THEATRE JOURNAL最新文献

{"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}

{"title":"Root Beer Lady the Musical by Barbara Cary Hall (review)","authors":"Eero Laine","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932176","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>Root Beer Lady the Musical</em> by Barbara Cary Hall <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Eero Laine </li> </ul> <em>ROOT BEER LADY THE MUSICAL</em>. Book, music, and lyrics by Barbara Cary Hall. Directed by Laurie Kess. Ely’s Historic State Theater, Ely, MN. September 8, 2023. <p>If you drive far enough, you eventually run out of road. And if you’re driving north through Minnesota, you might hit the end of the road right around the town of Ely. You can keep traveling, but you’ll need a canoe to transport you through the federally designated wilderness that borders the town. Throughout its history, Ely was a mining town, a logging town, and also a tourist town—a gateway to the wilderness for anglers and campers, youth groups, and adventurers.</p> <p>Ely is also an arts town. Photography, painting, and other visual arts have flourished in Ely since the turn of the twentieth century in no small part because of the beauty of the landscape. The area, it seems, is also full of singers, poets, musicians, and actors. The Ely Music and Drama Club celebrated its centenary in 2023, and Ely’s Historic State Theater has been significantly expanded and updated in recent years. If you find yourself at the end of the road during Ely’s annual Harvest Moon Festival in September, you will likely have a chance to see <em>Root Beer Lady the Musical</em>, which premiered in 2017 and has been performed in different iterations ever since. The musical celebrates and remembers Dorothy Molter, who spent her life not in Ely but out past the border of what is today the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.</p> <p>Molter lived on an island called the Isle of Pines for the better part of the twentieth century. It is a small island, and it’s still there on Knife Lake, if you are willing to paddle a canoe for half a day and carry it over a series of portages and small rapids. That is more or less how Molter got to and from her island home for most of her life. She moved there in the 1930s and stayed until her death in 1986. Not long after she moved to Knife Lake, the federal government began buying up private property with the intention of converting the area to federally managed wilderness. The process took decades, and as it wore on, Molter saw modern conveniences and connections to society recede one congressional bill or executive order at a time.</p> <p>Molter supplemented her income by selling supplies and snacks to passing canoeists. However, a 1949 federal law prohibited float planes from landing in the area, making it difficult to transport enough inventory. Realizing she had a significant supply of glass pop bottles on the island, she began to brew and bottle root beer that she could make with lake water and dry goods that were more easily transported by canoe. She then offered the root beer to summer canoeists and campers","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141750330","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":"Marginality Beyond Return: Us Cuban Performances in the 1980s and 1990s by Lillian Manzor (review)","authors":"Eric Mayer-García","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932186","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>Marginality Beyond Return: Us Cuban Performances in the 1980s and 1990s</em> by Lillian Manzor <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Eric Mayer-García </li> </ul> <em>MARGINALITY BEYOND RETURN: US CUBAN PERFORMANCES IN THE 1980s AND 1990s</em>. By Lillian Manzor. Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies. London: Routledge, 2023; pp. 321. <p>Lillian Manzor’s <em>Marginality beyond Return: US Cuban Performances in the 1980s and 1990s</em> is the first critical book dedicated to Cuban theatre in the US. As Manzor recounts in the acknowledgements, this project began in 1990 during a conversation between the author and two playwrights outside the Duo Theatre in New York. That conversation <strong>[End Page 255]</strong> shifted her approach and quickly led to one of her first publications, in <em>GESTOS</em>, where she introduced early versions of several of the concepts and questions she considers in this present work. Fast forward to 2023, Manzor’s long-awaited monograph on US Cuban theatre, <em>Marginality beyond Return</em>, is the culmination of many years of careful thought, presentations, and publications on the subjects therein. The author makes several field-changing interventions, including introducing the term “US Cuban,” a hybrid identity-in-difference distinct from Cuban American. As Manzor argues, US Cuban playwrights did not conform to the paradigm of multiculturalism that opened opportunities in equity theatres during the decades of the Hispanic and the Latino. Rather, their plays presented latinidad as the antithesis to the homogeneous, commodifiable, and interchangeable Other multiculturalism sought to interpellate. The author’s historiography questions narratives of Latine theatre since the 1960s that associate its beginnings with community-based activism alone. Finally, Manzor calls for the continued development of Latine theatre archives, interdisciplinary and transnational research methods, and collaboration with artists in theatre research. The persuasive force behind Manzor’s arguments and her meticulously researched historiography is the archives she has assembled over the last three decades, working with artists to donate and with archivists to process collections in the Cuban Theater Digital Archive and the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami Libraries.</p> <p>Distinguishing her subjects from Cuban Americans, Manzor introduces the term “US Cuban,” which builds on the theories of Norma Alarcón and other Third World feminists to name a hybrid identity-in-difference. In presenting several case studies, Manzor forges a dynamic interdisciplinary discourse to theorize the cultural production of an “ensemble” of border-crossed—<em>atrevesados</em>, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s sense of the term—US Cuban artists whose theatre makes visible the hybrid, the abject, th","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":"141755404","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":"Tom Stoppard In Context ed. by David Kornhaber and James N. Loehlin (review)","authors":"Katherine Weiss","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932183","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932183","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>Tom Stoppard In Context</em> ed. by David Kornhaber and James N. Loehlin <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Katherine Weiss </li> </ul> <em>TOM STOPPARD IN CONTEXT</em>. Edited by David Kornhaber and James N. Loehlin. Literature in Context Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; pp. 269. <p><em>Tom Stoppard in Context</em>, a collection of thirty-one short essays, is part of Cambridge University Press’s Literature in Context series aimed to enhance its readers’ appreciation of an author by providing the “literary, political, intellectual, social and cultural” context that has “bearing on his or her work,” as noted on the publisher’s website. To help the reader navigate the “context” provided in this particular volume, editors David Kornhaber and James Loehlin have grouped the essays in six parts: Origins; Influences; Ideas; Aesthetics; Politics; and Page, Stage, and Screen. The volume’s many contributors help to paint a portrait of Stoppard as one of Britain’s eminent playwrights, whose conservatism and extraordinary wit continues to win over audiences.</p> <p>Stoppard emerges as a deeply intelligent writer and thinker, engaged in big ideas. Parts 3 (“Ideas”) and 5 (“Politics”) examine the ways in which Stop-pard incorporates philosophical, historical, scientific, and mathematical concepts in his plays. Many of the chapters come to a similar conclusion: that Stoppard’s interest in big ideas, despite his lack of a university education, is astonishing. Thankfully, his use of these ideas is not academic. Kornhaber, in chapter 10, sums up Stoppard’s use of analytic philosophy, writing that Stoppard saw “the philosophical potential” of “theatre itself, a potential he often saw as lacking in academic philosophy: the potential to contemplate what it actually means to be human” (87). William W. Demastes takes Stop-pard’s use of ideas a step further, arguing that scientific thought provides the playwright with the very questions of “behavioural consequences” (92), which evolutionary science attempts to answer. For Demastes, Stoppard is content with those questions remaining unanswered.</p> <p>Part 2, “Influences,” includes chapters on Stop-pard’s debt to Russian literature, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett—the usual suspects and hardly surprising for anyone familiar with Stoppard’s plays. What is surprising, though, is just how often Beckett appears in the book. In addition to Kersti Tarien Powell’s essay, “Samuel Beckett” (chapter 8), the Irish writer appears in all six sections of the book. His presence outdoes Shakespeare’s and Wilde’s. However, in most chapters in which Beckett appears, the discussion amounts to a brief pointing to Stoppard’s debt to Beckett as seen in <em>Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead</em>. What sets Powell’s chapter apart is that her exploration ","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"97 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141750241","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":"Die Zauberflöte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (review)","authors":"Joseph A. Heissan Jr.","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932171","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>Die Zauberflöte</em> by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Joseph A. Heissan Jr. </li> </ul> <em>DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE</em>. By Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. Directed and choreographed by Simon McBurney. Metropolitan Opera House, New York. May 25, 2023. <p>In Mozart’s singspiel <em>Die Zauberflöte</em>, the characters struggle to distinguish truth from lies. Chock-full of conjurings, transformations, mysterious trials, and magical instruments, the heavily allegorical libretto provides many opportunities for elaborate onstage illusions. While this contemporary-dress production at the Met certainly delighted the eyes and ears with inspiring theatrical artifice, what distinguished the staging by Simon McBurney (co-founder of Complicité) was the decision to place the artists creating those effects in clear view of the audience. Exposing the artists’ activities paradoxically exemplified the Enlightenment ideals of truth, honesty, and integrity woven into the libretto while also championing the power of the imagination in live performance-making.</p> <br/> Click for larger view<br/> View full resolution <p>Thomas Oliemans (Papageno) and Ruth Sullivan (Foley artist) in <em>Die Zauberflöte</em>. (Photo: Karen Almond/Met Opera.)</p> <p></p> <p>From the moment I entered the auditorium in search of my seat, I noticed the creative team had worked to reinforce our collective awareness of being in the Metropolitan Opera House awaiting the performance. The open stage curtain revealed the upstage cyclorama and exposed wings. The minimal scenery consisted of a centerstage platform with four corner cables, each connected to tower-like scaffolding that formed two proscenium arches over the platform, thus creating a smaller onstage stage. (When repositioned during the performance, this platform was transformed imaginatively into various objects and locales.) In the orchestra pit, raised flooring made the musicians visible. After finishing their last-minute preparations, the actors, <strong>[End Page 226]</strong> who would serve as performer-puppeteers, took seats in chairs out on the apron, stage left and stage right, near the Met’s proscenium arch. Even farther left and right on the apron, workbenches displayed various materials and equipment. When the overture began, visual artist Blake Habermann and Foley artist Ruth Sullivan entered and walked onto the down-center apron to observe the audience. They exchanged glances confirming all was ready to begin. Habermann then crossed to one workbench and Sullivan to the other. From the beginning, this production called attention to the presence of these artists, whose labor—like that of most theatrical designers—might well have been left invisible.</p> <br/> Click for larger view<br/> View full resolution <p>Seth Morris (Flute So","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"95 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141750297","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":"Eco-Performance, Art, and Spatial Justice in The Us by Courtney B. Ryan (review)","authors":"Jonah Winn-Lenetsky","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932189","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>Eco-Performance, Art, and Spatial Justice in The Us</em> by Courtney B. Ryan <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jonah Winn-Lenetsky </li> </ul> <em>ECO-PERFORMANCE, ART, AND SPATIAL JUSTICE IN THE US</em>. By Courtney B. Ryan. Routledge Environmental Humanities Series. New York: Routledge, 2023; pp. 182. <p>How can we use small instances of material performance to address the global crises of climate change and environmental degradation? This question is at the center of Courtney B. Ryan’s <em>Eco-Performance, Art, and Spatial Justice in the US</em>. Ryan argues, “Just as small performances can highlight the micro-management of vegetal life and marginalized people, they can also expose the joint domestication of aquatic and human subjects” (4). Where scholarship has begun to address large-scale environmental performances and protests from Standing Rock to interventionist instances of theatre and performance such as Chantal Bilodeau’s <em>Sila</em> (2015) and Colleen Murphy’s <em>The Breathing Hole</em> (2020), most treatments of eco-performance focus on the grand and dramatic while missing the minute and quotidian. Ryan’s biggest contribution is to examine how performances of the mundane, including jogging with a cactus and abiding by the HOA covenants of a suburban Arizona housing development, are examples of spatial-ecological performance. Through these examples of mundane spatial interventions and forms of spatial violence, Ryan demonstrates how climate violence often operates through small instances of everyday urban development that separate people from the natural environment and plant life and that in particular deprives communities of color from access to plant life, clean water, air, and other natural resources. Another key intervention Ryan makes is in articulating how mundane instances of spatial-environmental discrimination that perform clear acts of violence and control against what Ryan calls “vegetal” life are also subtle mechanisms that discriminate against communities of color and migrant communities in urban centers. The final and most overt intervention of Ryan’s is to focus specifically on spatial-ecological violence both in the immediate and in the unknowable future fallout from current ecological events.</p> <p>Ryan focuses on several sites of rupture, or intervention by performance artists into the slow violence of urban development. She begins with performance interventions by Meghan “Moe” Beitiks and Vaughn Bell, who use plants to disrupt the normative othering of nonhuman organisms within urban and developed spaces. This is an important and unique intervention into the bureaucratically controlled cityscape. Additionally, as Ryan argues, “While plants are receiving a lot of attention in various fields lately, they continue to be underexplored in theater and performance” (24).","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141750374","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":"Professional Wrestling: Politics and Populism ed. by Sharon Mazer, Heather Levi, Eero Laine, and Nell Haynes (review)","authors":"Scott Magelssen","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932187","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>Professional Wrestling: Politics and Populism</em> ed. by Sharon Mazer, Heather Levi, Eero Laine, and Nell Haynes <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Scott Magelssen </li> </ul> <em>PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING: POLITICS AND POPULISM</em>. Edited by Sharon Mazer, Heather Levi, Eero Laine, and Nell Haynes. Enactment Series. London: Seagull Books, 2020; pp. 241. <p>Professional wrestling might strike some readers as a sensational topic on the kitschy frontier of performance studies, and to these readers it will make sense that this edited collection found its home in Richard Schechner’s Enactment series with Seagull Books, the purview of which “encompasses performance in as many of its aspects and realities as there are authors able to write about them.” Those in the know, however, will find the twelve essays in <em>Professional Wrestling: Politics and Populism</em> to be a thoroughly serious investigation of wrestling’s relationship with populism—both on the right, as seen in Trumpism and Brexit, and on the left, as seen in, say, Indigenous and pro-worker movements in Bolivia (as described in Nell Haynes’s essay). And they will welcome it as only the latest entry in a rigorous scholarly conversation that goes back to Sharon Mazer’s foundational <em>Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle</em> (1998), and that has enjoyed scholarly legitimacy since Roland Barthes took up the topic in his “World of Wrestling” essay in 1957.</p> <p>Refreshingly, then, editors Sharon Mazer, Heather Levi, Eero Laine, and Nell Haynes get right to the heart of their assertions within the first sentences of the introduction, without feeling the need to trot out the conventional paragraphs justifying their subject as real scholarship. Professional wrestling is “intrinsically political,” they write. But, moreover, it “captures the currents of daily life, distils them into a set of basic, easily recognizable and repeatable figurations, and replays them in a kind of low-art parody for spectators who, in playing along, engage in an ongoing, performative debate about what it all means” (1). Indeed, by the end of the volume, readers will be equipped to use wrestling to understand everything from Donald Trump’s improbable rise to power (as treated in essays by Heather Levi, Shana Toor, and others), to the Occupy movement (Eric Kennedy), to why some academics succeed and others don’t (Larry DeGaris).</p> <p>Hitting the ground running as it does, <em>Professional Wrestling</em>’s introduction also dispenses with the formalities of acclimating new readers to discourse concerning the squared circle, like providing definitions of its terms of art (putting over, heat, smarks) or important junctures in the history of wrestling entertainment (e.g., the fans’ disapprobation <strong>[End Page 257]</strong> of Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 34). Pat","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141755403","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 Many Voices of Sissieretta Jones: Opera and the Sonic Necromancy of the Black Phonographic Archive","authors":"Westley Montgomery","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932165","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Sissieretta Jones (1868-1933) is perhaps best remembered as one of the first Black opera singers, despite having never performed on the operatic stage. Exploring race and phonography as interlinking technologies of perception underlying and structuring the ability of audiences to perceive black performers, this essay analyzes the multiple Joneses produced through her archive—in reviews, promotional photographs and illustrations, and the absence of her phonographically recorded voice. Through this exploration, I argue that we must resist the drive to embalm the remains of performance in order to move toward a more multiple analysis of Black archives.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141750233","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":"Editorial Comment: More Life","authors":"Laura Edmondson","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932163","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;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; Editorial Comment: &lt;span&gt;More Life&lt;/span&gt; &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Laura Edmondson &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;I write this comment in the midst of rage. Earlier this month, on May 1, students at my home institution of Dartmouth College erected five tents in the college’s central green space as part of a pro-Palestine protest. In the context of widespread police action on US campuses, Dartmouth’s administration “stood out for its almost instantaneous response to a nonviolent protest,” to quote the &lt;em&gt;New York Times&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Just over two hours after the tents went up, the administration called the local police, which promptly brought in the state’s Special Events Response Team outfitted with riot gear, long guns, and batons. Injuries and mass arrests predictably ensued in which Black, Indigenous, Latine, Asian American and Pacific Islander, international, and queer and nonbinary students were disproportionately affected. Many &lt;em&gt;TJ&lt;/em&gt; readers undoubtedly share my fury at the criminalization of dissent, the Palestine exception to free speech policy, and the police brutality that has become (with noteworthy exceptions) the knee-jerk administrative response across the country.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;My feelings of fury are admittedly at odds with this general issue of &lt;em&gt;Theatre Journal&lt;/em&gt;, which does not explicitly address anger, activism, or police violence. Rather, the four articles offer poignant meditations on necromancy, revenants, ghostly presences, and diasporic yearning. In that vein, they expand upon the general issue I edited last year, which yielded the theme of archives and afterlives. In my editorial comment for that issue, I wrote that “these scholars imaginatively and rigorously enfold land, ocean, and bodies as capacious archives,” and that the issue “offers the archive as an opening.”&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Since general issues are more a matter of happenstance than curation, they take the pulse of the field. Significantly, these essays sustain the imagination and rigor of the previous issue through their nuanced explorations of archives and counterarchives. Once again, openings proliferate.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Through their focus on absence and loss, these essays have much to teach my anger. They help me to remember that I write this comment not only in a historical moment of widespread protest but also in an era of mass death. They remind me that I should not use the righteousness of my rage as a distraction from the horrific loss of life in Gaza, not to mention Sudan. My anger should not deflect but instead should coexist with grief. It should also attend to the structural and geopolitical inequalities that make certain deaths more grievable than others. In that spirit, I invite all &lt;em&gt;TJ&lt;/em&gt; readers to linger on the reflections on grief, loss, and absence contained herein. We have so much loss to bear; how do those losses generate new ","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141750298","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":"Cultures of Witnessing: Law and The York Plays by Emma Lipton (review)","authors":"Gillian Redfern","doi":"10.1353/tj.2024.a932185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2024.a932185","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;Cultures of Witnessing: Law and The York Plays&lt;/em&gt; by Emma Lipton &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Gillian Redfern &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;CULTURES OF WITNESSING: LAW AND THE YORK PLAYS&lt;/em&gt;. By Emma Lipton. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022; pp. 200. &lt;p&gt;Written in lively, engaging prose that is equally authoritative and accessible, the central argument of Emma Lipton’s most recent monograph, &lt;em&gt;Cultures of Witnessing: Law and the York Plays&lt;/em&gt;, is that the York plays use legal concepts of witnessing to promote ideals of citizenship in medieval York. Seeking to move scholarship on law and medieval drama beyond the accepted notion that the depiction of law in religious dramas generally reflects the corruption of earthly courts, Lipton persuasively theorizes that the plays also depict “virtuous witnesses, using them and other legalisms to promote local civic values and authority” (5). Thus, concepts of witnessing, and what or who makes a “good” witness, are uniquely interwoven with the York plays’ religious themes to bolster York’s sense of importance and promote local jurisdictional and legal powers, rather than monarchical, central ones. Lipton argues that this helped to articulate model citizenship in particularly local ways. Situating readings of selected dramas alongside legal treatises, sermons, confessional manuals, mirrors for princes, lyrics, conduct books, and all manner of textual forms of witness, Lipton explores how such texts and civic dramas informed and affected each other in site-specific ways in medieval York.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;For example, in the first chapter, “Space and the Cultures of Witnessing in the York ‘Entry into Jerusalem,’” Lipton claims that the legal charters in the &lt;em&gt;York Memorandum Books&lt;/em&gt;, kept in the guildhall, demonstrate York’s concerted effort to preserve local jurisdiction over central power. Lipton sees this echoed in the &lt;em&gt;Entry into Jerusalem&lt;/em&gt;, as Christ’s presence in the city, alluded to by deictic references, sets the audience as “His” witnesses and puts “the neighbor and citizen—rather than king, cleric, or lawyer—at the center of legal practice” (44). However, as Lipton rightly remarks at the very end of this chapter, there were many groups of citizens (such as women, the poor, et al.) who were excluded by law from giving legal witness. Thus, where Lipton concedes that, in practice, such legal witnessing would only have been available to a “subset” of York’s citizens, perhaps that subset would be more recognizably described as the wealthy male elite of medieval York (45).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Given Lipton’s focus on the law and witnessing, it is perhaps unsurprising to see two chapters devoted to scrutiny of York’s sequence of trial plays (&lt;em&gt;The Conspiracy&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Trial Before Caiaphas and Annas&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Christ before Pi","PeriodicalId":46247,"journal":{"name":"THEATRE JOURNAL","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141750238","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}