THEATRE SURVEY最新文献

{"title":"The Lines between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment By Bess Rowen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021; pp. x + 247, 1 illustration. $80 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 e-book.","authors":"George Pate","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000278","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000278","url":null,"abstract":"play after being immersed in a video game, with its branching narrative paths. We might, Bushnell suggests, approach it with heightened attention to the role of uncertainty and mischance, to the ways that choices shape a character’s identity, to whether tragic endings are inevitable or chosen. “While a traditional view of Hamlet focuses on the outcome as Hamlet’s assenting to his destiny to avenge his father’s death and accept his own,” she notes, “a focus on gaming . . . can make us look again at how Hamlet might be operating in a more open rather than closed world, defined by uncertainty rather than fatality” (236). Hamlet is, after all, a play whose most famous line turns on the word “or.” One of the great advantages of viewing the early modern stage in gaming terms is the framework that it provides for thinking about metatheatricality. This engaging and provocative essay collection opens by attempting to answer the question “What is a game?” but, by the time they finish, readers are also left with a range of new and surprising answers to the question “What is a play?”","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"288 - 290"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49220316","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":"Theater as Data: Computational Journeys into Theater Research Miguel Escobar Varela. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021; pp. viii + 222, 21 illustrations, 13 datasets, 4 code samples, 4 videos. $75 cloth, $29.95 paper, Open Access e-book.","authors":"Harmony Bench","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000254","url":null,"abstract":"Enola Gay. What keeps the image of flight aloft in the American imagination is a technophilia that conceals violence through the aestheticized and distanced act of bombing, further realized in the drone strike. The American infatuation with flight is inextricable from how it aesthetically and anesthetically wields violence that enables the American willing suspension of disbelief that we are not performing violence ourselves. Despite these issues, Magelssen should be commended for focusing on this topic with sensitivity. Throughout, he thoughtfully engages with performance studies to connect the specificity of the historical archive with contemporary culture and politics. He takes seriously the ways in which flight has not only been central to the American cultural imagination, but also how that figuration is fundamentally shaped by disciplinary regimes of race, gender, and nation. In so doing, Magelssen effectively makes the case for flight’s centrality to America’s image of itself, with performance as one of its foundational elements.","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"284 - 286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48445394","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":"Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre W. B. Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. vii + 271, 11 illustrations. $105 cloth, $29.99 paper, $24 e-book.","authors":"Alessandro Simari","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000205","url":null,"abstract":"formance’s location and duration. Part 1 also includes a chapter on Tadeusz Kantor by Magda Romanska (Chapter 6), as well as one by Edith Cassiers, Timmy De Laet, and Luk Van den Dries (Chapter 3) that examines Guy Cassiers’s and Romeo Castellucci’s notebooks and creative processes, both of which will easily complement courses examining these international artists’ work. Cassiers, De Laet, and Van den Dries aptly note that genetic theatre studies—research examining the genesis of a performance—tends to focus on scripts and text-based material, thus clinging “to characteristics that are foundational of classical drama, forsaking the expanded aesthetics that typify postdrama” (34). The chapter highlights how even a performance’s preparatory materials contribute to its form. Part 2 investigates the impact of different social contexts on performance. In Chapter 8, for example, Andrew Friedman considers the curation of avant-garde performance festivals, in which performers may disrupt or exploit one another’s work. In Chapter 9, Ryan Anthony Hatch considers the gallery setting of David Levine’s Habit using Lacanian analysis. Kate Bredeson, in Chapter 10, extends Lehmann’s theory to the contemporary French scene, which was underrepresented in Postdramatic Theatre, by linking it to Bruno Tackels’s concept of “set writing” (148). And, in Chapter 11, Yvonne Hardt considers reperformances from dance archives. The case studies in Part 2 illuminate how postdramatic theatre is not simply shaped by the dramaturgical choices of the artistic team but is also influenced by the broader social context in which it is presented. As with Lehmann’s original book, it is impossible to capture the full range that postdramatic forms may take. However, Postdramatic Theatre and Form offers a strong variety of case-study analyses that will encourage readers to consider more fully the extent to which a multitude of formal elements within a performance’s dramaturgy and its social context work to shape the overall meanings of a piece. In focusing specifically on form, the book extends Lehmann’s ideas into fruitful theoretical territory, simultaneously adding more recent performances to the discussion. The book consequently can ably serve to supplement and renew studies on postdramatic theatre sixteen years after Lehmann’s original publication.","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"296 - 299"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45569191","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":"Beckett beyond the Normal Edited by Seán Kennedy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020; pp. ix + 155. $100 cloth, $24.95 paper, $100 e-book.","authors":"J. McAllister","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000229","url":null,"abstract":"ideologies and does so with real teeth. Theatre companies who pursue the kind of important, necessary, and revolutionary work for which Rowen advocates should be aware of the risks that come from a system that invests the author with virtually unchecked omnipotence. One day it would be nice to see a theatre company fight one of these cease and desists on the grounds that they had, in fact, followed the stage directions, but such a fight would need to be planned and well-funded, as intellectual property cases can cost millions to litigate. In the meantime, any theatre company or student director stirred or moved by Rowen’s effective arguments and calls to action—a highly likely possibility given Rowen’s passionate writing style and effective rhetoric—should operate with an awareness of the very real imbalances in legal power in the contemporary theatre landscape.","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"290 - 292"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49042444","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 Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays Edited by Leanne Keyes, Lindsey Mantoan, and Angela Farr Schiller. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; pp. xi + 444. $100 cloth, $34.95 paper, $31.45 e-book.","authors":"A. Sansonetti","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000126","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"242 - 244"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47766683","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":"Nobodies and Somebodies: Embodying Precarity on the Early Modern English Stage","authors":"Mattie Burkert","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000072","url":null,"abstract":"Stock characters named “Nobody” and “Somebody” were mainstays of British performance culture in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Playbills and newspaper advertisements show that these roles were popular with audiences in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, as well as on the regional stages. Men and women alike took on these personae to deliver songs, prologues, and epilogues, often as part of benefit performances where they chose their most crowd-pleasing roles to maximize ticket sales. Some of the pieces spoken by Nobody and Somebody were popular enough to make their way into print, excerpted in novels and miscellanies. The duo appeared in George Alexander Stevens's wildly popular Lecture on Heads (1764), which traveled across the Atlantic to stages in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York, continuing to be performed in the early Republic until the nineteenth century. Offstage, the figures were staples of visual culture; as Terry Robinson has shown, audience awareness of these figures from Romantic-era political cartoons formed an important backdrop for Mary Robinson's theatrical afterpiece Nobody (1794).","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"205 - 232"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44921302","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":"Anticipation","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0040557422000035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0040557422000035","url":null,"abstract":"Anticipation is an energy that can enliven or evacuate a moment. It tells us to look forward to what is to come, but it can also keep us from sitting with the specificity of the present, moving us too hastily from the significance of what is right in front of us. As scholars of performance history, we are trained to look for the most meaningful change over time, the specialness of specific moments. The authors in this issue document and interpret the past in order to weave skillful bridges toward the present, sometimes illuminating, without falling into teleological framings, the ways that artists and critics of the past anticipated some of the most pressing concerns of contemporary times. Rebecca Kastleman opens this issue with a study that uplifts Zora Neale Hurston’s foresight as both a performance theorist and a leader in university-based theatre practice. Building upon the work of other Hurston scholars, she identifies the ways that Hurston’s creative practice, particularly after the termination of Charlotte Osgood Mason’s patronage, worked expansively to uplift the artistry of Black life across media and social spaces. Kastleman adds to the movement to recognize Hurston as part of the genealogy of American performance theory, providing a foundation for our understanding of precisely how relationships between participants and audiences constitute performance events. Hurston’s deployment of her anthropological training shed light on the interpersonal, institutional, and communal dimensions of social relationships, developing a framework that extends toward the ways in which subsequent articulations of performance theory evolved a scalar model of representational efficacy in the construction of social meaning. In addition, her work within university settings provided spaces where she could both refine her personal craft as a writer and theorist, and also contribute to a vision of what arts curricula at the collegiate level could and should include. In the first half of the twentieth century, Hurston was advocating for the well-rounded course offerings that many of us continue to implore our campus leaders to fund! Bradley Rogers offers a biographical contribution that highlights the signal influence of Otto Harbach upon what we now appreciate as “integrated” musical theatre. Harbach entered the field at a time when musical comedy was a disaggregated assortment of musical numbers and narrative, with no deep sense of connection between the two that would maintain an audience’s connection to the story’s emotional through line. Instead, Harbach leveraged his extensive training in (and subsequent employment as an instructor of) elocution and oratory to advance a more holistic approach to the musical, deploying songs to advance rather than interrupt the narrative, and did so quite early in the twentieth century, years before the theatrical works that are most commonly celebrated as achieving this formal synthesis. Rogers’s essay reasserts Harbach’s ","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"135 - 137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42269159","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":"Staging Hurston's Heaven: Ethnographic Performance from the Pulpit to the Pews","authors":"Rebecca Kastleman","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000047","url":null,"abstract":"It was May in Eau Gallie, Florida, and Zora Neale Hurston was headed to church. Shutting the door to her cottage near the shores of the Indian River, Hurston set out to join the local Baptist congregation, where she would hear a sermon delivered by its pastor, the Reverend C. C. Lovelace. Hurston had been pondering the question of how to represent the experience of a church service in a theatrical performance. “Know what I am attempting?” she had written to Langston Hughes a few days earlier, in April 1929. “To set an entire Bapt. service word for word and note for note.” Listening to Lovelace's sermon in Eau Gallie, Hurston admired how the preacher's oratory built seamlessly from a creation story into a fiery vision of divine retribution. She was so taken by the poetry of Lovelace's words that she transcribed his sermon in its entirety. This sermon later served as the centerpiece of the play The Sermon in the Valley, a work that testifies to Hurston's aim to render a Baptist service “word for word and note for note.” Like many of her plays, The Sermon in the Valley reveals the intimate entanglement of her ethnographic compositions and her writing for the stage.","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"138 - 159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47511436","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 Emergence of the Integrated Musical: Otto Harbach, Oratorical Theory, and the Cinema","authors":"B. Rogers","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000059","url":null,"abstract":"In 1920, Oscar Hammerstein II—fresh from the modest success of his debut musical Always You—was eager to write the show for Frank Tinney that his uncle Arthur was to produce. As Hugh Fordin wrote, “Arthur, confident of his nephew's ability but aware that he needed to learn more about his craft, brought in Otto Harbach to collaborate on the book and lyrics.” The two men joined forces on that show—Tickle Me—and went on to write such classics as Rose-Marie (1924, Rudolf Friml & Herbert Stothart), Sunny (1925, Jerome Kern), and The Desert Song (1926, Sigmund Romberg). After working with Harbach (Fig. 1), Hammerstein would venture on his own and write Show Boat, Oklahoma!, and be credited as having ushered in a new era of musical theatre, chiefly defined by his success at “integration.” As literary scholar Scott McMillin writes, the conventional idea of integration is that “all elements of a show—plot, character, song, dance, orchestration, and setting—should blend together into a unity, a seamless whole.” In popular commentary, this development is often attributed to Rodgers & Hammerstein's 1943 musical Oklahoma!, as seen in John Kenrick's claim that “[t]hroughout the show, every word, number, and dance step was an organic part of the storytelling process. Instead of interrupting the dialogue, each song and dance continued it. For the first time, everything flowed in an unbroken narrative line from overture to curtain call.” Other historians and critics are more tempered, touting the success of Oklahoma! while insisting that its integration must be seen as part of a broader historical arc. Andrew Lamb, for example, celebrates Oklahoma! by noting that it was the realization of “[w]hat Kern and Gershwin had experimented with as far back as the 1920s—a piece that was not just a collection of catchy numbers, but a fusion of drama, song, and dance.” In a 1962 article, Stanley Green notes that the creators of Oklahoma! “blended all the theatrical arts with such skill tha[t] many accepted it as a revolution in the theatre,” but he argues that their accomplishment was actually “more evolutionary than revolutionary. Rather than inaugurating any trend toward the well-integrated show, what it did achieve was a perfection in technique of a development that had been going on ever since the second decade of the century.” While Green cites the Princess Theatre musicals of Bolton, Wodehouse, and Kern as the earliest examples of integration, this lineage goes back further—further than Hammerstein, further than Gershwin, further than Kern. To understand the history of the idea of “integration” in musical theatre, we must go back to the artist whose 1910 musical Madame Sherry, hailed as the “musical comedy rage of a generation,” was celebrated by critics for the way its “entertaining elements” were “cleverly interwoven into a consistent whole,” for the innovative ways that “the songs, lyrics, and ensemble numbers . . . are directly related to the story of the comedy, a","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"160 - 182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42957975","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":"Street Theatre and the Production of Postindustrial Space: Working Memories By David Calder. Theatre: Theory—Practice—Performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019; pp. x + 205, 21 illustrations. £80/$120 cloth.","authors":"V. Bianchi","doi":"10.1017/S0040557422000151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557422000151","url":null,"abstract":"in temporary and permanent theatre institutions in post-Wall Berlin. Whereas it strongly disavows “the long-standing tradition of state-subsidized theater in Berlin,” it makes scant effort to disavow male dominance at the Berlin theatres (8). It also leaves the reader with a question: How have the burning issues of migration, citizenship, and nationalism impacted performing arts policies in post-Wall Berlin? It is understandable that Woolf does not address the question, however, because his primary focus is to explicate the complex relationship between performance and policy. Although he leaves this to other theatre and performance scholars for further exploration, Woolf makes a significant contribution to theatre studies, performance studies, German studies, and cultural studies.","PeriodicalId":42777,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE SURVEY","volume":"63 1","pages":"248 - 250"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46778964","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}