into written forms, it offers a more effective communication of both the body and of live performance. Given the continuing prevalence of the written word as the primary mode of performance documentation, the author makes a case forécriture féminineto be appropriated as a writerly tool to document women's bodies and particularly the ‘Potential Body’ in performance. She concludes with a discussion of the theory and practice of Hélène Cixous' writing in relation to women's performance methodologies. The debate is taken up by Susan Melrose in the article following this. Anna Cutler is currently producing events for the Belfast Festival, while completing her doctoral research in the Department of Literary and Media Studies at the University of North London.
My Body, Your Body, Her-His Body: Is/Does Some-Body (Live) There?
Authors: Melrose Susan
Published: January 2009

Taking up the arguments set out by Anna Cutler in the preceding article, Susan Melrose here cautions against what she sees as the dangers Cutler fails to take into account of nominalization as an inherently conservative process. She suggests that the reification of the term ‘the body’ carries its own dangers, unless its complexities – as suggested by the title of this article – are recognized and assimilated. Arguing that many of the problems identified by Cutler are as applicable to the male as to the female performer, Susan Melrose concludes that the primacy of the word in documentation processes, though contested by Anna Cutler, has none the less caused her to overlook existing, effective forms of performance documentation, perhaps because they originate from and primarily serve the interests of performers rather than academics. Susan Melrose is Senior Lecturer at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she leads the MA course in Performance Studies. She is author ofA Semiotics of the Dramatic Text(Macmillan, 1994), and a contributor to numerous journals and symposia in her field. Further contributions to the debate initiated in these articles are planned and invited.
‘Tight Roaring Circle’: Organizing the Organization of Bodies in Space
Authors: Spier Steven
Published: January 2009

Tight Roaring Circle, a 1997 Artangel installation at the Roundhouse in London, was a collaboration between choreographers and a musician, as well as with the curators and the audience. Through the installation Dana Caspersen, William Forsythe, and Joel Ryan furthered their explorations into engendering, ordering, and composing movement. By obscuring each individual's contribution they also raised issues of authorship, disciplinary boundaries, and autonomy. Many of the issues provoked by the installation are also being pursued at the Ballett Frankfurt, where Caspersen is a dancer and choreographer, Forsythe is artistic director and choreographer, and for which Ryan often writes music. Having first studied philosophy, Steven Spier is a senior lecturer in architecture in the School of Urban Development and Policy at South Bank University. He has written an article on Forsythe's relationship to classical ballet for the Journal of Architecture, and a book that brings together an architect's and a novelist's work.
Sanjukta Panigrahi: Dancer for the Gods
Authors: Varley Julia
Published: January 2009

The great classical Indian dancer and co-founder of the International School of Theatre Anthropology, Sanjukta Panigrahi, died in June 1997. An outstanding exponent – and virtually the rediscoverer – of Odissi dance, Sanjukta Panigrahi was born in Orissa into a Brahmin family, and defied the prejudice of her caste as the first girl to pursue Odissi dance as a career. With the support of her family, she began studying at the age of five under the guru Kelucharan Mahapatra, with whom she worked for many years, and also trained in Bharata Natyam for six years with the master Rukmini Devi. Julia Varley, an Odin Teatret actress since 1977, knew and worked with Sanjukta for twenty years, and in the following article offers her memories and reconstruction of the experiences of apprenticeship, performance, technique, cultural exchange, teaching, and family and work relationships, both in India and within the multicultural context of ISTA. Sanjukta's own descriptions of her life and work, drawn from a wide variety of sources, are interspersed throughout the article, in an attempt to keep alive this remarkable actress/dancer's way of thinking and being, coloured by her particular female strength. Julia Varley was born in London in 1954, spent her childhood in Milan, joined Odin in 1976, and has been a participant in the ISTA sessions since their conception in 1980.
The Reinvention of Shakespeare in Traditional Asian Theatrical Forms
Authors: Tian Min
Published: January 2009

Especially during the later decades of the twentieth century, Shakespeare's plays have been adapted for production in many of the major Asian traditional theatrical forms – prompting some western critics to suggest that such forms, with their long but largely non-logocentric traditions, can come closer to the recovery or recreation of the theatrical conditions and performance styles of Shakespeare's times than can academically derived experiments based on scantily documented research. Whether in full conformity with traditional Asian styles, or by stirring ingredients into a synthetic mix, Min Tian denies that a ‘true’ recreation is possible – but suggests that such productions can, paradoxically, help us to ‘reinvent’ Shakespeare in fuller accord with our own times, notably by exploiting the potential of stylized gesture and movement, and the integration of music and dance, called for by proponents of a modernistic ‘total’ theatre after Artaud. In considering a wide range of Shakespearean productions and adaptations from varying Asian traditions, Min Tian suggests that the fashionably derided ‘universality’ of Shakespeare may still tell an intercultural truth that transcends stylistic and chronological distinctions. Min Tian holds a doctorate from the China Central Academy of Drama, where he has been an associate professor since 1992. The author of many articles on Shakespeare, modern drama, and intercultural theatre, he is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
From Travelling with Footsbarn to ‘Wandertheater’ with Ton und Kirschen
Authors: Cousin Geraldine
Published: January 2009

The first issue of NTQ in February 1985 included a feature on the Footsbarn Travelling Theatre Company which traced the development of the group from its formation in Cornwall in 1971, through its development of a distinctive narrative-based performance style – strong in physicality, visual imagery, and knockabout humour – to its status as an internationally acclaimed company, based now in France but touring extensively in Europe. Geraldine Cousin, the compiler of that feature, provided an update in NTQ33 (February 1993), which focused on Footsbarn's work since 1985, culminating in the ‘Mir Caravan’ project, in which eight theatre groups toured to the Soviet Union and through Eastern and Western Europe. In May 1992, two members of the group, David Johnston and Margarete Biereye, left to establish a new theatre company in Germany – the Wandertheater Ton und Kirschen, now well established, with actors drawn from Germany, France, England, Morocco, Spain, Colombia, Poland, and Australia. Though based in a small German village, Ton und Kirschen has built up its reputation in a number of European countries, and in 1998 was awarded the prize for Performing Arts from the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Ton und Kirschen is funded partly by the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, and partly by the local district and the town of Potsdam, with a further portion of its income deriving from ticket sales and foreign tours. In December 1997 Margarete and David talked to Geraldine Cousin about their reasons for leaving Footsbarn, and their work with the new company. Geraldine Cousin is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, and is author of Churchill the Playwright (Methuen), King John in the ‘Shakespeare in Performance’ series (Manchester University Press), and Women in Dramatic Place and Time (Routledge). She has recently completed a book for Harwood which documents productions by Sphinx Theatre, Scarlet Theatre, and Foursight Theatre.
The Art of Manora: an Ancient Tale of Feminine Power Preserved in South-East Asian Theatre
Authors: Plowright Poh Sim
Published: January 2009

When is a widely-known fairy tale more than a story? Poh Sim Plowright recently went to South Thailand and North Malaysia to examine the relevance of the ‘birdwoman’ folk tale to the lives of the villagers1 in those two regions. Here the local people still participate in a ritual dramatization of a story which for them represents a crucial renewal of life in their yearly calendar – a celebration of the roots of feminine magical power which goes back to the ancient historical south-east Asian practice by which a victorious ruler would carry back as booty to his kingdom the wives and dancers of the vanquished. Since most of the members of these royal harems were mediums gifted with special powers of healing and communicating with spirits, they were seen as valuable additions to a ruler's aura of divinity – and consequently to his terrestrial power. More importantly, the theatrical art form known asManora, which enshrines the ‘birdwoman’ tale, is said to have been founded by two royal female trance mediums, regarded as primal healers and guardians of a life-renewing elixir: thus, each performance also serves as a shamanic and healing ritual. The performances here described by Poh Sim Plowright also have links with drama in China and Japan, and at the end of her article she explores the powerful connection with W. B. Yeats's celebrated ‘birdwoman’ play,At the Hawk's Well, which features a ‘Hawk’ Woman guarding a ‘well of miraculous water’ against male intrusion. Poh Sim Plowright is Director of the Centre for the Study of Noh Drama and Lecturer in Oriental Drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London.
Prodigals and Profligates; or, a Short History of Modern British Drama
Authors: Stokes John
Published: January 2009

In 1996 John Stokes was appointed to the first endowed Chair in Modern British Literature at King's College, London, where English has been taught since the 1830s. In this version of his inaugural lecture, delivered on 6 November 1997, he traces the transformations undergone by the figure of the prodigal son in the drama of the last hundred years and argues for recognition of the part played by actors in determining the course of theatrical history.
Who Framed Theatre? The ‘Moment of Change’ in British TV Drama
Authors: MacMurraugh-Kavanagh Madeleine , Lacey Stephen
Published: January 2009

It has long been the received wisdom that television drama has become increasingly ‘filmic’ in orientation, moving away from the ‘theatrical’ as its point of aesthetic reference. This development, which is associated with the rejection of the studio in favour of location shooting – made possible by the increased use of new technology in the 1960s – and with the adoption of cinematic as opposed to theatrical genres, is generally regarded as a sign that the medium has come into its own. By examining a key ‘moment of change’ in the history of television drama, the BBC ‘Wednesday Play’ series of 1964 to 1970, this article asks what was lost in the movement out of the studio and into the streets, and questions the notion that the transition from ‘theatre’ to ‘film’, in the wake of Ken Loach and Tony Garnett's experiments in all-film production, was without tension or contradiction. The discussion explores issues of dramatic space as well as of socio-cultural context, expectation, and audience, and incorporates detailed analyses of Nell Dunn's Up the Junction (1965) and David Mercer's Let's Murder Vivaldi (1968). Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh is the Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the HEFCE-funded project, ‘The BBC Wednesday Plays and Post-War British Drama’, now in its third year at the University of Reading. Her publications include Peter Shaffer: Theatre and Drama (Macmillan, 1998), and papers in Screen, The British Journal of Canadian Studies, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and Media, Culture, and Society. Stephen Lacey is a lecturer in Film and Drama at the University of Reading, where he is co-director of the ‘BBC Wednesday Plays’ project. His publications include British Realist Theatre: the New Wave and its Contexts (Routledge, 1995) and articles in New Theatre Quarterly and Studies in Theatre Production.
Twelve of the Fifty-One Shocks of Antonin Artaud
Authors: Ward Nigel
Published: January 2009

In ‘Artaud at Rodez’, published in the sixth issue of the original Theatre Quarterly, Charles Marowitz pursued an investigation into the nature of the alleged madness of Antonin Artaud, for which he was confined during the Second World War – eventually being transferred to the asylum at Rodez where he was subjected to electric shock ‘therapy’. Marowitz's article, which later formed the basis for his play of the same title, explored the motivations and responses of those involved: here, Nigel Ward focuses rather on the nature and effects of the treatment itself, inflicted on Artaud no less than fifty-one times – a treatment which, however controversial, was ironically appropriate for the creator of a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ which itself claimed to purge its audience of weaknesses and to heal through shock. Nigel Ward is a tutor on the MA in Performance Studies course at the Central School of Speech and Drama.
The Floating World of Nouveau Chinoiserie: Asian Orientalist Productions of Greek Tragedy
Authors: Diamond Catherine
Published: January 2009

Criticism is increasingly being levelled at western directors who, in the name of a vague intercultural aesthetic, embark on experiments combining western texts with various kinds of oriental movement, costume, and music. In this article, Catherine Diamond raises the same issues in regard to productions of western drama in Asia, and offers a detailed analysis of three productions of ancient Greek tragedies to reveal how a new kind of non-specific orientalism has come to pervade the international stage, originating no less in Asia than in the West. Lavish productions, mounted to impress the international festival circuit rather than to engage local audiences, appropriate western tragedies primarily on account of their status in the western literary and theatrical canon; and rather than offering new interpretations of the texts from a different cultural perspective, they contribute to the creeping ascendancy of superficially exotic spectacle. Catherine Diamond, a dancer and drama professor, is currently a director with Thalie Theatre, the only English-language theatre in Taiwan.
Revisiting ‘The Sea’: Bond's English Comedy in Toulouse
Authors: Stuart Ian
Published: January 2009

Edward Bond'sThe Seawas first presented at the Royal Court Theatre under William Gaskill's direction in 1973, and later confirmed as a modern classic in its revival in 1991 at the National Theatre– where it was claimed that it could only have been written by an Englishman. But, asLa Mer, it was chosen to open the Thėâtre de la Citė in Toulouse, where Bond scholar and editor Ian Stuart saw Jacques Rosner's production in October, and here reports on the resultant meeting between an English comedy and ‘French serenity’.
Goodnight Ladies… on the Explicit Body in Performance
Authors: Davis Jill
Published: January 2009

Jill Davis, Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, ‘spins off in other directions’ from what began as a review of Rebecca Schneider's The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge, 1997).
‘Making Theatre, Making a Society’: an Introduction to the Work of Peter Sellars
Authors: Delgado Maria M.
Published: January 2009

Variously raising hackles and acclaim, the work of Peter Sellars is wider-ranging than the occasional observer might suppose – rooted in an apprenticeship as a puppeteer, followed by some sixty productions in a variety of media during the decade of the ‘eighties. But it is for his eclectic approach to opera that Sellars has become best known on the international festival circuit – which, suggests Maria M. Delgado, he is forced to travel by default, since his socially critical stance combined with an anti-realist aesthetic deters the sponsorship on which so much American theatre depends. Maria M. Delgado here offers an overview and an assessment of a career and a philosophy dedicated to an awareness ‘both of theatre’ s role as a force of political and social responsibility and understanding and of the need to rise above the literal’. The author teaches in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary College in the University of London.
Which Came First: The System or ‘The Seagull’?
Authors: Merlin Bella
Published: January 2009

Anton Chekhov's dissatisfaction with Konstantin Stanislavsky's early productions of his plays is well known and oft-discussed. However, it may be argued that the detailed analysis to which Stanislavsky subjected the script of The Seagull, though offensive to the author's intentions, led to the germination of Stanislavsky's acting system as well as laying the foundations for the success of Chekhov's own dramatic career. Bella Merlin, Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, explores this avenue of debate by assessing the possible reasons for the Alexandrinsky Theatre's failure in its premiere of The Seagull in 1896. Thereafter, the mutual dependency of Chekhov and Stanislavsky is discussed with reference to the success of the Moscow Art Theatre's production of 1898. In the following article in this issue, she links these reflections on the play's early fortunes to its relevance to the ‘Method of Physical Actions’ developed by Stanislavsky towards the end of his career.
Albert Filozov and the Method of Physical Actions
Authors: Merlin Bella
Published: January 2009

As a complementary piece to her preceding article on the formative significance of The Seagull to Stanislavsky's early thinking, Bella Merlin here looks at the play in the context of Stanislavsky's later work, when he was developing the Method of Physical Actions – an approach to a text which placed improvisation and the physical exploration of a scene at the centre of the actor's rehearsal process. This was in some ways a contravention of what was becoming codified in the West (through limited material being available in translation) as the psychological basis of the system. In 1995, Bella Merlin undertook a ten-month course of actor-training at the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, where she worked with acting ‘master’, Albert Filozov, who had trained with Mikhail Kedrov, one of the first developers of Stanislavsky's work following his death in 1938. Here, she examines the roots of Filozov's training and the nature of the Method of Physical Actions in theory and in practice. Bella Merlin trained as an actress in Britain and Russia, and has worked extensively in theatre and television. She is currently a lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, where her area of research is acting processes and the psycho-physical nature of performance. This article is based on a paper delivered at the ‘Flight of the Seagull’ conference at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, in November 1996, to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the premiere of The Seagull.
In Search of Brecht: Notes from Rehearsals of ‘Leben des Galilei’ at the Berliner Ensemble, 1997
Authors: Lyons Robert
Published: January 2009

In the fall of 1997, Robert Lyons assisted at the Berliner Ensemble on the production of Leben des Galilei directed by B. K. Tragelehn, who himself had assisted on Brecht's 1955 production of the play, his last before his death. The following article comprises a series of notes, thoughts, and insights gathered and written by the author during the course of rehearsals, research into the theatre's archives, and following discussions spurred by the centenary celebrations of Brecht's birth. Issues arising include the autobiographical elements within Galilei, the nature of ‘alienated’ acting and the relevance of gestus, the treatment of time in the epic theatre, the parable and the need for context in the epic theatre, the necessity of coming to terms with Brecht for our own times, the potential for using ‘Brecht’ in the American theatre, and the future of the Berliner Ensemble. Robert Lyons, who studied at Wabash College, UCLA, and Humboldt University, is an independent director currently living and working in Berlin.
The Effervescent Carnival: Performance, Context, and Mediation at Notting Hill
Authors: Carver Gavin
Published: January 2009

The Notting Hill Carnival is now Europe's largest street festival, celebrating the music and popular arts of a variety of cultures. Not so long ago, the event – which sometimes culiminated in violence between the police and carnival goers – was widely perceived as both threatening and marginal. But more recently the size, success, and high media profile of the carnival have given it a ‘responsible’ image – and won sponsorship from a variety of commercial concerns. In this article Gavin Carver Explores these developments in the meditation and context of the carnival, and asks whether the sponsorrship has contributed towards the containment of the carnival, transforming a socio/cultural event into mere decorative spectacle. GAvin Carver is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent.
Impersonation in Some African Ritual and Festival Performances
Authors: Ukala Sam
Published: January 2009

Few studies of African ritual and festival performance have been written from a theatrical perspective, and Sam Ukala believes that the richness of such events has yet to be fully explored by African dramatists – while most of the western paratheatrical experiments derived from them have been influenced more by anthroplogical models than aesthetic principles. In pursuit of a dramaturgical approach to the study of African rituals and festivals, he focuses on the role and nature of impersonation in these events, and examines the relationship between the forms, objectives, and contexts of the performances and the kinds of impersonation to be found in them. Distinguishing between the western actor and the African role-player, and between ‘intense impersonation’ and possession, he suggests also some generic parallels between western theatre and African performance. Sam Ukala is a Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Edo State University, Ekpoma, Nigeria. A theatre director and playwright, his published plays include The Slave Wife, The Log in Your Eye, Akpakaland, The Trails of Obiamaka Elema, Break a Boil, and Two Plays: The Placenta of Death and The Last Heroes. In 1998–99 he was resident writer and director at Horse and Bamboo Theatre in the United Kingdom, where, with Bob Frith, he wrote and directed Harvest of Ghosts, a first experiment with wordless visual theatre, an extension of his preoccupation with ‘folkism’, a dramaturgy based on folk compositional and performance aesthetics formulated in his article in NTQ47 (August 1996).
Theatre and Urban Space: the Case of Birmingham Rep
Authors: Cochrane Claire
Published: January 2009

In NTQ61, Deborah Saivetz described the attempts over the past decade of the Italian director Pino DiBuduo to create ‘invisible cities’ – performances intended to restore the relationship between urban spaces and their inhabitants, through exploring the actual and spiritual histories of both. Earlier in the present issue, Baz Kershaw suggests some broader analogies between the theatre and its macrocosmic environment. Here, Claire Cochrane, who teaches at University College, Worcester, narrows the focus to a particular British city and the role over time of a specific theatre in relation to its urban setting. Her subject is the history and development of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in relation to the city – of which its founder, Barry Jackson, was a lifelong resident – as an outcome of the city's growth in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, which made it distinctive in terms of its manufactures, the workers and entrepreneurs who produced them, and a civic consciousness that was disputed yet also shared. She traces, too, the transition between old and new theatre buildings and spaces which continued to reflect shifting class and cultural relationships as the city, its politicians, and its planners adapted to the second half of the twentieth century.
Form as Weapon: the Political Function of Song in Urban Zimbabwean Theatre
Authors: Rohmer Martin
Published: January 2009

In Zimbabwean society, what may not be spoken sometimes becomes acceptable in song – whether to avoid social taboos and enable a wife to complain against her mother-in-law, or in broadening the boundaries of political protest. In this article, Martin Rohmer looks back to the ways in which song enabled forms of protest against forced labour and other aspects of colonial rule – in times of outward compliance as well as of direct struggle – and considers how urban theatre groups in independent Zimbabwe have adapted the tradition to their own, contemporary ends. Martin Rohmer spent almost two years studying Zimbabwean theatre when a research assistant at the University of Bayreuth, and completed his doctorate onTheatre and Performance in Zimbabweat the Humboldt University, Berlin, in 1997. Since then he has been working in the field of cultural management for the Young Artists' Festival in Bayreuth. The present paper was first presented at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in San Francisco in November 1996.
Aphrodite Speaks: on the Recent Performance Art of Carolee Schneemann
Authors: Schneemann Carolee
Published: January 2009

The work of Carolee Schneemann, who celebrated her sixtieth birthday last year, has from the first challenged suppressive sexual and other taboos, and placed her own body as an artist into a fluent relationship with her art. She both pioneered and in her new work continues to energize forms of what we now call performance art. The retrospective of her works from 1963 to 1996, recently seen at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, affirmed her recognition as a major artist – yet threatened also to ‘fix’ her art, which remains very much ‘in progress’. The exhibition included the installation Mortal Coils (1993–94), in which a slide projection system is combined with motorized ropes, flour, and sand to explore taboos of death and loss; Up to and Including Her Limits (1979), a video installation depicting the actions which produced surrounding wall drawings; and Video Rocks (1989), in which a hundred hand-sculptured rocks merge into a wall of seven monitors on which feet walk back and forth over virtual rocks. Vulva's Morphia (1995), a colour grid of photographs with text and motorized components, was exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in 1995, and her multi-media installation Known/Unknown – Plague Column (1996), was seen in New York and Montreal in 1996. Schneemann's published books include Parts of a Body: House Book (1972); Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter (1976); ABC: We Print Anything – in the Cards (1977); Video Burn (1992); and More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1997). Her Body Politics: Notes and Essays of Carolee Schneemann is forthcoming from MIT Press, and a selection of her letters from Johns Hopkins University Press. Alison Oddey, Professor of Drama at Loughborough University, interviewed Carolee Schneemann on 29 August 1997 in her Manhattan loft in New York, and what follows is an edited version of that interview, which focuses on her more recent performative work.
‘My Future Plan? To Die’: Grotowski's Last Visit to Wrocław
Authors: Ostrowska Joanna
Published: January 2009

After fifteen years absence, Jerzy Grotowski returned to Wroclaw on 6 March 1997, for the presentation of an award for his contribution to Polish Culture made by the Cultural Foundation's chairman, Stefan Starczewski. Grotowski was accompanied by his protégé and collaborator, Thomas Richards, and went to great lengths to establish Richards's equal and often major contribution to the laboratory work at Pontedera in Italy, which they had been jointly leading since 1986. This work has eschewed publicity, has never sought an audience, and has only been witnessed by chosen groups of sympathetic experts, who have been felt necessary at times for its validation. Initiated and sustained because of the reputation which had accrued to Grotowski during the various phases of his earlier career, the danger was that it might cease to attract support on the demise of its principal validator – which, as one of Grotowski's replies at the Wroclaw meeting anticipated, sadly occurred last year. By acknowledging the functional and artistic importance of Thomas Richards, Grotowski here establishes the argument for his work – described in detail in Richards's own At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions (Routledge, 1995) – to be continued, as the status of the old master passes to the new. Joanna Ostrowska, who is currently working at the Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, here offers her own impressions of the Wroclaw meeting.
Burmese Nights: the Pagoda Festival Pwe in the Age of Hollywood's ‘Titanic’
Authors: Diamond Catherine
Published: January 2009

The Burmese zat pwe, an exuberant variety show involving almost every kind of performing art, has fascinated foreign visitors to Myanmar for the past hundred years. It continues today as a vibrant amalgam of singing, dancing, acting, and comic improvisation, still performed annually at pagoda festivals. As Burmese scholars have noted, the Burmese performer is primarily a singer and dancer rather than a dramatic actor, and therefore tends to use plays as frameworks for demonstrating virtuosity in these areas. This is reinforced by the training given at the two State Schools of Music and Dance, and while the Drama Department at the University of Culture does acquaint students with dramatic acting, the emphasis remains on music and dance. Moreover, the scripted drama, especially the classical drama, which reached a peak in the mid-nineteenth century, is increasingly omitted from the pwe programme, having gradually been displaced by the pop music that is considered necessary to attract young audiences. Despite such changes, which alarm traditionalists, the pwe performance has shown a resilient flexibility to adapt to audience preferences and remains a lively highlight at the festivals. Catherine Diamond – who has previously written for NTQ on Vietnamese and Turkish theatre, and on oriental approaches to classical tragedy – is a dancer and drama professor who is currently directing for the Thalie Theatre, the only English-language theatre in Taiwan.
Mamet's Heresy and Common Sense: what's True and False in ‘True and False’
Authors: Merlin Bella
Published: January 2009

David Mamet's book, True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (Faber, 1998), is rapidly becoming recommended reading amongst the acting fraternity. In this article Bella Merlin offers a critical dissection of Mamet's approach, drawing on the working knowledge of Stanislavsky's Method of Physical Actions, or Active Analysis, which she acquired at the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. She underlines the fragility of Mamet's dismissal of Stanislavsky, and illustrates how much of his ‘common sense’ actually derives from the principles underlying the Method of Physical Actions. Bella Merlin is an actor and lectures in Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University.
Boal and the Shifting Sands: the Un-Political Master Swimmer
Authors: Davis David , O'Sullivan Carmel
Published: January 2009

Augusto Boal is one of the best-known contemporary practitioners and teachers in the use of drama as a means of challenging the status quo. Starting as a self-proclaimed revolutionary, challenging the artistic theories of Aristotle and seeking to supersede those of Brecht, he developed his ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ working with the poor of Brazil. Now he is perhaps best known for his work in ‘Forum Theatre’ and ‘Image Theatre’. In this article, David Davis and Carmel O'Sullivan argue that not only have Boal's methods been far from revolutionary for many years, but that they are now focused on individual needs, enabling the individual to survive a little longer within an oppressive social structure. They propose that this is not a case of Marxist revolutionary ideology becoming diluted over time, but that the roots of the change are to be found in a lack of grounding in Marxist theory and philosophy from the beginning. David Davis is Director of the International Centre for Studies in Drama in Education and Professor of Drama in Education at the University of Central England, teaching on the MA programme as well as supervising PhD research. He has presented workshops in many parts of the world, and published widely. Carmel O'Sullivan lectures in the Education Department at Trinity College, Dublin, and is currently completing her doctoral thesis critiquing the theory and practice of Boal at the University of Central England.
Ravishing Strides: Signs of the Peripatetic in Early Modern Performance
Authors: Roberts David
Published: January 2009

Actors' feet are accepted as part of their expressive equipment – but doubts are often expressed that this has always been so. The evidence of early English theatre history is adduced to suggest otherwise, while recent treatments of the peripatetic in literary studies argue that the ‘visible walk’ attains prominence only in the Romantic period. But David Roberts argues that, from the emergence of permanent theatres, walking offered a metonymy for performance which persisted throughout the seventeenth century. Cross-dressing highlighted the expressive potential of the feet, while close examination of play-texts implies evolving styles of the peripatetic in performance, and the scenic theatres of the Restoration frequently portrayed walking as a cultural activity bound up with the status of both actors and scenery in post-revolutionary London. David Roberts teaches English and Drama at University College Worcester, and has published widely on theatre and literature from 1550 to 1789. He leads an AHRB-funded project on theatre criticism.
Voices for Reform in South Asian Theatre
Authors: Brown John Russell
Published: January 2009

The classical theatres of southern Asia are variously treated with the reverence thought due to sacrosanct and immutable forms – or as rich sources for plunder by western theatre-makers in search of intra-cultural building-blocks. The rights and wrongs of this latter approach have been much debated, not least in the pages of NTQ; less so the intrinsic desirability of leaving well alone. At the symposium on Classical Sanskrit Theatre, hosted in Dhaka by the Centre for Asian Theatre in December 1999, an unexpected consensus sought ways in which classical theatre forms might best meet contemporary needs, not only by drawing upon their unique qualities – but also by respecting the injunction in the Natyasastra that the actor must combine discipline with a readiness for improvisation. John Russell Brown here supports the conclusions of the symposium that the qualities of Asian theatre which differentiate it from western forms – of a quest for transformation rather than representation, a concern with emotional truth rather than ideological ‘meaning’ – can best be pursued by such an approach, restoring to the theatre ‘its enabling and necessary role in society’. John Russell Brown was the first professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, and subsequently Associate Director at the National Theatre in London. More recently he has taught and directed in the USA, New Zealand, and Asia, and is now Visiting Professor of Performing Arts at Middlesex University. The most recent of his numerous books is New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience and Asia (Routledge, 1999).
The Impossible Birth of a Jewish Theatre
Authors: Shoef Corina
Published: January 2009

Accurately tracing the process leading to the creation of a theatre within most western societies is an endeavour usually fraught with hazards, since so much needful information has been lost or remains conjectural. But the Jewish theatre arrived far later than most, due to a combination of the prohibitions against theatricality in Jewish laws and the problems of preserving a performative tradition during the long period of the Diaspora. The eventual emergence of a Jewish theatre little over a century ago thus offers a unique opportunity not only to investigate the subsequent development of that specific theatre, but also potentially to illuminate questions concerning the social, economic, and demographic variants which determine the cultural distinctiveness of other national theatres. The author, Corina Shoef, is a researcher based in Tel-Aviv who has already published several articles on related themes, and is currently working on a project to create a research database of the Jewish and Hebrew theatre.
Dario Fo, the Commune, and the Battle for the Palazzina Liberty
Authors: Behan Tom
Published: January 2009

In 1974 Dario Fo and ‘The Commune’ theatre collective were forced to engaged in a political battle to secure control of the ‘Palazzina Liberty’, a nondescript building once a market canteen, set in the middle of a park in a south-eastern suburb of Milan. Here, Tom Behan describes how mass support, derived from a revolutionary ideology, secured The Commune's control over the building for several years. The relationship between this political movement and the political content of the shows performed at the Palazzina is then discussed with reference to Can't Pay? Won't Pay!, Fanfani Kidnapped, and Mum's Marijuana is the Best. Tom Behan, is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Kent at Canterbury. His article began life as part of the research for his Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theatre (Pluto Press, 2000), and forms a companion piece to ‘The Megaphone of the Movement: Dario Fo and the Working Class, 1968–79’, published in The Journal of European Studies, XXX (September 2000).
Dramaturgy According to Daedalus: the Odin Teatret Production of ‘Mythos’
Authors: Varley Julia
Published: January 2009

This is not only the story of an actor whose character began as Clytemnestra and became Daedalus, but of how the slow and arduous discovery of that character helped to form and transform the Odin Teatret production of Mythos – a collage of characters and places, their relationships rooted not in cause and effect but in action and reaction – and of how that production itself emerged by following both actual and metaphysical threads through the Cretan labyrinth. The search takes the form of a funeral wake which is interrupted by the arrival of Oedipus, Cassandra, Daedalus, Odysseus, Medea, Orpheus, and Sisyphus, who introduce the last revolutionary of the twentieth century to the immortality of myth. The author, Julia Varley, who herself took the role of Daedalus, has been with Odin Teatret since 1976. The production of Mythos, based on poems by Henrik Norbrandt and directed by Eugenio Barba, is at present on tour, and expected to be presented at the Salisbury Festival in June 2001.
The Alternative Theatre in Poland since 1989
Authors: Gołaczyńska Magdalena
Published: January 2009

The theatre of Eastern Europe has not always benefited as fully as might have been expected from the supposed freedoms which followed the collapse of Communism. State support for institutional theatre has been drastically reduced, while the ‘alternative’ theatre, though no longer constrained by a formal censorship, has had seriously to consider what it is now alternative to. Magdalena Gołaczyńska takes 1989 as starting point for a survey both of the framework within which alternative theatre now works, and of the three main strands that have emerged in the closing decade of the twentieth century – of companies continuing to produce socially critical work, of groups exploring experience at a more personal and existential level, and of ‘collective creators’ whose concerns are rather with pushing the boundaries of performance itself. Magdalena Gołaczyńska teaches at the University of Wroclaw and the State Academy of Drama in Cracow, and is author of a doctoral study of contemporary alternative theatre.
Puppetry and Pataphysics: Populism and the Ubu Cycle
Authors: Jannarone Kimberly
Published: January 2009

Many partisans of Alfred Jarry's work have discovered Ubu roi and the ‘science’ of pataphysics via a study of the Parisian avant-garde, and the play has been discussed for a hundred years in this context. Kimberly Jannarone also assesses Jarry in the context of the world of rural puppetry – for, like many other avant-garde artists at the fin de siècle, Jarry came to Paris from a small town, and brought with him such formative experiences as the makeshift puppet shows he saw as a child. Bringing the rural puppet into focus in a discussion of the Ubu cycle, Kimberly Jannarone exposes Père Ubu's identity as a class hybrid, whose maddening and elusive nature stems from the fusion of popular and elite forms. Further, she reveals that Jarry's use of puppet forms is radically different from that of the Symbolists, who conceived puppets as theoretical figures within a fully formed aesthetic doctrine. By contrast, Jarry used puppets for their very incompleteness – their makeshift nature making them ideal catalysts for the audience's imaginations. She sees Pataphysics as a model of the avant-garde itself: a system that focuses less on products than on effects. Kimberly Jannarone has taught at the University of Washington School of Drama, and is about to take up an appointment as Assistant Professor of Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her MFA and DFA from the Yale School of Drama, where her dissertation examined the historical avant-garde through the works of Jarry and Antonin Artaud.
‘Wistful Remembrancer’: the Historiographical Problem of Macqueen-Popery
Authors: Davis Jim , Emeljanow Victor
Published: January 2009

The theatre shelves of secondhand bookshops testify to the sometime popularity and prolific output of the theatre publicist and would-be historian Walter Macqueen-Pope. Yet even by the time Macqueen-Pope was publishing his later volumes in the 1950s, the rise of academic theatre scholarship was questioning such anecdotally based and unverified accounts of the theatre and its past. Today, we can look at Macqueen-Pope, and at the period immediately before the First World War which was so often the focus of his attention, not so much for evidence of flawed scholarship as for his revealing attitude towards his subject and its social context. For anecdotage and nostalgia have inevitably to be taken into account in any historical approach to so ephemeral an art as the theatre, and, as the authors here conclude, while Macqueen-Pope may not tell us the whole truth about his many subjects, such a ‘wistful remembrancer’ remains significant to any investigation of a theatrical past ‘that must always be a melting pot of imperfect recognitions and unattainable desires’. Jim Davis is Associate Professor of Theatre and Head of the School of Theatre, Film and Dance at the University of New South Wales. victor Emelijanow is Professor of Drama and Head of the Department of Drama at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. Both have written extensively on nineteenth-century British theatre and are the joint authors of Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880, which has just been published by the University of lowa Press.