bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Harlequin, Holberg and the (In)visible Masks:Commedia dell'artein Eighteenth-Century Denmark
Authors: Holm Bent
Published: January 2009

The profound influence of thecommedia dell'arteon European theatre is commonly acknowledged, although it has not yet been extensively analysed. In Northern Europe some of its first traces are iconographic. There are masked Venetian characters among the paintings collected by the Danish king Christian IV. The first such masks to appear in a Danish context are three Pantaloons acting as stage hands in a court ballet which was part ofDet store Bilager(‘The Great Wedding Feast’), the grandiose festivities celebrating the Crown Prince's wedding in 1634. Later, German troupes may have presented harlequinades. The first reliable accounts of Italian actors playing in Denmark feature a certain Venetian comedian-charlatan: Sebastiano di Scio, known as Harlekino, who travelled the country with a twenty-four strong entourage, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was employed as a royal comedian and physician, and furnished the Royal household with obscure medicines for obscure diseases. The combination of comedian and charlatan is, of course, typical.
The Drive to Communicate—The Use of Language in Commedia dell'arte
Authors: Beale Geoff , Gayton Howard
Published: January 2009

Ophaboom Theatre was formed in 1991 with the aim of developing, researching and performing a contemporary version of commedia dell'aite to provide humour and resonance for a modern audience. By returning to the roots of commedia, on the streets, Ophaboom's performances, we hoped, might recapture its popular appeal, and be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. In doing this we have questioned many of the traditional ideas associated with this form, and also its contemporary relevance. Our approaches to each mask or character type, such as the Zanni (servant), the innamorata (lover), and Pantalone (old man), are tested in live performance in turn, and only when satisfied with it do we move on to the next mask. This return to the roots is aimed at invigorating the form methodically through an evolution possibly analogous to that of the original commedia. Our belief is that the eighteenth-century manifestation, which is often the only perception and thus representation of commedia today, does not appeal to a wide public. At its height, commedia owed its vitality to its wideranging appeal, and by rediscovering its spirit we hope to revitalize this popularity.
An Ethnographic Approach to Role-Playing in a Performance of Madurese Loddrok
Authors: Bouvier Hélène
Published: January 2009

20 October 1986: the Rukun Kemala troupe is hired to perform at a wedding in Kalianget Barat, its home village from 8.30 p.m. to 2.30 a.m. In a courtyard between two houses, the stage is erected on poles, with a floor of woven bamboo panelling; one whole side will collapse in the middle of the night under the strain of the actors' entrances and exits, without so much as the performance being interrupted. The gamelan orchestra begins to play at 8.30 p.m. exactly, as contracted. Fifty minutes later, slides are projected onto the lowered stage curtain depicting names of the head and leading members of the troupe together with words of welcome to the audience. At 9.30 p.m. the curtain is raised for the first time to reveal a ten-minute dance number: four female dancers appear before the monumental split gates of a Hindu kingdom bathed in red light and strobe effects with Catherine wheels whirling. Next, photos of clowns are projected while the public is harangued to take an active participation in the forthcoming elections, family planning and family education organizations. The curtain rises again to reveal a painted backdrop depicting a street scene in an imaginary modern town, to accompany the clown programme which lasts forty minutes. A final set of slides, ten minutes long, this time shows the actors dressed in the costumes of the characters they are about to portray, with a brief introduction to the story by the scriptwriter. At 10.30 p.m. the curtain opens on the first scene of the play which will last four hours without an interval: ‘Black Mask, in the Story of Yuliati Awaiting Happiness’ (Topeng Hitam dalam kisah Yuliati menanti bahagia).
The Confucian Difference: Yin/Yang Feminism in Korean Women's Dramas
Authors: Shim Jung-Soon
Published: January 2009

In an answer to the question, ‘Who are we as women?’, Western feminisms have developed diverse theories. Appropriating post-structuralist theories, Linda Alcoff rearticulates female subjectivity as positionality, thus avoiding essentialism and yet including a historical dimension in her configuration. Allison Weir calls for a reformulation of the concept of women's identity which includes difference, connection and heterogeneity. Thus, the issues of meaning and interpretation regarding the concept of woman seems to occupy the central locus in the discussions of Western feminisms.
Geographies of Oppression—The Cross-Border Politics of (M)othering: The Break of Day and A Yearning
Authors: Aston Elaine
Published: January 2009

In the autumn of 1995 the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, UK, staged two plays which offer a dramatic treatment of the politics of motherhood: Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Break of Day (Haymarket Mainhouse, first performance 26 October 1995) and Ruth Carter's A Yearning (Haymarket Studio, 31 October to 4 November 1995). Neither play had significant box-office success, and The Break of Day received poor and hostile reviews from (male) critics, many of whom, like Paul Taylor for The Independent, commented on the play as a dramatization of ‘how the maternal drive can cause women to betray orthodox feminism’. My counter argument is that by addressing infertility as a feminist issue for the 1990s, both plays index the need to re-conceive a politics of motherhood in an international arena, highlighting the ways in which the biological contours of women's lives are globally mapped with the specificities of social, material and cultural geographies.
Polly Dick and the Politics ofFisicofollia
Authors: Diamond Elin
Published: January 2009

On 10 March 1913, the artist, arsonist, and suffragette Mary Richardson, alias Polly Dick, a member of the militant Women's Social and Political Union, walked into London's National Gallery and took an axe to Velázquez's ‘Rokeby Venus’. Her act resulted in the closure of the National Gallery and other museums. At her trial Richardson announced: ‘I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history.’ In 1911 Umberto Boccioni wrote to his friend Gino Severini in heady enthusiasm about the manifestos he had co-written and signed—Futurist Painting and Sculpture(January 1910), andFuturist Painting: Technical Manifesto(April 1910). The first featured the familiar futurist exhortation to smash the ‘cult of the past, all things old, academic pedantry’, to bear ‘bravely and proudly’ the banner of ‘madness’ with which ‘they’ try to dismiss innovators. Boccioni echoes the words of Marinetti'sThe Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism(1909):

So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! … Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! O the joy of seeing the glorious old canvasses bobbing adrift on those waters, discoloured and shredded … Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the vulnerable cities.
Urbanizing Woman and Her Sisters: The Ethics of Gender in Chinese Television Dramas
Authors: Yan Haiping
Published: January 2009

In the autumn of 1997 the World Bank issued ‘China 2020’, a seven-volume report on the key issues and challenges that ‘China must face over the next two decades’. The opening passage reads:

China is in the throes of two transitions: from a command economy to a market-based one and from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial one. So far, both transitions have been spectacultarly successful. China is the fastest growing economy in the world, withper capitaincomes more than quadrupling sine 1978, achieving in two generations what took other countries centuries.
Invisible Presences—Performance Intertextuality
Authors: Carlson Marvin
Published: January 2009

The analysis of theatrical performance has always provided a problem of particular difficulty to semiotic theory, for a variety of reasons—the ephemerality of the event, the complexity of the interrelationships of so many communicative channels, the almost infinite variety of physical realizations that may be generated from a single written script, the phenomenological concerns generated by the physical presence of the event, and the effects upon interpretation of changing historical and social reception strategies. Historical placement is of course a concern involved in analysing the interpretive process of any work of art, but it is particularly obvious and important in theatre, where an institutional collective process at a particular historical moment is always involved both in the specific realization and in the specific reception of the work.

Certain aspects of this complex problem have received useful attention, others have been very little considered. The Prague circle provided some useful distinctions in dealing with, for example, the various operations of the actor in the semiotic process.

More recently, theorists with a phenomeno-logical orientation or with an interest in reception aesthetics have further enriched our understanding of what is involved in the theatre event. Clearly much remains to be explored. One area is the effect on theatrical reception of the re-use of the same performance elements or combinations of elements in physical realizations of what might be quite different written scripts.

The most obvious example of this is the individual actor, who in the course of a career will be seen by the public in many different roles.
The Actors' Brief: Experiences with Chekhov
Authors: Nordmann Alfred
Published: January 2009

Künstler ist nur einer, der aus einer Lösung ein Rätsel machen kann. (Karl Kraus)

Only that person is an artist who can turn a solution into a riddle. (Karl Kraus)

The aphorism by Karl Kraus captures the intuition that an artwork is an intentional structure, that it represents the response to a question or the solution to a problem, if only a problem of self-expression. Even when, for example, a theatrical performance is riddled with accidental omissions of text and other mishaps, we find ourselves watching and appreciating it as if everything in it was meant to be as we see it. It has therefore been said that in the presence of art we ‘suspend disbelief’, we suspend the sceptical suspicion according to which the arrangement of internal relations within the artwork might be less than perfectly meaningful: in the presence of art we begin as absolute believers in the integrity of the artwork.

But there is another dimension to Kraus's remark: what appears to be the solution to a problem or a coherent response to some situation becomes a riddle of its own. The apparent integrity of the work may result from interpretation rather than through the deliberate intentionality of the artwork itself. Moreover, it is the exception for a work of art to be reducible to providing a solution to a particular problem. Indeed, we would tend to deny that artworks are governed by instrumental reason. This is true even in the case of theatrical performances: a performance is bound to provide more than a solution to the problem of how to stage a particular play; it cannot be regarded merely as an instrumental means of conveying a drama.
Comic Stage Routines in Guarinonius' Medical Treatise of 1610
Authors: Katritzky M. A.
Published: January 2009

The theatrical descriptions of Hippolytus Guarinonius are among the most substantial of several significant discoveries of visual and textual documentation relating to thecommedia dell'artein recent decades. Not noted in the standard bibliography of thecommedia dell'arte, they have made far less impact on theatre historians than their early date and richness of theatrical detail warrant. Here, selected descriptions are examined in the context of related textual and visual records, in order to highlight aspects of the new information they offer on the staging of comic routines, and to draw attention to some limitations of using material of this type as historical evidence for stage practice.
The Spatialization of Loss in the Theatre of Marguerite Duras
Authors: Noonan Mary
Published: January 2009

Marguerite Duras developed a theatrical form that both staged a severing of the woman's body/ presence from discourse/subjectivity, and gave expression to the distressed source of the woman's voice beyond discourse. This form of theatre appeals to the spectator who is willing to become involved in its uncovering of possible meanings of female identity through a meticulously orchestrated, slow, rhythm-based and essentially uncomfortable sifting and dredging of the processes of memory and desire. In exploring this terrain, Duras went some way toward realizing Irigaray's feminist project of ‘playing with mimesis’, whereby the woman resubmits herself to ideas about her self that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, in order to uncover the place of her exploitation by discourse.
Caribbean Women Playwrights: Madness, Memory, but Not Melancholia
Authors: Miller Judith
Published: January 2009

Ina Césaire and Simone Schwarz-Bart are among the most arresting Frenchwomen writing plays today. They are not, however, among the most studied, nor are they of ‘La Metropole’. One cannot even count them among the myriad ‘French women playwrights’, bom in Algiers, Oran, Cairo, or St. Petersburg, who now make Paris their home. Césaire and Schwarz-Bart are Antillean, Frenchwomen of colour, at this point in their lives returned from Paris to their respective islands—Martinique and Guadeloupe—after prolonged stays in the French capital, because, as Ina Césaire relates, life in Paris has simply become ‘trop méchanic’.
Bisexuality in Cixous's Le Nom d'Œdipe
Authors: Freeman Sandra
Published: January 2009

In her essay, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Hélène Cixous talks about bisexuality and writing. Feminist writing may be said to be truly bisexual not in the sense which does away with sexual difference thereby producing neutrality, but in the sense that male and female are both omnipresent, exchanging, intermingling, enriching each other. Freed from the constraints of conventional binary opposition, male and female are able to unite, divide, multiply in an almost endless expansion of possibilities. The celebration of difference which does not divide, which is at the heart of sexual pleasure, transfusing and transforming the whole living being, will be found in women's writing, since women's songs spring from a body which denies castration. I use the future tense, since in the same essay Cixous declares that these songs use the future tense, since these songs have not yet been written, that women must liberate themselves from the dominance of the phallus, of men's language, in order to give voice to thensensuality, their sexuality, in all its complexity; to speak in the language which existed before patriarchal dominance, the fore-language which has a multiplicity of tongues. To sing a woman's song, in the language of the body, which rejects the law of the castrating father, telling of a total sexual pleasure knowing no guilt, no boundaries, is a courageous act in a world which has invented the direst forms of punishment for such transgression.
‘Each in our open-ended way, we are multitudinous’—Les Nombres, by Andrée Chedid
Authors: Freeman Sara
Published: January 2009

The Lebanese-French playwright Andrée Chedid begins her play, Le Montreur (1967), with a song sung by ‘une—ou plusieurs—voix’. As the voice becomes voices become voice, the song addresses the audience saying, ‘Ce soir, ce soir, ce soir, amis, / Le Sire Montreur nous dévoilera: / L'unité et la pluralité des choses!’ Like the image of many voices among one voice, the trope of the ‘unity and plurality of things’ is arguably Chedid's vision of human consciousness—a consciousness that is both one and many; a consciousness that is embedded in a relationship with the other, which is figured as a connectedness that makes society. In Les Nombres (1965) and Bérénice d'Egypte (1962), through her writing and use of theatrical space and sound, Chedid constructs a unique vision of consciousness—configured as a vital empathy with the multitudes. She centres her revolutionary vision of consciousness on her women characters, who, by interacting with ‘the multitudes’ (le peuple, la foule, les nombres) open the possibility that human connectedness can make consciousness multiple and thereby transcends the dichotomies of self and other.
The Scene of Writing: The Representation of Poetic Identity in Cixous's Recent Theatre
Authors: Dobson Julia
Published: January 2009

Much critical engagement with the work of Hélène Cixous has tended to foreground her early writings and the discourses ofécriture féminine, whilst overlooking the importance of theatre to the development of her aesthetics. This continued focus has contributed to a perception of her work as divided into distinct, chronologically or generically defined sets and has consequently hampered the exploration of common threads and evolving representations of issues central to her work. This study aims to identify a consistent concern behind Cixous's strategic use of the theatrical form: the desire to construct and project representations of poetic identity, a theme which I will argue has become increasingly explicit in her work in the theatre, and which is essential to a reading of Cixous's writings as a coherent body of work. After a brief contextualization of the representation of the poet figure in her early theatre, I will focus on her most recent plays:Voile noire voile blanche (Black sail white sail, 1988),La Ville par jure ou le réveil des Erinyes (The Perjured City or the Awakening of the Erinyes)andL'Histoire (qu'on ne connaîtra jamais) (The Story (which we will never know)), both published in 1994. This play constitutes an explicit staging of thescène de l'écriture.
The Repressed Feminine: Nathalie Sarraute's Elle est là
Authors: Phillips John
Published: January 2009

Nathalie Sarraute has written six plays over a period of some fifteen years (1967–82). Her latest play, Pour un oui ou pour un non, was first performed in 1982. Given their relative success, however, one is forced to wonder why she has not continued to write for the theatre (though, since 1982, she has published four major works of narrative, Enfance, Tu ne t'aimes pas, Ici and Ouvrez). When I put this question to Nathalie Sarraute in October 1996, at the Institut Français in London, she replied that she had ‘found more amusing things to do’. Her failure to answer the question directly perhaps suggests an unawareness of the real answer, at least at conscious levels. The theatre, an inescapably physical medium, which requires the bodily presence of men and women as gendered beings, was, in fact, never really suited to a writer who continually takes refuge from the physical and even the sexual, hi words. It seems plausible, then, to conjecture that Sarraute gave up writing for the theatre, because her radio plays had, by reason of their success, been translated onto the stage, and the author did not know how to deal with a medium that privileged the physical as opposed to the emotional and psychological dimensions of human relationships which had been her territory since Tropismes. The frequently impersonal voices of her fiction work well on radio, but less so on a live stage, upon which the actors are physically as well as audibly present: ‘Le person-nage de théâtre’, says Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘est en scène, c'est sa première qualité: il est là.’ In Sarraute's theatre, however, this physical presence is no more than a kind of contingency, wholly superfluous to the action. The characters find themselves together for no particular reason and they hardly ever interact physically. The very lack of stage directions, which the author justifies on the grounds of textual purity, is itself indicative of an absence of movement, the main signifier of physical presence. Textual purity depends for Sarraute on words alone.
Painters and Paint at the Pantheon Opera, 1790–1792
Authors: Milhous Judith
Published: January 2009

The importance of scene painters to English theatre increased markedly toward the end of the eighteenth century—in part a response to the contributions of Philip James De Loutherbourg at Drury Lane in the 1770s. Advertisements began routinely to record the name of what we would now call the scene designer. Gaetano Marinari was identified as principal painter and machinist at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket between 1785 and 1789, when the old opera house burned. Thomas Greenwood held the equivalent position at Drury Lane, John Inigo Richards at Covent Garden, and Michael Angelo Rooker at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. For particular productions the names of assistant painters might also be advertised. On 20 December 1785, for example, Covent Garden listed Richards, Carver, Hodgins, Catton Jun., and Turner as the crew that executed scenery for the travelogueOmai, which turned out to be De Loutherbourg's last designs for the London theatre.
Interculturalism, Aestheticism, Orientalism: Starting from Peter Brook's Mahabharata
Authors: Shevtsova Maria
Published: January 2009

The criticism of ‘intercultural’ theatre in general, and Peter Brook's Mahabharata in particular, that was spearheaded by Rustom Bharucha in Theatre and the World, has taken firm hold in the Anglo-American academy and especially in Britain. Bharucha's critique of Eurocentric appropriation of non-western cultures (although the word ‘plundering’ might be more precise for his argument) is the mainstay of his attack on interculturalism, whether theorized by Richard Schechner or, in Bharucha's view, epitomized in performance by Brook's production. Schechner is understandably Bharucha's central reference, for he essentially gave the concept of interculturalism its particular twist in the early 1980s and has continued his crusade for it ever since. Scheduler's concept involves generic mixing within an anthropological framework, as occurs, for instance, when ‘western’ text-based theatre, usually situated in the domain of art and letters, merges with non-western ritual, one of the main areas of anthropological study.
Les Opéras Parfumés: Aspects of Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century French Opera
Authors: Dietrich Charles
Published: January 2009

In his introduction to Orientalism, Edward Said defines the West's conceptualization of the East as a European invention which had been ‘since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences’. He further posits that this conceptualization has formed a basis on which western civilizations build self-definition. The Orient, therefore, has shifted from the imaginary to the actual. This creation of a culture in opposition has enabled Europeans to construct an impression of their collective ‘Self’ as reflected by the oriental ‘Other’. In this regard, Said formulates the notion of the orientalization of the Orient. Europe, in creating the demarcation of the world into East and West, has sought to locate its own proper topological and cultural place within a global scheme. While setting up the parameters of ‘western civilization’, the West defines the East. Since the known world at the time of this demarcation consisted of Europe, Asia, and the northern extremities of Africa, everything outside these designated parameters becomes the ‘Other’. Philosophies and concepts disorienting to western thought become the Orient.
Thinking Through Veils: Questions of Culture, Criticism and the Body
Authors: Dox Donnalee
Published: January 2009

When Homi Bhabha discusses the problematics of signification and coding in intercultural interpretation, he questions the relationship between practices and the experience of culture. By questioning the power of codes and signifiers to fix cultural identity, Bhabha allows that the stable object of culture might be caught ‘in the disturbed artifice of its signification’, that is, ‘at the edge of experience’. This suggests to theatre and performance studies that the culturally inscribed body need not be viewed as a stable repository of displaced and deferred codes. The body may be intercepted in situations, or at moments, when signification dissolves and is reconfigured.
K. N. Panikkar's Teyyateyyam: Resisting Interculturalism Through Ritual Practice
Authors: Singleton Brian
Published: January 2009

Indian theatre practice under British colonial rule was marked by differing strategies of resistance: agit-prop drama to promote social and political reform; the preservation of classical dance as cultural heritage; and the continuing practice of folk rituals in rural areas outwith the immediate control of the colonial authorities. Postindependence India, however, has witnessed those ‘deviant’ practices of resistance become the dominant ideological performance practices of modern India. Much actor training continued to be modelled on British drama schools such as RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art); classical dances have survived to incorporate certain aspects of western ballet (for example, group sequences in Kathak); and the folk rituals have come increasingly under the microscope of western cultural tourists. Indian theatre practice, therefore, succumbs to the power of the dollar, as western academics and practitioners, with their financial and technological power, act as legitimizing agents for the global recognition of Asian culture. We are at a time when great currency is being attached to the notion of intercultural rejuvenation of home cultures by acts of productive reception with foreign cultures (a more positive definition of the practice by Erika Fischer-Lichte in direct response to Edward Said's charge of cultural colonialism which he terms orientalism). It is worthwhile taking note of how certain forms of modern Indian theatre are resisting intercultural practices, not by refusal or direct opposition, but by theatrical acts of intra-cultural rejuvenation, without the injection of the foreign culture as a serum.
Exploring the Limits of Self-Portraiture inLe Jeu de la feuillée
Authors: Scolnicov Hanna
Published: January 2009

One could say that all plays, even those with an international reputation, are best understood within their national, ethnic and cultural contexts. But very few plays can be as intimately attached to their author, his city, his family, his friends and enemies, and fellow citizens in general, as theJeu de la feuillée, written by thetrouvéreAdam de la Halle, and staged by him in 1276, in the Petite Place of the town of Arras. For the protagonist of the play is Adam himself, and some of the other characters are real people connected with him. This is a play of unrivalled audacity, in which Adam exposes himself for public scrutiny. He deals openly with his own ambitions and frustrations, with his intimate relations with his wife and his troubled relationship with his father, and with the lives of his friends and neighbours. All this is unfolded in front of an audience holding his acquaintances, some of whom are equally satirized in the play.
‘Mise en Scent’: The Théâtre d'Art's Cantique des cantiques and the Use of Smell as a Theatrical Device
Authors: Shepherd-Barr Kirsten
Published: January 2009

In December 1891, an adaptation by Paul-Napoléon Roinard of the Old Testament text of the Cantique des cantiques (Song of Songs) of Solomon was performed at the recently created Théâtre d'Art, expressly to present a new idea of theatre as total art by engaging the visual, aural, and olfactory senses of the audience. One of the few theatre historians who has mentioned this remarkable endeavour notes that in it,‘music, words, colour, even perfume, were to be harmonized; all the senses were to be involved, simultaneously, in the one overwhelming experience’. Roinard's synaesthetic experiment drew on a range of sources including Baudelaire, Wagner and Rimbaud, and, most strikingly, featured scents pumped into the auditorium on cue by young symbolist poets stationed in the far edges of the proscenium and in the balcony and using hand-held vaporizers. According to the outline Roinard provided in the programme, nine scents were used: frankincense, white violets, hyacinth, lilies, acacia, lily of the valley, syringa, orange blossom, and jasmine. Each of these odours had corresponding orchestrations of speech (specific vowel sounds), tones (original music composed by Mme Flamen de Labrély), and colours.
Aby Warburg's ‘Costumi teatrali’ (1895) and the Art Historical Foundations of Theatre Iconography
Authors: Katritzky M. A.
Published: January 2009

In 1895, Aby Warburg drew attention to ways in which information of theatre historical significance can be gained from visual images, in an article which outlines a clear methodology for their evaluation as historical documents, based on a comparative approach in the context of the surviving documentation concerning the event under investigation as a whole, the Florentine intermedi of 1589. ‘Probably the most described theatrical production in history’, these intermedi were especially devised to embellish dramatic performances by professional commedia dell'arte actors (La Zingana and Pazzia of Isabella) and amateur players (La Pellegrina) which were intended by the Medici as the greatest attraction of the celebrations in honour of the wedding of Ferdinande I de'Medici to Christine de Lorraine, and recognized by both contemporaries and historians as a highpoint of European court festival.
From Text to Performance: The Rise of Theatre Studies as an Academic Discipline in Germany
Authors: Fischer-Lichte Erika
Published: January 2009

In the course of the 1990s, a new paradigm in cultural studies seems to have arisen. In the humanities, the metaphor of ‘culture as text’ held true until the late 1980s; culture as a whole and different cultural phenomena were understood and interpreted as structural sequences composed of single elements (signs) to which a particular meaning can be attributed. In the 1990s, however, the focus of interest shifted to the processes of making, producing, creating, doing and to the actions, processes of exchange, negotiation and transformation as well as to the dynamics which constitute the agents of these processes, the materials they use and the cultural events they produce. Thus, it seems that the metaphor of ‘culture as performance’ is gaining ground. Whereas the humanities prevailingly dealt with texts and monuments as the results, manifestations and greatest achievements of modern European culture, they are now concerned with all kinds of performative processes which are, by their very nature, bodily processes. Thus, it seems that the discovery of the performative nowadays directs the humanities and cultural studies in particular.
‘False but True, Empty but Full, Few but Many’—The Dialectic Concepts in Traditional Chinese Performance Art and Painting
Authors: Li Ruru
Published: January 2009

In 1986, an international symposium on Chinese theatre was held in Beijing, and for the first time the process of aesthetics in the theatrical form was debated among scholars, critics and practitioners on an international scale. Among the discussion, the three dialectic concepts of ‘false but true, empty but full and few but many’ were often referred to and applied. What are they and why are they so important that they are regarded as the guiding principles that make Chinese theatre different from its western counterparts? Mu Gong, a theatre historian from Jiangxi province, offers the following explanation:

[On the Chinese stage] a horse whip, or an oar, is merely a piece of property if it is seen on its own. But when it is seen through the performers' acting combined with the story, it not only represents the form of ‘a horse’ or ‘a boat’ on the stage, but also transforms the flat stage into a three-dimensional mountain, battlefield or river. In addition, the character's action, feelings and desires are therefore underscored. … If a real horse or a boat is used on the stage, the object itself is true, but the character and its circumstances will become false.
Technology and Dramaturgical Development: Five Observations
Authors: Aronson Arnold
Published: January 2009

In her landmark book, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater, the great historian Margarete Bieber stated simply and elegantly, ‘The development of the theater building always follows the development of dramatic literature.’ While historians, of course, have always attempted to explain the drama in terms of known architectural, scenographic, and technological practices, the effect of one upon the other has been less fully or successfully explored. Why, for instance, is the reverse of Bieber's statement not true? And in the rapidly changing technology of the contemporary world, is it possible that technology has become a causal factor in the development of drama?
Reflections on Miss Julie: The New Scandinavian Experimental Theatre's Miss Julie in Copenhagen, 1992
Authors: Sauter Willmar , Martin Jacqueline , Arntzen Knut Ove
Published: January 2009

A Danish theatre group with a Swedish director, calling themselves the New Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, presented a provocative staging of Strindberg's Miss Julie in Copenhagen in April 1992. It was received with enthusiasm by the group of Strindberg scholars at the International Strindberg Conference being held in Copenhagen at that time. What was it about this production which was so appealing? The following three articles attempt to demonstrate different ways of approaching this production in retrospect — that is to say almost one year later. The first is mainly concerned with the actress playing Julie, the second is concerned with the director's concept and how this was realized on stage, whilst the third is interested in placing this production in the context of the Scandinavian Strindberg tradition.
Symbolism in Miss Julie
Authors: Franchuk Edward S.
Published: January 2009

The theme of Strindberg's Miss Julie (Fröken Julie, 1888), the struggle for sexual ascendancy between a liberated young woman and an ambitious young man who is her social inferior, continues to hold fascination even in times such as our own, which purport to be sexually liberated, socially egalitarian, and feminist. Perhaps, one might speculate, fascination with the play, its characters, and its situation is especially intense in such times. Certainly awareness of an interest in sexual politics have not lessened in the century since the play appeared. Since it has been a century dominated to a large extent by the theories of Dr Sigmund Freud, this is hardly surprising.
Miss Julie— The Ballet, 1950–1
Authors: Näslund Erik , Marshall Julia
Published: January 2009

If by a classic one means a work of art which has the ability to remain alive through various epochs and continue to engage people's attention, then the word is suitable to describe Birgit Cullberg's balletMiss Julie. Perhaps one ought to adjust the notion slightly and describe the ballet as a ‘modern classic’, because we do not know how it will have endured in, let us say, fifty or a hundred years.
The Black Glove: Wilhelm Carlsson's production at the Dramaten, 1988
Authors: Rokem Freddie
Published: January 2009

On 1 December 1987, the production team for Strindberg's last and least performed chamber play, The Black Glove (Svarta Handsken) written in 1909, had gathered in one of the rehearsal rooms at the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Dramaten) in Stockholm. Wilhelm Carlsson, the director of the performance, started by explaining to the producer, the scenographer, the dramaturg, the composer, the actors and the other members of the team who were present, as well as myself who was going to follow the rehearsals, all in all about twenty people, that he had never directed Strindberg before, except for an exercise with Miss Julie during his training as a director at Dra-matiska Institutet in Stockholm. His plan was then to present this much more frequently performed piece with an on-stage double bed and to have Kristin leave the room when the relations between Jean and Julie become intimate.
The House as Setting and Metaphor in Strindberg's Chamber Plays
Authors: Steene Birgitta
Published: January 2009

The houses Strindberg describes in his stage directions for the chamber plays demand a great deal of sheer physical space. A part of a practical, dramaturgical reality that calls for visualization, they constitue an integral part of the setting. It has in fact been said that in Strindberg's chamber plays ‘houses are the main characters’.
The Royal Library's Strindberg Collections
Authors: Brundin Margareta , Marshall Julia
Published: January 2009

August Strindberg was employed at the Royal Library from the end of 1874 to August 1882 – ‘rising from the proletariat class and carrying the legal title of royal secretary and temporary assistant librarian’, as it is said of Johan in Tjänstekvinnans son (The Son of a Servant). Strindberg himself carried this title with pride and had it printed on his visiting card. This was his only more permanent position in the public service and was a qualification which he would refer to many times later in his life. Presumably it would have gladdened him to know that his former place of employment would come to house the largest collection of his manuscripts and letters.
Towards a Concept of an Intimate Theatre
Authors: Nolin Bertil
Published: January 2009

On 26 November 1907 Strindberg finally succeeded in opening a theatre of his own in Stockholm: Intima teatern. He did so with an unpublished chamber play: Pelikanen (The Pelican). The newspapers covered the event extensively. Intima teatern was referred to as ‘a literary theatre’.
Genetic characteristics of pneumococcal disease in elderly patients before introducing the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine
Authors: PICHON B. , BENNETT H. V. , EFSTRATIOU A. , SLACK M. P. E. , GEORGE R. C.
Published: January 2009

Streptococcus pneumoniaestrains causing invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) in the elderly population of England and Wales during the winter of 2003/2004 (1 November 2003 to 30 April 2004) were characterized by serotyping and genotyping in order to determine their population structure in the elderly. Serotyping and multilocus sequence typing (MLST) were carried out on 542 invasive isolates referred to the Respiratory and Systemic Infection Laboratory. Pneumococci were distributed among 32 serotypes and 144 MLST sequence types. A high genetic diversity was observed within the major serotypes. Genetic relatedness varied with regard to serotype. Isolates within serotypes 3, 7F and 8 were the most genetically related whereas serotypes 6A and 19F comprised isolates originating from unrelated ancestors. There was indirect evidence that some pneumococci were derived from clones that had undergone capsular switching in the past. Interestingly one case of IPD was caused by a pneumococcus originating from a clone that had undergone capsular switching from serotype 18C, a serotype included in 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) to serotype 1 (serotype not included in PCV) suggesting that virulent clones with the potential ability to evade PCV existed in the pneumococcal population prior to the routine introduction of this vaccine. Isolates from 28 cases of apparent 23-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine (PPV) failure were included but there was no evidence of the emergence of particular clones associated with vaccine failures. Longitudinal studies based on serotypic and genetic characterization of pneumococci are fundamental to understanding the impact of both PPV and PCV on the genetic structure of pneumococcal populations.
School Burnout Inventory (SBI)
Authors: Salmela-Aro Katariina , Kiuru Noona , Leskinen Esko , Nurmi Jari-Erik
Published: January 2009

This study introduces a measure for school burnout and examines its validity and reliability among students in upper secondary high schools and vocational schools by using confirmatory factor analysis. School-related burnout comprises three dimensions: (a) exhaustion at school, (b) cynicism toward the meaning of school, and (c) sense of inadequacy at school. A total of 1418 (709 girls, 709 boys) adolescents from 13 postcomprehensive schools (6 upper secondary high schools, 7 vocational schools) filled in a questionnaire concerning their school burnout and background variables. The results showed that the three-factor solution, compared to one- or two-factor solutions, fit the data best and also gave the best reliability indices. The three theoretically-derived dimensions of school burnout were closely related but separate constructs. Finally, concurrent validity for the School-Burnout Inventory (SBI) was found when the correlations of depressive symptoms, school engagement, and academic achievement with each of the three dimensions of school burnout were examined: The more depressive symptoms adolescents suffered, the more exhaustion, cynicism, and inadequacy they reported; and the lower their academic achievement and school engagement, the more cynicism and inadequacy they reported.
Beyond a Single Pattern of Mixed Emotional Experience
Authors: Oceja Luis , Carrera Pilar
Published: January 2009

The Analogical Emotional Scale (AES) permits respondents to represent the changes that occur in the course of two different emotions over the time in which they are experienced ( Carrera & Oceja, 2007 ). We tested whether the use of the AES allows us to go beyond the distinction between sequential and simultaneous emotional experiences. Specifically, the AES permits us to detect and discriminate at least four different patterns of mixed emotional experience: sequential, prevalence, inverse, and highly simultaneous. We carried out four studies in which different stimuli were used for inducing emotion: personal memories, verbal accounts, videos, and photographs. The results supported our expectation that these four patterns are associated with different levels of emotional ambivalence and tension along a continuum from lesser to greater: sequential, prevalence, inverse, and highly simultaneous.
The Psychometric Properties of the Revised Self-Monitoring Scale (RSMS) and the Concern for Appropriateness Scale (CAS) in Hebrew
Authors: Bachner-Melman Rachel , Bacon-Shnoor Naomi , Zohar Ada H. , Elizur Yoel , Ebstein Richard P.
Published: January 2009

We examined the factor structure, reliability, and construct validity of a Hebrew translation of Lennox and Wolfe’s Revised Self-Monitoring Scale (RSMS) and Concern for Appropriateness Scale (CAS) in a large Israeli population sample. A total of 1,294 individuals (1,010 females and 284 males), divided into two samples, completed the RSMS, the CAS, the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire Harm Avoidance Scale, and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. With the exception of RSMS Item 12, the total and subscale structure of the English versions of the scales was replicated in both samples. Internal consistencies compared very favorably with those of the original scales. The CAS and the RSMS were moderately correlated yet appeared to be distinct, correlating as expected in opposite directions with harm avoidance and self-esteem. Confirmatory factor analysis justified the use of the RSMS and the CAS as separate scales with two subscales in each. Whereas the fit of our data to the RSMS was very good, the fit to the CAS was far less satisfactory, apparently because items tended to load onto both subscales. The Hebrew translation of the RSMS, and, to a lesser extent, that of the CAS, appear to be psychometrically sound instruments.
A unifying framework for shoreline migration: 1. Multiscale shoreline evolution on sedimentary coasts
Authors: Wolinsky Matthew A.
Published: January 2009

A unifying framework for shoreline migration is presented which synthesizes problems from coastal engineering, geomorphology, and stratigraphy into a common quantitative basis. Consideration of characteristic problems from these fields reveals that multiscale shoreline evolution problems naturally break into three classes on the basis of the morphologic unit of evolution: shoreface bed versus shoreline planform versus stratigraphic shoreline trajectory. Shoreline evolution models correspondingly break into morphodynamic, morphokinematic, and hybrid approaches. A generalized shoreline continuity equation is derived, the shoreline Exner equation, which subsumes equilibrium profile models commonly used in geomorphology and engineering and provides a natural framework for interpreting shoreline trajectories preserved in the sedimentary record. The shoreline Exner equation provides a rigorous basis for geometric and moving boundary models, which have significant untapped potential for shoreline migration problems. Recent advances in computational methods for evolving interface problems make hybrid models particularly attractive for problems of large‐scale planform shoreline dynamics, such as delta evolution.
Glacial to interglacial primary production and El Niño–Southern Oscillation dynamics inferred from coccolithophores of the Santa Barbara Basin
Authors: Grelaud Michaël , Beaufort Luc , Cuven Stéphanie , Buchet Noëlle
Published: January 2009

We investigate the long‐term stability of El Niño–Southern Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation based on the examination of coccolithophore assemblages in a largely laminated 35 ka sedimentary record, retrieved in the Santa Barbara Basin (core MD02‐2503). At a centennial scale coccolith assemblages indicate low primary production in the basin from 35 to 11.5 ka B.P., whereas the Holocene is characterized by high‐productivity conditions. This pattern demonstrates the influence of the glacial‐interglacial cycles on productivity and, by inference, on the nutrient supply by the upwelling cell off Point of Conception. On a shorter scale, laminations associated with Dansgaard‐Oeschger events appear to be due to an injection of poorly oxygenated waters in the deepest part of the basin rather than anoxia due to high primary production. A seasonal sampling in seven laminated sections (spanning from 20 to 220 years) extracted from Holocene, Bølling‐Allerød, and Dansgaard‐Oeschger event 3 indicates El Niño probably existed continuously during the last 28 ka. The frequency of El Niño varied through time (between 1/2.5 and 1/5 event a−1) and appearing to follow the precession cycle. El Niño exhibits higher (lower) frequencies when the precession values are lower (higher). Finally, the Holocene is characterized by a decrease in El Niño's frequencies due to the reinforcement of El Niño through this period.