Theaters of Justice


Book Description

"Theaters of Justice is an important and highly readable in-depth study of post-war legal and literary events that continue to exert their influence on the contemporary understanding of justice and historical truth."---Ulrich Baer, New York University --




In the Theater of Criminal Justice


Book Description

Focusing on a sensational 1869 murder trial and on the newly designed wing of the Palais de Justice in which it was held, Katherine Taylor explores the representation of criminal justice in Second Empire Paris. She considers the performative aspect of the trial on its new stage and shows how the controversially ornate design of the courtroom created a heightened sense of theatricality for participants and spectators alike, exacerbating conflicting notions about the theory and practice of criminal justice. The tension caused by the blending of the inquisitorial procedure of the ancien régime with an accusatorial one in the modern criminal courtroom expressed a larger conflict concerning sources and types of authority, their styles, and their bases for judging evidence--a conflict played out in the representation of authority in many public buildings of the post-Revolutionary era. This work treats the relationship between judicial and political doctrine and social practice in cultural terms, particularly those of architecture, art, and theater. It offers a unique type of architectural history by interpreting a building through its use and users; it differs from most historical studies of trials by concentrating on the stakes of visual representation.




Devising Critically Engaged Theatre with Youth


Book Description

Devising Critically Engaged Theatre with Youth: The Performing Justice Project offers accessible frameworks for devising original theatre, developing critical understandings of racial and gender justice, and supporting youth to imagine, create, and perform possibilities for a more just and equitable society. Working at the intersections of theory and practice, Alrutz and Hoare present their innovative model for devising critically engaged theatre with novice performers. Sharing why and how the Performing Justice Project (PJP) opens dialogue around challenging and necessary topics already facing young people, the authors bring together critical information about racial and gender justice with new and revised practices from applied theatre, storytelling, theatre, and education for social change. Their curated collection of PJP "performance actions" offers embodied and reflective approaches for building ensemble, devising and performing stories, and exploring and analyzing individual and systemic oppression. This work begins to confront oppressive narratives and disrupt patriarchal systems—including white supremacy, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Devising Critically Engaged Theatre with Youth invites artists, teaching artists, educators, and youth-workers to collaborate bravely with young people to imagine and enact racial and gender justice in their lives and communities. Drawing on examples from PJP residencies in juvenile justice settings, high schools, foster care facilities, and community-based organizations, this book offers flexible and responsive ways for considering experiences of racism and sexism and performing visions of justice. Visit performingjusticeproject.org for additional information and documentation of PJP performances with youth.




Dramatic Justice


Book Description

For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, classical dogma and royal censorship worked together to prevent French plays from commenting on, or even worse, reenacting current political and judicial affairs. Criminal trials, meanwhile, were designed to be as untheatrical as possible, excluding from the courtroom live debates, trained orators, and spectators. According to Yann Robert, circumstances changed between 1750 and 1800 as parallel evolutions in theater and justice brought them closer together, causing lasting transformations in both. Robert contends that the gradual merging of theatrical and legal modes in eighteenth-century France has been largely overlooked because it challenges two widely accepted narratives: first, that French theater drifted toward entertainment and illusionism during this period and, second, that the French justice system abandoned any performative foundation it previously had in favor of a textual one. In Dramatic Justice, he demonstrates that the inverse of each was true. Robert traces the rise of a "judicial theater" in which plays denounced criminals by name, even forcing them, in some cases, to perform their transgressions anew before a jeering public. Likewise, he shows how legal reformers intentionally modeled trial proceedings on dramatic representations and went so far as to recommend that judges mimic the sentimental judgment of spectators and that lawyers seek private lessons from actors. This conflation of theatrical and legal performances provoked debates and anxieties in the eighteenth century that, according to Robert, continue to resonate with present concerns over lawsuit culture and judicial entertainment. Dramatic Justice offers an alternate history of French theater and judicial practice, one that advances new explanations for several pivotal moments in the French Revolution, including the trial of Louis XVI and the Terror, by showing the extent to which they were shaped by the period's conflicted relationship to theatrical justice.




Staged


Book Description

Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term “show trials” suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era’s great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages? In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions.




Staging Social Justice


Book Description

Fringe Benefits, an award-winning theatre company, collaborates with schools and communities to create plays that promote constructive dialogue about diversity and discrimination issues. Staging Social Justice is a groundbreaking collection of essays about Fringe Benefits’ script-devising methodology and their collaborations in the United States, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. The anthology also vividly describes the transformative impact of these creative initiatives on participants and audiences. By reflecting on their experiences working on these projects, the contributing writers—artists, activists and scholars—provide the readerwith tools and inspiration to create their own theatre for social change. “Contributors to this big-hearted collection share Fringe Benefits’ play devising process, and a compelling array of methods for measuring impact, approaches to aesthetics (with humor high on the list), coalition and community building, reflections on safe space, and acknowledgement of the diverse roles needed to apply theatre to social justice goals. The book beautifully bears witness to both how generative Fringe Benefits’ collaborations have been for participants and to the potential of engaged art in multidisciplinary ecosystems more broadly.”—Jan Cohen-Cruz, editor of Public: A Journal of Imagining America




The Theatre of Justice


Book Description

The Theatre of Justice contains 17 chapters that offer a holistic view of performance in Greek and Roman oratorical and political contexts. This holistic view consists of the examination of two areas of techniques. The first one relates to the delivery of speeches and texts: gesticulation, facial expressions and vocal communication. The second area includes a wide diversity of techniques that aim at forging a rapport between the speaker and the audience, such as emotions, language and style, vivid imagery and the depiction of characters. In this way the volume develops a better understanding of the objectives of public speaking, the mechanisms of persuasion, and the extent to which performance determined the outcome of judicial and political contests.




Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theatre


Book Description

This collection of original new essays focuses on the many ways in which early modern Spanish plays engaged their audiences in a dialogue about abuse, injustice, and inequality. Far from the traditional monolithic view of theatrical works as tools for expanding ideology, these essays each recognize the power of theatre in reflecting on issues related to social justice. The first section of the book focuses on textual analysis, taking into account legal, feminist, and collective bargaining theory. The second section explores issues surrounding theatricality, performativity, and intellectual property laws through an analysis of contemporary adaptations. The final section reflects on social justice from the practitioners’ point of view, including actors and directors. Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theatre reveals how adaptations of classical theatre portray social justice and how throughout history the writing and staging of comedias has been at the service of a wide range of political agendas.




The Courtroom Is My Theater


Book Description

Former President of the Criminal Bar Association Richard Levitt called Goldberg “one of the foremost litigators of this or any generation.” Former Chief of the Criminal Division of the United States Attorney's Office S.D.N.Y. Frederick Hafetz said: “I consider you to have the best killer trial skills I have ever seen in my 47 years of practice, and I have worked with the best, courtroom presence, capturing the jury's attention through devastating cross and summations that have jurors on the edge of their seats.” New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Lonschein said: “[Jay Goldberg] holds the distinction of being one of the most skilled, if not the most skilled trial lawyer in the United States.” In The Courtroom Is My Theater, Jay Goldberg shows why he is one of the preeminent trial attorneys in America, as he shares stories of his high-profile courtroom drama as well as his adventures outside of the courtroom with some of the country’s most prominent politicians, businessmen, entertainers, and “men of honor.”




Theaters of Pardoning


Book Description

From Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump's claims that as president he could pardon himself to the posthumous royal pardon of Alan Turing, the power of the pardon has a powerful hold on the political and cultural imagination. In Theaters of Pardoning, Bernadette Meyler traces the roots of contemporary understandings of pardoning to tragicomic "theaters of pardoning" in the drama and politics of seventeenth-century England. Shifts in how pardoning was represented on the stage and discussed in political tracts and in Parliament reflected the transition from a more monarchical and judgment-focused form of the concept to an increasingly parliamentary and legislative vision of sovereignty. Meyler shows that on the English stage, individual pardons of revenge subtly transformed into more sweeping pardons of revolution, from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, where a series of final pardons interrupts what might otherwise have been a cycle of revenge, to later works like John Ford's The Laws of Candy and Philip Massinger's The Bondman, in which the exercise of mercy prevents the overturn of the state itself. In the political arena, the pardon as a right of kingship evolved into a legal concept, culminating in the idea of a general amnesty, the "Act of Oblivion," for actions taken during the English Civil War. Reconceiving pardoning as law-giving effectively displaced sovereignty from king to legislature, a shift that continues to attract suspicion about the exercise of pardoning. Only by breaking the connection between pardoning and sovereignty that was cemented in seventeenth-century England, Meyler concludes, can we reinvigorate the pardon as a democratic practice.