Voices for Reform in South Asian Theatre

2001 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-53
Author(s):  
John Russell Brown
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Theatre Arts ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Southern Asia ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The University ◽  
Associate Director

The classical theatres of southern Asia are variously treated with the reverence thought due to sacrosanct and immutable forms – or as rich sources for plunder by western theatre-makers in search of intra-cultural building-blocks. The rights and wrongs of this latter approach have been much debated, not least in the pages of NTQ; less so the intrinsic desirability of leaving well alone. At the symposium on Classical Sanskrit Theatre, hosted in Dhaka by the Centre for Asian Theatre in December 1999, an unexpected consensus sought ways in which classical theatre forms might best meet contemporary needs, not only by drawing upon their unique qualities – but also by respecting the injunction in the Natyasastra that the actor must combine discipline with a readiness for improvisation. John Russell Brown here supports the conclusions of the symposium that the qualities of Asian theatre which differentiate it from western forms – of a quest for transformation rather than representation, a concern with emotional truth rather than ideological ‘meaning’ – can best be pursued by such an approach, restoring to the theatre ‘its enabling and necessary role in society’. John Russell Brown was the first professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, and subsequently Associate Director at the National Theatre in London. More recently he has taught and directed in the USA, New Zealand, and Asia, and is now Visiting Professor of Performing Arts at Middlesex University. The most recent of his numerous books is New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience and Asia (Routledge, 1999).

Performance, Theatre Training, and Research

1996 ◽  
Vol 12 (47) ◽  
pp. 207-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Russell Brown
Keyword(s):  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Theatre Arts ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Present Experience ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Training And Research ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
Founder Member ◽  
The University ◽  
Associate Director

John Russell Brown, who was a founder member and first Head of the University of Birmingham's Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, and subsequently an Associate Director of the National Theatre in London, here responds to the article by NTQ co-editor Clive Barker in our May 1995 issue, ‘What Training – for What Theatre’, taking as further text an editorial by Richard Schechner in the Summer 1995 issue of TDR. Currently, as a Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, John Russell Brown is teaching a production-based undergraduate acting course, and is also an advisor for Theatre Studies at the University of Singapore and a consultant to the School of Drama at Middlesex University. He draws upon this wide range of past and present experience to explore the issues raised by Barker and Schechner – and to suggest some possible ways forward.

Cross-Dressed Actors and their Audiences: Kate Valk's Emperor Jones and William Shakespeare's Juliet

1999 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-203
Author(s):  
John Russell Brown
Keyword(s):  
Recent Book ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Theatre Arts ◽  
Wooster Group ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Arts Festival ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
The University ◽  
Representation Of Sexuality

Male cross-dressing in leading female roles in the Elizabethan theatre has, at different extremes of modern stage practice, been either ignored as a no longer relevant convention or appropriated to make some kind of sexual-political statement. In either case, at issue is the ‘lifelikeness’ or otherwise achieved, and how far modern deployment should or should not be taken to challenge our own assumptions. John Russell Brown takes a recent production by the Wooster Group, in which Kate Falk played the eponymous male lead in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, to suggest that cross-dressing can engage us with other perceptions of reality altogether – and demand, in relation to Shakespearean performance, a reading of the text that responds to resonances more often ignored or avoided. He illustrates his argument with close reference to the presentation and representation of sexuality in Romeo and Juliet. John Russell Brown was the first professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham and, subsequently, Associate Director at the National Theatre in London. More recently he has taught and directed in the USA, New Zealand, and Asia. He is now based in London, and is Consultant in Theatre at Middlesex University. His most recent book is New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience and Asia (Routledge, 1999) and his most recent theatre work a production of Surrena Goldsmith's Blue for the Wandsworth Arts Festival (November 1998) and an acting and Living Newspaper workshop for the National School of Drama in Delhi (March 1999).

scholarly journals Free Roast Pig at Open Day: All you can eat will not attract South Auckland Pacific Islanders to University

Te Kaharoa ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Teena Brown Pulu
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Pacific Islander ◽  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
University Education ◽  
The South ◽  
University System ◽  
Obesity And Diabetes ◽  
Low Expectations ◽  
The University

I kid you not.  This is a time in Pacific regional history where as a middle-aged Tongan woman with European, Maori, and Samoan ancestries who was born and raised in New Zealand, I teach students taking my undergraduate papers how not to go about making stereotypical assumptions.  The students in my classes are mostly Maori and Pakeha (white, European) New Zealanders.  They learn to interrogate typecasts produced by state policy, media, and academia classifying the suburbs of South Auckland as overcrowded with brown people, meaning Pacific Islanders; overburdened by non-communicable diseases, like obesity and diabetes; and overdone in dismal youth statistics for crime and high school drop-outs.  And then some well-meaning but incredibly uninformed staff members at the university where I am a senior lecturer have a bright idea to give away portions of roast pig on a spit to Pacific Islanders at the South Auckland campus open day. Who asked the university to give us free roast pig?  Who asked us if this is what we want from a university that was planted out South in 2010 to sell degrees to a South Auckland market predicted to grow to half a million people, largely young people, in the next two decades? (AUT University, 2014).  Who makes decisions about what gets dished up to Pacific Islanders in South Auckland, compared to what their hopes might be for university education prospects?  To rephrase Julie Landsman’s essay, how about “confronting the racism of low expectations” that frames and bounds Pacific Islanders in South Auckland when a New Zealand university of predominantly Palangi (white, European) lecturers and researchers on academic staff contemplate “closing achievement gaps?” (Landsman, 2004). Tackling “the soft bigotry of low expectations” set upon Pacific Islanders getting into and through the university system has prompted discussion around introducing two sets of ideas at Auckland University of Technology (The Patriot Post, 2014).  First, a summer school foundation course for literacy and numeracy on the South campus, recruiting Pacific Islander school leavers wanting to go on to study Bachelor’s degrees.  Previously, the University of Auckland had provided bridging paths designed for young Pacific peoples to step up to degree programmes (Anae et al, 2002).  Second, the possibility of performing arts undergraduate papers recognising a diverse and youthful ethnoscape party to an Auckland context of theatre, drama, dance, music, Maori and Pacific cultural performance, storytelling, and slam poetry (Appadurai, 1996).  Although this discussion is in its infancy and has not been feasibility scoped or formally initiated in the university system, it is a suggestion worth considering here. My inquiry is frank: Why conflate performance and South Auckland Pacific Islanders?  Does this not lend to a clichéd mould that supposes young Pacific Islanders growing up in the ill-famed suburbs of the poor South are naturally gifted at singing, dancing, and performing theatrics?  This is a characterisation fitted to inner-city Black American youth that has gone global and is wielded to tag, label, and brand urban Pacific Islanders of South Auckland.  Therefore, how are the aspirational interests of this niche market reflected in the content and context of initiatives with South Auckland Pacific Islander communities in mind?

Learning Shakespeare's Secret Language: the Limits of ‘Performance Studies’

2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Russell Brown
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Theatre Arts ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Look Back ◽  
University College ◽  
University College London ◽  
Associate Director

As author of one of the pioneering books advocating the study of Shakespeare's Plays in Performance (1966), founder of the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, and for fifteen years an Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre, John Russell Brown is in a uniquely authoritative position to look back over the intervening years as ‘Performance Studies’ have increasingly displaced the study of Shakespeare's plays as texts. But has this been as helpful as many, including the author, hoped, when in practice it is so often based on the second- or third-hand recreation of lost and isolated theatrical moments, and fails entirely to give a sense of the progressive experience of watching a play? John Russell Brown here argues for closer attention to what he calls the ‘secret language’ of the plays – implicit instructions to actors that are buried in the texts themselves, at a time when there was no director to encourage or impose a particular interpretation or approach. He concludes: ‘Rather than trying to describe and understand what very different people have made of the plays in very different circumstances and times, we can best study them in performance by allowing them to reflect our own lives.’ John Russell Brown's most recent books are Shakespeare Dancing (Palgrave, 2005) and, as editor, The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare (2008). In 2007 he was appointed Visiting Professor at University College London.

Maki, Fumihiko [槇文彦] (1928--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neilton Clarke
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Assistant Professor ◽  
Gold Medal ◽  
Associate Professor ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The University ◽  
North And South America ◽  
Washington University ◽  
American Institute Of Architects

Fumihiko Maki was born in Tokyo in 1928. After studying at the University of Tokyo and graduating with a bachelor’s in architecture (BS Arch) in 1952, he undertook further studies in the USA, at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan, and at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), Harvard University, obtaining a Master of Architecture from each in 1953 and 1954, respectively. Afterwards, Maki worked for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in New York, and for Sert, Jackson & Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1956 he became an assistant professor of architecture at Washington University, St. Louis. Steinberg Hall, the university’s on-campus arts center, was Maki’s first design commission. Maki served as associate professor at Harvard’s GSD from 1962 to 1965, returning to Japan afterwards to establish his own firm, namely Maki and Associates. He held a professorship at the University of Tokyo from 1979 to 1989. Maki’s architectural oeuvre straddles Asia, North and South America, Europe, and the Middle East, encompassing a breadth of projects including art museums and performing arts venues, educational, research, and administrative institutions, conference, media, sports, and community centers, and residential projects, among others. His practice has earned him innumerable awards including the Wolf Prize (1988), the Thomas Jefferson Medal in Architecture (1990), the UIA Gold Medal (1993), the Pritzker Architecture Prize (1993), Japan Arts Association Praemium Imperiale (1999), and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Gold Medal (2011).

scholarly journals Allan Charles Wilson. 18 October 1934 — 21 July 1991

2014 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 455-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca L. Cann
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Molecular Evolution ◽  
Doctoral Students ◽  
Molecular Clock ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Change ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Living Species ◽  
The University

Allan Charles Wilson was born on 18 October 1934 at Ngaruawahia, New Zealand. He died in Seattle, Washington, on 21 July 1991 while undergoing treatment for leukaemia. Allan was known as a pioneering and highly innovative biochemist, helping to define the field of molecular evolution and establish the use of a molecular clock to measure evolutionary change between living species. The molecular clock, a method of measuring the timescale of evolutionary change between two organisms on the basis of the number of mutations that they have accumulated since last sharing a common genetic ancestor, was an idea initially championed by Émile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling (Zuckerkandl & Pauling 1962), on the basis of their observations that the number of changes in an amino acid sequence was roughly linear with time in the aligned haemoglobin proteins of animals. Although it is now not unusual to see the words ‘molecular evolution’ and ‘molecular phylogeny’ together, when Allan formed his own biochemistry laboratory in 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley, many scientists in the field of evolutionary biology considered these ideas complete heresy. Allan’s death at the relatively young age of 56 years left behind his wife, Leona (deceased in 2009), a daughter, Ruth (b. 1961), and a son, David (b. 1964), as well his as mother, Eunice (deceased in 2002), a younger brother, Gary Wilson, and a sister, Colleen Macmillan, along with numerous nieces, nephews and cousins in New Zealand, Australia and the USA. In this short span of time, he trained more than 55 doctoral students and helped launch the careers of numerous postdoctoral fellows.

South Africa's National Theatre: the Market or the Street?

1989 ◽  
Vol 5 (19) ◽  
pp. 272-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Graver ◽  
Loren Kruger
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Theatre Companies ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The University

The original Theatre Quarterly devoted a large portion of one issue-TQ28 (1977—78) to the theatre of South Africa. It is, of course, important to relate new developments in the theatre of that troubled nation to the context of its changing political situation – considering, for example, how far a reflection of the realities of the urban black experience is now more typical than the ‘acceptable’ face represented by the once-popular ‘tribal musicals’. Here. David Graver and Loren Kruger contrast two approaches to the theatre of anti-apartheid. The internationally known (and now relatively stable) Market Theatre of Johannesburg, they argue, today largely reaches an educated, liberal, and elite audience, and sustains what is essentially a European literary tradition: but other plays written and directed by blacks — notably since the Soweto uprising of 1976 — have developed a more appropriately African style. Often, these, have emerged from the theatre companies within the black townships, such as the Bachaki Theatre Company - whose Top Down is here the focus of analysis. David Graver is currently Mellon Fellow in Drama at Stanford University: his articles have appeared in Theatre Journal and in NTQ, and he is now completing a book on the theory and practice of the avant-garde. Loren Kruger teaches in the University of Chicago, has published in Theatre Journal and the Brecht Yearbook, and is working on a study of theatres with national aspirations in Europe and the USA.

Toward a Populist Nigerian Theatre: the Plays of Femi Osofisan

1987 ◽  
Vol 3 (11) ◽  
pp. 280-288
Author(s):  
Sandra L. Richards
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Assistant Professor ◽  
Michigan State University ◽  
Wole Soyinka ◽  
State University ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Fulbright Scholar ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The University

Though his work is as yet less familiar in Europe and the USA than that of Wole Soyinka. Femi Osofisan, while acknowledging a discipleship to his predecessor, is more concerned with specific social issues than with universalized themes, and is pre-eminent among contemporary Nigerian playwrights in combining a radical perspective with a recognition of the importance of cultural traditions. In this article. Sandra L. Richards explores his work in terms of the way that its social analysis elicits an active response from its audiences, through the reshaping of recognizable forms – ‘whodunits without solutions’ – while accepting the often-limited resources of theatre machinery and personnel on which most of his directors will be able to call. Sandra L. Richards spent two years in Nigeria as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Benin, and is presently Assistant Professor of Drama and Director of the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University, California. An earlier version of the present article was presented at the annual African Literature Association conference held at Michigan State University in 1986.

Representing Sexuality in Shakespeare's Plays

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (51) ◽  
pp. 205-213
Author(s):  
John Russell Brown
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The University ◽  
Associate Director

Sexuality resides in much more than what is spoken or even enacted, and its stage representation will often work best when the minds of the spectators are collaboratively engaged in completing the desired response. John Russell Brown, founding Head of Drama at the University of Birmingham and a former Associate Director of the National Theatre, here explores Shakespeare's arts of sexual obliquity, whether in silence, prevarication, or kindled imagination, and their relationship both with more direct forms of allusion and with an audience's response. John Russell Brown, currently Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, is author of numerous books on Shakespeare and modern drama, and editor of many Elizabethan and Jacobean texts – most recently a new edition of Shakespeare for Applause Books, New York.

Shakespeare, the Natyasastra, and Discovering Rasa for Performance

2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Russell Brown
Keyword(s):  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
Theatre Arts ◽  
Production Studies ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
World Series ◽  
Theatre Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
Associate Director

Recognizing analogies between the assumptions about theatricality found in the classic Sanskrit treatise on acting, the Natyasastra, and those of the Elizabethan theatre, John Russell Brown suggests that the concept of rasa as the determining emotion of a performance is similar to that of the Elizabethan ‘humour’, or prevailing passion, as defined by Ben Jonson. Here he describes his work exploring what happens when actors draw on their own life experiences to imagine and assume the basic rasa of the character they are going to present, based on experiments in London with New Fortune Theatre; in Bremen with actors of the Bremer Shakespeare Company; and in New Delhi with actors of the National School of Drama. Using actors both young and experienced, familiar and unfamiliar with ensemble playing, and well or poorly acquainted with the concepts involved, he suggests that the results merit further exploration of a technique which could empower actors to bring Shakespeare's plays to new kinds of life. John Russell Brown founded the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, and for fifteen years was an Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre. His New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia was published by Routledge in 1999, and his Shakespeare Dancing: a Theatrical Study of the Plays by Palgrave Macmillan in 2004. He edited and contributed to The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (1995), and for Routledge has been General Editor of the ‘Theatre Production Studies’, ‘Theatre Concepts’, and forthcoming ‘Theatres of the World’ series.

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