THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

{"title":"The Threat Is Now: Choreography, Temporality, and the Active Shooter Drill","authors":"Shannon Woods","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943402","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This article explores how the police state choreographs active shooter drills as \"performances of protection,\" or embodied actions framed around an anticipatory threat. During these scenarios, choreographic imperatives—or movement directives in response to specific cues—become tools for directing bodies through public space to preempt crisis. While these measures protect students, teachers, and administrators, they also reinforce the school-to-prison pipeline, targeting communities deemed dangerous by the police state. The article examines how such measures embody control, surveillance, and time as methods of discipline. It also analyzes what performances of protection reveal about the school-prison pipeline in the United States.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142645954","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":"Consent Pedagogies: Classroom Lessons from Intimacy Practice","authors":"Lindsay Brandon Hunter","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943397","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Consent Pedagogies:<span>Classroom Lessons from Intimacy Practice</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Lindsay Brandon Hunter (bio) </li> </ul> <p>In 2023, I took part in a conversation gathered under the title \"Decarcerating the Field: Building Abolitionist Networks of Care at ATHE\" at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in Austin, Texas. Where others entered that conversation from a more explicitly abolitionist perspective, I had proposed to offer something that seemed perhaps less intuitive: I wanted to talk about doing intimacy work in academic theatre, and in particular about how my own training and practice in intimacy choreography for the stage has inflected my pedagogy—including my non-teaching work in helping to administer programs and make policy. Although a connection between intimacy choreography and abolitionist practice may not seem plain at first blush, I wanted to speak about how a sustained focus on consent-based practice in classrooms and rehearsal halls has illuminated for me the extent to which our institutions seek to control students, frequently in ways that uncomfortably resemble policing.</p> <p>Even as I made this case to the group convening at ATHE, I debated whether it was apt to connect highly professionalized discourses about consent in working and teaching contexts to the fundamental and profound commitments that drive abolition activism. The codification of best practices that has been part of intimacy work's relatively rapid ascendance is quite clearly an investment in progressive reform, and so in some ways is antithetical to an abolitionist mode. To speak more honestly, I was afraid that for some folks who work in theatres and universities, enthusiasm for the reform promised by intimacy and consent work might register primarily as a professional fad, or worse: as <em>itself</em> an exercise in controlling or policing students, in the sense that it could involve drilling them to comply with professional standards. I worried, too, that words like \"boundaries\" and \"consent\" might read as liberalist buzzwords, <strong>[End Page E-31]</strong> or that some audiences might find in them echoes of a carceral feminism aligned with policing even as it co-opts the language of abolition.¹</p> <p>Still, it remains true that a sustained focus on consent—which I offer here not as a panacea, or a set of rules for disciplining behavior, but specifically as an orientation away from coercion and toward self-determination, one which I continue to interrogate and revise—has quietly remade my teaching in ways that I think resonate with aspects of abolition work. Engagement with intimacy work has catalyzed a significant and continual grappling with the power I wield over students, perhaps similar to the way other developments in the past handful of years have called teachers to co","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142637141","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":"Abolitionist Laughter: The Joint Movement to #StopCopCity","authors":"Nicholas Fesette","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943401","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>In Atlanta, South River (Weelaunee) Forest is the proposed home of the $90 million Public Safety Training Center, also known as \"Cop City.\" On June 5, 2023, when the Atlanta City Council opened the floor for public comment on Cop City, hundreds of people voiced their opposition for nearly fifteen hours, frequently using humor as a tactic of resistance. What are the radical political potentials of laughter? Which forms of laughter support the power of police, and which disrupt it? This article addresses these questions by closely attending to the comedic performances of #StopCopCity activists.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142637151","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 Unbearable Whiteness of John Brown: Theatrical Legacies and Performing Abolition","authors":"Ben Spatz, SAJ, Eero Laine, Michelle Liu Carriger, Henry Bial","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943398","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943398","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>John Brown is a figure so intensely contested as to embody diametrically opposed meanings according to the varied contexts in which his image has been activated. At times hailed as the man who started the US Civil War, Brown has been variously described as a righteous abolitionist, a religious zealot, a gifted orator, a formidable military strategist, a self-appointed white savior, and a madman. Today, Brown is conjured in the name of all manner of causes, from leftist gun clubs to collegiate sports, while his theatricalized image is activated in wildly disparate ways. The apparent singularity of Brown as a historical figure, together with his ready adoption and deployment across various arenas—from entertainment to revolutionary politics—presents a problem familiar to theatre and performance scholars, namely the space between the image or concept of a person (or a character) and their actual performance, in life or onstage. There is perhaps an obvious tension in the ways that John Brown is remembered and reperformed and for whom he is remembered and reperformed. Or, as Ted A. Smith points out in thinking with Brown: \"An image, however iconic, is not an argument.\"</p></p>","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142637144","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 Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance by Peter P. Reed (review)","authors":"Guo Shuyu","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a943421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a943421","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance&lt;/em&gt; by Peter P. Reed &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Guo Shuyu &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;STAGING HAITI IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA: REVOLUTION, RACE AND POPULAR PERFORMANCE&lt;/em&gt;. By Peter P. Reed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022; pp. 231. &lt;p&gt;Peter P. Reed's new and prodigious volume, &lt;em&gt;Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race, and Popular Performance&lt;/em&gt;, offers a comprehensive &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 411]&lt;/strong&gt; overview of the impact of the Haitian Revolution, particularly its manifestations in nineteenth-century US performance by generations of French colonial refugees, abolitionists, writers, students, and Black celebrities in distinctive ways. Through insightful analysis of performances, supported by extensive historically visual and printed archives, Reed traces the evolution of \"staging Haiti\" from the 1790s Haitian Revolution in the 1790s to the 1860s US Civil War. Throughout this nearly century-long transatlantic engagement, Reed dissects how Haiti redefined US popular culture, reshaping the country's fundamental views on race, power, identity, and freedom through the interaction between actor-audience. Remarkable in its breadth and depth, &lt;em&gt;Staging Haiti&lt;/em&gt; also fills a significant gap in theatre and performance studies, which has not attended fully to the island nation's cultural and political influences.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Reed divides his book into six chronological chapters. Each contains several sections providing complementary analysis to its given topic. The book is structured around a central dialectic: white Americans' mixed feelings toward slave insurrection—fear and loathing of its horror and aftermaths, but curiosity and even obsession with it. Reed reveals these central dialectical ambiguities, as he understands them, through detailing \"the horrors of Saint Domingue\" in the introduction (14). In the way of Brechtian \"historification,\" by which Reed traces the origins of those mixed feelings through the original Haitian revolution, he unravels to readers the deep-seated paradox toward enslavement in their own culture. More of an emotional analysis, it adds factual and historical explanation to Reed's larger argument as it demonstrates how the Haitian Revolution influenced racial and political debates in the United States. The many illustrations in the book from literature, theatre, and public speeches, among other performance forms, attest to Americans' fascination with the Haitian Revolution.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Chapter 1 delves into the initial theatre of the Haitian Revolution with John Murdock's 1795 play &lt;em&gt;The Triumph of Love&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;Happy Reconciliation&lt;/em&gt;. Although the play itself \"foregrounded the experiences of the largely white [characters]\" (179), Reed focuses his ana","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"98 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142637152","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":"Augmented Reality and Theatre","authors":"E. B. Hunter","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932167","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>The technology industry’s recent spatial turn presents new opportunities for theatre and performance in the twenty-first century. One such opportunity is augmented reality (AR), a technology that overlays digitally rendered assets onto the user’s physical space, giving the appearance that those assets populate the physical world. Through an analysis of The Builders Association’s <i>Elements of Oz</i>, which incorporated mobile AR into its stage production, as well as <i>Bitter Wind</i>, the author’s adaptation of <i>Agamemnon</i> for the Microsoft HoloLens headset, this essay analyzes the interpretive possibilities AR creates for theatre and performance.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"65 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141750326","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":"Stereophonic by David Adjmi (review)","authors":"Elizabeth L. Wollman","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932169","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Stereophonic&lt;/em&gt; by David Adjmi &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Elizabeth L. Wollman &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;STEREOPHONIC&lt;/em&gt;. By David Adjmi, with music by Will Butler. Directed by Daniel Aukin. Playwrights Horizons, New York. October 15 and November 26, 2023. &lt;p&gt;When &lt;em&gt;Stereophonic&lt;/em&gt; began previews in October 2023, David Adjmi argued that despite its setting in a 1970s recording studio and its focus on a newly famous rock group under pressure to top the success of their debut album, the piece was not a musical, but instead a “play with music.” The playwright professed an “allergy” to musicals, which to him reflected a “calcified idea” of “how music should feel in the theatre.” Such a distaste for musicals is standard among theatremakers who mine aspects of the rock world for the stage; more often than not, musicals are loudly dismissed as too commercial and formalistic to properly capture rock’s purportedly superior artistic “realness.”&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Theatre critics tend to blithely accept and regurgitate such rockist attitudes. It’s no big surprise, then, that virtually every critic covering &lt;em&gt;Stereophonic&lt;/em&gt; followed Adjmi’s lead by eschewing the musical theatre label as inaccurate for a show so authentic that it defied traditional descriptors. In his rave for the &lt;em&gt;Washington Post&lt;/em&gt;, Peter Marks called &lt;em&gt;Stereophonic&lt;/em&gt; “one of the best works of narrative art about the day-to-day grind and emotional toll of artistic creation,” compared aspects of it to those of &lt;em&gt;Waiting for Godot&lt;/em&gt;, and described its characters as “refugees from classic drama.” The &lt;em&gt;New York Times&lt;/em&gt;’ Jesse Green gushed that terms like “play with music,” “musical,” and even amalgams like “playical” fail &lt;em&gt;Stereophonic&lt;/em&gt;, which never foundered, “as most theatrical treatments of the artistic process do, on either side of the genre divide.” &lt;em&gt;Vulture&lt;/em&gt;’s Jackson McHenry likened &lt;em&gt;Stereophonic&lt;/em&gt; to a “fugue” built of naturalistic threads that together wove “incandescent art.” “If you’ve recently tried to sate yourself with imitation-crab rock-history dramatizations like &lt;em&gt;Daisy Jones and the Six&lt;/em&gt;,” he assured his readers, “you’ll find that &lt;em&gt;Stereophonic&lt;/em&gt; is, refreshingly, the real thing.”&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Don’t tell McHenry, but &lt;em&gt;Stereophonic&lt;/em&gt; is more a companion to &lt;em&gt;Daisy Jones&lt;/em&gt; than it is an artistically superior achievement to the television miniseries. Both are accessible entertainments that allow for fly-on-the-wall views of beautiful, overwhelmingly white musicians who fall in and out of love, swill and snort to excess, and argue, sometimes bitterly, as they toil away at making music together. Most obviously, both use Fleetwood Mac’s most celebrated lineup (drummer Mick Fleetwood, pianist/vocal-ist Christine McVie, bassist John McVie, guitarist/vocalist Lindsey Buckingham, sin","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141750230","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":"Macbeth by William Shakespeare (review)","authors":"Paul Innes","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932173","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; by William Shakespeare &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Paul Innes &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;MACBETH&lt;/em&gt;. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Richard Twyman. Dubai Opera House, Dubai. November 4, 2023. &lt;p&gt;Major theatrical productions were understandably on hiatus in the United Arab Emirates during the COVID-19 emergency. Large-scale events are beginning to resume, however, and the cooperative production of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;—jointly produced by English Touring Theatre, Northern Stage, Shakespeare North Playhouse, and Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg—was a landmark event in post-pandemic Dubai.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The set remained unchanged throughout the performance, varied only in its presentation by the use of props, drapes, and screens mounted on the walls above the main playing space. The costuming was relatively neutral modern dress, and many of the minor roles were played by very young women. The sound design, featuring music by Louis Armstrong, for example, gave the production a 1920s feel, presumably intended to convey a society on the brink of catastrophe by conjuring up imminent stock market crashes and impending war.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The action of this &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; began with Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy from act 1, scene 5, so it was clear from the outset that this was going to be no ordinary presentation of the play. The focus on an individual character out of sync with the standard text of the play demonstrated a particularly intense emphasis on the main characters. The production continued throughout to rewrite the text by inserting plot elements—especially those relating to the Weird Sisters—at various unexpected points in the visual and narrative structure of events.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;br/&gt; Click for larger view&lt;br/&gt; View full resolution &lt;p&gt;Laura Elsworthy as Lady Macbeth in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. (Photo: The Other Richard.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The result was a psychological character study of Macbeth’s descent into wild tyranny. After the banquet scene, for instance, Macbeth isolated himself even from his wife by leading her into their bedroom through a rear door before slamming it on her and &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 231]&lt;/strong&gt; drawing drapes across it. The production consistently concentrated on Macbeth’s centrality, with the effect of turning the play into something like a horror story. At several points, Macbeth mimed the Weird Sisters almost as though he were possessed; the screens above the stage accompanied his performance with the sound of voices that would not be out of place in &lt;em&gt;The Exorcist&lt;/em&gt;. No actors played the roles of the witches; the combination of screen imagery and Macbeth’s ventriloquism worked to modernize characters that can cause so many problems for contemporary audiences, thus avoiding kitsch presentations that verge on cackling crones.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;br/&gt; Click for larger view&lt;br/&gt; View full resolution &lt;p&gt;","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"306 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141755359","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":"To the Life: Resurrection and Presence in The Second Maiden's Tragedy, Hamlet, and Fat Ham","authors":"Lauren Robertson","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932166","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Occupying a central place in Jacques Derrida’s formulation of hauntology, <i>Hamlet</i>’s Ghost is familiar to contemporary performance theory, standing in for the secondariness and self-division that define dramatic representation. But there was another figure more emblematic of performance in the early modern English playhouse: the revenant. Examining the convention of resurrection as it was frequently deployed in this theatre, this essay uncovers the capacity of the revenant to generate presence, the visceral sense of theatrical immediacy first championed by Antonin Artaud. Following readings of <i>The Second Maiden’s Tragedy</i> and <i>Hamlet</i>, it concludes with a coda on James Ijames’s <i>Fat Ham</i> (2023), a play that adopts the early modern theatre’s resurrective praxis of presence.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141750296","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":"Watch Night by Marc Bamuthi Joseph (review)","authors":"Sonja Arsham Kuftinec","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932177","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Watch Night</em> by Marc Bamuthi Joseph <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Sonja Arsham Kuftinec </li> </ul> <em>WATCH NIGHT</em>. Co-conceived and libretto by Marc Bamuthi Joseph. Co-conceived and directed by Bill T. Jones. Music by Tamar-kali. Perelman Performing Arts Center, New York. November 12, 2023. <p>Where are we? A marbled cube of cultural life in lower Manhattan, Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) rises luminous and opaque across from the 9/11 Memorial site. There, in the footprints of the Twin Towers, two voids sink into concrete through layers of trade history. That memorial, <em>Reflecting Absence</em>, is designed to stop business-as-usual, to prompt meditation on collective loss. Yet the memorial, alongside the genre-defying performance of <em>Watch Night</em> that took place in November 2023, prompts difficult questions. Whose violent deaths do we choose to remember and how? For PAC NYC’s inaugural season, Artistic Director Bill Rauch commissioned choreographer Bill T. Jones and spoken-word artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph to create a piece that reckoned with racialized violence. Rooted in multiple perspectives and genres, <em>Watch Night</em> wrestled with conundrums that refuse easy resolutions.</p> <p>In its very title, <em>Watch Night</em> pays homage to a dialectic of enslavement and liberation. The historical Watch Night, New Year’s Eve 1862, anticipated emancipation, marking both prophetic release and weighty reflection. Jones and Joseph’s composition draws on these energies while inquiring still further into the nature of forgiveness and redemption amid Super/Natural energies and a shifting Echo Chamber Chorus. In this way, <em>Watch Night</em> resists easy categorization. In part, the piece reflects on the dual tragedies of racially motivated slaughter in sacred spaces: the 2015 murder of congregants at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Yet <em>Watch Night</em> is not a documentary account. The congregations are fictionalized, and we are led through the events of the piece by a flawed Black Jewish journalist as well as a lone white Wolf. The dramaturgy moves forward in time while also being pulled into memory. Scenes split, echo, repeat. There are beats of story as well as percussive pulses of energy. Ostinatos and choreographic returns. Jones defines himself as a postmodern artist, concerned less with narrative cohesion than with the rigorous play of ideas in a form that embraces classical opera, everyday movement, and displays of hip-hop-inspired virtuosity. Joseph is a spoken-word artist who self-identifies as a “code surfer” rather than a code-switcher. In his libretto, references to the “Parable of the Sower” point to the Book of Matthew as well as to Black futurist author Oct","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141750299","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}