Journal of dramatic theory and criticism最新文献

{"title":"The Lines between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment by Bess Rowen (review)","authors":"Catherine Heiner","doi":"10.1353/dtc.2023.a912010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2023.a912010","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Lines between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment by Bess Rowen Catherine Heiner The Lines between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment. By Bess Rowen. University of Michigan Press, 2021. Cloth, $80.00, Paper, $34.95. 258 pages. 1 illustration. In an ambitious project that bridges theoretical analysis and practical application, Bess Rowen considers the significance and importance of stage directions within the theatrical text in The Lines between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment. Tracing the evolution of stage directions from the twentieth century on, Rowen argues that stage directions offer a path toward interrogating the cultural processes of theatre to challenge, subvert, and transform how we think about representation. To categorize these lines between the lines, Rowen first defines affective stage directions as lines “where multiple forms of cultural consciousness come into contact as playwright, reader, actor, director, and designers all bring their individual cultural lenses and experiences to a script” (9). Her title plays on the dual nature of “affect,” both as the theory related to the circulation of emotions and feelings, and the ability to influence, impress, or move. By tracing the origins of stage directions through print culture, Rowen identifies these moments as opportunities for readers to imaginatively embody these moments as they imagine and consider the possibilities of performance. Doing so allows Rowen to oscillate between the practical factors of theatre production—including casting, design, and staging—and the theoretical complexities of theatre as embodied semiotics. She suggests this process as an act of translation, in moving a play from written text to bodily experience, thus reiterating the collaborative and flexible nature of theatre production. Within this framework, Rowen argues that drawing attention to the specificity and nuance of [End Page 81] embodiment in relation to theatrical texts can offer more affective possibility in production. Rowan pays particular attention to these moments as sites of generative collaboration for playwrights and readers, or as instances that reflect problematic cultural associations and judgements, depending on how these stage directions are interpreted through and with the bodies of performers. At times it is a little unclear whether Rowen intends her work as a call to action for practitioners to reconsider their approach to these moments, or for theatre scholars to layer affect into textual analysis; however, Rowen demonstrates how these unspoken moments reflect the importance of representation. Rowen shapes this project by organizing the major categories of stage directions in her chapters as spoken, affective, choreographic, multivalent, and impossible. Moving temporally through the history of stage directions, Rowen moves from the small-scale moments of spoken stage directions to the much larger, more nebulous nature ","PeriodicalId":488979,"journal":{"name":"Journal of dramatic theory and criticism","volume":"161 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":"135195528","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":"Kalu Skin, Kalu Masks: Performing Blackness in Simon Nawagattegama’s Sudu Saha Kalu (1979)","authors":"Marlon Ariyasinghe","doi":"10.1353/dtc.2023.a912004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2023.a912004","url":null,"abstract":"Kalu Skin, Kalu Masks1: Performing Blackness in Simon Nawagattegama’s Sudu Saha Kalu (1979) Marlon Ariyasinghe (bio) In March 2019, I was among the audience for a performance of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, directed by Ushan Perera and translated into Sinhala as Maya Bandana by Gamini Wiyangoda at the Prof. Ediriweera Sarachchandra Theatre (fondly known as the Wala) in Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. One particular aspect of the performance that struck me was the portrayal of the character Tituba, an enslaved woman from Barbados owned by Reverend Parris. Tituba’s face was painted black in the production, reminiscent of Black minstrelsy performances. During the post-production discussion, I inquired from the director about the rationale for selecting the particular makeup used for Tituba’s character. He seemed confused by the question, gave me an evasive answer, and stated whether my question was relevant to present-day Sri Lanka. I inferred from his response that he believed that the portrayal of Tituba in black makeup was not insensitive because Sri Lanka does not have the same racial dynamics of Black and white. The director may not have intended for Tituba’s Blackface makeup to be a stereotypical caricature, yet, as argued by Ayanna Thompson, a scholar of race and performance, “intentionality is always subject to interpretation in production.”2 Thomson further posits the fluidity of intention in pre- and post-performance: “Even artists themselves revisit their own conceptions of their intentions after performing something in front of an audience.”3 Therefore, despite what the director intended, it is ineluctable that Tituba’s portrayal in black makeup evokes racialized caricatures of Blackness rooted in the history of minstrelsy shows. The early nineteenth-century minstrel shows represented a significant component of American pop culture within the United States. The shows, which depicted Black American lives and the life of the enslaved, were in the form of skits and songs by white singers, dancers, comedians, and performers in black makeup that caricatured Black physiological stereotypes: large mouths, lips, and eyes, woolly hair, and coal-black skin. As stated in Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (2013), the minstrelsy theatrical practice originated in “the urban north, in which white men caricatured blacks for sport and profit.”4 [End Page 11] The minstrel shows portrayed enslaved Blacks as passive and happy. The distortion and ridicule of speech, mannerisms, color, and caricature of general comportment reinforced whiteness and white comportment as the norm. As Catherine Cole observes, the use of Blackface became a signifier for African American culture. The American minstrel show’s racism lay in the fact that Blackness was equated with “ignorance, disorder, and the grotesque.”5 Thus, the caricaturing of Black physiological aspects through Blackface makeup reinforced the negative portrayal of African American cult","PeriodicalId":488979,"journal":{"name":"Journal of dramatic theory and criticism","volume":"10 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":"135195533","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":"Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era ed. by Xiaomei Chen, Tarryn Li-Min Chun and Siyuan Liu (review)","authors":"Whit Emerson","doi":"10.1353/dtc.2023.a912008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2023.a912008","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era ed. by Xiaomei Chen, Tarryn Li-Min Chun and Siyuan Liu Whit Emerson Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era. Edited By Xiaomei Chen, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, and Siyuan Liu. University of Michigan Press, 2021. Hardcover $80.00, E-book $69.95. 310 pages. 14 illustrations. Rethinking Chinese Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era spotlights the complex artistic and cultural history of twentieth-century Chinese theatre through an exploration of spoken drama, traditional opera, revolutionary opera, and dance. Eminent scholars of Chinese performing arts chisel away at the monolithic perception of modern Chinese theatre, taking a more nuanced look at how performance of the period served both international and domestic needs. In their essays, contributors such as Liang Luo, Emily Wilcox, and Siyuan Liu bring their collective knowledge to bear in unpacking the interactions between socialist revolutionary ideologies and the practice of implementing such reform between the 1930s and the 1970s. Chen, Chun, and Liu structure their study with an introduction, nine chapters, and an epilogue. The introduction gives an exceptionally insightful overview of the historical and ideological forces at work in Mao-era Chinese performing arts. This well-written essay offers a great primer for undergraduates, graduates, and instructors of theatre seeking to understand the origins of many contemporary Chinese performance practices. In chapter 1, Max L. Bohnenkamp discusses first the product and then the process of creating the 1950 “New Music-Drama” version of The White-Haired Girl, one of the most influential dramas of the Mao era (and one of Mao’s favorite plays). Bohnenkamp emphasizes the play’s role as an early point of contention in the realization of a distinctly Chinese socialist aesthetic onstage. Bohnenkamp goes further than discussing a simple Chinese/Western blend of performance aesthetics to acknowledge the influence of Sino-Soviet artistic collaboration and the ways in which the personal decisions of production supervisor Zhang Geng integrated theatrical concepts in the spirit of Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. Bohnenkamp showcases how reform is complicated by “the politicized aesthetics of Chinese socialist theatre of the Mao era” (55), while linking the idea to the official policy of state-supervised performing arts in China today. [End Page 77] In chapter 6, Emily Wilcox demonstrates how a reconsideration of history in the new Chinese socialist imaginary can lead to practical aesthetic choices made for both domestic and foreign audiences. Wilcox takes the 1959 performance of the national dance drama Dagger Society as an example of how Chinese socialist performance can be political not only in content but also in aesthetic form. To further her claim, Wilcox off","PeriodicalId":488979,"journal":{"name":"Journal of dramatic theory and criticism","volume":"3 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":"135195529","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":"A Philosopher at the Door: A Theatrical Interruption","authors":"Ira Avneri","doi":"10.1353/dtc.2023.a912005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2023.a912005","url":null,"abstract":"A Philosopher at the Door: A Theatrical Interruption Ira Avneri (bio) 1. Introduction In drama—both in text and on stage—an entrance into a space serves to “further artistic purposes which could not be served in any other way,” as Oliver Taplin has claimed.1 It is often designed as “a profound—can we say life-threatening?—event,” as Arnold Aronson has claimed,2 suggesting thereby that an entrance always creates an essential shift in the scene and often places someone at risk, either the entering character or the ones already present. Such qualities are at the core of this article, which discusses several dramatic scenes introduced not in plays for the stage but rather in philosophical texts that address the art of theatre. These scenes revolve around a specific image: the arrival of a philosophical character at a house associated with theatrical activity. The interruption caused by his arrival stirs critical thinking and sets the stage for a display of philosophizing within the arena of theatre. And yet, these scenes also imply a theatrical mischief or even a misperformance in the philosopher’s strategy and treat it with dramatic irony.3 The paradigm for the introduction of dramatic scenes within a philosophical text is obviously Plato’s dialogues. Thus, the first case is Plato’s image, in the Symposium, of Socrates’s entrance into the house of the tragic poet Agathon, where a banquet in honor of the host is taking place. Although the event has already begun, Socrates first chooses to remain outside. Standing immobile in a neighbor’s doorway, immersed in thought, he ignores Agathon’s repeated requests from him to enter, and enters only after concluding his act. This deferred entrance is the first stage of Socrates’s agôn (contest) with Agathon, juxtaposing the self-absorbed standpoint of a philosopher with the audience-dependent standpoint of a playwright. And yet, the publicly visible nature of Socrates’s gesture implies that it is not a pure display of commitment to philosophy; rather, it is a theatrical display aiming at arousing curiosity about the ritual of philosophizing. Socrates plays to an audience no less than Agathon does. The second case is Bertolt Brecht’s image, in the dialogues of Der Messingkauf, of the arrival of an unnamed philosopher at a large theatre house, to hold discussions with its “inhabitants” (the practitioners) about the future of theatre. Whereas [End Page 27] in Plato’s dialogue the bodily standstill occurs outside the house prior to the philosopher’s entrance and interrupts the indoor sequence, in Brecht’s dialogues the “standstill” occurs after the philosopher’s entrance and is embodied in the form of the aforementioned discussions. They allegedly take place during four nights, on the stage itself, after the evening’s show, as a philosophical alternative to the theatrical show that has just ended. In these discussions, the philosopher declares his vision of subjecting the theatre to philosophical ends by turning i","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":"135195532","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}