Journal of dramatic theory and criticism最新文献

{"title":"Circus and the Avant-Gardes ed. by Ann-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand (review)","authors":"Dave Peterson","doi":"10.1353/dtc.2023.a912015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2023.a912015","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Circus and the Avant-Gardes ed. by Ann-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand Dave Peterson Circus and the Avant-Gardes. Edited by Ann-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand. Routledge, 2022. Hardcover $128.00, E-book $39.16. 284 pages. 27 illustrations. Ann-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand’s Circus and the Avant-Gardes consists of fourteen essays by sixteen authors, most using focused case studies to center the relationship between European and Russian circus and the avant-garde. The essays explore not just how circus served to inspire avant-garde movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also how the lens of circus can challenge presumptions about the avant-garde, both as a historical set of movements and as an ongoing spur of change in the world of performance. The book is invested in how the relationship between circus and avant-garde has long been a two-way street, with theatrical forms drawing inspiration from circus, and circus then absorbing and reworking many of these innovations to its own ends. The book is divided into five groups of essays. Part 1 focuses on circus and its relation to a variety of early avant-garde movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part 2 examines performances in the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century, centering ways that the intersection of circus, popular entertainments, and avant-garde destabilize traditional hierarchies and artistic borders. Part 3 explores the influence of circus and avant-garde on the emergence of film in the early twentieth century. Part 4 focuses on contemporary performances, both live and filmed, and how they reenvision or use avant-gardeand circus-inspired materials from the past. Part 5 explores how circuses have changed in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, often incorporating ideas from the avant-garde or from other artistic movements. Taken together, the diverse essays interrogate the ways in which circus has been used by innovative art forms, while also using circus as a lens through which to challenge avant-garde presumptions of innovation and high art. Many of the essays in Circus and the Avant-Gardes work to reframe the narrative around the workings and cultural importance of circus. In part 1, Hildbrand challenges the notion that early circus was largely without narrative through a close analysis of nineteenth-century circus practices. Hildbrand links the rise of narrative in circus, through forms such as pantomime, to the increasingly literary nature of the theatre. In doing so, she challenges the presumption that circus primarily offered the avant-garde nonnarrative models of performance, and thus reaffirms circus’s potential as an experimental site in non-literary performance. Her essay also provides details on early circus performance content, an under-documented area of circus studies. In part 2, Martyn Jolly positions a collection of novelty acts performed in mid-n","PeriodicalId":488979,"journal":{"name":"Journal of dramatic theory and criticism","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135195522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage ed. by Rosa Andújar and Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos (review)","authors":"Trevor Boffone","doi":"10.1353/dtc.2023.a912007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2023.a912007","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage ed. by Rosa Andújar and Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos Trevor Boffone Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage. Edited by Rosa Andújar and Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Hardback $135.00, Paper $39.95. 296 pages. When one considers classical Greek and Roman theatre, Latin America might not immediately spring to mind. After all, the Americas are geographically and temporally a world away from the likes of Aristophanes, Euripides, and Sophocles. As Rosa Andújar and Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos’s edited collection Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage reveals, however, there is far more to this relationship than meets the eye. In fact, throughout the twentieth century and well into the present, Latin American dramatists have turned to the classics to make sense of sociopolitical struggles. Highlighting the afterlife of classical Greek and Roman theatre throughout the Americas, the collection offers a critical intervention not only into studies of theatre in the Hemispheric Americas but also into studies of ancient theatre. The book’s introduction offers a brief history of Greco-Roman classics in Latin America. At every turn, the book reiterates how Greco-Roman influence throughout Latin America is not monolithic. To demonstrate this, chapters explore how Latin American dramatists rewrite classic theatre to speak to sociopolitical issues relevant to specific communities and time periods. Authors consider how these sociopolitical issues are transhistoric and transnational, which informs how Greco-Roman drama is received in distinct eras and countries throughout the Americas. Each chapter focuses on one or two plays to underscore the playwright’s motivations and processes for engaging with ancient European myths, thus revealing how theatre-making can be a tool for social change. Although Latin America is understudied in both classical theatre studies and theatre studies writ large, case studies in Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage demonstrate how Latin American dramatists have frequently turned to the classics as sources for adaptations through which to speak to current events. The book questions how Greco-Roman dramaturgy converges with issues such as race, religion, gender, and Indigenous sovereignty in ways that are applicable to specific regions. Greco-Roman legacies in the Americas vary “depending on the location in question and the European nation by which it was colonized” (4). As such, there is neither a singular definition of Latin American culture nor a singular Latin American method of adapting the classics. The strategies of playwrights responding to the Pinochet regime in Chile, for instance, are distinct from how dramatists on the US-Mexico border comment on the femicides in Juárez. Although these playwrights might be linked through geography (at best), each brings their specific cultural specificities and sociopolitical realities to t","PeriodicalId":488979,"journal":{"name":"Journal of dramatic theory and criticism","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135195527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative by Kathleen Gallagher and Andrew Kushnir (review)","authors":"Caitlin A. Kane","doi":"10.1353/dtc.2023.a912012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2023.a912012","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative by Kathleen Gallagher and Andrew Kushnir Caitlin A. Kane Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative. By Kathleen Gallagher with Andrew Kushnir. University of Toronto Press, 2022. Paper $39.95. 424 pages. 34 illustrations. What can theatre offer young people living in a seemingly perpetual state of crisis? Why does theatre education matter in an era characterized by political polarization, racial and economic inequality, and climate change? These are some of the questions that Kathleen Gallagher and Andrew Kushnir take up in Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative. Following an ambitious five-year ethnographic study carried out at five sites around the world, Gallagher and Kushnir offer a compelling defense of theatre education’s relevance in the twenty-first century and a useful model for interdisciplinary ethnographic research with and about young people. Hope in a Collapsing World pairs Gallagher’s insights as the lead social scientist for the Radical Hope Project (the name that she and her colleagues gave their five-year study) with Kushnir’s verbatim play, Towards Youth, which transforms his observations from the study into a moving exploration of relational ethics in educational theatre and ethnographic research. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 consists of seven chapters focused on Gallagher’s findings and part 2 includes Kushnir’s critical introduction to his play and the script used for its 2019 premiere. In a brief prologue, Gallagher lays out her primary claims and describes her motivations for writing Hope in a Collapsing World, which is the second monograph to result from the Radical Hope Project. While the first monograph, Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope: Enacting Community-Engaged Research through Performative Methodologies, features chapters by scholars from the study’s five research sites, this new text centers Gallagher’s perspective and challenges readers to reconsider how theatre education contributes to students’ civic development. Gallagher’s research suggests that, although we often focus on theatre’s ability to instill confidence in young people, the value of educational theatre stems from its ability to reduce students’ insecurity. She contends that a sense of security enables young people to tune in and respond to the needs of those around them. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 describe the Radical Care Project in depth. In chapter 1, Gallagher provides a literature review focused on the role that listening and care play in democratic processes. In chapter 2, she describes each of the five sites involved in the study: an after-school program for junior high students in Athens, Greece; an all-girls school that uses drama throughout the curriculum in Lucknow, India; a youth theatre group associated with the University of Warwick in Cove","PeriodicalId":488979,"journal":{"name":"Journal of dramatic theory and criticism","volume":"283 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135195534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor’s Note","authors":"Michelle Liu Carriger","doi":"10.1353/dtc.2023.a912003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2023.a912003","url":null,"abstract":"Editor’s Note Michelle Liu Carriger, PhD This issue is late. It’s late because a journal like Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism relies on the time and labor of innumerable people, none of whom have the journal as their first and only priority. A peer-reviewed journal in the academic arts and humanities is a labor, if not exactly of love, then certainly of some other ill-defined at-least-partially-emotional impetus. And it seems to me that late-late capitalist society is in the midst of a reckoning of that affective relation between occupation and avocation. This reckoning is hitting hard at the places where Arts and Entertainment overlap with commerce overlap with education. Which is to say, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism’s primary field of study and its own site of publication. This journal issue started during a media blitz about burnout, “Quiet Quitting,” and “Working to Contract” (in the aftermath of, at my institution, the largest strike of graduate student and postdoc labor in U.S. history), then spread over “Hot Labor Summer” 2023.1 First we struggled to find enough articles, then we struggled mightily to find enough peer reviewers, then many of our authors struggled to find time to complete revisions. Meanwhile, I and my managing editor(s) continued our own full time jobs of researching, writing, publishing, job marketing, teaching and keeping departments at two land grant R1 universities afloat. Indeed, a vast ill-defined proportion of the work and atmosphere of academia (and theatre/performance) exists between the distant shores of clearly defined paid duties, volunteer “service to the field” said to enhance the doer’s profile in vague-but-important ways, and the complexities of “labors of love.” Today, the CV-line appeal for free labor has worn thin, the love within the labor of both theatre and academic research, and spare bandwidth beyond the rigors of the job all seem to be running out. I haven’t been long enough in academia to feel confident this isn’t just how it always feels to reach “mid-career,” but certainly the stridency of the calls to “self-care” by saying no, the proportion of colleagues citing burnout, and the aforementioned struggle to get anything done at this volunteer-run journal seem to constitute a specific moment of crisis for the volunteer model that Theatre and Performance Studies academia runs on. And I haven’t even broached the hand-wringing ink spilled over the 2023 state of theatre production, in academia, community, and professional capacities. This long preamble to introducing the actual contents of the issue is meant to also point out that the three articles and nine book reviews we see here were completed in heroic conditions. They also represent authors across the globe with longer and shorter periods of editorial gestation. Marlon Ariyasinghe’s article provides the beginning of new discussions regarding blackface performance by presenting a case study and some historical background from","PeriodicalId":488979,"journal":{"name":"Journal of dramatic theory and criticism","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135195531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Black Theatre, City Life: African American Art Institutions and Urban Ecologies by Macelle Mahala (review)","authors":"Khalid Y. Long","doi":"10.1353/dtc.2023.a912013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2023.a912013","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Black Theatre, City Life: African American Art Institutions and Urban Ecologies by Macelle Mahala Khalid Y. Long Black Theatre, City Life: African American Art Institutions and Urban Ecologies. By Macelle Mahala. Northwestern University Press, 2022. Hardcover $99.95, Paper $34.95. 272 pages. 7 illustrations. Macelle Mahala’s Black Theatre, City Life: African American Art Institutions and Urban Ecologies is a critical study of African American performing arts institutions that provides a vital framework for scholars interested in the intersections of African American theatre history and urban city life. In this extension of her first book, Penumbra: The Premier Stage for African American Drama (2013), Mahala employs similar methodologies in Black Theatre, City Life, “drawing from oral interviews, traditional archival research, and productions site visits to engage with and write about the achievements of these important institutions” (3). In five chapters and an introduction, Mahala charts the history and endeavors of several Black performance institutions in four cities: Cleveland, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Significantly, the cities she examines are directly tied to urban geographical landscapes that have participated in developing a national African American identity throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This notion is highlighted in the concluding chapter, “Finding Joy, Creating Justice.” In addition to connecting Black theatre—past and present—to the Black Lives Matter movement and the call for equitable treatment in theatre issued by the We See You White American Theatre coalition, Mahala contends that “these institutions are not just presenters of history; they are makers and shapers of that history”; she writes further, “They have participated directly in civic and political movements. …These institutions have all been part of the political movements and operations of their cities” (197). Mahala is cognizant that she is among those leading the charge in situating Black theater companies at the center of academic discourse. While the monograph looks exclusively at Black theater in four cities, the study is quite comprehensive in that it examines over one hundred years of African American theatre history, thus exploring a wide range of vital periods such as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s as well as influential artists such as Langston Hughes and August Wilson. [End Page 88] Take, for example, chapter 1, “Karamu: A Hundred Years of Joyful Gathering in Cleveland.” One of the oldest and still operating African American theatre houses in the United States, this chapter chronicles Karamu House’s history throughout major moments of US (theatre) history, from the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century and the Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s to Karamu’s success under artistic director’s Terrence Spivey’s leadership from 2003 to 2016. Key highlights of","PeriodicalId":488979,"journal":{"name":"Journal of dramatic theory and criticism","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135195523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Theater in the Middle East: Between Performance and Politics ed. by Babak Rahimi (review)","authors":"Q-mars Haeri","doi":"10.1353/dtc.2023.a912009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2023.a912009","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Theater in the Middle East: Between Performance and Politics ed. by Babak Rahimi Q-mars Haeri Theater in the Middle East: Between Performance and Politics. Edited by Babak Rahimi. Anthem Press, 2020. Hardcover $125, E-book $40. 184 pages. 7 illustrations. Theater in the Middle East: Between Performance and Politics is a long overdue and necessary book on the topic of Middle Eastern theatre. Theatre and performance studies in the Global North have been dominated by a narrative that theatre does not exist in the Middle East, largely due to a certain interpretation of Islam that does not allow representational art. Scholars have been working to change that narrative for the past two decades, but prior to this book, no collection has brought together the work many have done to depict the true diversity of the region’s performance traditions. From court festivities in 1850s Iran to radio drama in the Syrian diaspora of the 2010s, this anthology presents diverse forms of performance that address notions of nationalism and transnationalism, gender performativity and representation, and the interconnectivity of Indigenous “traditional” and “modern” theatre. Babak Rahimi’s introduction to Theater in the Middle East serves two important purposes. On the one hand, it offers a brief yet comprehensive history of theatre in the region. It provides immense knowledge on the topic to the general reader and to the specialist alike. While it may be impossible to write about all forms of theatre in the region, Rahimi has managed to put together interconnected theatre histories of North Africa, the Levant, Iran, and the Gulf countries. In doing so, he provides necessary context for the chapters that follow. On the other hand, this introduction is a reflection on the concept of translation and the ways in which translation (both literary and embodied) have shaped performances in the region. He argues that theatrical performances occur “under changing conditions that reflect both local and trans-local influences” (9). With this in mind, he problematizes the identifier “Middle East” as itself “a geographical imaginary of a Eurocentric bias” (4) and attempts to redefine Middle Eastern theatre in terms of practices that are experientially and hermeneutically complex as well as transcultural. Theater in the Middle East is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Pedagogy and Tradition,” is about pedagogues of the Middle East as well as how Middle Eastern theatre is taught in North America. For example, in chapter 1 Michael Malek Najjar [End Page 79] describes his process of co-teaching Middle Eastern theatre with Sahar Assaf. Najjar provided students with materials that accurately reflected different perspectives on areas of transnational conflict. Throughout the chapter, the course is discussed as both made possible and limited by the number of English translations of Middle Eastern plays. For those teaching courses on Middle Eastern theatre, this chapter serves as a","PeriodicalId":488979,"journal":{"name":"Journal of dramatic theory and criticism","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135195530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre by Elizabeth Brewer Redwine (review)","authors":"Richard Jones","doi":"10.1353/dtc.2023.a912011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2023.a912011","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre by Elizabeth Brewer Redwine Richard Jones Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre. By Elizabeth Brewer Redwine. Oxford University Press, 2021. Hardcover $80. 238 pages. True to its title, Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre concentrates on a handful of women, mostly performers: Laura Armstrong, Maud Gonne, Molly Allgood (stage name Maire O’Neill), Sara Allgood—and to a somewhat lesser extent, Florence Farr, Florence Darragh, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Individually and in some cases collectively, these women had a profound influence on several of the foundational dramatic works of the 1890s and 1900s, including The Countess Cathleen, Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Playboy of the Western World, and both William Butler Yeats’s Deirdre and John Millington [End Page 83] Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows. Of course, the title is also a little misleading, in that more than a few pages are devoted to plays that predate the Abbey Theatre, or, in the case of the epilogue, to Sara Allgood’s career after she left. Redwine explains her project early on: “the role of female performance in the plays of the Abbey needs a reassessment to counter a historical bias towards male authorship at the expense of female performance” (xiv). Both criteria are important here, as Redwine concentrates attention specifically on female performers rather than on female playwrights, like Lady Augusta Gregory, whose contribution to the text of 1902’s Cathleen ni Houlihan was underestimated until well into the 1980s, or on, for example, the Fay brothers, who certainly had a significant impact on virtually anything staged at the Abbey prior to their departure in 1908. Following the introduction, the book proceeds essentially chronologically, opening with what is certainly one of the most interesting chapters, largely because much of it may come as entirely new information to many readers. This discussion concerns Laura Armstrong, for whom Yeats wrote his first plays, Vivien and Time, Time and the Witch Vivien, The Island of Statues, and Mosada, all of which were completed before The Land of Heart’s Desire or even the earliest versions of The Countess Cathleen. Armstrong was the first to occupy the muse role, which was later and more famously filled by Maud Gonne. Like Gonne, Redwine writes, Armstrong implicitly challenged gender expectations and “delighted in her roles of controlling actress and muse” (7). That Gonne was involved from the outset with both Cathleen plays, the subject of Chapter 2, will surprise few readers, but the extent of her influence, even on The Countess Cathleen, the title role of which she ultimately declined, has been hitherto underappreciated. Her famous performance as the “Poor Old Woman” in Cathleen ni Houlihan, striding through an audience fully aware of who she was, both as a celebrated beauty of only thirty-five years old and as a nationalist firebrand, t","PeriodicalId":488979,"journal":{"name":"Journal of dramatic theory and criticism","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135195524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Correction Notice","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/dtc.2023.a912002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2023.a912002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":488979,"journal":{"name":"Journal of dramatic theory and criticism","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135195526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Resisting Algorithmic Determination: Becoming the Political Other in Blast Theory’s Operation Black Antler","authors":"William W. Lewis","doi":"10.1353/dtc.2023.a912006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2023.a912006","url":null,"abstract":"Resisting Algorithmic Determination: Becoming the Political Other in Blast Theory’s Operation Black Antler William W. Lewis (bio) So here I am, hiding behind a dumpster in a dirty alley in downtown Brighton. I’m doing my best to maintain my cover and make sure that the two people fifty yards ahead are not aware that they are being watched. I have been following these two for the past ten minutes since they slinked out of the pub. Obviously, they must have been trying to give my team the slip, knowing that we were getting too close to uncovering the truth. What can they be talking about I wonder and what is it that they are scheming? Something horrible I suspect. They are political extremists after all. With each move through the neighborhood, I begin to distrust them even more because they seemingly are not doing anything that should raise any suspicions. I’ve been tasked with finding out what cruel intentions Alice has up her sleeves, but all I have been able to tell so far is that she and her companion are having a leisurely stroll on a warm summer evening, telling jokes, and catching a moment to smoke a cigarette together. Surely there is more to this encounter, I’ve been told they are up to no good. Is my distrust unfounded? In the above experience, I was performing the role of covert agent tasked with profiling the behavior patterns of supposed political extremists in a theatrical performance based in role play. As part of this role play, levels of distrust, fear, and contempt for the political Other were amplified to justify my own actions. The experience opened up for me a sense of the ways algorithms embedded in digital media interactions condition my beliefs and daily behavior. It also caused me to question they ways these algorithms invisibly drive political messaging that determines how we perceive and behave toward those around us. Specifically, those of different political beliefs. Through algorithmic determination1 our politics are becoming primary identifiers framing entire social realities and the ways we perform within these frames. In an era where every digital interaction is tracked, analyzed, and recorded to manipulate our future behavior, it makes me question how we might resist? [End Page 49] Algorithmic processes have co-opted many elements of contemporary life, none more than the ways we perceive and communicate with one another online, and through those interactions how we form our political identities. As these processes harden and narrow these identities into specific rigid formations, we become programmed to be suspicious and untrusting of those who think and act differently, creating a social position of the political Other. Social media platforms are often heralded as the digital equivalent of the public square where dialogue helps create a healthy social sphere. In previous non-mediatized paradigms this social space offered an opportunity to create forms of social cohesion through acts of negotiation that might lead","PeriodicalId":488979,"journal":{"name":"Journal of dramatic theory and criticism","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135195521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones Contemporary American Performance and the Racial Past by Ariel Nereson (review)","authors":"Carl Paris","doi":"10.1353/dtc.2023.a912014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2023.a912014","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones Contemporary American Performance and the Racial Past by Ariel Nereson Carl Paris Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones Contemporary American Performance and the Racial Past. By Ariel Nereson. University of Michigan Press, 2022. Hardback $85.00, Paperback $39.95, E-book $39.95. 278 pages. 22 illustrations. Bill T. Jones is undoubtedly the most written about, publicly vocal, and highly decorated choreographer of recent decades. Ariel Nereson’s Democracy Moves adds an important new perspective to that renown with its focus on Jones’s acclaimed trilogy, Serenade/The Proposition (2008), 100 Migrations (2008), and Fondly Do We Hope . . . Fervently Do We Pray (2009), commemorating the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (commissioned by the American Dance Festival, the University of Virginia, and the Ravinia Festival). Identifying herself as a white critic, a dance historian/historiographer, and an assistant professor of dance at the University at Buffalo, Nereson states that the book takes its title and subject matter in part from questions that Jones asked himself in conceiving his trilogy: What does history mean to us? What does dance mean? What can dance do? These questions formed the basis upon which Jones reimagined Lincoln’s historical legacy as “the heroic emancipator” in ways that acknowledged him also as a man of flesh and desire who was lover and spouse to Mary Todd Lincoln, and explored how that reimagining might implicate alternative understandings of democracy, freedom, and the racial past. With Jones’s project as a starting point, Nereson proposes to show that “dance as history and historiography holds the potential to address . . . [that] [End Page 90] racial past as a legacy of modernity’s violence,” and thus offers “a site of repair for minoritized and specifically Black people” (11). Nereson also broadens this purpose by exploring how “artists as public intellectuals” and the aesthetic-political praxis of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane (BTJ/AZ) Company’s “Lincoln repertory,” as she calls the trilogy, intertwine with postmodern discourses around Black aesthetics, representation, and social equity. Nereson’s scholarship is impressive, comprehensive in its research, and intricately interdisciplinary, drawing on concepts from dance, dramaturgy, critical race studies, and, quite prevalently, performance studies theory. Although deeply probing and highly engaging, however, the text’s abundant interweaving of high-theory concepts, citations, and dense terminology might at times obscure or overshadow connections between the theoretical and descriptive aspects of her analyses. Each of the eight chapters foregrounds important features of BJT/AZ’s reportorial whole, ranging from Jones’s creative, funding, and touring concerns; to ethnographic and critical theory ideas around Black aesthetic and kinesthetic practices; to Jones, the artist and activist. The author explores these aspects in relation to","PeriodicalId":488979,"journal":{"name":"Journal of dramatic theory and criticism","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135195525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}