Intertextual Inquiry and Interpretive Creation: Pope.L’s Experimental Staging of William Wells Brown’s The Escape

IF 0.4 0 THEATER
Ilka Saal
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Abstract

This contribution discusses Pope.L’s 2018 provocative restaging of William Wells Brown’s anti-slavery play The Escape: Or, A Leap of Freedom (1858) at the Art Institute of Chicago. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, it argues against a source-oriented assessment of the production, which would prioritize the original over its interpretation and delimit aesthetic evaluation to questions of fidelity. It proposes to consider Pope.L: The Escape as an interpretive creation in its own right. Engaging in a complex intertextual and intercultural dialogue with its antetext, Pope.L’s staging brings into focus particular aspects of the contemporary moment. While Brown’s play presents race as first and foremost a performative category and stresses the possibility of autopoiesis qua performance, Pope.L reduces slavery to an ontological condition. Its title and manifold multimedia performances notwithstanding, there is no escape from enslavement in Pope.L: The Escape. Performance remains contained in and prescribed by an ongoing condition of physical and psychic enslavement. With this radical adaptation, Pope.L responds to what Paul Gilroy identifies as the “ontological turn” in recent Black thought. In light of the ongoing structural and quotidian violence against People of Color, this approach insists on the central significance of the bodily experience of racializing attributions for understanding social relations as well as Black collectivity. It also provocatively asks whether the performative does indeed suffice to unsettle the structural coordinates of anti-Blackness that continue to impact and overdetermine contemporary lives.
互文探究与解释性创造:蒲柏。威廉·威尔斯·布朗《越狱》的实验舞台
这篇文章讨论了Pope。L 2018年在芝加哥艺术学院重新演绎威廉·威尔斯·布朗(William Wells Brown)的反奴隶制戏剧《逃跑:或者,自由的飞跃》(1858年)。借鉴琳达·哈钦的改编理论,它反对对作品进行以来源为导向的评估,这种评估会优先考虑原作而不是对原作的解释,并将审美评价限定在保真度的问题上。它建议考虑蒲柏。L:《越狱》本身就是一部解释性的作品。与前文教皇进行复杂的互文和跨文化对话。L的舞台剧突出了当代的某些方面。布朗的戏剧将种族首先呈现为一个表演范畴,并强调了作为表演的自我创生的可能性。L将奴役化简为一种本体论条件。尽管它的名字和多种多媒体表演,但在《教皇》中没有逃脱奴役。L: Escape。表演仍然包含在一种持续的身体和精神奴役状态中。通过这种激进的适应,波普。L回应了保罗·吉尔罗伊(Paul Gilroy)所说的近期黑人思想中的“本体论转向”。鉴于针对有色人种的持续的结构性和日常暴力,这种方法坚持种族化归因的身体体验对于理解社会关系和黑人集体的中心意义。它还提出了一个具有挑衅性的问题,即表演是否确实足以动摇反黑人的结构坐标,这种结构坐标继续影响和过度决定当代生活。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.80
自引率
40.00%
发文量
20
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