bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
How did the Commedia dell'arte cross the Alps to Bavaria?
Authors: Katritzky M. A.
Published: January 2009

The commedia dell'arte is a type of improvised acting based around the masked stock characters of the merchant, lawyer and servant, whose earliest names were Magnifico, il Dottore and Zanni (Plate I). From 1571 onwards, it was spread throughout Europe by visiting troupes of professional Italian actors, whose members, activities and travels are, for the most part, well-documented. The way in which it reached Bavaria is less clear. Records, including three festival books, suggest that already as early as February 1568, when crown Prince Wilhelm married Princess Renée of Lorraine in Munich, the commedia dell'arte was an established and popular feature of Bavarian court festivities, to which it contributed in three contexts. Some of its costumes were used in masquerades; the Venetian Magnifico, or merchant, and his servant Zanni (the servant-master pair who became the central comic focus of the commedia dell'arte) appeared as masked clowns on several occasions, and on 8 March 1568 there was a full-length play whose description in Massimo Troiano's festival book is generally acknowledged as the earliest known comprehensive description of a complete commedia dell'arte performance.
Lighting at the King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1780–82
Authors: Milhous Judith
Published: January 2009

For late eighteenth-century London theatres, lighting is the facet of production about which we have least information. In his authoritative Lighting in the Theatre, Gösta Bergman describes Garrick's reforms of the 1760s with reference to contemporary French practice and then speculates on what de Loutherbourg's advances in scene design imply about lighting. However, no detailed lighting accounts like those for the Comédie-Française have hitherto been known for any English theatre of this period. This gap can now be partly filled: a ‘Schedule’ attached to the answer in a 1787 Chancery lawsuit gives two seasons' worth of the daily accounts of Joseph Hayling, a tinman and purveyor of lamps, who provided light at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket from about 1768 to 1782. His schedule can be compared with contemporary French and English records to clarify our picture of lighting practices in London in the late eighteenth century.
L'engagement dans le théâtre haïtien: l'œuvre dramatique de Jean Métellus
Authors: Adamson Ginette
Published: January 2009

In his dramatization of the genocide of Haiti's indigenous Indian population, Jean Metellus sets himself the task of reading the island's future in the archives of Haiti's graveyards. Without being didactic Métellus's Anacaona and Colomb, do have a teaching purpose. They retrace the history of the Indians who lived in Haiti (Ayti) before the arrival of the Conquistadors and their African slaves. In this retracing of history we have a political theatre which calls into question that which and those who allowed this atrocious massacre to take place, and which echoes the dilemmas facing post-Duvalier Haiti.
Folklore in the Theatre of Franck Fouché
Authors: Coates Carrol F.
Published: January 2009

Franck Fouché was born on 27 November 1915, in Saint-Marc, Haiti. His formative years were precisely the period of the first American occupation of the island. He received his baccalauréat from the Lycée Pétion in 1934. After studying literature at the Université d'Haïti, he returned to Saint-Marc as a professor of literature and director of the Lycée Sténio-Vincent in 1940. He began to publish poetry (‘Billet à Florel’, 1941) and founded a literary review, Horizon (1942). He wrote for two daily newspapers, Le National and Le Nouvelliste in 1944. He received a Licence en Droit from the Université d'Haïti in 1945. After serving as Editor of Le National (1953–4), he was appointed Cultural Attaché at the Haitian Embassy in Mexico City in 1957. Along with a number of Haitian intellectuals, he emigrated from the Duvalierist Haiti to Montreal in 1966. He taught in Chambly. At the Université du Québec à Montréal, he completed an M.A. thesis, Vodou et théâtre; pour un nouveau théâtre populaire (1976). Following an automobile accident, he died on 3 January 1978 in Montreal.
‘I Am Going to America’: James Sheridan Knowles'sVirginiusand the Politics of ‘Liberty’
Authors: Parker Gerald. D.
Published: January 2009

My dear Mackenzie, the fact is—my plays are too liberal for the aristocratic illiberals of Ireland.… My plays breathe the noble sentiments of the influential classes of Ireland.… But I am going to a place where the feelings and the reality of liberty exist in their most glowing form—and not the form alone, but the embodied spirit. I am going to America.
Evreinov and Pirandello: Two Theatricalists in Search of The Chief Thing
Authors: Pearson Tony
Published: January 2009

The name Evreinov appears in the footnotes to a number of monographs on the better known Pirandello. Indeed, the artistic parallels between these two contemporaries have been frequently, if superficially, recognized in separate studies of both. I have sought elsewhere to develop the framework for a comparative analysis, focusing upon a common instinct for ‘theatricality’ and a snared obsession for putting theory into practice. This second and concluding study examines in closer detail the aesthetic and philosophical affinities between Evreinov and Pirandello in the context of their ‘theatre-in-thetheatre’ trilogies; it begins by identifying the formal properties of Evreinov's plays and goes on to consider the parallels and convergences with Pirandello's ideas.
Alternative Theatre: Reflecting a Multi-racial South African Society?
Authors: Angove Coleen
Published: January 2009

When Barney Simon's play Cincinatti was presented at the Market Theatre in 1979, it epitomized a watershed event in the development of theatre in South Africa, anticipating a new tend towards a tradition of a multi-racial theatre. In 1965 legislation had forced racial segregation in the theatre. Pleas for the official desegregation of races in the theatre had finally been successful in 1977 and Cincinatti, sporting one of the first multi-racial casts, was symbolic of a reaching-out amongst different racial, cultural and lingual groups in a highly polarized South African society. Cincinatti was chosen by Hauptfleisch and Steadman to represent Alternative theatre in their anthology (South African Theatre, Four Plays and an Introduction, 1984), thereby acknowledging a new theatrical tradition on the South African theatre scene.
The Actor as Performer of the Implied Spectator's Role
Authors: Kaynar Gad
Published: January 2009

Omri Nitzan's direction of Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters at the Israeli National Theatre Habimah in 1993 was one of the most ingenious and locally-bound contemporizations of a classical play that I have ever seen, as well as one of the most dependent on a correlatively attuned recipient. Nitzan sets out from the viewpoint that Goldoni's comedy of errors, derived from the commedia dell'arte and negating it, is not a stylized refined and exclusively theatrical pastime, set in the never-never locus of a glamorous stage Venice, as implied by Strehler's famous precedent, but is rather a kind of socially critical and realistically inclined play, ‘dealing with crime, class-distinctions and the capitalist structure of society’. ‘As I repeatedly read the play’–maintains Nitzan–‘I felt myself attracted to its human tale. I have seen suffering, miserable characters, relentlessly striving for unattainable happiness. There are three suicide attempts in the play […], which sometimes seems like a nightmare.’ Nitzan's production is set in a derelict square, a cross between a contemporary shabby Italian piazza and the backyard of a ramshackle, old Bauhaus building in a Tel Aviv suburban slum. The set of enclosing walls, lit by harsh Mediterranean lighting, and its multiple doors including a revolving one, vaguely alludes to the traditional setting of a farce. However, this impression is contradicted by the very theatrical and yet lifelike signs of depravity, instability and aggression: the thin paper walls, which are punctured and vandalized throughout the performance, are smeared with hostile graffiti expressing the pent-up feelings of its emotionally mute inhabitants. Heaps of trash lie scattered. The performance does not start with Clarice's engagement to Silvio, but with an invented mimed scene of Federigo Rasponi's murder by his sister Beatrice's lover, Florindo Artusi, performed to flickering disco lighting and accompanied by the shrill music of a Gothic horror melodrama. The actors speak a brilliantly processed vulgar slang; their body language is erratic and violent, including in the love scenes; these are lovers who swiftly resort to blows or pull out knives with long blades resembling shabarias, the weapon of Palestinian terrorists in 1993. Truffaldino wears the stained blue overall of a delivery boy, with an empty money pouch, typical of many such lads seen driving third-hand scooters in the streets of Tel Aviv. He is no smart comedy servant, but a hungry, humiliated and bitter unemployed youngster, although some remnants of the traditionally stooped posture are still vaguely in evidence. The archetypal attributes of the commedia masks are also belied by the performance of other characters such as Pantalone, who appears here as a small-time Levantine merchant, clad in a cheap suit, an unlit cigarette butt between his lips, bragging with his car keys in the typical macho gesture of working-class Israeli males.
‘A very nice Theatre at Edinr.’: Sir Walter Scott and Control of the Theatre Royal
Authors: Worth Christopher
Published: January 2009

In short, the drama is in ours, and in most civilized countries, an engine possessing the most powerful effect on the manners of society.

Thus the idea of theatre is political … it must make possible the enactment of an actual political world in the midst of painful and complex transformations within and between politics.
Michel Tremblay, dramaturge-démiurge
Authors: Lavoie Pierre
Published: January 2009

During the twenty years separating Gratien Gélinas's Tit-Coq in 1948, a play considered a foundation piece of Québécois (as opposed to French-Canadian) dramaturgy, and the 1968 creation of Michel Tremblay's Les Belles-Sœurs which opens the era of ‘new’ Québécois dramaturgy, Quebec society underwent a radical change. It was no longer traditional, religious and rural, but had become fully urbanized.

A quarter of a century later, Michel Tremblay has published over twenty books—novels, plays and screenplays—composing an original body of work which reflects, sometimes almost clinically and through the use of joual (the idiomatic French spoken in the working-class district of East Montreal) the local Québécois reality. At the same time, it has a universal value: to a typically Montreal universe, Tremblay's creation integrates dramaturgical influences ranging from Greek tragedy to Tennessee Williams. The result is a unique and strong combination of a musical language, with powerful monologues and vivid dialogues, and of innovative dramatic structures reflecting (in a lucid and ironic manner) a society in quest of its identity, torn between traditional values centred on the family unit, and the liberating, dream world of the theatre.
The Dramaturgy of the Perverse
Authors: Knowles Richard Paul
Published: January 2009

Les œuvres des dramaturges contemporains canadiens-anglais, Margaret Hollingsworth, George F. Walker, Judith Thompson et Beverley Simons entre dans la catégorie de la «dramaturgie de la perversité». La «perversité» est, selon Knowles, un principe structurel dialogique qui remet en question les concepts aristotéliciens du renversement et de la reconnaissance, aussi bien que les notions modernistes de pureté, de clarté et de cohérence. Est pervers ce qui fait éclater les concepts traditionnels tels que la convergence et l'unité, et toutes les stratégies théâtrales mises en œuvre pour fragmenter la perception du spectateur, pour l'obliger à repenser sa position vis-à-vis de l'objet spectaculaire, c'est-à-dire, à se repenserr. Knowles se propose, done, d'analyser ici les pièces les plus représentatives de ce courant choisies parmi les œuvres des quatre auteurs cités.
Entre Cassandre et Clytemnestre: le théâtre québécois, 1970–90
Authors: Lafon Dominique
Published: January 2009

The purpose of this article is to examine theatre in Quebec as the site of transformation of its collective images as they have evolved through theatrical texts over the past twenty years. Quebec society, in a constant state of mutation as it searches for its national identity, has been particularly receptive to forms of theatre that emphasize the theme of the family. For example, the first important work of this ‘new theatre’ which dared to liberate the language from its French model was Tremblay'sLes Belles-Sœurs, a play where all the action is located in a kitchen and whose characters are all women. In the development of Tremblay's work, we see how the discourses of women are taken over by masculine characters, mediated through the transvestite within a homosexual theme and finally liberated from the feminine model by the affirmation of the homosexual couple. In other more recent works, playwrights such as Normand Chaurette and Michel Marc Bouchard, have incorporated the search for a patrilinear descent into the very heart of the family conflict where the mother is put to death in a ritual killing, presented either as a ceremony (Chaurette), or as the unfolding of a myth (Bouchard).

In all these cases, the evolution of the fictive family structure is the projection of social transformations taking place in Quebec where the maternal heritage, represented historically by France, is necessarily damaged and eventually eliminated in order to lay claim to a political structure which confirms the rights of the father.
The Chimera of Amalgamation
Authors: Gurr Andrew
Published: January 2009

One of the features of the growth of playing in London in the late 1580s shows itself in the size of casts needed for some of the new plays composed around 1590. The history plays in particular laid exceptional demands on the numbers in the companies playing in London. Presumably this was one result of the foothold for performing to large audiences that the new amphitheatres had given the players. But it raises many questions about the organization of the companies. Did they enlarge the companies for the occasion with hired men, using casual if stagestruck labour hanging around the playhouses, or did they take on extra sharers? There is no evidence that this happened. The number of sharers in the leading companies, apart from the uniquely-large Queen's Men, who were allotted twelve players in 1583 but split into two in about 1590, when most of the companies had eight or ten players. Which came first, the larger companies or the larger plays? Did different companies join forces to stage them? Did they, after performance in London, take these large plays on tour? The conventional assumption about that, based largely on the evidence of the ‘bad’ and shortened quarto texts of the early plays, is that the ‘large’ plays were cut down to the ‘bad’ quarto size to allow the plays to be taken on tour. So were the large plays written only for London audiences? The writing of plays for large casts was a short-lived phenomenon, starting at the end of the 1580s and dying by 1594. What changed the conditions in that year? I believe we can address these questions most sharply by considering one of theatre history's more intriguing chimeras, the so-called ‘amalgamated company’ that is thought to have occupied Henslowe's Rose through the early 1590s.
After the Last Bow: The Fate of Superannuated Actors in Nineteenth-Century France
Authors: Hemmings F. W. T.
Published: January 2009

One of the incidental attractions of joining the Comédie-Française had always been that the Society could be relied on to look after the well-being of its veteran members even after they had left the stage, provided that they had given it a full twenty years' service counting from the date of their promotion to the rank of societaire. The policy of paying retirement pensions to superannuated actors at the royal theatre antedates even the coming into being of the Comédie-Française. In his Théâtre françois of 1674, Chappuzeau mentions the custom which had already grown up at that time for a new entrant to pay the older one whom he was replacing ‘une pension honnête’ out of his own earnings, so as to provide the retired actor with an income permitting him to live out his remaining days without falling into destitution. On 17 May 1728 the system was regularized by a proclamation to the effect that ‘les acteurs et actrices qui se retireraient jouiraient à l'avenir d'une pension viagère de mille livies, soit qu'ils eussent eu part entière, demi-part ou même un quart de part’; and although these arrangements fell into abeyance during the Revolution, causing acute distress to several former sociétaires who had only their personal savings to fall back on, they were reinstated by the Act of Association which all members of the Society were required to sign in 1804: clause 12 laid it down that ‘le sociétaire qui se retirera après vingt ans de service aura droit à une pension viagère de 2000 francs de la part du Gouvernement et à une pension égale de la part de la Société’. Even if they had no other resources, 4000 francs a year would relieve an ex-actor of serious financial anxieties; and since they might still be in their early forties when they took retirement, there was nothing to prevent them starting a business if they wished or cultivating a small farm in the country.
Theatre and Political Discord: Theatre Rebels of Zimbabwe and Kenya
Authors: Ukpokodu I. Peter
Published: January 2009

Though the world is aware of the political activities of the Nigerian playwright, Wole Soyinka, it might be difficult to find a better example of the relationship between a nation in a state of socio-political chaos and the arts in an African country than that of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Kenya as exemplified in Matigari:

Matigari, the main character [in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Matigari], is puzzled by a world where the producer is not the one who has the last word on what he has produced; a world where lies are rewarded and truth punished. He goes round the country asking questions about truth and justice. People who had read [Matigari] started talking about Matigari and the questions he was raising as if Matigari was a real person in life. When Dictator Moi [President of Kenya] heard that there was a Kenyan roaming around the country asking such questions, he issued orders for the man's arrest. But when the police found that he was only a character in fiction, Moi was even more angry and he issued fresh orders for the arrest of the book itself.
The Commedia dell'arte: An Introduction
Authors: Katritzky M. A.
Published: January 2009

Although more has been written on the commedia dell'arte than on any other type of theatre, many fundamental questions remain unanswered, and opinions concerning its origins, early history, and definition are surprisingly divergent. It is evident that the term ‘commedia dell'arte’ would become virtually meaningless if it were stretched to include, without qualification, all manifestations of theatrical entertainment which feature characters representing, or deriving from, its stock types; or the full range of theatrical practises offered by the very versatile early comici d'arte, although all are of concern to commedia studies. The commedia dell'arte itself may be broadly defined as a type of professional dramatic performance associated with distinctive stock characters, that arose in mid-sixteenth-century Italy, whose evolving cultural derivatives have spread throughout Europe. Its stock types drew on a wide variety of sources, including mystery and mummers’ plays, carnival masks, street theatre and court entertainment; popular farces and erudite comedy; and have transcended the theatre to play key roles in music, dance, art and literature. The extreme complexity of its continuing interchanges with other cultural phenomena makes precise definition of the commedia dell'arte elusive, and the term itself also resists easy definition because it was coined only in mid-eighteenth-century Paris, two centuries after the type of theatre with which it is associated first came into being.
The Charlatans of the Pont-Neuf
Authors: Marks Jonathan
Published: January 2009

The charlatans of seventeenth-century Paris attracted customers to view and buy their wares by producing and participating in free theatrical performances in the open air. Some of them worked solo, at ground level or ‘mounting a bench’—hence the term ‘mountebank’. Others, however, worked with sizeable troupes of performers on large stages in busy metropolitan interchanges traversed by all strata of society. This made them public figures, among the best known in France. They worked on the same principle as commercial television: attract people, by means of some sort of entertainment, to focus their attention on one spot, and then take a break to sell them wonderful products at a very low price that will make them young, hard-bodied, and happy.
Contemporary Indonesian Theatre in the Regions: Stage Idiom and Social Referentiality
Authors: Hatley Barbara
Published: January 2009

In 1973, the poet and essayist Goenawan Mohamad wrote a lengthy and incisive defence of contemporary Indonesian theatre (that is to say, modern, Indonesian language plays of roughly the mid-60s onwards) against the complaints of its critics.1 The lack of dramatic and psychological development noted in many plays, the sketchy scripts, bizarre dramatic happenings, showy settings and inappropriate mixture of comic and serious elements—all of these purported ‘faults’, in Goenawan's view, were associated with the great strength of contemporary Indonesian theatre, its concern with the process of performance, and with intimate communication with its audiences. Previous playwrights had written worthy, wordy ‘schoolroom’ dramas, and members of a small European-educated élite performed them, for an amorphous, universal ‘general public’. Their view that the current minority position of modern theatre would strengthen as Indonesian society became better educated, at the same time revealed a sense of distance between plays and their public. But for the new breed of playwrights, people like Rendra, Arifin Noer and Putu Wijaya, who directed and performed in their own plays and were fully involved in the totality of production,2 there was no such gap. Spectacle and humour, colloquial, everyday language, and the improvisatory possibilities of sketchy scripts, served to entertain, engage and involve audiences drawn from a particular sector of society. Theatre audiences were identified by Goenawan as overwhelmingly young, educated but not used to reading. They had been brought up in a ‘post-literate’ culture of radio, television and film, influenced in some ways, certainly in its group-oriented entertainment habits, by the ‘pre-literate’ aural-oral regional cultures of their parents.
Desire and Sexual (In)difference: Constructing Lesbian Self in Tari Ito's Performance with the Skin
Authors: Tonooka Naomi
Published: January 2009

Tari Ito is so far the only ‘out’ lesbian performance artist in Japan. After performing as a pantomime artist in Tokyo and Holland for ten years, she began her series of solo performances in 1989. In 1996, she ‘came out’ as a lesbian, in a performance entitled Self-Portrait. In her performances Ito makes various uses of a latex ‘skin’ which she uses to create an interface between discursive practices and desire, revealing the constructedness of our desire and sexuality. Along with this skin, Ito's verbal assertion of her lesbian identity at the end of the otherwise non-verbal Self-Portrait unsettles a heterosexual reading of her performances that would assume the construction of desire and sexuality in terms of heterosexuality.
Moving Beyond Imaginary Walls: FIT's Handbook Women in European Theatre Today
Authors: Czekay Angelika
Published: January 2009

As a materialist feminist from the former West Berlin I have always been in support of the German Democratic Republic as a system that granted womenextensive social benefits through the law. Before German reunification, rights to apprenticeship, employment, day care, and abortion were secured for East German women. Thus, in my imagination, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) occupied a space where gender and class equality were guaranteed—at least on paper.
Transculturation and Gender in US Latina Performance
Authors: Arrizón Alicia
Published: January 2009

Transculturation refers to an intercultural body associated with hybrid encounters and with a system that resists and contests the powers of domination. The term transculturation was coined by the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940. He formulated this neologism as a way to counteract and subvert the homogenizing grammars implicit in the term ‘acculturation’, which Anglo anthropologists had coined in the late 1930s. Mary Louise Pratt suggested that as a function of the ‘contact zone’, transculturation dramatizes dialectical bodies ready to be reconstrued, re-embodied, and re-visioned. Specifically, Pratt refers to the ‘contact zone’ as the space of colonial encounters. While the contact zone can be materialized at any point in time and space, interculturalism in the study of Latina performance not only shapes the heterogeneous character of the term Latin American and its hybrid variants, but also influences diverse modes of representation. Within the specificity of US Latina performance, I propose to expand the idea of transculturation as it opens possibilities for understanding the intercultural body—the hybrid that can redefine notions of mestizaje itself. In this study, the concepts of transculturation and performance suggest a framework in which cultural norms and practices must be rooted in the materiality of human agency. Therefore, before discussing transculturation and performance, it is necessary to clarify the term Latina as an identity marker, which displaces hegemonic representation across linguistic and cultural borders.
Woman and the City: The Semiotics of Embodiment
Authors: Bryant-Bertail Sarah
Published: January 2009

C'est toujours cela que j'ai voulu donner sur scene: faire voir la force violente des idees, comment elles ploient et tourmentent les corps.

Antoine Vitez

Two years ago, a philosophy professor friend remarked that he would never forget Jules and Jim and the sense of walking with Jeanne Moreau through the beautiful French countryside in spring with its colours in full bloom. When reminded that the film was shot in black and white, he replied that it must have impressed him so much that his imagination had added colour to it. To remember a walk through the landscape of another country and time, to insert one's own colours into a scene: does this occur in theatre as in film? And if the landscape can be transformed, what becomes of Jeanne Moreau? More specifically, what happens when such a star is imported onto the stage as a legend of woman incarnate? What happens semiotically when the ‘incarnate’ legendary woman confronts the material presence of the actress? These questions had already begun to emerge a year earlier, when I saw Moreau in person at Avignon, first on a performance on the open-air stage of the Com d'honneui in the fourteenth-century Palais des Papes, and then at a public discussion just outside the palace wall.

In Antoine Vitez's 1989 production of La Célestine, Jeanne Moreau played the mercurial, irascible procuress Célestine, the first picara, a larger-than-life character popular in Spain for four centuries. The play was written in 1499 by Fernando de Rojas, who coined the term tragicomedy to describe it.
Stage Metaphor: With or Without. On Rina Yerushalmi's Production of Ionesco's The Chairs
Authors: Rozik Eli
Published: January 2009

In the last century it has become commonplace that faithfulness to the playwright, and the play, is not necessarily a commendable quality. The play is currently viewed as raw material for a production, a pre-text for a more complex and final text, which reflects the universe of the director rather than that of the playwright. The performance is a work of art in which dialogue is only one component among others, although usually of crucial importance. Similarly, the playwright is viewed as merely the designer of the verbal aspects of the final text, among other designers. The director, in contrast, is viewed as the actual sender of the message and accountable to audience and critics for the results of his decisions: whether he or she has impoverished or enriched the play, whether or not he or she succeeded in conveying some new insight. Without elaborating on a justification of this view, there is no doubt that the production of Ionesco's The Chairs, directed by Rina Yerushalmi at the Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv, 1990, is a clear instance of such an approach.

Perhaps the most striking decision of Yerushalmi was to get rid of any deviation from consistent characterization, although prescribed by the playwright in the stage directions of the play. Following Martin Esslin, with regard to plays within the style of the so-called ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, such deviations are among the features which are held responsible for the sense of absurdity and/or grotesque that such texts produce in the audience.
Would You Splash Out on a Ticket to Molièe's Palais Royal?
Authors: Schumacher Claude
Published: January 2009

Little by little we are building up a reliable picture of what a seventeenth-century Parisian theatre looked like. In Theatre Research International we published an important article by Graham Barlow's on the Hôtel de Bourgogne in our first volume, and we return to the subject with the eye-opening reconstruction of the Palais Royal by Christa Williford in this, our last issue. In the intervening twenty-five years we have published articles on the problem of law and order in the auditorium, on actors and acting in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France; on the interaction between tragedy and the emerging opera, on theory, on dramatic literature, on the morality of actors and actresses, even on publicity; but nothing, specifically, on the identity of the spectator. And without a clearer impression of who patronized the Parisian theatres, we are in danger of missing important clues, not only concerning the theatrical performance, but also in our reading of the dramatic text—which will inform our theatrical decisions.
The Grand-Guignol: Aspects of Theory and Practice
Authors: Hand Richard J. , Wilson Michael
Published: January 2009

The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris (1897–1962) achieved a legendary reputation as the ‘Theatre of Horror’, a venue displaying such explicit violence and blood-curdling terror that a resident doctor was employed to treat the numerous spectators who fainted each night. Indeed, the phrase ‘grand-guignolesque’ has entered the language to describe any display of heightened, remorseless horror. Such is the myth of the Grand-Guignol: the reality is subtler and far more complex.
The Radical Negativity and Paradoxical Performativity of Postmodern Iconoclasm: Marcel Duchamp and Antonin Artaud
Authors: Birrell Ross
Published: January 2009

‘Iconoclasm grew from the destruction of religious images and opposition to the religious use of images to, literally, the destruction of, and opposition to, any images or works of art and, metaphorically, the “attacking or overthrow of venerated institutions and cherished beliefs, regarded as fallacious or superstitious”’. Dario Gamboni.
On Being a Shakespearian Dramatist: An Approach to The Back of Beyond
Authors: Rabey David Ian
Published: January 2009

The lack of constant speech is not contempt But silence measures those compelled to speak. What does not change is will to change, they say, Though changes do outrun the will's control. Each person has a story that rolls on Beyond the boundaries of the play in which they're placed, Unless they fall in love at last with limits And try to die into an old play's shape. Not even witches know what happens after, But once I met an actor, wild and broken, Who said, ‘The play is dead: long live the play’, with laughter, Then wept at faces he saw in the bracken.
Introduction
Authors: Bradby David , Noonan Mary
Published: January 2009

In February 1997 a conference entitled ‘Women give voice to women’ brought together scholars from Britain, Europe and the USA to investigate the relationship between feminist theory and practice on the French stage. The starting point for our discussions was to determine how far French women playwrights of the last thirty years have contributed to remoulding what Marcelle Marini referred to as the ‘socio-symbolic space’. We wanted to explore what was new, in theatrical, political and social terms, in the large number of plays and productions by women during this period. A second question was: how useful is French feminist theory as an aid to the illumination of this work?
Warriors and Runaways: Monique Wittig's Le Voyage sans fin
Authors: Lewis Valerie Hannagan
Published: January 2009

My aim is to explore what kind of lesbian subjectivity is brought to life in Monique Wittig's play Le Voyage sans fin, and to what extent it fits in with Wittig's project as a whole. Is it consistent with the representational strategies at work in her fiction?
Sound Tracks: the Soundscapes of India Song
Authors: Taylor Lib
Published: January 2009

In both the play and the film of Marguerite Duras's India Song no verbal exchange is seen to take place on stage or in camera shot and all the dialogue emanates from disembodied voices which reverberate across the filmic or theatrical imagery. The verbal text is woven into a complex, orchestrated soundscape of instrumental music, songs, non-verbal cries and utterances, screams of pain and wretchedness, sound of street shouting, and screeches of exotic birds and animals. These elements together become a score functioning alongside the visual text. In this essay, I want to focus on the composition and the ‘enactment’ of the sound script of India Song and consider the way in which it functions as a stratum of eloquent signifying systems in the performance of this rich and poetic text. My concern will be with the ‘composite’ text of novel/play/ film and the way in which sound is evoked across the spectrum of reader, spectator and auditor, though my intention is not to suggest that the written text, the film and the play performance are interchangeable. I shall refer to the published text, Duras's own 1974 film version, and Theatr Clwyd's performance directed by Annie Castledine and Anabel Arden in 1993.
À Table: The Power of Food in French Women's Theatre
Authors: Beach Cecilia
Published: January 2009

Contemporary women's theatre in France provides a rich corpus of plays that explore the social and psychological significance of food. Little wonder, given the deep, universal ties between women, particularly mothers, and food. As the anthropologist Carole Counihan explains:

Food is a particularly important concern and symbol for females in all cultures. Women have universal responsibility for food preparation and consumption … They are defined as nurturers and carry out this role principally throughfeeding. In addition, women themselves are food for their children during pregnancy and lactation, intensifying their identification with food and its relevance as symbol … Western women also use food as symbol of self.
Theatre Administration at the Court of Catherine II: The Reforms of Ivan Elagin
Authors: Borovsky Victor
Published: January 2009

At the beginning of October 1777, Sumarokov, dramatist and first director of the first Russian professional theatre, died in Moscow alone, poverty-stricken and deserted by all. A few actors carried the deceased to the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery and buried him at their own expense. A week later Catherine II received a communication from Prince Volkonsky: ‘In the last few days Aleksandr Sumarokov, being afflicted with a violent illness, has died, but otherwise all here goes well; having nothing more at present worthy of report to Your Imperial Majesty, I commit myself to Your Imperial Grace’.
Double Vision: Second Empire Theatre in Stereographs
Authors: Senelick Laurence
Published: January 2009

Of cherry-wood or pressed tin, lined with red plush or gutta-percha, hand-held or mounted in a self-standing case, the stereoscope was, by the mid-1850s, ubiquitous in the Victorian parlor, where the viewing device and its attendant cards provided an inoffensive and instructive amusement. ‘The stereoscope is now seen in every drawing-room’, reported the Art Journal of 1856, ‘philosophers talk learnedly upon it; ladies are delighted with its magic representations; and children play with it.’
Technique and the Embodied Actor
Authors: Sellers-Young Barbara
Published: January 2009

A primary theme of twentieth-century theatre has been the actor's body. Numerous directors from Stanislavsky to Anne Bogart have evolved stage theories and related training methods to promote a more expressive body on stage. In her 1995 article ‘Developing a Physical Vocabulary for the Contemporary Actor’, Lea Logic provides an overview of many of these approaches. While acknowledging the contributions of these director-teachers, she suggests, ‘If body shape and movement are to retain and increase their power as the central focus of theatre, actors must learn to maximize the expressive potential of their bodies.’ Quoting Copeau, Chekhov, Stanislavsky or Barba, she maintains the primary problem is an actor's tendency consistently to return to physical choices related to their personality and not necessarily to the role they are playing. She quotes Copeau's description of actors: ‘I always know, in advance what they are going to do. They reduce everything to the level of their habits, their clichés, their affectations. They do not invent anything.’ While Copeau's complaint is not directed at actor teachers, but actors, his words define one of the primary challenges for them, to teach actors to expand their expressive abilities beyond their self image.
Introduction: The Pursuit of Otherness for the Investigation of Self
Authors: Singleton Brian
Published: January 2009

In his introduction to Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said lays to rest my fears of political incorrectness and of being orientalist in my teaching and research of Asian as well as European theatre practices and proto-theatrical forms. Said empowers me by locating my nationality (Irish) and the locus of my vision of the Orient in the very realm of the Orient: amongst the colonized peoples of the world. Theatre historians in recent years have embraced Said's modernist dichotomies of Orientalism, and mistakenly divided the theatrical manifestation of culture into West/East, first world/third world, bad/good, colonizers/colonized. The simplicity of such binary opposites consequently denounces and sanctifies. The politics of culture, however, is a much more complex affair. Modern Irish theatre, for example, contemporaneous with social struggle and revolution, is lauded by Said as a strategy of resistance against cultural imperialism. In Asia the resurrection of pre-colonial dance forms and folk traditions is similarly seen as a cultural assertion of independence. Conversely fin de siècle European theatre divorced from its formalist, societal and religious origins has looked to the oriental theatres for inspiration. In the same mistaken paradigm à la Said, this is branded as eclectic purloining of the surface of foreign cultures of the third world, a colonial plundering disguised as aesthetic pursuit.
Strindberg and the Silent Cinema
Authors: Waldekrantz Rune
Published: January 2009

Of nineteenth century Swedish writers, August Strindberg was almost alone in displaying any interest in the predecessors to the moving film. On one occasion, during the conception of ‘Tschandala’, his interest in moving, projected pictures led him to a literary fantasy of a greatly suggestive power.
Assessing cost effectiveness of empirical and prophylactic therapy for managing leptospirosis outbreaks
Authors: GALLOWAY R. L. , LEVETT P. N. , TUMEH J. W. , FLOWERS C. R.
Published: January 2009

This study evaluates the utility and cost effectiveness of empirical and prophylactic antibiotic treatment of leptospirosis compared with conventional management. We developed decision trees comparing empirical antibiotic treatment (within 4–7 days of symptom onset) or prophylaxis to conventional antibiotic treatment (initiated ⩾7 days post-onset). Costs were calculated using both US and Barbados pricing. Empirical treatment provided slightly lower probability of survival, while prophylactic treatment resulted in slightly higher survival rates. Antibiotic treatment initiated after 4–7 symptomatic days was ineffective in preventing serious health outcomes, but cost less with the exception of azithromycin (US pricing). Empirical treatment in Barbados cost less than conventional treatment. Prophylaxis reduced rare serious health outcomes and resulted in significant cost savings for the United States and Barbados. Prophylactic therapy for high-risk individuals or prompt diagnosis and early treatment (before 4 days of symptoms) appear to be cost-effective approaches to prevent severe complications of leptospirosis.
Using the Brief Core Schema Scales with Individuals at Clinical High Risk of Psychosis
Authors: Addington Jean , Tran Lisa
Published: January 2009

Background: The Brief Core Schema Scales (BCSS) were developed to provide a theoretically coherent self-report assessment of schemata concerning self and others in psychosis. They provide a more useful measure of schemata about self and others than traditional measures of self-esteem. Aims: The aim of this study was to determine if these scales would be useful in a sample of individuals who are at clinical high risk of psychosis to help identify targets for intervention. Method: Thirty-eight individuals who are at high risk for psychosis were administered the Scale of Prodromal Symptoms, the Calgary Depression Scale, the Brief Core Schema Scales and the Young Schema Questionnaire–short version. Results: Results suggested that these scales are appropriate for this population and that negative evaluations of the self and others were significantly associated with attenuated psychotic symptoms and, in particular, suspiciousness.
A numerical testbed for hypotheses of extraterrestrial life and intelligence
Authors: Forgan D.H.
Published: January 2009

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been heavily influenced by solutions to the Drake Equation, which returns an integer value for the number of communicating civilizations resident in the Milky Way, and by the Fermi Paradox, glibly stated as: ‘If they are there, where are they?’. Both rely on using average values of key parameters, such as the mean signal lifetime of a communicating civilization. A more accurate answer must take into account the distribution of stellar, planetary and biological attributes in the galaxy, as well as the stochastic nature of evolution itself. This paper outlines a method of Monte Carlo realization that does this, and hence allows an estimation of the distribution of key parameters in SETI, as well as allowing a quantification of their errors (and the level of ignorance therein). Furthermore, it provides a means for competing theories of life and intelligence to be compared quantitatively.
Measurement Invariance of Divergent Thinking Across Gender, Age, and School Forms
Authors: Kuhn Jörg-Tobias , Holling Heinz
Published: January 2009

The present study explores the factorial structure and the degree of measurement invariance of 12 divergent thinking tests. In a large sample of German students (N = 1328), a three-factor model representing verbal, figural, and numerical divergent thinking was supported. Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses revealed that partial strong measurement invariance was tenable across gender and age groups as well as school forms. Latent mean comparisons resulted in significantly higher divergent thinking skills for females and students in schools with higher mean IQ. Older students exhibited higher latent means on the verbal and figural factor, but not on the numerical factor. These results suggest that a domain-specific model of divergent thinking may be assumed, although further research is needed to elucidate the sources that negatively affect measurement invariance.
The Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP-64) as a Screening Measure for Avoidant Personality Disorder
Authors: Leising Daniel , Rehbein Diana , Eckardt Julia
Published: January 2009

We investigated the usefulness of the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP-64) as a screening measure for avoidant personality disorder (AVPD), and for personality disorder (PD) in general. A total of 159 female participants filled out the IIP-64 and then took part in a structured clinical interview for the DSM-IV personality disorders (SCID-II). Interview-based diagnoses of AVPD (N = 21) were predicted with good diagnostic accuracy by a single scale (socially inhibited) of the IIP-64, whereas the presence of any kind of PD (N = 37) was more accurately predicted by the IIP-64 total score. The IIP-64 not only assesses general personality pathology, but may also be used in screening for specific kinds of personality pathology, which have greater clinical relevance.
Upper mantle structure beneath the Caribbean‐South American plate boundary from surface wave tomography
Authors: Miller Meghan S. , Levander Alan , Niu Fenglin , Li Aibing
Published: January 2009

We have measured shear wave velocity structure of the crust and upper mantle of the Caribbean‐South American boundary region by analysis of fundamental mode Rayleigh waves in the 20‐ to 100‐s period band recorded at the BOLIVAR/GEODINOS stations from 2003 to 2005. The model shows lateral variations that primarily correspond to tectonic provinces and boundaries. A clear linear velocity change parallels the plate bounding dextral strike‐slip fault system along the northern coast of Venezuela, illustrating the differences between the South American continental lithosphere, the Venezuelan archipelago, and the Caribbean oceanic lithosphere. At depths up to 120 km beneath the Venezuelan Andes and the Maracaibo block, there is evidence of underthrusting of the Caribbean plate, but there is no other evidence of subduction of the Caribbean plate beneath the South American plate. In eastern Venezuela, linear crustal low velocities are associated with the fold and thrust belts whereas as higher crustal velocities are imaged in the Guayana shield lithosphere. The subducting oceanic part of the South American plate is imaged beneath the Antilles arc. The surface wave images combined with seismicity data suggest shear tearing of the oceanic lithosphere away from the buoyant continental South American plate offshore of northeastern Venezuela. The continental lithosphere south of the slab tear is bent down toward the plate boundary in response to the propagating tear in the lithosphere. We interpret a nearly vertical low‐velocity “column” west of the tear centered beneath the Cariaco Basin, with three‐dimensional asthenospheric flow around the southern edge of the subducting oceanic lithosphere, with the asthenosphere escaping from beneath continental South America and rising into the plate boundary zone. The complex plate boundary structure is best examined in three dimensions. We discuss the new surface wave tomographic inversion in the context of results from other researchers including local seismicity, teleseismic shear wave splits, and interpretations from active source profiling.