{"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}
{"title":"Performativity and fragmentation in Samuel Beckettʼs That Time","authors":"Aténé Mendelyté","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1917187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1917187","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Samuel Beckett’s stage play That Time offers an aesthetic exploration of the paradoxical and deconstructive nature of identity and selfhood where the ability of narrative acts to express and capture a preexistent, originary identity is put into question. That Time implies that there is no such core identity and that any identity is constituted by performing and narrating one’s selfhood, thus questioning the hierarchy of the signifier and the signified. In this essay, I therefore read this play alongside Judith Butler’s notions of performativity, citationality, and subject formation in order to explore That Time’s constitution of the self and to show that Beckett’s play and its performance present a perfect instance of how narrative, to use Butler’s description, can bespeak its own impossibility, i.e., to deconstruct itself at the moment of its construction. I aim to reveal some key intersections between That Time and Butler’s thought since the former allows one to aesthetically experience her philosophical ideas and the latter aids in better articulating the complexity of the play’s performance.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"61 1","pages":"171 - 184"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80293889","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 pleasure in moving: drawing the space through flamenco bodies","authors":"Miriana Lausic","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1913322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1913322","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article develops an analysis of flamenco performance and religious processions in Andalusia by deploying and extending Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of drawing, using the results of extensive ethnographic field research completed by the author among the Roma community in southern Spain. The article demonstrates how the Gitano body becomes a corpus of drawing, in Nancy’s sense, through a performance of tracing. The logic of this trace entails an originary intermingling of time and space, as well as a structural overlapping of the animate and the inanimate. Far from being purely abstract, such tracing is read as the choreographed self-portraiture of the Gitano community itself. The author argues that the performers and ethnographic researcher meet and intersect in a shared space of extension. In this sense, the tracing of flamenco bodies parallels the performative dimension of auto-ethnographic writing.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"35 1","pages":"155 - 170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81197959","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":"Horses and Cowboys on the Contemporary American Stage: The Horse as Prop in Sam Shepard’s Kicking a Dead Horse and Sarah Ruhl’s Late: a cowboy song","authors":"Ana Fernández-Caparrós","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1902139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1902139","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This comparative essay analyses the dramatic representation of horses in two early twenty-first-century American plays by Sam Shepard and Sarah Ruhl. Both plays bring a horse figure onto the stage as a prop and couple it to human characters fashioned by the iconography of the American cowboy. While both plays rely heavily on the symbolic power of horses and trope the animal, thus failing to achieve a portrayal of animality initially capable of challenging traditional humanist forms of representation, a close analysis of the materiality of equine presence on the stage shows the overlooked yet essential dramatic function horses have in these plays; that, far from being static symbols, they intervene decisively in the construction and cultural perception of space, gender and values of evolving American cowboy cultures; that their presence contributes to an appreciation of the potential of the horse-human partnership; and that, bringing to the stage their historical heritage as inhabitants of the American frontier, their presence contributes to the reconceptualization of borders making boundaries between humans and animals more permeable.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"106 1","pages":"91 - 107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78254419","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":"Field works: wild experiments for performance research","authors":"D. Overend","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1895543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1895543","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article reflects on a series of wild experiments in literal field sites. It develops a practice-based methodology that aims to identify, perform and assert wild presences and unruly processes, playfully engaging with vibrant and dynamic ecologies. To explore these concerns ‘in the field’, a series of research trips were undertaken in the United Kingdom between 2017 and 2020, including repeated visits to Knepp Wildland Project in West Sussex and Bamff Estate in Perthshire. These locations were chosen due to their engagement with rewilding as an experimental mode of ecosystem management. Rewilding is explored here as a process-driven approach to conservation that offers a potential model for transdisciplinary artistic research. Adopting and adapting its methods through a combination of place writing, collaborative performance making and site-specific art, a creative practice is developed that prompts collaborative ways of working in response to the ecologies, conceptualisations and performances of these field sites. Aiming to bring something back from the field into the academy, the article argues for a (re)wilding of disciplinary knowledge exchange. It concludes with a call for wild epistemology, proposing that research in specific field sites can be informed by an artistic practice that is entangled, unsettling and continually practiced.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"32 1","pages":"70 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82485620","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":"Borderline society and ‘rebellious mourning’: the case of South Korean feminist activism","authors":"Y. J. Hwang","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1874106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1874106","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article I propose two concepts – a borderline society and ‘rebellious mourning’ – to present a conceptual framework for understanding contemporary Korean feminism. This article argues that borderline society is both a concept and a product of co-existing and contesting ways of Korean women’s speaking against the culture of gender-based violence to consider the (imagined) topography for their co-existence as one that requires the psychic conception of reality as a counterpart to the patriarchy. Given that the 2016 femicide accelerated the movement of Korean women speaking about their experiences as an act of mourning, borderline society provides an understanding of how Korean women perform it. Drawing on contemporary news clippings and websites related to Korean feminist activism, this article examines how ‘rebellious mourning’ is embodied through the cultural practices of Korean activist groups. While Womad stands in opposition to #MeToo because of its negation of the patriarchy, Flame, Femi, Action is situated as a point of contact between the two. This article will thus provide a new understanding of the particularity of Korean feminism based on the link between the psyche and gender subjectivity of women speaking up, thereby placing a specific local situation into the broader context of constructing activism.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"1 1","pages":"32 - 46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88210783","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":"Vulnerability, care and hope in audience research: theatre as a site of struggle for an intergenerational politics","authors":"K. Gallagher, C. Balt, Lindsay Valve","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2020.1862998","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2020.1862998","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article considers the theatre as a vital site for the formation of an ‘intergenerational polis’ through its examination of the verbatim play, Towards Youth: A play on radical hope, by Andrew Kushnir. Performed in Toronto from February to March, 2019, at Crow’s Theatre, Towards Youth attracted a uniquely intergenerational audience. Our audience research on this production, consisting of post-performance interviews, conducted in the lobby of Crow’s Theatre, gave rise to difficult dialogues between generations, particularly regarding questions of ‘intergenerational injustice’ at these times of economic, environmental, and socio-political precarity. We examine how discomfort,witnessing and vulnerability manifested in these audience interviews and in the development of a tentative and temporary ‘intergenerational polis’ in the theatre. We look to how the affective labour performed by the audience in these interviews sought to establish an ‘ethics of care’ between some younger and older audience members, as a practice of hope in uncertain times. This research gestures towards the importance of attuning to ‘dissensus’ in audience research towards the cultivation of a critical and civically-engaged spectatorship.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"25 1","pages":"35 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82676884","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 manifesto to decentre theatre and performance studies","authors":"Swati Arora","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1881730","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1881730","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT With the climate of Brexit, xenophobia and white supremacy on the rise, health and safety of Black and Global Majority people under threat during the spread of Covid in the UK and elsewhere, a discussion of colonialism, migration, borders, and equality – in the classrooms and outside – is more pertinent than ever. Situating the ongoing Decolonise the University movement as part of broader social justice struggles to address the political, social, and economic crises we find ourselves in today, I propose a few ways of decentering Theatre and Performance Studies in the form of a manifesto. What follows is a meditation on precarity, critical pedagogy, Black study, feminist survival, ethical research praxis, and the violence of caste, colourism, and racialisations.","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"41 1","pages":"12 - 20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78619405","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":"If/when performance studies came to Singapore: PSi #10 and its ramifications","authors":"N. Cheng","doi":"10.1080/14682761.2021.1889238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2021.1889238","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In 2004, Performance Studies came to Singapore for a brief visit, and, by some accounts, it was a fraught encounter. That year, a Performance Studies international (PSi) conference, PSi #10, was hosted in Singapore, the first time this association gathered in ‘Asia’. In this essay, I use this conference as a starting point to tease out the intersections between my discipline and my home country, and the anxieties and potentialities that arise from bringing the two in the same space with someone like me as an interlocutor. In doing so, I critically raise the question: what does it mean to ‘perform’ Performance Studies in a place such as Singapore, a (post-)colonial, soft- authoritarian state?","PeriodicalId":42067,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Theatre and Performance","volume":"57 1","pages":"40 - 49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80219145","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}