Australasian Drama Studies最新文献

{"title":"The suitcase royale: Sonic explorations of gothic Victorian towns","authors":"Miles O’Neil","doi":"10.3316/INFORMIT.645259813297918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3316/INFORMIT.645259813297918","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42838,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Drama Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48935968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary","authors":"L. Reid","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-1205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-1205","url":null,"abstract":"ALISON FINDLAY, WOMEN IN SHAKESPEARE: A DICTIONARY, NEW EDN, ARDEN SHAKESPEARE DICTIONARIES (LONDON: BLOOMSBURY 2014)From 'abbess' to 'Zenelophon', Alison Findlay's Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary is a rich yet accessible reference tool. Ever wonder what a Shakespearean Joan or Bianca is typically like? Or how words including 'fish', 'placket', or 'nothing' were used as bawdy slang in the early modern period? Or what a phrase like 'lead apes in hell' could possibly have meant to Shakespeare's contemporaries? Newly available in paperback and priced at a reasonable £25.99, Women in Shakespeare contains an informative, insightful, and sometimes surprising array of entries covering these and other topics. Perusing the variety of material collected within this laboriously researched and intricately cross-referenced volume is truly a pleasure.The organisation of Women in Shakespeare broadly conforms with the standard format used throughout the Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries series (general editor Sandra Clark), which also includes such recent and forthcoming titles as Shakespeare's Insults: A Pragmatic Dictionary, Shakespeare's Plants and Gardens: A Dictionary, and Shakespeare's Medical Language: A Dictionary. Each of Women in Shakespeare's 350-plus alphabetised entries is formatted according to a useful tripartite structure. The first section provides readers with a basic definition of the headword (often a proper name, but alternatively a common noun, a verb, or a phrase) and outlines how it was understood and used by Shakespeare and his early modern English contemporaries. This is followed by a brief account and succinct analysis of Shakespeare's particular use(s) of this name, turn of phrase, or term within his corpus. In Findlay's lengthier entries, often these second sections read as sophisticated, argument-driven, and feminist-leaning 'mini-essays', to borrow the author's own description (xiv). And, finally, the third section of each entry provides readers with a list of judiciously selected critical sources that could be used as a starting point for further reading and research on the entry's topic. The book concludes with a substantial bibliography of relevant scholarship as well as a comprehensive index that will aid readers in finding further interconnections between entries.Findlay's brief Introduction at the outset of the work describes the unique scope and aims of this dictionary. Though many of its constituent headwords are proper names, the entries for 'Katherine', 'Portia' or 'Emilia', for instance, do not function as individual character studies. Rather, in a move that will have particular appeal for those readers interested in onomastics, such entries typically 'group together several figures by given name with the aim of exploring what kinds of common attribute Shakespeare associated with that name or how he deliberately played off expectations about a given name' (xi).The scope of this book extends far beyond a study of Shakespe","PeriodicalId":42838,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Drama Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71131345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"International Women Stage Directors","authors":"S. Richards","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-4178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-4178","url":null,"abstract":"ANNE FLIOTSOS AND WENDY VIEROW (EDS), INTERNATIONAL WOMEN STAGE DIRECTORS (MICHIGAN: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS, 2013)This book celebrates the achievements of women stage directors, against the odds. Their talent and tenacity in a consistently male-dominated industry distinguish these inspiring theatre-makers. There is no escaping the pervading state of play in the twenty-first century: women directors across the world are underrepresented, underfunded and marginalised in mainstream theatre. Where women directors make their mark is in independent theatre, creating their own companies and as freelance artists, giving them a good deal of artistic freedom, socially and politically.In the Foreword by Roberta Levitow, we begin to consider the inevitable relationship between theatre, politics and conflict. The Introduction by Anne Fliotsos advises the reader that the twenty-four countries selected represent the range of geographic diversity, socio-economic situations, and cover different religions and cultures.The work is not exhaustive but it is authentic, with the practitioners living and/or working in their communities. Each chapter, organised alphabetically, shares a common structure addressing: Women's Rights: Historical Context, Early Women Directors, Working Climate in the Twenty-First Century and Profiles of Contemporary Directors. Fliotsos identifies the many ways in which gender has influenced their work. This is the common denominator throughout.Successive waves of feminism have washed over each of the places in which the directors have pursued their work: more often than not, they have been disrupted by social and political turmoil. These circumstances ranged from moderate to extreme, including the imposition of dictatorship, martial law, war, genocide, economic crises, communism, totalitarianism, revolution, tensions of modernity versus traditionalists versus fundamentalists. They are predominantly patriarchal societies which have commonly derailed both the feminist movement and often theatre itself. Thus Poland's fight for liberation is entangled with the struggle for women's equality, both restrained by communism and Catholicism. In more recent times, in Egypt, feminism has been linked to the struggle for independence where it 'distils the journey of Egyptian women theatre artists searching for their voice and mission in the public sphere' (109).Communism reveals some unexpected results for the status of women directors. For example, while Imperial China afforded women limited rights, now most have equal employment rights under communism. However the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution saw theatre companies and schools shut down, and women presented on stage as stereotypes. In Poland, the transition, after 1989, from communism to capitalism, saw the curtailment of the previously generous theatre sponsorship by the state. In Russia, feminism was seen as a capitalist fight, not theirs. Under such regimes, artists had to make p","PeriodicalId":42838,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Drama Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2015-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71145080","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography","authors":"P. Monaghan","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-1987","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-1987","url":null,"abstract":"JANE COLLINS ANI ANIIEW NISIET |EIS|, THEAT?? AHB PEREBBMAHCE BESIEH: A REABEB IH SCEHBEBAPHY (LONDON ANI NEW roil: IOITIEIGE, 20101Josef Svoboda, 'the father of modern scenography' (390), insists - in Jarka Burian, The Scenography of Josef Svoboda (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971) - that 'true scenography is what happens when the curtain opens and can't be judged in any other way'. Nevertheless, in this fabulous reader Jane Collins and Andrew Nisbet have collected a fascinating range of existing and newly commissioned contributions that explore and expand our understanding of scenography in theatre and performance. The title, as the editors mention in their Introduction (1), has been carefully chosen to encompass the terms 'theatre', 'performance', 'design' and 'scenography' - practices which 'are sometimes considered discretely but more often paired when they are written or spoken about'. Moreover, 'the blurring of boundaries between these fields is one of the distinguishing features of current practice' (1). A reader of this kind has long been missing and therefore warrants celebration.It is now widely recognised that the term 'design' in relation to theatre and performance carries with it the baggage - commonly misrecognised as 'Aristotelian' - that the visual and spatial aspects of theatre are less important than words and actions. Arnold Aronson refers, elsewhere, to scenography as 'an all encompassing visual-spatial construct as well as the process of change and transformation that is an inherent part of the physical vocabulary of the stage'. For Svoboda, the term 'scenography' refers to the 'interplay of space, time movement and light on stage' - in Pamela Howard, What Is Scenography? (London: Routledge, 2002) - and Implies 'a handling of total production space, which means not only the space of the stage, but also the auditorium in terms of the demands of a given production' (in Burian). It concerns itself with architectural forms, objects and bodies in space, but also with making the invisible visible, with what exists between architecture, objects and bodies. In an extract in the reader, Svoboda quotes Paul Klee on this point: 'Instead of the phenomenon of a tree, brook or rose, we are more interested in revealing the growth, flow and blossoming which takes place within them' (391). Scenography is dramaturgically active, and might indeed be thought of as the equivalent of visual and spatial dramaturgy; see, for example, the editors' discussion of 'the scenographic' (140-2). Hence the practice and theory of scenography are discursive, and this reader is 'an invitation to enter into this discourse, to participate in this journey of enquiry' (1).The readings are divided into five parts, each of which contributes to the discourse of scenography. The sections move from broad issues of philosophy and perception, towards more specific issues of scenographic practice, and then broaden out again to the way that spectators make m","PeriodicalId":42838,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Drama Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71131798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Performance in Place of War","authors":"Rand Hazou","doi":"10.5860/choice.47-4325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-4325","url":null,"abstract":"James Thompson, Jenny Hughes and Michael Balfour, Performance in Place of War (London and New York: Seagull, 2009) How and why do theatre-makers create work in places of conflict? What kinds of practices are prevalent in war zones and what are their ethical implications? And can theatre and performance resist or provide alternatives to war? These are just some of the pertinent questions that are addressed by the recent publication Performance in Place of War. The book discusses a variety of recent performance projects emerging in places of conflict and explores the potential role that theatre and performance can play in ameliorating the devastating effect of war on people's lives. However, this 'preventive, protective and rehabilitative' role that performance can play is not presented uncritically (2). Rather, the various chapters present a series of theatre case studies that are framed by important and penetrating critical considerations about the efficacy of performance and the extent that theatre can be disentangled from regimes of power that might have vested interests in the continuation of conflict. This critical framing of the inquiry is epitomised by the provocation included in the introduction. Following Carl von Clausewitz, the authors suggest that if 'war is the continuation of politics by other means', then perhaps 'performance may well be a continuation of war and politics by other means' (2). The book is presented in five main chapters organised in response to the complex spatial and temporal reconfigurations that war affects. Chapter One, 'In Place', begins with theatre events created in the place and at the time of war. It includes a discussion of the art project Butterfly Peace Garden in Sri Lanka, that attempted to provide a place of safety and beauty for young people, and Laughter under the Bombs, a theatre production developed during the most recent Israeli bombardment of Beirut in 2006. This latter production was devised from workshops conducted with young people at the Madina Theatre, with rehearsals at times limited to the use of half the stage space while the other half was used to accommodate the several families who had been forced to take refuge in the theatre building (39). Despite Adorno's pronouncement that 'all culture after Auschwitz is barbaric' (28), and in contrast to suspicions of theatre as pretention that is incapable of doing justice to the gravity of war, the examples cited in this chapter highlight how theatre and performance can work to counteract the numbing effects that the trauma of war can precipitate. In opposition to the anaesthetising of war, theatre's aesthetics can facilitate feelings of hope, engender senses of beauty and play, and restore much-needed normalcy at a time of intense disruption and upheaval. Chapter Two, 'Displaced', explores theatre practices generated with, by and for displaced communities. It includes discussion of the work Exodus by refugee communities in Manchester, UK, the Is","PeriodicalId":42838,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Drama Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71128826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Make It Relevant","authors":"N. Jamieson","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1131b2h.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1131b2h.10","url":null,"abstract":"Nigel Jameson delivered the annual Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne on 22 September, 2008. He spoke about his first experiences on coming to Australia and his experiences with theatre and the arts in Australia.","PeriodicalId":42838,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Drama Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2009-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68769997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio","authors":"Bryoni Trezise","doi":"10.4324/9780203000977","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203000977","url":null,"abstract":"Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci, Chiara Guidi, Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout, The Theatre of Soctetas Raffaello Sanzio (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) In their introduction to The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Nicholas Ridout and Joe Kelleher explain what it is for writing to capture the terms of a theatrical project that places the spectator 'already in the archive, re-examining the state of the imprints' (12). As the first English-language book to contribute to the growing archive on this internationally feted Italian theatre company, The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio formally wrestles with the very spatio-temporal logics posed by the company's signature architectures of image: eviscerated bodies, a myth cut in half and made abject, peripatetic thuds spliced against the precision of an electronic bow and arrow, a child on stage, cooing alone. The images created by Societas Raffaello Sanzio are viscerally impossible - they leave us sweaty and tangled in our seats, having glimpsed the self, the world, the wound of hypermodernity, in all its rotten but tremulous complexity. The ability to articulate in language that which the company has been chasing in such raw mise-en-scene for over twenty years is a difficult task for any enthused spectator. For scholars of their work, it seems that no one angle is ever quite enough to get at what, exactly, their theatre is able to produce. To be already in the archive, re-examining the state of the imprints, is to be placed in a position of clinical observation. This archive - Societas Raffaello Sanzio's roaming four-year, city-based repertoire Tragedia Endogonidia - contains the rapidly fading imprints of the West's end-of-millennium atrocities. In Cesena (C.#01), a near-naked body lying in a gilded room is actually that of Carlo Guiliani, a young protester killed by police at the 2001 G8 summit. In the Berlin episode (B.#02), an unspeakable homage to the 'mute, tragic stature' (73) of Germany's revolutionary Ulrike Meinhof is envisaged in the figure of an anonymous, mourning mother masturbating desperately on the edge of her bed. As referents of recent histories, these images are less about staging specific events and more about naming a state of deep but impenetrable loss. As the company members explain, their work is about city, post-tragedy and erasure - a 'mim[ing] [of] the images of tragedy' in a context in which tragedy has become farce - where 'redemption, pathos and ethos are inaccessible' (30). Tragedia Endogonidia mourns the sanctity of tragedy as a formal code, forcing the spectator to enter a logic that inverts the European theatrical sensorium as well as the symbologies of the late capitalist West. Ridout and Kelleher have collaborated with founding company members Romeo Castellucci (director), Chiara Guidi (dramaturg and designer) and Claudia Castellucci (performer), to construct a monograph that is itself a restaging, an assemblage of critical essays, process lo","PeriodicalId":42838,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Drama Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2008-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70565968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"and what remains","authors":"H. Halba","doi":"10.3998/mpub.11522475.cmp.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11522475.cmp.29","url":null,"abstract":"Miria George, and what remains (Wellington: Tawata Press, 2007) The Maori culture has resided in Aotearoa/New Zealand for nearly a thousand years, and its erosion through colonisation, globalisation and government policy is neatly allegorised in Miria George's play and what remains. The year is 2010. As the play's narrative unfolds, the viewer discovers that under the guise of hidden, false notions of 'universality' embedded into Pakeha (non-Maori) New Zealand governmental policy, the decision has been made for all Maori to leave this country. Mary - a name aurally reminiscent of 'Maori' mispronounced by the linguistically ignorant - is the last. She represents the final vestige of Maoritanga (Maori-ness), which is about to depart forever and which will be replaced by the homogeneity of the global world. Mary carries a suitcase that the viewer eventually discovers is full of earth: the last memory of the whenua (land). Moreover Mary's voyage provides an ironic counter to the great sea voyages of famed Maori navigators such as Kupe in the north and Rakaihautu in the south, who led their people through the Pacific, finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa. and what remains is set in the liminal space of an airport's international departure lounge - 'the spaces in between places' (25). Mary's intended destination is equally liminal: the no-place of exile from one's turangawaewae (home ground), what Ila calls '[t]he trusty flight to Nowhere' (3). Ila, of Gujarati Indian heritage, is heading to London to escape her stifling immediate family environment: 'out there I can be found' (39). Ila can be herself and find a sense of belonging 'out there'. In contrast, Solomon's family in New Zealand provides that sense of belonging: SOLOMON: I'm dependent on Mum, Dad, my brothers and sisters ... on my Mates ... That makes me feel good ... I know that not one of us ...... that not one of us is left in need because need will only ever lead to problems for all of us! (24) While Ila rails at the delayed flight, Solomon - off for the first time on his Big Overseas Experience - becomes increasingly reluctant to leave. Although Ila and Solomon feel trapped by circumstances, it is Mary who truly lacks agency. She is grief-stricken, remaining all but silent while the other characters bicker, talk about her and defend their own reasons for leaving. Eventually, in scene 5, she talks to Anna, the airport cleaner, in the bathroom of the departure lounge about her family and her life. At this point in the play, Mary is given her voice and the viewer realises that she has been interpellated into the discriminatory government agenda. Problematically, she is a nurse and an unwilling accomplice in a political scheme to undermine reproductive rights. She has been charged with administering a compulsory government birth control and sterilisation programme to all Maori women, eventually including herself. However, she is tired of protest for minimal or no gains, and she is tired","PeriodicalId":42838,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Drama Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2008-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70390051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Path of the Actor","authors":"Ian Maxwell","doi":"10.4324/9780203969236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203969236","url":null,"abstract":"Michael Chekhov (edited by Andrei Kirillov and Bella Martin), The Path of the Actor (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) Once, in my admittedly limited time as an actor, I experienced a fleeting moment of double consciousness. For perhaps a minute, and in a way utterly resistant to adequate description or metaphor, I was split, performing my role and at the same time standing apart, observing the audience, observing myself performing, and forming for myself a discursive commentary on what was going on. I remember the words that came to me: 'this is going well ...'. Except I wasn't 'standing apart' - a lazy metaphor redolent of faux-spiritual, popular-culture representations of near-death experiences and the like. I was still there, in and with my body, but carrying on parallel cognitive, critical, aesthetic and affective processes; I recall feeling quite pleased with myself. It was a great moment - although not sufficiently great to have convinced me of the merits of a life on the stage - and I have frequently thought about it since: was I 'really' just switching backwards and forwards between different intentions more rapidly than I could register? Or was something genuinely transcendental happening? I wish that, at the time, I had read Michael Chekhov's reflections on just such a moment in his own experiences, in which the theosophical writings of Steiner - which he had been reading since the early 1920s - crystallised in a revelatory performative moment. That I hadn't is partly to do with the unavailability of those reflections in translation. However, even if they had been available, given the (then ... and now?) reluctance of our training institutions to direct students towards any kind of reading, chances are I still wouldn't have read them. Routledge has now corrected that unavailability, adding Chekhov's autobiographical writings to the recently revised and expanded To The Actor (Routledge, 2002) and Franc Chamberlain's 2004 overview for the Performance Practitioner series. The texts published here for the first time in English are Chekhov's first autobiography The Path of the Actor (Put'aktera, 1928) and excerpts of the serialised autobiographical sketches published in the mid-1940s in Novi Zhurnal, a New York-based journal for emigre Russians, reproduced here as Life and Encounters. Chekhov's revelatory moment, as described in Life and Encounters, comes during the opening performance of Artisten (George Waiters and Arthur Hopkins' 1927 Broadway hit Burlesque), directed by Max Reinhardt in Vienna in November 1928. Self-exiled from Russia, where his experiments with theosophical principles in rehearsal had come to the attention of Lunacharsky's Narkompros (Ministry of Enlightenment), Chekhov had been referred to Reinhardt by a 'well-known impresario and art lover who was doing good business' with whom he had met, 'armed with a small volume of Hamlet in German'. The impresario appears to have summed up Chekhov's potential with some alacr","PeriodicalId":42838,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Drama Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2006-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70601021","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Aesthetics of the Oppressed","authors":"R. Morelos","doi":"10.4324/9780203969830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203969830","url":null,"abstract":"Augusto Boal, The Aesthetics of the Oppressed (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) Aside from being, arguably, one of the most important theatre theorists and practitioners of the last fifty years, Augusto Boal is also a master storyteller. As Paul Dwyer (2004) contends in a New Theatre Quarterly commentary on the Origin' story of Forum Theatre, Boal has long had a marvellous propensity for invoking the poetic realms, through narratives and anecdotes, to address the problematic space between practice and theory. In this way, the central paradigms of the tradition we recognise as 'Theatre of the Oppressed' have been articulated, established and debated. In his latest book. The Aesthetics of the Oppressed, Boal reflects upon more than thirty years of practising and theorising the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO). From a story about a 2002 workshop in Middle England, he weaves a brief story of the development of various strands of TO techniques, using the metaphor of a tree and genealogy to visually articulate the growth of this tradition. This is followed by a series of essays under the title of ¢ Theoretical Foundation'. Borrowing notions from semiotics, linguistics and cognitive neuroscience, Boal constructs an aesthetic rationale for the practice of TO, principally by presenting an argument for its necessity. This argument is based on the notion that human perception occurs on three different levels. The simplest mode is thought of as 'information - the receptive level'; a second mode is described as 'knowledge and tactical decision-making - the more active level' which causes basic forms of categorisations and actions; the third mode is referred to as 'ethical consciousness - the human level' by which complex categorisations, meaning-making and valuations can be said to occur (34-6). Boal argues that the practice of TO can promote the development of these perceptual modes or capacities in individual participants, by providing opportunities by which to critique structures or values, as well as by providing experiences and models for processing that can serve as an 'apprenticeship for citizenship' (37). For Boal, TO achieves this through the way it approaches the four fundamental elements that are identified in the 'tree' as the roots and the immediate earth from which it grows. These elements are referred to as the Word, the Image, the Sound, and the Ethics. The Word is concerned with written text, with suggestions of narratives of interest, identity and poetry as starting points in working with participants. In the first three of these elements, Boal revisits the principles of games and exercises described in his earlier books, with a view towards developing the aesthetic rationale of TO in employing these approaches. Here the poetic nature of this rationale is further revealed. For example, in articulating the element of the Image, he declares: We must develop our capacity not only to hear but also to see. The creation of images produced by our","PeriodicalId":42838,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Drama Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2006-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70601082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}