bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Unsolicited Playscript…and Its Almost Inevitable Return
Authors: Eccles Christine
Published: January 2009

If the playwright is the most written about of all theatre practitioners, he or she is also, financially, the least underwritten. Despite the emergence of a Theatre Writers' Union during the 'seventies, the path for the novice writer into the profession remains as uncertain as ever, and security is tenuous even for the established dramatist. Christine Eccles has worked in the theatre both as a director and as a member of that elusive species, the playreader, and is currently reviewing for Time Out and Plays International. Here, she looks at the various ways in which a script may – or, more probably, may not – reach the stage, and at the few sources of financial support for the aspiring playwright. NTQ will be looking in depth at each of the major areas here outlined in future issues.
Theatre of Liberation in Action: the People's Theatre Network of the Philippines
Authors: van Erven Eugène
Published: January 2009

Our inclusion in NTQ5 of a piece by the priest-playwright Karl Gaspar, recording his experiences of creating drama in a Philippine prison-camp, coincided with the overthrow of the Marcos regime – a revolution in whose preparation and support. Eugène van Erven now argues, the theatre played a significant part. In the following article, he describes the organization and work of the Philippine Educational Theatre Association – PETA for short – from its creation in the early 'seventies, to the fully-established network of companies and activities of the present day, and discusses its future role in a society not yet certain of the success of its revolution. Eugène van Erven is currently involved in a long-term project researching liberation theatre in the Third World, funded at present by his postdoctoral research fellowship in the Drama Studies Programme of the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His earlier publications have been in the field of contemporary western European political theatre, on which subject he was awarded his doctorate from Vanderbilt University. Tennessee.
Harrison, Herakles, and Wailing Women: ‘Labourers’ at Delphi
Authors: Rutter Carol Chillington
Published: January 2009

As well as being a widely published poet, Tony Harrison is well known as a dramatist for his reworkings of classical materials, from ancient Greek to medieval. When he was invited to contribute a play for the eighth International Meeting on Ancient Greek Drama, on the theme of ‘Crossing Millennia’, to be held at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi in August 1995, he chose to present a version of The Labourers of Herakles set on a building site – a building site the Greek sponsors specially ‘constructed’ for the event. In describing the single performance of the play, Carol Chillington Rutter, who teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, vividly evokes the theatrical forcefulness of the occasion: but she questions what she considers the ambivalence of Harrison's theatre work in its presentation and treatment of women – of which the decision to visualize the chorus of women in Labourers as cement mixers was most strikingly emblematic.
Theatre after the Dictatorships: Developments in Chile and Argentina
Authors: Watson Ian , Epstein Susana
Published: January 2009

Ian Watson and Susana Epstein went to Chile and Argentina in the summer of 1992 in order to interview several leading theatre artists about the differences the political changes in their countries had made to their own work and the work of their colleagues. Although, as the authors stress, they made no attempt to conduct a systematic study of the theatrical implications of the shift from authoritarianism to democracy, their findings suggest some parallels with the situation in Eastern Europe. Ian Watson, who heads the Theatre Division in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Rutgers University, Newark, is a theatre scholar whose main interests include contemporary Latin American theatre. Susana Epstein, an expatriate Argentine, is a Contributing Editor of The Drama Review.
Questioning the Canon in a Multicultural Classroom
Authors: Babb Valerie , Cima Gay Gibson
Published: January 2009

This second paper contributed to the ATHE Conference in Atlanta takes the form of a dialogue between its authors, who argue for the use of African American scripts in a multicultural classroomnot as the usual tokenist leavening of a ‘traditional’ dramatic canon but as one way of questioning and redefining the concept of the canon itself, thus encouraging a positive awareness of cultural identities within one's society. Ways in which non-traditional casting methods can reinforce this process are also explored and illustrated, as means of moving from acting in the classroom to action in building a truly multicultural community.
Chekhov, Shakespeare, the Ensemble and the Company
Authors: Hall Peter
Published: January 2009

The visit to Britain in the spring of 1994 by the St Petersburg Maly Drama Theatre – described by Peter Brook as ‘the finest theatre ensemble in Europe’ – was warmly received by audiences and critics alike. Yet in Britain the idea of this kind of ‘permanent’ theatre company, so dear to earlier generations of actors and directors, seems not to have survived the climate of the 'eighties, and there is a sense that such remaining permanent companies as the Moscow Art Theatre and the Berliner Ensemble are dinosaurs from a more collectivist past. In an interview with Izvestiya, however, the Maly company's director, Lev Dodin, castigated western theatre for being ‘just a branch of the economy’ and having no permanent companies on what he called ‘the Russian model’. What is the truth about ensembles and permanent companies? In 1991, as part of research for an essay on Chekhov and the ‘company problem’ in British theatre, Patrick Miles interviewed Peter Hall on the subject of ensembles and companies. Peter Hall founded the Royal Shakespeare Company as a permanent ensemble in 1960, directed the National Theatre for fifteen years – but not as a permanent theatre company – and since 1988 has been running his own, impermanent company in the theatrical market-place. At the time of the interview, here edited for publication, Peter Hall was rehearsing Twelfth Night at the Playhouse Theatre, London. Patrick Miles's essay ‘Chekhov and the Company Problem in the British Theatre’ was included in Chekhov on the British Stage (Cambridge, 1993).
The Company You Keep: Subversive Thoughts on the Impact of the Playwright and the Performer
Authors: Hauptfleisch Temple
Published: January 2009

This article explores the much-debated question of the political impact or potential of theatre from a new angle. Accepting frankly the limitations of a medium which seldom reaches more than four per cent of the population, Temple Hauptfleisch looks instead at the contingent ways in which influence works – creating ‘images’ of authors, performers, venues, companies, and even of specific occasions which work upon audiences and non-audiences alike. The ideas explored in this article were first proposed in a paper read at a colloquium on ‘The Semiotics of Political Transition’, held at the Port Elizabeth Campus of Vista University in August, 1992: although most of the author's examples are thus from the theatre world of South Africa, the major thrust of his argument holds equally well for any contemporary westernized, media-dominated society. Temple Hauptfleisch is Associate Professor of Drama and Head of Theatre Research at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He is co-editor of the South African Theatre Journal and has published widely on the history and theory of South African theatre.
Leaking Bodies and Fractured Texts: Representing the Female Body at the Omaha Magic Theatre
Authors: Carlson Susan
Published: January 2009

The contemporary staging of Women's bodies raises both practical and theoretical issues, and in both text-based theatre and performance art women theatre artists are currently engaging these challenges in inventive ways. Drawing upon the inland expanses and ontological freedoms of the American Midwest, the women at the Omaha Magic Theatre have recently premiered two collaboratively written plays, Body Leaks and Sound Fields, which use image, action, technology, and text to engage issues of gender, identity, sexuality, and the material body. In these issues, the spectator is prohibited from making direct relations between body and self, and must instead come to terms with a web of relationships which include the self, the physical body, the community, and the environment. Susan Carlson, a professor of English at lowa State University, has written two books on theatrical comedy, most recently Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition (1991). She is currently working on the contemporary performance of Aphra Behn's plays, and is writing a book on the connections between productions of Shakespeare at the turn of the twentieth century and early suffrage theatre.
Naturalism, Poetic Realism, Spectacle: Wesker's ‘The Kitchen’ in Performance
Authors: Lacey Stephen
Published: January 2009

When Stephen Daldry took over the artistic directorship of the Royal Court in 1994, the first play he chose to direct was a revival of one of the great successes of the theatre's early occupancy by the English Stage Company, Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen. In the following article, Stephen Lacey sees this as in part a defining statement of Daldry's own relationship to the theatre and its traditions, and he offers a detailed comparison between Daldry's production and John Dexter's original in 1959, as revived in 1961. Exploring in particular the directors' – and the designers' – differing perceptions of the elements of naturalism and theatricality which co-exist in the play, he also contrasts Dexter's end-on use of the Court's picture-frame stage with Daidry's reconstruction of the theatre to provide an in-the-round ambience. This, he suggests, is emblematic of a new relationship not only between the play and its audience, but of changed perceptions between the 'fifties and the 'nineties concerning the nature and potential of social realism in the theatre.
Comedy in the Holocaust: the Theresienstadt Cabaret
Authors: Kift Roy
Published: January 2009

The concentration camp in Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic was unique, in that it was used by the Nazis as a ‘flagship’ ghetto to deceive the world about the real fate of the Jews. It contained an extraordinarily high proportion of VIPs – so-called Prominenten, well-known international personalities from the worlds of academia, medicine, politics, and the military, as well as leading composers, musicians, opera singers, actors, and cabarettists, most of whom were eventually murdered in Auschwitz. The author, Roy Kift, who first presented this paper at a conference on ‘The Shoah and Performance’ at the University of Glasgow in September 1995, is a free-lance dramatist who has been living in Germany since 1981, where he has written award-winning plays for stage and radio, and a prizewinning opera libretto, as well as directing for stage, television, and radio. His new stage play, Camp Comedy, set in Theresienstadt, was inspired by this paper, and includes original cabaret material: it centres on the nightmare dilemma encountered by Kurt Gerron in making the Nazi propaganda film, The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a Town. Roy Kift has contributed regular reports on contemporary German theatre to a number of magazines, including NTQ. His article on the GRIPS Theater in Berlin appeared in TQ39 (1981) and an article on Peter Zadek in NTQ4 (1985).
Emma Lyon, the Attitude, and Goethean Performance Theory
Authors: Schachenmayr Volker
Published: January 2009

The origins of thetableau vivantcan be traced back at least to thepantomimusof ancient Rome, but the form achieved its peak of modern popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whenposes plastiquessometimes struck an ambiguous balance between art and pornography. In the following article, Volker Schachenmayr calls for a re-evaluation of the form, investigating how far and in what ways a static pose, orattitude, can be a theatrical performance. His article focuses on theattitudesof Emma Lyon, later and more familiarly known as wife to Sir William Hamilton and mistress to Nelson. Drawing on connections with Sir William's archaeological pursuits, and with the performance theory of Goethe, an admirer of Emma's attitudes, he suggests a vocabulary to make thetableauaccessible to performance critics, using Goethe'sItalienische Reiseand Poussin'sInspiration of the Epic Poettoto shape the discussion. Volker Schachenmayr received his PhD in Drama from Stanford University, and this article is part of a larger research project on Winckelmann, the Grand Tour, and stage performance in the age of Goethe.
Theatre and the Eritrean Struggle for Freedom: the Cultural Troupes of the People's Liberation Front
Authors: Warwick Paul
Published: January 2009

The thirty-year Eritrean struggle for independence – during which a small and poorly-armed guerrilla force eventually triumphed over a highly-equipped enemy, supported by foreign powers – is also the story of a social revolution in which the theatre played its part. The Eritrean People's Liberation Front not only employed theatre as a propaganda weapon, but also recognized its value as an agent for educating its people – concerning education and women's rights, and on the benefits of modern medicine and farming methods – and with victory came measures to stimulate the growth and development of theatre as part of Eritrean culture. Following Jane Plastow's contextual history of Eritrean theatre in our previous issue, Paul Warwick here makes the first attempt to reconstruct its undocumented role in the independence struggle, and the efforts of the rebels to create theatre for the first time in a rural context. A graduate of the Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds, Paul Warwick made this the subject of his research when he visited Eritrea in the summer of 1995 as part of the Eritrea Community Based Theatre Project. Since his return he has collaborated on a translation of The Other War by Alemseged Tesfai, written during the independence struggle, and given a reading at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in December 1996: this is due for publication later this year in an anthology of African drama from Methuen. Paul Warwick is currently Artistic Director of the Unlimited Theatre Company based in Leeds.
‘High-Engender'd Battles’: Gender and Power in ‘Queen Lear’
Authors: Dobson Teresa
Published: January 2009

As a companion piece to the foregoing study of Ophelia and /, Hamlet, there follows a full appraisal of a project discussed in the previous issue (NTQ53) as part of our feature on the Open University/BBC experiments in ‘multimedia Shakespeare’. For King Lear: Text and Performance – one of the pilot CD-ROMS which were the end-products of the experiment – three teams of performers were commissioned, in collaboration with the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, to create over a two-day period their own variations on the Heath Scene in Lear. The most innovative of these, in Teresa Dobson's judgement, was conceived and directed by the Canadian performance artist and writer Beau Coleman, who envisioned a female Lear – a woman who, having found success in a male-dominated world, comes to confront the nature of that power in the process of relinquishing it. Teresa Dobson, who teaches in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, witnessed and here records the development of the project, also assessing how far it succeeded in its intention to ‘raise questions about the gender and power relations in King Lear, as well as questions about what happens when Lear himself is cast against gender’.
Cause and Effect in Cross-Media Fertilization: the Impact of Historicity
Authors: Militz Klaus Ulrich
Published: January 2009

It is the modernist wisdom that each art or medium should be defined in its own terms, so as to delimit it from other arts or media, while also arriving at certain conclusions as to the ‘message’ of the medium in question and its preferred subject-matters. This tradition has often been criticized for an inherent essentialism, and a less prescriptive approach is proposed in the following article – which, while taking the interaction between the different arts and media into account, also attempts to understand this in its historical perspective. The author, Klaus Ulrich Militz, concentrates mainly on the interrelations between the audio-visual performing arts of theatre, cinema, and television, and refers in particular to a number of artistic approaches to theatre which appear to be based on media interplay as a major source of aesthetic innovation. He also includes some crucial statements by theatre artists, suggesting different ways in which they came to locate their aesthetic positions. Klaus Ulrich Militz is a member of the media research group at the University of Edinburgh, and is currently completing his doctoral thesis on the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Multimedia Possibilities for Live and Lesbian Performance
Authors: Goulden Jan
Published: January 2009

Our sequence of features on the use of the new technology in the creation as well as the re-creation of live performance continues with a consideration of the implications of interactive CD-ROM – with special reference to its potential for liberating multimedia lesbian representation, and for other kinds of live performance which designedly subvert the norm. This article was sparked by Lois Weaver's solo performance of her own Faith and Dancing, which the author, Jan Goulden, saw at Jackson's Lane Theatre, London, on 9 August 1996: and extracts from Goulden's subsequent interview with Weaver intersperse her analysis of the nature and potential of multimedia in performance. Jan Goulden is a writer and teacher who lives in Wales and has taught with the Workers' Educational Association. She is currently writing a postgraduate thesis on ‘Myth and Variation: Lesbian Representation in American Fiction and Film’ with the Open University. Performing under the name Split Britches, Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw and Deborah Margolin have for the past fifteen years been at the vanguard of lesbian feminist theatre both in the US and in Britain. Their work, which addresses radical issues through its exploration of gender roles and desire in performance, is highly regarded in both theatrical and academic circles.
Darkening Clouds over Istanbul: Turkish Theatre in a Changing Climate
Authors: Diamond Catherine
Published: January 2009

Modern Turkish theatre, benefiting from the support of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, has had a secular bent throughout its history. However, after the elections of 1994 and 1995, when Refah (Welfare) Party candidates espousing a distinctly religious agenda swept into power, dramatists have found themselves in an uneasy position, caught between corrupt secular politicians and a censorship-inclined military on the one hand, and Islamists hostile to theatre both in principle and as an unnecessary luxury on the other. Besides swiftly changing demographics and competition from alternative entertainments, shifts in political policy in Istanbul are eroding the city's strong theatre tradition. Yet the theatre of this nation which straddles Europe and Asia maintains an impressive vitality and variety, with state and municipal companies mounting regular seasons of foreign and Turkish works, and experimental troupes challenging established theatre forms as well as daring to broach some of the sensitive ideological conflicts in Istanbul. Catherine Diamond, a dancer and drama professor in Taiwan, is author of Sringara Tales, a collection of short stories about dancers in South-East Asia and the Middle East.
Feldenkrais Revisited: Tension, Talent, and the Legacy of Childhood
Authors: Rotté Joanna
Published: January 2009

Moshe Feldenkrais developed his influential philosophy and physiology of movement from a background in engineering, and a concern to remedy a knee injury sustained in a game of soccer. Though he scorned psychoanalytical approaches to the remedying of poor or painful postures, he had great faith in the capacity of the body, through the brain, for self-correction and self-healing. Joanna Rotté met Feldenkrais shortly before his death in 1985, in his eightieth year, and talked to him during a nine-week course he was leading in his own methodology. Joanna Rotté now teaches Script Analysis and Voice and Movement at Villanova University, outside Philadelphia. Her travel memoir Scene Change, a theatre diary from Prague, Moscow, and Leningrad, was published by Limelight in 1994, and her performance piece, Death of the Father, was produced in the spring of 1998 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.
Restaging ‘Theory’ in the Postgraduate Performance Studies Workshop
Authors: Melrose Susan
Published: January 2009

Postgraduate programmes in performance studies are playing an increasingly important role within drama departments in the British university sector, and require that both staff and students confront with greater rigour than at undergraduate level the relationship between theory and practice – more precisely, how that theoretical relationship should and can be related to practical aspects of the programme. Taking her own cue from bedside-reading ranging from Foucault to the latest titles from Routledge to the influential article on ‘Geographies of Learning’ contributed to Theatre Journal in 1993 by Jill Dolan, Susan Melrose here debates the dilemma, and in particular the problems posed to actors by challenging their approach to their work at precisely the moments when they may most need to fall back on old strategies and securities. Susan Melrose recently took up the post of Head of Graduate Studies and Research Development at Rose Bruford College, London. She presented an earlier draft of this article at the SCUDD Conference at the University of Glasgow in March 1998, which was concerned with issues relating to the teaching of theatre and drama studies in the university.
Space, Genre, and Methodology in Max Stafford-Clark's Touring Production of Chekhov's ‘Three Sisters’
Authors: Vickers Sylvia
Published: January 2009

It is received theatrical wisdom – indeed, a self-evident truth – that performances of a particular production differ not only night by night, depending on the chemistry between actors and audience, but in the case of touring productions, in response to the changing relationship between the driector's approach and the venue for which it must be freshly adapted. Yet studies of the theoretical or practical effects of such differences are rare – and can rarely draw on such a range of performing venues as those in which the Out of Joint company presented Max Stafford-Clark's production of Chekhov's Three Sisters in 1995. Originally staged at the ornate, tradition-steeped Bristol Old Vic, the production was taken on tour to modernist, hangar-like auditoria in India, and presented in the unusual yet apt ‘found’ environment of an English country house, before reaching its final home at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, with its renovated Victorian interior surrounded by a modernist shell. Exploring the terminology used by lain Mackintosh in his Architecture, Actor, and Audience, Sylvia Vickers compares and contrasts the conception, realization, and reception of the production in these varying venues. Sylvia Vickers worked as an actress in a wide range of theatre before co-founding and creating the Brighton Actors' Workshop and Studio Twelve in the 'seventies. She then took a first in English at Sussex, and now teaches in the Drama Department at Roehampton Institute while continuing her work as a director, most recently for the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond.
Female Jewish Comedians: Grotesque Mimesis and Transgressing Stereotypes
Authors: Mock Roberta
Published: January 2009

Female Jewish stereotypes such as the ‘Jewish Mother’, the ‘Jewish American Princess’, and the ‘Radical Bitch’ are often closely associated with sexuality. Roberta Mock proceeds from Riv-Ellen Prell's premise that these stereotypes are a projection of male Jewish fears of a changing secular society which yet must sustain religious continuity. She links a discussion of theoretical transgression of women's social roles to the physicalization of this transgression by female Jewish comedians who embody an explicit rebellion against function. Through the comic mimesis of established stereotypes, often combining more than one in a single characterization, female Jewish comedians typify themselves (to excess) from another's point of view, transforming themselves from the object of a gaze to subjects who redirect its focus. The appeal of these comedians moves away from a localized female (perhaps Jewish) audience to a more inclusive acceptance by applying Bakhtin's theories of ‘the grotesque body’, creating a subversion which embodies the ‘normal’ by being ‘abnormal’. The Jewish woman comedian is placed in the difficult position of being estranged from the community which ‘created’ her by being associated with the dominant culture, while being tolerated but not accepted as ‘one of them’ by that dominant culture. Roberta Mock teaches Theatre and Performance at the University of Plymouth. She is a co-founder of Lusty Juventus theatre company, and is currently editing a book entitled Performing Processes, which explores the relationship between the process of creating performance and spectator response.
Moving in the Cityscape: Performance and the Embodied Experience of theFlâneur
Authors: Kuppers Petra
Published: January 2009

Walter Benjamin's concept of theflâneurhas been widely used to conventionalize ‘the disinterested voyeur, the lonely figure haunting the streets of cities, the person who watches the spectacle of modern life’. Petra Kuppers argues that theflâneuris as central to the ‘nineties cityscape as to that of Baudelaire's Paris, of which Benjamin was writing, or to his own inter-war Berlin. She responds to feminist and other objections and, while recognizing the validity of later writings on the nature of the body such as Foucault's, argues that theflâneurremains valuable in counterbalancing ‘aspects of contemporary theory that use the human body as metaphor’ with the physicality of ‘a lived set of material practices and inscribed discourses’. To illustrate and develop her argument she uses moments from Kathryn Bigelow's filmStrange Days(1996), performances by the Austrian group Bilderwerfer and by Francesca Vilalta-Ollé, and the camera-dance made for TV,Pace(1996). Petra Kuppers is Research Fellow in Performing Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Landscapes of Fact and Fiction: Asian Theatre Arts in Britain
Authors: King Barnaby
Published: January 2009

In the first of two essays which use academic discourses of cultural exchange to examine the intra-cultural situation in contemporary British society, Barnaby King analyzes the relationship between Black arts and mainstream arts on both a professional and community level, focusing on particular examples of practice in the Leeds and Kirklees region in which he lives and works. This first essay looks specifically at the Asian situation, reviewing the history of Arts Council policy on ethnic minority arts, and analyzing how this has shaped – and is reflected in – current practice. In the context of professional theatre, he uses the examples of the Tara and Tamasha companies, then explores the work of CHOL Theatre in Huddersfield as exemplifying multi-cultural work in the community. He also looks at the provision made by Yorkshire and Humberside Arts for the cultural needs of their Asian populations. In the second essay, to appear in NTQ62, he will be taking a similar approach towards African-Caribbean theatre in Britain. Barnaby King is a theatre practitioner based in Leeds, who completed his postgraduate studies at the University of Leeds Workshop Theatre in 1998. He is now working with theatre companies and small-scale venues – currently the Blah Blah Blah company and the Studio Theatre at Leeds Metropolitan University – to develop community participation in theatre and drama-based activities.
‘Every Light Form Has a Shadow’: Acting in ‘Invisible Cities’
Authors: Saivetz Deborah
Published: January 2009

In the foregoing article Deborah Saivetz described the background to the creation of Pino DiBuduo's Invisible Cities on the Newark, New Jersey, campus of Rutgers University in October 1998, and the development, limitations and strengths of that production. Its ‘audience’ – for the most part members of the university community and attendees at the concurrently scheduted ‘Arts Transforming the Urban Environment’ conference – were impressed by DiBuduo's artistic vision and the conviction of the actors, though a few expressed disappointment that, despite the project's urban setting and conference tie-in, Invisible Cities seemed to have little to do with the historically and culturally rich city of Newark itself. Most, however, were fascinated by, and perhaps even grateful to, the visiting Italian director who, with his band of student artists, transformed an ordinary campus building into an at times baffling, frequently delighful, and always provocative sequence of worlds – as if, as one witness put it, ‘watching a dream in real life’. The actors and technicians who participated in Invisible Cities confronted challenges from all angles: the English–Italian language barrier, the University bureaucracy, the physical limitations of the performance space, inclement weather, and the shortage of finances, human resources – and, most of all, time. Yet, despite the constant ‘changes of direction’ that were part of the Invisible Cities process, the actors were inspired by DiBuduo's willingness to allow them complete artistic licence in the conception and execution of their cities, and they came to understand that even artistic tensions can strengthen the bonds within an ensemble, infusing its members with a fighting spirit that refuses to let the project die. In the following interview, the student artists reflect upon the unique process of creating Invisible Cities, the actor–director relationship, the role of the audience, and the effect of the project upon the Rutgers–Newark community.
More-and-Less-Than: Liveness, Video Recording, and the Future of Performance
Authors: Varney Denise , Fensham Rachel
Published: January 2009

With the spread of digital and other modes of electronic recordings into the auditoria and lecture theatres where performance is studied, the debate about the video documentation of performance – already well rehearsed and in the pages of NTQ – is about to intensify. Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney have based the article which follows on their own work in videoing live theatre pieces for research into feminist performance. This article deliberates on their experience with the medium and examines the anxieties that surface at the point of implosion between live and mediatized performance. The first part locates these anxieties in the question of presence and absence in performance – especially that of the performer, whose body and self are both at stake in the recorded image. In the second part, the authors offer a description of viewing practices, which they present as a model of ‘videocy’. Rachel Fensham is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University, and Denise Varney is Lecturer in the School of Studies in Creative Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
The African-Caribbean Identity and the English Stage
Authors: King Barnaby
Published: January 2009

In the first of two essays employing academic discourses of cultural exchange to examine the intra-cultural situation in contemporary British society, published in NTQ 61, Barnaby King analyzed the relationship between Asian arts and mainstream arts in Britain on both a professional and a community level. In this second essay he takes a similar approach towards African–Caribbean theatre in Britain, comparing the Black theatre initiatives of the regional theatres with the experiences of theatre workers themselves based in Black communities. He shows how work which relates to a specific ‘other’ culture has to struggle to get funding, while work which brings Black Arts into a mainstream ‘multicultural’ programme has fewer problems. In the process, he specifically qualifies the claim that the West Yorkshire Playhouse provides for Black communities as well as many others, while exploring the alternative, community-based projects of ‘Culturebox’, based in the deprived Chapeltown district of Leeds. Barnaby King is a theatre practitioner based in Leeds, who completed his postgraduate studies at the University of Leeds Workshop Theatre in 1998. He is now working with theatre companies and small-scale venues – currently the Blah Blah Blah company and the Studio Theatre at Leeds Metropolitan University – to develop community participation in
Across Two Eras: Slovak Theatre from Communism to Independence
Authors: Inštitorisová Dagmar , Bačová Daniela
Published: January 2009

At the cusp of the ‘eighties and ’nineties, theatre in what was soon to become the Slovak Republic had to come to terms not only with the disintegration of the communist system, but with the break-up of the former Czechoslovakia into its constituent nations. During the previous decade, the theatre had in many ways helped to undermine the decaying authoritarian regime, but now many of its practitioners found themselves disaffected by the disappointment of early ideals, and their livelihoods threatened by the loss of state funding, which had at least acknowledged the importance of theatre to the nation's cultural prestige. In this article, the authors trace the distinguishing strands of the work of major directors and writers of both the older and the younger generations, and attempt to define the changing role of theatre – not forgetting the influence of the puppet theatre tradition – as the Slovak nation seeks a renewed vitality through reclaiming its cultural past while re-defining its present. Daniela Bacova teaches English literature and drama at the Department of English and American Studies in the University of Constantine the Philosopher, Nitra, Slovakia, and is one of the editors of the journal Dedicated Space. Dagmar Institorisová works in the Institute of Literary Communication in the University of Constantine the Philosopher, and has just published her doctoral thesis on Variety of Expression in a Theatrical Work.
Tacit Knowledge: Heritage and Waste
Authors: Barba Eugenio
Published: January 2009

Eugenio Barba is founder and director of Odin Teatret, and of the International School of Theatre Anthropology. A longstanding Advisory Editor of NTQ, he is also a prolific writer on the nature of acting and the actor, with a special concern for what is shared by and what divides the traditions and styles of East and West. In the following article he explores the fundamental differences in approaches to the training of the aspirant actor, distinguishing between ‘acculturation’ as the usual point of departure in eastern traditions, and ‘inculturation’ as the dominant western mode. He explores the differing natures of the young actor's apprenticeship which have historically derived from these traditions, and the consequences of new emphases and social movements in the twentieth century which threaten the future of the ‘accultured’ approach, while requiring a new range of responses from the ‘incultured’. This article was first presented at the international symposium ‘Tacit Knowledge – Heritage and Waste’ which was held in Holstebro from 22 to 26 September 1999, on the occasion of Odin Teatret's thirty-fifth anniversary. Eugenio Barba's most recent publications are Land of Ashes and Diamonds: My Apprenticeship in Poland, including a long correspondence from Jerzy Grotowski, and Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt, both from Black Mountain Press.
‘The Artwork Judges Them’: the Theatre Critic in a Changing Landscape
Authors: Féral Josette
Published: January 2009

The functions of the critic in the theatre and of his or her responsibilities towards the theatre have long been debated and disputed, and are now in a state both of flux and contradiction – flux, because of the rapidly changing state of the media in which criticism is published and the new forms which ‘publication’ can now take; contradiction, because of the dual perception of criticism as at once an ‘offensive’ art and an ‘art of solidarity’. Especially for the critic of theatre, the dilemma has always been heightened not only by the ephemerality of the art to which the review gives a vicarious and subjectified after-life, but also by the shifting sands between the journalistic and the academic landmarks of the craft. Rather than attempting impossible solutions, Josette Féral offers illuminating definitions and suggests helpful boundaries – aesthetic, cultural, social, and historical. Josette Féral is full professor in the Drama Department of the Université du Québec à Montréal. She has published several books, including Mise en scène et jeu de I'acteur, (two volumes, 1997, 1999), dealing with many European as well as North American directors, Rencontres avec Ariane Mnouchkine (1995) and Trajectoires du Soleil (1999), both on Mnouchkine's work, and La Culture contre I'art: essai d'économie politique du théâtre (1990). She has also published several articles on the theory of theatre in Canada, the United States and Europe, in journals such as The Drama Review, Modern Drama, The French Review, Discourse, Theaterschrift, Cahiers de théâtre, and Théâtre Public. She is currently President of the International Federation for Theatre Research.
Cheshire Cats in the Theatre: a Translator and the Fringe Experience
Authors: Miles Patrick
Published: January 2009

In February 1999 Patrick Miles's adaptation of Chekhov's Ivanov as Sara opened at a prestigious London fringe theatre, the Bridewell – to a review from The Times largely devoted to the omission of Chekhov's name from the programme. Here, Miles, relates the circumstances (not all accidental) which led to that omission, the consequences that flowed from it in terms of poor audiences and company disharmony – and how such an apparently random happening is also representative of a typology of the fringe which warrants more sustained investigation. Patrick Miles was Russian literary consultant at the National Theatre from 1977 to 1980, and has translated Turgenev, Chekhov, Gorky, Bulgakov, and Vampilov for various theatre companies. He is editor of Chekhov on the British Stage (Cambridge, 1993) and translator of Anatoly Smeliansky's The Russian Theatre after Stalin (Cambridge, 1999).
Gitta Sereny and Albert Speer's ‘Battle with Truth’ on the London Stage
Authors: White Nick
Published: January 2009

Prompted by the investigative journalist Gitta Sereny's biography Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, two recent productions, Esther Vilar's Speer and David Edgar's Albert Speer, have set out to explore the reputation of Hitler's architect and later Minister of Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer, the only leading Nazi to acknowledge his guilt at the Nuremberg Trials. The plays, like the biography, are concerned with the extent of Speer's knowledge of the ‘Final Solution’ during his career in the Nazi hierarchy, and consequently with the integrity of the stance he adopted at Nuremberg and thereafter – that is, of his claim of guilt by association and omission rather than by active participation. In her biography, Sereny claims that as a result of her association with Speer he eventually acknowledged his guilt to her, and was repentant. But Nick White believes that the evidence – much of it unearthed by Sereny herself – suggests otherwise, and that Sereny had failed to acknowledge that between 1978 and his death in 1981 Speer consistently deceived her about crucial aspects of this evidence. How successful are Vilar and Edgar in their quite different dramatic sifting, not only of the public persona of Speer, but also of the interpretation granted their subject by the biographer upon whom their plays, to a lesser and greater degree, depend? Nick White has taught at City University, London, and his PhD dissertation, ‘In the Absence of Memory? Jewish Fate and Dramatic Representation: the Production and Critical Reception of Holocaust Drama on the London Stage, 1945–1989’ (1998) has been followed by a companion volume of criticism, articles, and letters, The Critical Reception of Holocaust Drama on the British Stage, 1939–2000.
Stumbling in the Dark: Facets of Sensory Perception and Robert Wilson's ‘H.G.‘ Installation
Authors: Di Benedetto Stephen
Published: January 2009

The ways in which we receive and perceive what we taste, hear, touch, and smell all serve as potential resources for our understanding of an artistically mediated event. Though some modes of perception are more usually associated with the visual than the performing arts, the development of forms of Live Art has begun to challenge our understanding of how the conventions of theatricalizing experience can be modulated. Using methodologies drawn from a phenomenological perspective, Stephen Di Benedetto here examines the way in which Robert Wilson's installation,H.G., presented at the Clink, near London Bridge, in 1995, triggered a journey in sensory perception for its spectators, and served as an exemplar of the ways in which the full range of sensory resources can be ‘theatrically’ deployed. Stephen Di Benedetto, having received his PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London, for his thesis onPlaywriting as a Visual Art, is currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre History at the School of Theatre, University of Houston, and is now actively engaged in research on the body in contemporary Live Art and new Irish and English playwriting.
I, You, He, We, They: Some Nostalgic Reflections on MALTA
Authors: Piasecka Ewa Obrębowska , Cynkutis Jolanta , Tyabji Khalid
Published: January 2009

THE MALTA FESTIVAL was born at a very specific moment of transition in Poland and for Poles. At the beginning of the 1990s we were still hungrily swallowing our newly acquired freedom. We were impassioned by the television coverage of parliament (where members expressed exactly what they thought in grammatically correct Polish), we read papers from front to back (a world, formerly known to us only through autopsy, but now related without resort to the official mumbo-jumbo of our former epoch). We strongly believed that life could be beautiful, truly ours.
‘There's Our Catastrophe’: Empathy, Sacrifice, and the Stageing of Suffering in Beckett's Theatre
Authors: Fox Michael David
Published: January 2009

In his seminalThe Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin suggested that Samuel Beckett, in denying his characters individualized facets of humanity, achieved an ‘alienation effect’ that was more profound and assured than Brecht's. Here, Michael David Fox, while agreeing that Beckett denies actors and audiences the kinds of identification achieved in naturalistic drama through Stanislavskian techniques, argues that he demands a different quality of empathy from his audiences – not through the artifice of a character's simulated pain but through the actuality of the performer's physical suffering. While analyzing the demands and constraints upon actors which Beckett imposes in his better-known plays, he also re-evaluates the more ‘occasional’ pieceCatastrophe– written in 1982 ostensibly as a homage to the then-imprisoned Czech playwright Vaclav Havel – less as a critique of political terror than as an ironic and devastating self-critique of the terror of Beckett's own tragic representation. Michael David Fox is a doctoral student in drama and critical theory in the Joint Doctoral Program in Drama at the University of California, Irvine and the University of California, San Diego. His dissertation is on the production of empathy in Shakespeare's tragedies. He wishes to thank Robert Weimann, Wolfgang Iser, and Gabriele Schwab for their helpful and generous comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
Women Experiment with Theatre: Magdalena 86
Authors: Bassnett Susan
Published: January 2009

In the autumn of last year, two events took place which marked in very different ways the recognition that feminist thinking has affected theatre more profoundly than through the necessary logistics of job and role redistribution. In August, the first-ever festival of women in experimental theatre, known as Magdalena 86, took place in Cardiff. Then, in the following month, the International School of Theatre Anthropology devoted its congress in Holstebro, Denmark, to the subject of ‘The Female Role’ – a title we borrow for this short feature, in which Susan Bassnett. who teaches in the Graduate School of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, and has been a regular contributor both to NTQ and its predecessor, analyzes and evaluates these occasions in successive reports. The core paper presented at Holstebro by ISTA director Eugenio Barba, which discusses the balance between the qualities of ‘animus’ and ‘anima’ necessary to the actor's energy, ‘completes’ a feature which, in the questions it raises for further discussion, remains necessarily inconclusive.
The Actor's Energy: Male/Female versus Animus/Anima
Authors: Barba Eugenio
Published: January 2009

INTEREST IN ACTORS who play female roles and actresses who play male roles is periodically rekindled. At such times, one might almost suspect that behind these disguises, these contrasts between reality and fiction, lie hidden one of the theatre's secret potentialities. One also often speaks of the actor's female side and the actress's male side, and attempts to develop these forthwith by means of apposite exercises.
W. S. Gilbert: Victorian Entertainer
Authors: Midwinter Eric
Published: January 2009

Interpretive criticism applied to the plays of W. S. Gilbert verges upon self-parody, suggests Eric Midwinter. The musical plays to which Sullivan contributed his inimitable scores were careful and calculated blends of the theatrical resources which Gilbert could command with plot and character conventions of proven and sustained appeal – which could, moreover, attract to the theatre the respectable family audiences for which the Savoy became almost a home-from-home. Eric Midwinter analyzes the ingredients of the operas which contributed to this popular success, describes the veritable industry of spin-offs which they generated, and assesses their contribution to the development of the ‘musical play’ as distinct from the ‘musical comedy’. Eric Midwinter is a social historian and social policy analyst, whose books include Make 'Em Laugh: Famous Comedians and Their World (1979) and Fair Game: Myth and Reality in Sport (1986). He has published widely on social aspects of popular theatre and television, and is presently Director of the Centre for Policy on Ageing.
From Surrealism to Snoorealism: the Theatre of Snoo Wilson
Authors: Coe Ada
Published: January 2009

Snoo Wilson has remained one of the most distinctive of those playwrights who emerged from the ‘generation of 1968’ – but unlike his collaborators in the early Portable Theatre, he has never been at home on the big stages of the establishment theatres. Sadly, this has also tended to deny him his proper share of critical and, indeed, audience attention: his highly allusive yet also highly elusive style has thus remained a specialized taste, and many of his plays have been denied even the dignity of publication. Accordingly, we accompany the following article by Ada Coe, in which she examines one of the many threads which contribute to Snoo Wilson's work – his recurrent concern with the world of animals and its symbolism – with an ‘NTQ Checklist’ of Snoo Wilson's complete dramatic output compiled by NTQ Editor Simon Trussler. in collaboration with Malcolm Page of Simon Fraser University. British Columbia, and NTQ's assistant editor, Elaine Turner.