Performing exile, performing self
Subtitle: drama, theatre, film
By: Yana Meerzon
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 350
ISBN-13: 9780230221536
Subjects: Psychology; Psychological aspects; Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.); Expatriate authors; Immigrants in the performing arts
Description: This book examines the life and art of those contemporary artists who, by force or by choice, find themselves on other shores; for whom the hardship of exile is both an existential ordeal and an opportunity to exercise their creative abilities, professional competence, and artistic resources. It argues that the exilic challenge enables the ̌migř artist to (re)establish new artistic devices, new laws and a new language of communication in both his/her everyday life and artistic work. It celebrates the creative propensity and artistic success that the state of exile can offer to an artist forced to deal with the typical exilic conditions of pain of displacement, nostalgia, and loss. The creative output and the fame of the artists selected for this study (Joseph Brodsky, Eugenio Barba, Wajdi Mouawad, Josef Nadj, Derek Walcott, and Atom Egoyan), present a variety of 'success stories' in exile that challenge the view of the exilic state as one of mourning, depression, disbelief, and constant suffering.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Heteroglossia of a castaway : on the exilic performative of Joseph Brodsky's poetry and prose; title: Beyond the postcolonial dasein : on Derek Walcott's narratives of history and exile; title: Performing exilic communitas : on Eugenio Barba's theatre of a floating island; title: The homebody/Kanjiža : on Josef Nadj's exilic theatre of autobiography and travelogue; title: To the poetics of exilic adolescence : on Wajdi Mouawad's theatre of secondary witness and poetic testimony; title: Framing the ancestry : performing postmemory in Atom Egoyan's post-exilic cinema.