Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance


Book Description

Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History takes up the urgent need to think about temporality and its relationship to history in new ways, focusing on theatre and performance as mediums through which politically innovative temporalities, divorced from historical processionism and the future, are inaugurated. Wickstrom is guided by three temporal concepts: the new present, the penultimate, and kairos, as developed by Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Antonio Negri respectively. She works across a field of performance that includes play texts by Aimé Césaire and C.L.R. James, and performances from Ni'Ja Whitson to Cassils, the Gob Squad to William Kentridge and African colonial revolts, Hofesh Schechter to Forced Entertainment to Andrew Schneider and Omar Rajeh. Along the way she also engages with Walter Benjamin, black international and radical thought and performance, Bruno Latour, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's logistics and the hold, and accelerationism. Representing a significant contribution to the growing interest in temporality in Theatre and Performance Studies, the book offers alternatives to what have been prevailing temporal preoccupations in those fields. Countering investments in phenomenology, finitude, ghosting, repetition, and return, Wickstrom argues that theatre and performance can create a fiery sense of how to change time and thereby nominate a new possibility for what it means to live.




Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance


Book Description

A highly sophisticated study of the question of time and temporality as we experience them in the theatre.




Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance


Book Description

Representing a significant contribution to the growing interest in temporality in Theatre and Performance Studies, the book offers alternatives to what have been prevailing temporal preoccupations in those fields. Countering investments in phenomenology, finitude, ghosting, repetition, and return, Wickstrom argues that theatre and performance can create a fiery sense of how to change time and thereby nominate a new possibility for what it means to live.




Remaking Pacific Pasts


Book Description

Since the late 1960s, drama by Pacific Island playwrights has flourished throughout Oceania. Although many Pacific Island cultures have a broad range of highly developed indigenous performance forms—including oral narrative, clowning, ritual, dance, and song—scripted drama is a relatively recent phenomenon. Emerging during a period of region-wide decolonization and indigenous self-determination movements, most of these plays reassert Pacific cultural perspectives and performance techniques in ways that employ, adapt, and challenge the conventions and representations of Western theater. Drawing together discussions in theater and performance studies, historiography, Pacific studies, and postcolonial studies, Remaking Pacific Pasts offers the first full-length comparative study of this dynamic and expanding body of work. It introduces readers to the field with an overview of significant works produced throughout the region over the past fifty years, including plays in English and in French, as well as in local vernaculars and lingua francas. The discussion traces the circumstances that have given rise to a particular modern dramatic tradition in each site and also charts routes of theatrical circulation and shared artistic influences that have woven connections beyond national borders. This broad survey contextualizes the more detailed case studies that follow, which focus on how Pacific dramatists, actors, and directors have used theatrical performance to critically engage the Pacific’s colonial and postcolonial histories. Chapters provide close readings of selected plays from Hawai‘i, Aotearoa/New Zealand, New Caledonia/Kanaky, and Fiji that treat events, figures, and legacies of the region’s turbulent past: Captain Cook’s encounters, the New Zealand Wars, missionary contact, the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, and the Fiji coups. The book explores how, in their remembering and retelling of these pasts, theater artists have interrogated and revised repressive and marginalizing models of historical understanding developed through Western colonialism or exclusionary indigenous nationalisms, and have opened up new spaces for alternative historical narratives and ways of knowing. In so doing, these works address key issues of identity, genealogy, representation, political parity, and social unity, encouraging their audiences to consider new possibilities for present and future action. This study emphasizes the contribution of artistic production to social and political life in the contemporary Pacific, demonstrating how local play production has worked to facilitate processes of creative nation building and the construction of modern regional imaginaries. Remaking Pacific Pasts makes valuable contributions to Pacific literature, world theater history, Pacific studies, and postcolonial studies. The book opens up to comparative critical discussion a geopolitical region that has received little attention from theater and performance scholars, extending our understanding of the form and function of theater in different cultural contexts. It enriches existing discussions in postcolonial studies about the decolonizing potential of literary and artistic endeavors, and it suggests how theater might function as a mode of historical enquiry and debate, adding to discussions about ways in which Pacific histories might be developed, challenged, or recalibrated. Consequently, the book stimulates new discussions in Pacific studies where theater has, to date, suffered from a lack of critical exposure. Carefully researched and original in its approach, Remaking Pacific Pasts will appeal to scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduate students in theater and performance studies and Pacific Islands studies; it will also be of interest to cultural historians and to specialists in cultural studies and postcolonial studies.




Theatre/archaeology


Book Description

Theatre/Archaeology is a provocative challenge to disciplinary practice and intellectual boundaries. It brings together radical proposals in both archaeological and performance theory to generate a startlingly original and intriguing methodological framework.




The Contemporary History Play


Book Description

Something exciting is happening with the contemporary history play. New writing by playwrights such as Jackie Sibblies Drury, Samuel Adamson, Hannah Khalil, Cordelia Lynn, and Lucy Kirkwood, makes powerful theatrical use of the past, but does not fit into critics' familiar categories of historical drama. In this book, Benjamin Poore provides readers with tools to name and critically analyse these changes. The Contemporary History Play contends that many history plays are becoming more complex and layered in their aesthetic approaches, as playwrights work through the experience of being surrounded by numerous and varied forms of historical representation in the twenty-first century. For theatre scholars, this book offers a means of interpreting how new writing relies on the past and notions of historicity to generate meaning and resonance in the present. For playwrights and students of playwriting, the book is a guide to the history play's recent past, and to the state of the art: what techniques and formulas have been popular, the tropes that are widely used, and how artists have found ways of renewing or overturning established conventions.




The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art


Book Description

The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art offers a comprehensive guide to the major issues and interdisciplinary debates concerning performance in art contexts that have developed over the last decade. It understands performance art as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label or object. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization and mainstreaming of performance, the book's chapters identify a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art, and explore how this development is reflective of capitalist approaches to art and event production. Embracing what we perceive to be the 'oxymoronic status' of performance art-where it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitable-the essays in this book map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction. This Companion adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to present performance art's legacies and its current practices. It brings together specially commissioned essays from leading innovative scholars from a wide range of approaches including art history, visual and performance studies, dance and theatre scholarship in order to provide a comprehensive and multifocal overview of the emerging research trends and methodologies devoted to performance art.




Modern Playhouses


Book Description

The first detailed study of the major programme of theatre-building in Britain between the 1950s and the 1980s, Modern Playhouses draws on a vast range of archival material to present the history of post-war theatre buildings as a history of ideas relating not only to performance but also to culture, citizenship, and the modern city.




The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre


Book Description

This is a guide to contemporary debates and theatre practices at a time when gender paradigms are both in flux and at the centre of explosive political battlegrounds. The confluence of gender and theatre has long created intense debate about representation, identification, social conditioning, desire, embodiment, and lived experience. As this handbook demonstrates, from the conventions of early modern English, Chinese, Japanese and Hispanic theatres to the subversion of racialized binaries of masculinity and femininity in recent North American, African, Asian, Caribbean and European productions, the matter of gender has consistently taken centre stage. This handbook examines how critical discourses on gender intersect with key debates in the field of theatre studies, as a lens to illuminate the practices of gender and theatre as well as the societies they inform and represent across space and time. Of interest to scholars in the interrelated areas of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, and globalization and diasporic studies, this book demonstrates how researchers are currently addressing theatre about gender issues and gendered theatre practices. While synthesizing and summarizing foundational and evolving debates from a contemporary perspective, this collection offers interpretations and analyses that do not simply look back at existing scholarship, but open up new possibilities and understandings. Featuring essential research tools, including a survey of keywords and an annotated play list, this is an indispensable scholarly handbook for anyone working in theatre and performance.




A History of Polish Theatre


Book Description

Poland is celebrated internationally for its rich and varied performance traditions and theatre histories. This groundbreaking volume is the first in English to engage with these topics across an ambitious scope, incorporating Staropolska, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Enlightenment and Romanticism within its broad ambit. The book also discusses theatre cultures under socialism, the emergence of canonical practitioners and training methods, the development of dramaturgical forms and stage aesthetics and the political transformations attending the ends of the First and Second World Wars. Subjects of far-reaching transnational attention such as Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor are contextualised alongside theatre makers and practices that have gone largely unrecognized by international readers, while the participation of ethnic minorities in the production of national culture is given fresh attention. The essays in this collection theorise broad historical trends, movements, and case studies that extend the discursive limits of Polish national and cultural identity.