bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Development of the Theatre in French-speaking West Africa
Authors: Edebiri Unionmwan
Published: January 2009

French-speaking African drama owed much of its growth in the colonial era to French initiative and support. From 1933 to the late 40s, French-speaking African drama was virtually synonymous with the end-of-year theatrical presentations at the William Ponty School in Gorée, Senegal. Not only did the French colonial administration encourage the students to tour the capitals of French West African colonies with their plays during the holidays but it also sponsored a William Ponty School troupe to the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937, where it performed Sokamé and Les prétendants rivaux.
Black French Theatre of the Eighties
Authors: Waters Harold A.
Published: January 2009

At the end of this essay is a list of the black French plays first published in book form between 1980 and May 1983. In all there are 43 plays in 31 books, not counting mimeographed and journal items, nor performed plays that have not yet been printed. The rate of book publication continues high. I commented on most of the 1980 and 1981 plays in ‘Black French Theatre: The Latest Plays’ and ‘Black French Theatre Update’ so in a first section I shall present those missed from that period as well as the ones of 1982 and 1983. This will be done alphabetically by author except that Diouf is postponed until Sall, the two having written on the same subject.
New Trends in the Theatre of the Ivory Coast (1972–83)
Authors: Kotchy Barthélémy
Published: January 2009

Since 1970, the young generation of dramatists in the Ivory Coast has questioned the approach to the theatre represented by the tradition of the Ecole William Ponty and even by the new writing of Bernard Dadié, with his Monsieur Thôgô-gnini and, especially, Béatrice du Congo. Following Aimé Césaire's example, Dadié began writing political plays after 1966, but did, at the same time, incorporate some features of the traditional theatre. The founders of La Griotique, discussed below, thought these reforms too timid and were determined to break completely with the old style. This was the starting point for the new trends we shall be examining in this article.
I — Theatricality Introduction: Theatricality: A Key Concept in Theatre and Cultural Studies
Authors: Fischer-Lichte Erika
Published: January 2009

At the Theatre Historiography Symposium, held during the 1993 Helsinki IFTR/FIRT Conference, a specific term came into circulation which infiltrated and permeated the discussion to such an extent that it appeared to adopt the position and function of a key term in theatre historiography: ‘theatricality’. This was no great surprise, however. For the symposium set out to consider two basic issues: first, to examine the application of analytic strategies from other disciplines to theatre history and, secondly, to identify the distinctive features of theatre history as a single discipline. Both concerns are closely related to the concept of theatricality.
From Theatre to Theatricality—How to Construct Reality
Authors: Fischer-Lichte Erika
Published: January 2009

At the end of the nineteenth century, the dominance of language, so typical of Western culture since the Renaissance, was increasingly challenged. As early as 1876, Nietzsche wrote on Richard Wagner in Thoughts Out of Season:

He was the first to recognize an evil which is as widespread as civilization itself among men; language is everywhere diseased, and the burden of this terrible disease weighs heavily upon the whole of man's development. Inasmuch as language has retreated ever more and more from its true province— the expression of strong feelings, which it was once able to convey in all their simplicity—and has always had to strain after the practically impossible achievement of communicating the reverse of feeling, that is to say, thought, its strength has become so exhausted by this excessive confusion of its duties during the comparatively short period of modern civilization, that it is no longer able to perform even that function which justifies its existence, to wit, the assisting of those who suffer in communicating with each other concerning the sorrows of existence. Man can no longer make this misery known unto others by means of language; hence he cannot really express himself any longer. And under these conditions, which are only vaguely felt at present, language has gradually become a force in itself which with spectral arms coerces and drives humanity where it least wants to go.

The disease of language which Nietzsche here diagnoses, can be described as a degeneration of language from the state of being a polyfunctional, ambiguous, flexible semiotic system that allows people to express their feelings, constitute their selves and communicate with each other, into a restrictive technical language.
Actors and Emotions: A Psychological Perspective
Authors: Konijn Elly
Published: January 2009

The acting of emotions on the stage can be looked at from three different points of view. Traditionally, the relationship of the emotions of the actor to the presupposed emotions of his character is discussed from a theatrical point of view. I shall provide a short overview of the different approaches to acting emotions based on current acting theories. Only recently have the emotions of the actor on stage portraying character-emotions been looked at scientifically from a psychological perspective. Finally, I shall present the empirical results of a questionnaire drawing on answers from a wide sample of professional actors. Due to limited space, this presentation can only be a global one. Emphasis is placed on the presentation of the empirical material about actors and emotions on stage.
Theatre History and the Nation-State
Authors: McConachie Bruce
Published: January 2009

The American theatre and film critic Stanley Kaufman once told the following version of the ‘Napoleon’ joke. It seems a French official in the 1820s on a visit to an insane asylum was taken around the institution by one of the inmates. As the tour progressed, the official was increasingly impressed by the inmate's evident knowledge of the asylum. There were times when his guide even seemed to be running the place; he commanded orderlies to open locked doors or to remove other inmates from confinement, and the orderlies always obeyed. Finally, they came to the last room on the tour and the inmate explained that the people within suffered from delusions of grandeur. Sure enough, the official looked through the bars and saw an entire roomful of men dressed like French generals, strutting about with one hand thrust inside their vests. ‘Those poor fools all think they are Napoleon’, said the guide. Certain now that his guide was as rational as he, the official asked him how soon he was going to be released. The inmate drew him aside and whispered confidentially, ‘They'll never let me go. They're afraid of my power in France. They know all these other Napoleons are fakes.’
The Three-Actor Rule
Authors: Ashby Clifford
Published: January 2009

For those who may have been a little dismayed by my previous questioning of such sacred absolutes of the Greek theatre as (1) the circular shape of the original orchestra, (2) the central placement of the altar, (3) the panoramic siting of Greek theatres, and (4) the dawn beginning of performance, please accept this assurance: the three-actor rule for tragedies is alive and well—and not presently refutable. I shall apply the three-actor rule to the extant tragedies in order to see what effect it had upon acting and production practices during the Classic period.
The Impact of Working Conditions upon Acting Style
Authors: Sarlós Robert K. , McDermott Douglas
Published: January 2009

All artistic conventions of each theatrical era have two intertwining aspects: the aesthetic goals, and the technical crafts for achieving them. In some cases, a particular combination or development of skills results in a refinement of the art or the discovery of a newly desirable aesthetic; in others, the demand for new artistic effects leads to the invention of appropriate techniques. Thus, when painterly standards and drafting methods of central perspective spread rapidly over Northern Italy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, illusionistic spectacle became an indispensable element of theatrical performance. It was eagerly supplied by architects in whom the printing of Vitruvius's De Architectura (1486) awakened both the responsibility for and the challenge embodied in designing theatrical scenery. Conversely, as Elizabethan playwrights conceived of plots dependent on avoidance of meetings between certain exiting and entering characters, second and third entrances were provided—either by cutting into the tiring house wall, or by hanging a curtain with several slits in front of it, to accommodate stage traffic.
When is the Play the Thing?—Analytic Aesthetics and Dramatic Theory
Authors: Saltz David Z.
Published: January 2009

When the Prague semiotician Jiri Veltrusky maintains that ‘in theater, the linguistic sign system, which intervenes through the dramatic text, always combines and conflicts with acting, which belongs to an entirely different sign system’, he makes explicit a commonplace premise: that the performance and the play constitute two distinct and parallel sign systems. This premise underlies the standard distinction between the dramatic text and the performance text, and forms the basis of what I will call the ‘two-text’ model of the play/performance relationship. The difference between a play and its performance is a difference between the ‘languages’ in which the two ‘texts’ are ‘written’: a play is a text constructed of linguistic signs, and a performance, a text constructed of theatrical signs.
Applause for the Wrong Reasons: The Use of Applications for Political Purposes in Paris Theatres, 1780–1830
Authors: Hemmings F. W. J.
Published: January 2009

John Moore, the Glasgow physician and friend of Tobias Smollett, after attending a few performances at the Théâtre-Fran¸ais during a visit to the French capital in 1779, commented as follows on the surprisingly subversive behaviour of the Parisian parterre at that date: ‘By the emphatic applause they bestow on particular passages of the pieces represented at the theatre, they convey to the monarch the sentiments of the nation respecting the measures of his government.’ Moore gives no precise instances, but it is clear what he is referring to, and there were plenty of other contemporary observers to testify to the growing habit of making applications, and using this method to express opposition to certain government policies which, in the prevalent atmosphere of political repression, it might have been dangerous to contest too openly anywhere else. The theatre auditorium was the ideal place for voicing anonymous criticism with impunity. The guard in the theatre, entrusted with the task of preserving law and order, was powerless to prevent the parterre applying a maxim or simple phrase spoken from the stage to some matter of burning political import, and showing, by their vociferous applause, where exactly their sympathies lay.
Tristan Tzara's Mouchoir de nuages
Authors: Whitton David
Published: January 2009

Tzara's role in the Dada onslaught on the theatre is well known. His Le Cœur à gaz (1921) is often regarded as the masterpiece of that genre. It is sometimes overlooked, though, that Tzara's theatrical activity did not cease with the disintegration of the Dada movement. His fourth and final play, Mouchoir de nuages (1924), is often relegated to the status of a minor coda to his earlier experiments. It is certainly a less revolutionary work than Le Cœur à gaz or the two celestial adventures of Monsieur Antipyrine. On its own terms, though – that is, as an attempt at theatrical renewal rather than theatrical demolition – it is no less noteworthy than its more notorious predecessors.
Ibsen and the Irish Theatre
Authors: Worth Katharine
Published: January 2009

The Irish Literary Theatre, from which a new Irish theatre was to develop, came to birth at the very point when Ibsen was about to depart from the European theatrical scene. His last play, When We Dead Awaken, appeared in 1899, the year in which Yeats's The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field were produced in Dublin. They were the first fruits of the resolve taken by the two playwrights, with Lady Gregory and George Moore, to ‘build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature’ and they offered decidedly different foretastes of what that ‘school’ might bring forth. Yeats declared himself an adherent of a poetic theatre that would use fantasy, vision and dream without regard for the limits set by the realistic convention. Martyn, on the other hand, was clearly following Ibsen in his careful observance of day-to-day probability. The central symbol of his play, the heather field, represents an obscure psychological process which might have received more ‘inward’ treatment. But instead it is fitted into a pattern of social activities in something like the way of the prosaically functional but symbolic orphanage in Ghosts.
A Defence of D'Arcy and Arden's Non-Stop Connolly Show
Authors: Cohen Michael
Published: January 2009

Margaretta D'Arcy and John Arden's six part cycle, The Non-Stop Connolly Show (1975), is probably the most ambitious attempt in English to dramatize working-class and socialist history. However, productions have been remarkably few even in the ‘alternative’ theatre, so that the work has seldom been seen, even by its critics. Arguably, it is as important as anything in the Arden canon and is certainly the major achievement of the D'Arcy/Arden one. But to say so is to challenge a widely-held view that the D'Arcy/Arden collaborations of the 1970s are significant only in so far as they illustrate a decline in Arden's career. Even when admired, the Connolly plays are usually discussed primarily as an aspect of Arden's development. When not, they are perceived as the clearest indication of his supposed demise as a major playwright, a fall from favour which is often attributed to D'Arcy's influence. Perversely, such discussions may simultaneously fail to acknowledge D'Arcy's role as senior partner in The Non-Stop Connolly Show.
Finding a Truer Form: Rawle Gibbons's Carnival Play I, Lawah
Authors: Fido Elaine Savory
Published: January 2009

The development of so-called ‘Carnival theatre’ in the Anglophone Caribbean has been steady and important. Rawle Gibbons, a young dramatist/director presently heading the recently established Creative Arts Centre at the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies in his native Trinidad, has learned to utilize ritual and festival in his playwriting in increasingly effective ways. I, Lawah is his latest play, and in it he articulates, in theatrical form, a belief in the importance of Caribbean tradition as a revitalizing, invigorating element for the community after the enervating period of colonial rule and the ever-present threat of neocolonial inertia taking its place.
Titus Andronicus directed by Daniel Mesguich: The Other Stage Beyond Misery
Authors: Baal Georges , Singleton Brian
Published: January 2009

Daniel Mesguich does not meet with everyone's approval. This child prodigy, this prodigal son, has made a name for himself since leaving the Conservatoire by his provocative mises en scène. Since creating the Théâtre du Miroir in 1974 at the age of twenty-two he has passionately divided both critics and connoisseurs. Some dismiss him outright without a second thought; others proclaim him a superstar, a genius. And there are those who hover in the middle, unsure how long they can entertain this phenomenon. More recently, of course, his opera direction (Wagner's Ring in 1988) has raised temperatures once more. No one can arouse a rather dominant theatre scene or incite new Hernani riots as Mesguich can.
The Playwright in the French Theatre — A Reply to Keith Gore
Authors: Bradby David
Published: January 2009

Keith Gore's article ‘The Playwright in an institutionalized theatre’ (TRI, vol. 15, no. 2, Summer 1990) paints a dismal picture of the state of affairs in France at the end of the 1980s. Gore claims that the French playwright is an endangered species, the victim of predatory directors whose uncontrolled lust for power has weakened and impoverished the whole institution. Gore is able to support his claims with an impressive array of statistics and his article must be welcomed for making these available to English readers and for raising what is an important subject for debate. He was greatly helped by the publication, in 1987, of a meticulously researched and far-reaching report on the playwright in the French theatre by Michel Vinaver. Gore's fundamental suspicion of the director finds many echoes among practitioners of French theatre to-day. It has become fashionable to demonize the director and to accuse him (or occasionally her) of stifling new talent. But although the record of French theatre in the decade since the Socialists came to power is, to some extent, disappointing, it is not as bleak as Gore suggests, nor is it helpful to suggest that all its ills can be traced to a single source in the director. The director, too, is a product of the same political and cultural forces that have been at work gradually changing the shape of the theatrical map in France.
Henslowe's Diary and the Economics of Play Revision for Revival, 1592–1603
Authors: Knutson Roslyn L.
Published: January 2009

There is much evidence, it seems, that Elizabethan dramatists spent a measure of their creative energy revising old playbooks. The title pages of some quartos advertise that their contents are ‘amended’ or ‘newly corrected’, and the similarity of plays on such subjects as the Yorkist kings and tamable shrews have made it plausible that one text is a revision of the other. In the 1908 edition of Henslowe's Diary, W. W. Greg lent sanction to the idea of playhouse revision; defending the sign ‘ne’ as the mark of new plays, he offered as an exception a play ‘new in the sense that it was a revival with alterations’. In the Cambridge editions of Shakespeare's plays, J. Dover Wilson systematically identified textual variants and cruxes in the early plays as evidence of revisions, allegedly made for a revival. Over the years, editions of and monographs on plays with more than one textual version have reinforced the association of major alterations with a play's return to the stage after some period of retirement. For such an apparently widespread playhouse practice, G. E. Bentley developed a ‘rule of thumb’: ‘almost any play … kept in active repertory by the company which owned it is most likely to contain later revisions by the author or, in many cases, by another playwright working for the same company’.
A French Troupe in Naples in 1773: A Theatrical Curiosity
Authors: Davison Rosena
Published: January 2009

On January 2nd 1773 the abbé Galiani wrote to his friend in Paris, Mme d'Epinay: ‘Qu'on voie Paris et Naples, on verra une légère esquisse du tout et du néant.’ He is referring to the dearth of interesting people and events he found on returning to his native Naples, in contrast to the flourishing social and cultural life which he had enjoyed with his many friends in Paris. Forced to leave the post he had held for ten years as secretary to the ambassador of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies because of a diplomatic blunder, Galiani dreaded his return to Naples, and his letters constantly complain of the intolerable conditions of what he termed his ‘exile’. While prone to a certain amount of exaggeration in his letters – thereby hoping to provoke sympathy amongst his Parisian correspondents – Galiani nevertheless had cause to complain of the intellectual ‘desert’ in which he now found himself. This is how he expressed it to Mme d'Epinay, his closest and most faithful correspondent:

Si vous ne me rendez pas ma gaîté, je n'écrirai plus à personne; car ici je n'ai rien qui me tourmente, si ce n'est que je n'ai ni d'amusements, ni de plaisirs, ni d'amis, ni d'écoliers, ni de dîners, ni de soupers, ni d'argent, ni de vanité, ni de gaîté, ni d'affaires agréables, ni d'amours. (I, 50–1)

It is therefore not surprising that an unusual theatrical event in Naples shook him out of the apathy into which he had retreated, and temporarily at least filled the Neapolitan ‘néant’ of which he complained. This was the arrival of a French theatre company; and for approximately two and a half months, from early January to mid-March 1773, Galiani's letters to Mme d'Epinay were almost entirely devoted to what he enthusiastically called his ‘Gazette des Spectacles’. The event could not fail to capture his undivided attention. The company, directed by Sennepart, was to perform seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French plays at the Teatro dei Fiorentini. Apart from delighting Galiani, this brief episode of theatrical history provides us with some interesting insights into the taste in drama, both French and Italian, at the mid-way point of the second half of the eighteenth century. In this article we propose to examine the choice of plays, and the reactions of the Neapolitan audiences, as reported by Galiani who, with his thorough and up-to-date knowledge of the French theatre and of the milieu which had inspired it, frequently amazes (and amuses) us with the perspicacity of the comments in his ‘Gazette’.
Theatres and Spectacles in Italy: An English Gentleman on Tour, 1838–9
Authors: van der Merwe Pieter
Published: January 2009

Following an exhibition in 1979 on the British theatrical scene-painter and marine artist Clarkson Stanfield R.A. (1793–1867) a previously unseen document came to light in the hands of one of his descendants.
The Royal Plays at Christ Church in 1636: A New Document
Authors: Elliott John R. , Buttrey John
Published: January 2009

On 29 August 1636, King Charles I and his Queen, Henrietta Maria, paid a royal visit to the University of Oxford at the invitation of Archbishop Laud, Chancellor of the University. They lodged in Christ Church, a royal foundation and the largest of the Oxford colleges, which was to become the seat of their court during the Civil War. During the two days they spent in Oxford on this occasion, the King and Queen and their entourage were entertained with three plays: William Strode's The Floating Island, in Christ Church hall on the night of 29 August; George Wilde's Love's Hospital, in St. John's College hall on the afternoon of 30 August; and William Cartwright's The Royal Slave, again in Christ Church hall on the night of 30 August.
‘The Gaiety of Meditated Success’: The Richard III of William Charles Macready
Authors: Green London
Published: January 2009

William Charles Macready was, except for Edmund Kean, the greatest and most influential actor of his time. He was distinguished not only for the energy, design, and command of his own acting, but also for the introduction of thorough rehearsal procedures and a concern for all aspects of production: a policy which led to the carefully unified production work of his disciple Samuel Phelps and the lavish Shakespearian productions of Henry Irving at the end of the century. Macready was demanding, disciplined, outspoken, and widely admired. He in fact helped to establish the actor-manager/company relationship typical of the period. In his youth, relationships between leading actors had been typically combative and coercive, and actors who had developed successful individual styles exacted company submission as their due. Kean, when he could, had refused to act with other men of quality, and Macready himself had been kept from Shakespearian roles at Covent Garden by Charles Mayne Young, J. B. Booth, and Charles Kemble. In the face of such divisive factors, Macready, with continual hard work and a bustling dictatorial manner, rose to a position of such power and respect that twice he was able to gather around him some of the most respected actors of his time to form a company unequalled for the beauty and finish of its productions.
The Actresses' Franchise League and the Campaign for Women's Suffrage 1908–1914
Authors: Hirshfield Claire
Published: January 2009

In the great suffrage campaign waged in the decade preceding the First World War, women established a multitude of organizations in order to exert collective pressure upon a reluctant House of Commons. Some, such as the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), which was founded by Emmeline Pankhurst, favored confrontational tactics and resorted to occasional violence against property, as a means of attracting notice to the cause. Others, most notably the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) over which Mrs Millicent Fawcett presided, defined themselves as ‘constitutional’ and utilized the classic methods of persuasion and lobbying, in preference to the more dramatic tactics of their ‘militant’ sisters. Between the extremes of the WSPU and the NUWSS were numerous organizations composed of women activists of varying backgrounds, occupations, and views, sharing nonetheless a common dedication to the principle of female enfranchisement and caught up in the excitement and pageantry of a campaign which at times appeared almost religious in tone and character.
Margaret Webster's Henry VIII: The Survival of ‘Scenic Shakespeare’ in America
Authors: Micheli Linda McJ.
Published: January 2009

On 6 November 1946, in New York City, three enterprising women of the theatre – Margaret Webster, Cheryl Crawford, and Eva La Gallienne – launched a noble experiment with a lavish production of Shakespeare's Henry VIII. Their goal was to found a national repertory company, modelled on the European national theatres, to be a home for the classics and a training ground for a new breed of classically trained American actors – ‘an American Old Vic’. Webster and her partners had been trained in such a tradition, and their dream of an American national theatre had been given additional impetus by the Old Vic's successful visit to New York in 1945. Despite the good wishes of the theatrical community, an able band of established actors (such as Walter Hampden, Victor Jory, and the founders themselves), and generally sympathetic critical notices, the fledgling American Repertory Theatre (ART) foundered financially after one season, and the dream was abandoned (though it has recently been revived by Peter Sellars and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.).
‘Shine on us, Grandmother Moon’: Coding in Canadian First Nations Drama
Authors: Gilbert Reid
Published: January 2009

Current productions written, directed, and/or performed by First Nations Canadians are often characterized by a complex layering of myth and iconography operating simultaneously in more than one cultural system. The effect is richly visual and auditory theatre, but, more important, such performances highlight the essentially indexical and iconographic nature of theatre itself by writing text at the intersection of discourses with quite different political and historical markers and, in the process, bringing those discourses together to form a new typology of signs. What is problematic is the effect of such signs.
Community Plays—A Search for Identity
Authors: Andreasen John
Published: January 2009

During the last twenty years the number of community plays has grown enormously in Scandinavia and Great Britain. In Denmark, on average, some twenty new plays are produced annually. From the early 1970s to 1993, I have registered more than 300 Danish productions; these include about sixty of the 140 plays which celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of abolition of adscription in 1988. ‘Community plays’ are known by a number of different names. In Scandinavia they are called ‘lokalspil’, ‘egnsspil’, ‘bygdespel’, ‘krönikespel’, ‘arbetarspel’, and so on. It is important to distinguish ‘community theatre’ from ‘community play’. Community theatre is any kind of performance organized by ordinary people in a given area with or without support from theatre professionals. It may be totally amateur or it may include professional guest performances by theatre practitioners from outside the area.
Opening Up Doors of Perception: Stanislav Stratiev and Yordan Radichkov
Authors: Vigouroux-Frey Nicole
Published: January 2009

The principle of a new professional theatre was decided in Sofia, in 1956:the State Theatre of Satire. Founded in 1957, its aim was to promote comedy and satire. For obvious reasons, party politics could not have allowed its creation earlier in years when satire was not considered serious enough; but in the late 1950s official aesthetics was beginning to crumble.
Bulgarian Radio Drama: An Aural Workshop
Authors: Dimitrova Ralitza
Published: January 2009

Bulgarian radio drama first appeared in 1945, broadcasting live from the national studios. The immediate postwar years were difficult throughout the country, both in economic and political terms. The socialist revolution and takeover, on 9 September 1944, soon imposed strict criteria on dramatic creation and artistic achievement, presumably on world standards. Radio drama, as one of the key instruments in the new national, revolutionary symphony, could not but play in general harmony. It naturally developed according to patterns governed by the political authorities. It contributed to programmes devoted to promote conflict, action, heroes, virtues abounding in the young socialist doctrine. Russian plays and novels were selected and broadcast as master keys in the opening of popular minds to the new philosophy. Broadcasting slots allowed some room for the production of the emerging Bulgarian literature of the late nineteenth century. Plays and playwrights from other parts of the world remained ignored by those in power and, as a consequence, by the production teams and the general audience.
A Galaxy of Directors
Authors: Prunet Monique
Published: January 2009

The art of directing has undergone great changes in Bulgaria over the last forty years. New trends appeared in the 1960s with the Theatre of Burgas, whose influence is felt to this day. Two generations are working alongside each other, and the younger directors are becoming more and more influential as the role of the director has gained increasing importance over the last few years, with the development of experimental theatre and the techniques of collage.
The Ritual Context of Two Plays by Soyinka
Authors: Wright Derek
Published: January 2009

New Year purification ceremonies are perhaps spread more widely over African fiction than African drama, ranging from the disposal of the old year's yams at the Feast of the New Yam in Achebe'sThings Fall Apartto the Somalian Rendezvous of the Brooms which, in Nurridin Farah's novelSweet and Sour Milk, the military dictatorship perverts into a political circus. More specifically, the annual rite of the carrier, who bears away the sins and misfortunes of the past year in the form of a miniature wooden boat, a bundle of twigs or a wicker effigy, is handled figuratively in the first novels of the Ghanaians Kofi Awoonor and Ayi Kwei Armah. This particular ritual practice does make some vestigial dramatic appearances, however – for example, in the symbolic dismemberment of Tufa in the cleansing floods at the end of J. P. Clark's playThe Masquerade– and it receives what is probably its most complex and experimental treatment in two plays by Wole Soyinka,The Strong Breedand his adaptation of Euripides'The Bacchae.
Unnatural Acts: Art and Passion on the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Stage
Authors: Shortland Michael
Published: January 2009

The so-called ‘theatrical revolution’ of the mid-eighteenth-century is generally hailed as the turning point in the history of English acting patterns, writing styles and playhouse management. As with any revolution, its origins and development have been described by leading participants from the viewpoint of the victor. It is a story of the pioneering labours of such figures as David Garrick and Charles Macklin rendering new performances, of old plays being reset and recast, of puffing up the pride and the prestige of the profession of actors and actresses. In true revolutionary manner, the accumulated weight of tradition which had borne down so heavily on individual talents, narrowing and stifling them, was cast aside. Under the banner of‘realism’ (in some accounts ‘naturalism’), a new generation of actors breathed life into dusty theatres and threw down the challenge of novelty: new styles, new acting manuals, new forms of expression, new representations on stage.
Zeami's Mature Thoughts on Acting
Authors: Ishii Tatsuro
Published: January 2009

It is difficult to deal with all the ideas and concepts of a man whose writings span a period of some forty years and which are contained within some twenty-one essays. But the time spent on even a cursory exploration into some of the most important ideas presented in Zeami's later essays is most rewarding to anyone interested in theatre, for they are unique in pointing to the nucleus of his concepts on acting and performance based on his own experience and deep insights as a thinker, actor, director and playwright.
Training of the Nō Performer
Authors: Emmert Richard
Published: January 2009

Japanese nō is a complex theatrical form, as most Japanese including nō performers themselves will often say. The nō performer must undergo years of training before he will be recognized as an ‘adult’ among other nō performers. But this feature in itself is common to many other performing art forms throughout the world. In terms of pure performing technique, in fact, the physical demands of nō are probably not as great as many other Asian genres – such as kathakali, for example, which demands extensive training to master its complex eye, face and hand techniques, or Peking opera, which requires an often highly acrobatic body control of its performers.
The Festival of the Kasuga Wakamiya Shrine
Authors: Ishii Tatsuro
Published: January 2009

Kasuga Wakamiya no On-matsuri (hereafter referred to as On-matsuri) is a giant annual festival which has taken place for almost 850 years. Nara, the first permanent capital of Japan between 710 and 794 A.D., abounds in ancient rituals and festivals even to the present day; On-matsuri is the largest of these, attracting both local people and visitors from throughout Japan. On-matsuri is known particularly for its wealth of ancient Japanese performing arts such as kagura, bugaku, sēnō, dengaku, sarugaku, and nō, as well as for the ritualistic events of Shintoism, the polytheistic religion indigenous to Japan.
Political Censorship of the Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Authors: Goldstein Robert Justin
Published: January 2009

Censorship of the stage, like censorship of the printed word, was widespread and well-established in Europe in 1815. However, while prior censorship of the press was eliminated throughout Europe by 1914, European countries almost universally retained prior censorship of the stage until (and sometimes well after) World War I. England became the first major European country to abolish censorship of the press in 1695, yet Parliament systematized a formerly haphazard theatre censorship in 1737, and did not end stage censorship until 1968. Most other European countries did not eliminate press censorship until about the middle of the nineteenth century, while maintaining theatre censorship throughout the century, and typically exercised much harsher controls over the stage than over the printed word. As John Allen has noted, ‘In many times and places the drama has been subject to far greater censorship than any other form of literature or art’, reflecting governmental feelings that ‘the theatre, with its power of affecting an audience with possibly subversive emotions and ideas, is more to be feared’.
The Training of Actors at the Paris Conservatoire during the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Hemmings F. W. J.
Published: January 2009

The original Ecole royale dramatique, forerunner of the Paris Conservatoire, was opened in 1786, which makes it an institution of truly venerable antiquity compared to our own stripling Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, founded relatively recently, in 1904, by Sir Herbert Tree. Its establishment on the eve of the French Revolution came as the culmination of thirty years of projects, argument and disappointment. The idea appears to have been first mooted by three of the leading actors of the Comédie-Française Lekain, Préville and Bellecourt, who on 4 September 1756 appended their signatures to a ‘Mémoire précis, tendant à constater la nécessité d'établir une Ecole Royale, pour y faire des élèves qui puissent exercer l'art de la déclamation dans le tragique, et s'instruire des moyens qui forment le bon acteur comique.’ In their exordium, the authors drew particular attention to the fact that the provincial theatre companies, which had traditionally formed a reservoir of acting talent for the Comédie-Française, could no longer be relied on to maintain the supply. They offered no explanation why this should be, beyond hinting that the quality of these tributary companies was declining. The real reason for the crisis in recruitment, which was undoubtedly making itself felt during the closing years of Louis XV's reign, can be deduced from the pages of Papil-lon de La Ferté's Journal, beginning with the entry for 28 February 1767, in which he reproduces the gist of a memorandum he submitted at this time to the Due de Duras, one of the Gentilshommes de la Chambre principally concerned with the welfare of the Comédie-Française. It was largely a matter of relative earnings. A good provincial actor could count on an annual income of some 7–8,000 livres; if he were outstanding enough to warrant an order being despatched demanding he should make his début in the capital, he would, rather than try and make ends meet on an income of 1200 livres which was all the Comédie-Française could offer him, as like as not escape abroad. In addition, as La Ferté discovered when, in the summer of 1767, he left on a recruiting drive to the French-speaking provinces of the Netherlands, there was considerable reluctance to take up a position in Paris where, as he reported to Duras on his return, ‘les comediens les plus mediocres que j'ai vus dans mon voyage m'avaient annoncé qu'ils renonceraient plutôt au théâtre, que de venir s'exposer aux cabales des Comédiens Français et aux mauvais traitements que l'on faisait subir aux débutants’ – a reference to the notorious hostility of the permanent actors towards newcomers who might have designs on the parts in which they fancied themselves.
The Ghosts of Versailles
Authors: Carlson Marvin
Published: January 2009

An important shift occurred in the work of many analysts of performance in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a shift suggested by the title and the main argument of a book appearing at that time, Gerald Hinkle's 1979 Art as Event. Hinkle argued that critical understanding of the performing arts had been hindered by the application to them of strategies evolved in arts such as literature and painting, where temporal placement and duration were not so central a part of the experience. Instead of attempting to analyse a phenomenon like a theatrical performance as an art object, Hinkle suggested, it should rather be considered as an event, a shift in orientation that not only places more emphasis on the working out of the performance in a temporal dimension, but also on the embedding of the entire experience in a particular historical and cultural moment which normally operates on a more direct and conscious fashion in both the creative and the receptive processes than it does in such arts as literature and painting.
A Jew in the Dark: The Aesthetics of Absence—Monodrama as Evocation and Formation of ‘Genetic’ Collective Memory
Authors: Kaynar Gad
Published: January 2009

This is the story of a Jew from Israel, who dreams that he is a Marrano priest in Spain, who dreams that he is a Jew in Israel.… And as the reader stands between these mirrors.… and looks at the faces doubly reflected all around, there is certainly no need to tell him whose face he is seeing.
The Defamiliarization of a Significant Phenomenon
Authors: Wilcox Dean
Published: January 2009

As I ponder how we as performance theorists endeavour to analyse the question of context as it relates to theatrical activity, I am struck by the fact that this question has both micro and macro-cosmic implications. Certainly, we must address the far reaching ideological concerns that permeate any performance, but within specific parameters, within the confines of a particular performance, the interrelationship of material components demands that we deal with the physical presence that appears before us. This essay grapples with this problem of theatrical presence through adiscussion of visual perception.
The Case for the Rectangular/Trapezoidal Orchestra
Authors: Ashby Clifford
Published: January 2009

In 1947, Carlo Anti publishedTeatri Greci Arcaici da Minosse a Pericle. In this book, he formulated what one reviewer termed ‘the dogma of the originally rectangular orchestra’. This directly contradicted over a century of research which had concluded that Greek performance areas began with a completely circular dancing place and gradually changed to an arrangement which used a partial circle backed by a scene house. Over a hundred part-circular orchestras, lastingly embalmed in stone, attest to the accuracy of at least part of this curvilinear hypothesis. All of these stone remains, however, are from the mid-fourth century or later; nothing remains of the wooden theatres in which the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were first performed.
Opéra Comique at the Théâtre Italien
Authors: Neiiendam Klaus
Published: January 2009

In 1976 a drawing, today at the Bibliothèque Nationale, by the French artist, Pierre Alexandre Wille (1748–1821) was published in Theatre Research International. The picture is signed and dated: ‘P. A. Wille filius del 1767’ and depicts a performance in the Hôtel de Bourgogne, at that time called the Théâtre Italien or the Comédie Italienne. But the drawing has not yet been analysed, nor has the artist's motif been identified. [Plate I]
The Languages of the Jews and the Jewish Theatre
Authors: Rozik Eli
Published: January 2009

In the professional sense Jewish theatre does not emerge until the second half of the nineteenth century. Its establishment was the consequence of two hundred years of socio-economic processes which revolutionized the structure of Jewish society. These processes had a crucial influence on the various languages used by the Jews and eventually determined which ones would be spoken on Jewish stages.
Audience Response in the Yiddish ‘Shund’ Theatre
Authors: Bialik Ilana
Published: January 2009

The following comparison between the Yiddish ‘Shund’ playDos Yudishe Hertzby Joseph Lateiner and August von Katzebue's most popular melodramaMenschenhass und Reueaims to throw light on a very significant aspect of the Yiddish ‘Shund’ Theatre. I believe that the conclusions of this comparison show how Yiddish ‘Shund’ playwrights tried to answer their audience expectations and how they manipulated their audience by trying to evoke a certain kind of response.
The Gospel According to Hanoch
Authors: Levy Shimon
Published: January 2009

Hanoch Levin, born 1943, is one of Israel's best known and most widely performed playwrights, and the author of some 20 strikingly morbid plays (as well as numerous short stories and many beautiful lyrics). Levin's drama has proved to be both an artistic and a commercial success. His political cabaret shows You, I and the Next War (1968) and Queen of the Bathtub (1970), ridiculed the self-righteous complacency of Israeli society after the overwhelming victory of the Six Day War in 1967. Levin, like the slave in triumphal processions of ancient Rome, stood behind hubrisridden Israel, whispering ‘memento mori’, and so, quite naturally, caused a local scandal. Levin mocks highly esteemed army generals, and he uses (or abuses) the sacred myth of the Akeda, the binding of Isaac, when he is about to be offered as a sacrifice by Abraham (Genesis 22): ‘Dear father, when you stand by my grave … do not be too proud … and ask me to forgive you’, says dead Isaac, a ‘live’ metaphor for the blood spilt in vain, in Levin's sacrilegious version. The Israeli censor found it necessary to ban The Patriot (1983), a reaction to the stupidity and futility of the Lebanon War, until some modifications were entered.
Eight Portraits of Gelosi Actors in 1589?
Authors: Katritzky M. A.
Published: January 2009

The group of actors from whom the Gelosi company arose are thought to have first come together in 1568, with the amalgamation of two troupes led by the prima donnas Vincenza and Flaminia. They were already known by the name Gelosi when they toured France in 1571; by 1572 they were popular enough to be able to complain that the stanze in Genoa could only hold an audience of 150; in 1574 their performance, and that of their leading lady, Vittoria Piisimi, were the highlight of Henri III's visit to Venice, and their reputation as the foremost com-media dell'arte troupe was fully established. Por-cacchi's pamphlet of 1574 notes some of the Gelosi actors of the time as Simon of Bologna, who played a facchino Bergamasco, Giulio Pas-quati as the Magnifico and Rinaldo. A Mantuan decree of 5 May 1579 names as Gelosi actors Simon the Bergamasco, Orazio and Adriano the innamorati, and Gabriele their friend.
Acting Africa
Authors: Kruger Loren
Published: January 2009

I begin with two images of African actors. The first, fromAsinamaliby the South African playwright Mbongeni Ngema (1985; Plate 23), shows a group pose drawn directly from protest theatre—angry men in prison khaki, with fists clenched, bodies tensed in readiness and, one can assume, voices raised against the invisible but all too palpable forces of apartheid. The second, from the centenary celebrations of the American Board Mission in South Africa (1935; Plate 24), portrays the ‘smelling-out of a fraudulentumthakathi’ (which can be translated as diviner or trickster), which were followed, on this occasion, by other scenes portraying the civilizing influence of European settlers. While the first offers an image of African agency and modernity in the face of oppression, the second, with its apparently un-mediated reconstruction of pre-colonial ritual and, in its teleological juxtaposition of ‘tribal’ and ‘civilized’ custom, seems to respond to the quite different terms set by a long history of displays, along the lines of the Savage South Africa Show (1900), in which the authenticity of the Africans on stage was derived not from their agency but by their incorporation into the representation of colonial authority.
Konrad Swinarski's Midsummer Night's Dream
Authors: Walaszek Joanna
Published: January 2009

The first night of Konrad Swinarski's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Stary Teatr in Cracow took place on 22 July 1970, then a national holiday commemorating the establishment of the People's Republic of Poland. Thanks to Swinarski the Stary Teatr was one of the best companies in Poland; he expected the actors to engage fully with their work, and he had a great gift for inspiring their imagination and emotions. Actors of great personalities belonged to the cast of this Midsummer Night's Dream: Wojciech Pszoniak (Puck), Anna Polony (Helena), Wiktor Sadecki (Oberon), Wojciech Ruszkowski (Quince), yet the main quality of the production resided in the high standard of acting of the ensemble. Swinarski set his actors a difficult task—he wanted them to act both comedy and quite serious drama at the same time. His idea was to search for and enlarge analogies among the threads of the drama, accentuating the oppositions and contrasts in order to stress the internal contradictions of the fictional world. Moreover, he wanted to show all the events of the play in two different, contradictory perspectives: the fairy-tale perspective and the court perspective.