Studies in Theatre and Performance最新文献

{"title":"Right from the centre: The dramaturgy of right-wing politics in Chris Hannan’s What Shadows, Chris Bush’s The Assassination of Katie Hopkins, and Rob Drummond’s The Majority","authors":"James Hudson","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1964848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1964848","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Reactionary retrenchment in UK society, including the resurgence of national chauvinism and anti-immigration sentiment, has recently stimulated explorations of right-wing politics in theatre. This article offers a reading of three recent productions that illuminate the way that reactionary politics is currently framed, explored and interrogated in UK theatre: What Shadows (2016) by Chris Hannan, Chris Bush’s The Assassination of Katie Hopkins (2018), and Rob Drummond’s The Majority (2017). The article argues that these pieces’ approach towards right-wing politics emerges from anxiety over ideological polarisation and a perceived breakdown in communication in political discourse. It suggests that this attempt to generate nuance, neutrality and complexity while dispensing criticism equally across both poles of left and right on the political spectrum implicitly works to authorise a ‘moderate’ centrist position. While the thesis of each play functions to validate a centrist position that is presumed to be automatically reasonable, the article considers the potential liabilities inherent in such dramaturgical framing in broaching topics relating to the far right and reactionary right.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"71 1","pages":"321 - 338"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83200585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"White supremacist performance and its refusal: a reflection on the mosque shootings in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand","authors":"Emma Willis","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1971885","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1971885","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The terror attack carried out at two mosques in Aotearoa New Zealand by a white supremacist in 2019 was intended as a spectacle for mass public consumption. Its live-stream on Facebook invited hyper-identification (akin to a first-person shooter game), exploiting the disembodied nature of digital connection. In this essay, I draw from Judith Butler’s concept of ‘hallucinatory merging’ to characterize this performativity and to suggest that both the killings and their filming were an attack on the ‘generativity’ of the assembly of bodies-in-prayer. The public response led by New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern avowedly rejected the ideology of white supremacy that motivated the attack. Her remark that ‘this is not us’ galvanized public sentiment, generating waves of public solidarity and a variety of public counter-performances. At the same time, this was a white supremacist act carried out in a settler (post-colonial) society, throwing into sharp relief the everyday performances of racial intolerance that trouble the notion that this is ‘not us,’ a point made by various communities including Indigenous Māori. In tracing the two opposed modes of performance – that of white supremacist exclusivity and a national narrative of inclusion – I reflect on their entanglement as well as their distinction.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"2 1","pages":"236 - 246"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75573080","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Networked audience participation: the futurity of post-Brexit democracy in One Day, Maybe and Operation Black Antler","authors":"Joseph Dunne-Howrie","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1964849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1964849","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Where are we in the story of British democracy? Was the 2016 EU Referendum a rehearsal for a new political system of direct democracy that ultimately benefits the far right? Or will the Internet replace the conventional machinery of government with a radical new form of network power where people discursively experiment with new political realities through aesthetic modes of social relations? This article proffers the term ‘networked participation’ to describe a conceptual model of citizenry centred on structuring meaning through the dialogic exchange of information in aesthetic environments. The political ideals of network politics inform my analysis of the complex web of connections that participants scaffold in the performances Operation Black Antler(Blast Theory and Hydrocracker 2017) and One Day, Maybe (dreamthinkspeak 2017) between identitarian ideology in Britain and competing narratives of democracy’s meaning in South Korea, respectively. This model of audience participation is proffered to develop a theory of social relations produced through a theatrical experience of digital interconnectivity.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"70 1","pages":"339 - 357"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85716973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The counter-theatricality of right-wing populist performance","authors":"Julia Peetz","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1964818","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1964818","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article investigates Donald Trump’s performances of right-wing populism, contrasting these with the professional theatrical practice of US political speechwriting. The public performances of US presidents are theatrical constructions in a broad conceptual interpretation of the term: as speechwriters work to construct the presidential persona and the national audience, they abstract and fictionalize both the presidential self and the national public. The resulting presidential persona is a theatrical construction designed to appeal to an idealized national community. Much of the appeal of Trump’s populism, this article posits, lies in his efforts to eschew the professionalized theatricality of US presidential performance. Drawing on in-depth interviews the author conducted with US political speechwriters – primarily presidential speechwriters spanning administrations and campaigns from Reagan to Obama – the article seeks to account for the counter-theatrical appeal of the Trump presidency and of performances of right-wing populism more broadly. Building on the speechwriters’ specialist knowledge, the historical conditions that have allowed performances of right-wing populism to flourish are explored. The article interrogates right-wing populism’s exploitation of institutional distrust as a dominant political affect and its undermining of integrative concepts of the nation in favour of a definition of ‘the people’ in terms of white, patriarchal nativism.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"338 1","pages":"247 - 262"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82949717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Garden of Dystopian Pleasures","authors":"P. de Senna, Foivos Dousos, Fil Ieropoulos, Richard Pfützenreuter","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1974693","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1974693","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article offers a reflection on the authors’ curation of (Dousos and Ieropoulos) and participation in (de Senna and Pfützenreuter) The Garden of Dystopian Pleasures, a performance festival that took place at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2018. Dousos and Ieropoulos present their thoughts around the need to curate such an event in the first place, discussing the context within which they operate, the Athenian art scene, while making the case that ambiguity as a political and poetical tool must not be surrendered to the right. De Senna and Pfützenreuter discuss their experiences in creating and performing right-wing personas that blur the lines between what is real and what is performed; engaging in strategies of overidentification, they initiate a discussion around the ethics and role of critical artistic practice in response to contemporary right-wing radicalisation and aesthetics. Mirroring the curatorially experimental nature of the festival, the contributors speak from multiple positionalities. As such, the structure and tone of the article attempt a destabilisation of the form of a conventional academic paper, avoiding an overall, singular summing-up of the positions presented, and allowing for shifts in register.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"6 1","pages":"281 - 304"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90855616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A history of robot camp: performing beyond the uncanny valley, from early twentieth-century automata to contemporary science fiction theatre","authors":"Cole Remmen","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1959182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1959182","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this work, I intervene in discussions of robot performance, pointing to a history of a performance mode I classify as ‘robot camp’ that, in offering techniques that overcome potential affective repulsion to these near-human machines, shifted the trajectory of the relationship between humans and robots. I first invoke ideas of theatre artists Edward Gordon Craig and Oriza Hirata, along with theatre scholar Louise LePage’s reinterpretation of Judith Butler’s ‘performativity’, in order to offer a consideration of the robot as a performer. This leads to a reframing of Steve Dixon’s ‘metallic camp’ in conversation with Masahiro Mori’s concept of the uncanny valley (and through a return to Susan Sontag’s foundational ‘Notes on “Camp”’), through which I theorize the performance strategy of robot camp. I trace robot camp throughout the history of performative robot portrayals, primarily early twentieth-century automaton exhibitions and Elizabeth Meriwether’s contemporary science fiction play Heddatron, foregrounding how techniques of robot camp have been successfully employed to overcome affective uneasiness toward the robot (i.e., manifestations of the uncanny valley); in doing so, I highlight how live theatre has shaped public engagements with and imaginings of the robot from its early origins.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"13 7 1","pages":"222 - 239"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83089291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Myth and popular culture: Brough’s Victorian Burlesque Medea as a heterotopic cultural space","authors":"Marta Villalba-Lázaro","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1932076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1932076","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT While Victorian classical burlesque has been traditionally dismissed as low culture for both, its insouciant treatment of classical mythology and its inability to raise serious social issues, this article focuses on Robert Brough’s Medea to demonstrate that his burlesque and its performance constitutes a fascinating example of a product of popular culture that discusses Victorian socio-political matters. Based on Brough’s political mindset, this paper reads his classical burlesque using a heterotopic perspective to analyse its potential to discuss Victorian paradigms of class, gender and racial divisions, even if it did it using music, puns, anachronisms and vulgar jokes.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"50 1","pages":"185 - 199"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73620865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"41.2 Editorial","authors":"Harriet Curtis","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1916280","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1916280","url":null,"abstract":"This is my first editorial as a new editor for Studies in Theatre and Performance. I am grateful to be joining this team at a key moment in re-shaping the priorities of theatre and performance studies in line with or in response to urgent global cultural, economic, and socio-political shifts. Studies in Theatre and Performance has always encouraged a variety of voices and perspectives in theatre and performance studies, and I, too, am committed to maintaining and expanding that through self-reflexive and field-wide reflections on the past, present, and future shape of the discipline as we continue to teach, research, and live through a period of uncertainty. The six articles collected in this issue offer a range of approaches to performance as a social practice that explores the liminal and the transformational. The authors elaborate on moments of pleasure, enchantment, grief, and mourning drawn out by and through performance, offering analyses of plays and performances emerging from navigating the joys and contradictions of everyday life. Matched by their rootedness in the material present, the articles also make connections to shifting historical narratives, reverence to ancestral pasts, the opening up of transformational spaces between the real and the ethereal, and performance’s ontological suspension of the rational. Each touches on the politics of temporality, on cycles of living from childhood, parenthood, illness, death, and beyond, each time returning to the will to life, to survival, and the possibilities in performance of staging life’s intricacies. Gloria Nwandu Ozor, Ciarunji Chesaina, and Masumi Odari’s article focuses on the Odo masquerade ritual of the Umulumgbe – a community in the South Eastern subtribe of the Igbo of Nigeria – representing the return of ancestors to the world of the living and the means through which actors represent the dead through imitation. The authors characterise the work of the Odo according to the division of labour, between those who administer and promote justice, and those who enforce laws, promote peace, and discourage physical conflict. Ultimately, though the focus of the Odo masquerade is on justice, peace, and conflict-resolution, analysed here as a social drama with a civic function, the authors also emphasise the Odo as a death ritual, whereby the dead are reunited with the living, transitioning from the spiritual to the physical. The themes of division, unity, conflict resolution, and community are continued in David Overend and Oliver Heath’s article, which focuses on The Majority, performed at the National Theatre in 2017. Conceived in response to the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016, the audience’s use of voting technology is integral to the play’s structure. Prompted to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a series of propositions ranging from the seemingly mundane to the morally complex, the article focuses on the performance’s use of audience participation – the performance of ","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"12 1","pages":"133 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78505579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"(Skin)Aesthetics (First Manifesto)","authors":"Freya Verlander","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1912489","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1912489","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT '(Skin)Aesthetics (First Manifesto)' offers an introduction to my new performance theory and method of performance analysis: ‘(skin)aesthetics’. In the spirit of a manifesto, I outline the theoretical development of (skin)aesthetics as an approach and its objectives. (Skin)aesthetics focusses on the spectator’s skin as an active and reciprocal site of engagement in the performance environment. It considers the way that other materials, and senses, represent or emulate the skin and the tactile sense, as well as investigating how the spectator’s skin-based experience might be manipulated to communicate meaning in performance environments. It asks how spectators might be drawn into empathetic relation with others through such skin-based experiences.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"2 1","pages":"4 - 17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81637337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘He did not go back to the army’: war, patriotism and desertion in Pavel Pryazhko’s The Soldier","authors":"J. Rowson","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1917873","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1917873","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Over the past twenty years, a collection of theatre makers in Russia have staged suppressed and marginalised voices to engage with the political and social realities of contemporary Russia. The work of these innovative theatre practitioners has been collated under the idiom of New Drama (Novaya Drama). Previous studies of New Drama have placed an emphasis on the role of the text and the playwright’s dynamic use of contemporary language. While acknowledging that these are important features of the New Drama repertoire, this article provides an alternative approach by examining the work of Pavel Pryazhko. This article explores Pryazhko’s The Soldier (Soldat, 2011), in the context of the Second Chechen War and Vladimir Putin’s revivification of the military in the public sphere. Through a detailed study of The Soldier in performance, this article contends that the production’s content and form is vital in generating an oppositional discourse about the role of the military in contemporary Russian society. Pryazhko’s eschewal of traditional notions of theatrical language and dialogic interaction in The Soldier disrupts the audience’s expectations of what a theatre performance is, and subsequently facilitates a wider dialogue about the Kremlin’s privileging of the military in Russia.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"49 1","pages":"200 - 221"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85321840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}