Distance and Reflexivity: Creating the Stage World of Pantoland

2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 331-339
Author(s):  
Millie Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
Extended Version ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Forthcoming Book ◽  
The World ◽  
Commercial Theatre ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

In pantomime the Dame and comics, and to a lesser extent the immortals, are positioned between the world of the audience and the world of the story, interacting with both, forming a link between the two, and constantly altering the distance thus created between audience and performance. This position allows these characters to exist both within and without the story, to comment on the story, and reflexively to draw attention to the theatricality of the pantomime event. In this article, Millie Taylor concludes that reflexivity and framing allow the pantomime to represent itself as unique, original, anarchic, and fun, and that these devices are significant in the identification of British pantomime as distinct from other types of performance. Millie Taylor worked for many years as a freelance musical director in repertory and commercial theatre and in pantomime. She is now Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts and Music Theatre at the University of Winchester. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Conference on Arts and Humanities in Hawaii (2005), and an extended version will appear in her forthcoming book on British pantomime. Her research has received financial support from the British Academy.

scholarly journals Staging the Delinquent: Edwardian Theatre and The Hooligan

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 344-354
Author(s):  
Martin Heaney
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Drama Education ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Commercial Theatre ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
Participatory Arts ◽  
Urban Working

W. S. Gilbert is best known as a dramatist and librettist who produced fourteen comic operas with his collaborator, composer Arthur Sullivan. Less familiar is his last work The Hooligan (1912), one of the first realist representations of the young urban working-class male seen on the twentieth-century British stage. This article explores the Edwardian conditions of social and cultural volatility reflected in the authoring and production of this play. It discusses the period as one where narratives of gender and class that underpin contemporary perspectives were shaped and contested. It demonstrates how hegemonic systems of cultural production created binary distinctions between the ‘ideal’ of the ‘Imperial Youth’ and the alien, working-class ‘other’. Gilbert’s authoring of the working-class male subject and his representation in a commercial theatre were subject to both market controls and middle-class ‘anxieties’. This historical perspective indicates continuities between these factors and the contemporary representation of the young urban working classes. Martin Heaney is a senior lecturer in Drama, Applied Theatre and Performance at the University of East London. He is co-director of the Centre of Applied and Participatory Arts and has published articles in various journals, including Research in Drama Education. His book chapter ‘Edward Bond and The Representation of Adolescence’ is forthcoming in The Routledge Guide to Theatre for Young People (2021).

A Conversation on Directing Opera

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 246-255
Author(s):  
Katie Mitchell ◽  
Mario Frendo
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Musical Score ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Don Giovanni ◽  
National Opera ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
And Performance

Katie Mitchell has been directing opera since 1996, when she debuted on the operatic stage with Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni at the Welsh National Opera. Since then, she has directed more than twenty-nine operas in major opera houses around the world. Mitchell here speaks of her directorial approach when working with the genre, addressing various aspects of interest for those who want a better grasp of the dynamics of opera-making in the twenty-first century. Ranging from the director’s imprint, or signature on the work they put on the stage, to the relationships forged with people running opera institutions, Mitchell reflects on her experiences when staging opera productions. She sheds light on some fundamental differences between theatre-making and opera production, including the issue of text – the libretto, the dramatic text, and the musical score – and the very basic fact that in opera a director is working with singers, that is, with musicians whose attitude and behaviour on stage is necessarily different from that of actors in the theatre. Running throughout the conversation is Mitchell’s commitment to ensure that young and contemporary audiences do not see opera as a museum artefact but as a living performative experience that resonates with the aesthetics and political imperatives of our contemporary world. She speaks of the uncompromising political imperatives that remain central to her work ethic, even if this means deserting a project before it starts, and reflects on her long-term working relations with opera institutions that are open to new and alternative approaches to opera-making strategies. Mitchell underlines her respect for the specific rules of an art form that, because of its collaborative nature, must allow more space for theatre-makers to venture within its complex performative paths if it wants to secure a place in the future. Mario Frendo is Senior Lecturer of Theatre and Performance and Head of the Department of Theatre Studies at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta, where he is the director of CaP, a research group focusing on the links between culture and performance.

From the Streets to the Stage: Disability and the Performing Arts

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 620-625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie Sandahl
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Theater Studies ◽  
Suitable Site ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

Despite its newness, disability-theater studies is an incredibly rich area of inquiry that is exploding in artistic practice and scholarship. The university is a particularly suitable site for a meeting of disability and the theater; after all, we theater scholars think of our classrooms and productions as laboratories not only for showcasing knowledge but for producing, rehearsing, and revising it. As the theater scholar Jill Dolan points out, live performance, especially in the liberal arts setting, has the unique power to test, on bodies willing to try them, academic theories that are otherwise purely theoretical. The feedback loop that oscillates between theory and practice in theater studies is necessarily changed by the inclusion of disability perspectives in the classroom, research programs, and performance offerings. Interestingly, an underlying theme of disability perspectives is that the lived experience of disability is always already performative; indeed, many of us with disabilities understand our disabilities as performance, not exclusively in an aesthetic or theoretical sense, but as an actual mode of living in the world. Consider what the playwright and wheelchair user John Belluso told me in a recent interview: “Any time I get on a public bus, I feel like it's a moment of theater. I'm lifted, the stage is moving up, and I enter, and people are along the lines, and they're turning and looking, and I make my entrance. It's theater, and I have to perform. And I feel like we as disabled people are constantly onstage and we're constantly performing.” The perspective of disability as performance undergirds and permeates disability art and scholarship. Thus, my own development as a disability-theater scholar and artist frames my perception of how disability challenges both the practical and the theoretical aspects of theater studies and points to the role universities play in fostering further development of the field.

Mitterer, Wolfgang (1958--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Cassidy
Keyword(s):  
Chamber Music ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
Live Electronics ◽  
Performance Events ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Orchestra Music ◽  
And Function ◽  
Granular Layers ◽  
The University

Wolfgang Mitterer (1958--) is an Austrian composer and organist noted for his work with live electronics and improvisation. Born on 6 June, 1958 in Lienz, East Tyrol, Mitterer studied organ and composition at the University of Music and the Performing Arts Vienna, followed by a year-long residency at the studio for electroacoustic music (EMS) in Stockholm. An exceptionally prolific composer, Mitterer’s output spans a staggeringly broad range of approaches to music making, including works for tape, chamber music of various formations, experimental pop songs (Sopop), works for large orchestra, music for theatre and opera, music for film, and sprawling site-specific installations and performance events (turmbau zu babel, for example, is scored for 4,200 singers, 22 drums, 48 brass players, and 8-channel tape). His works list includes over 200 entries and demonstrates a particularly catholic, pluralistic, non-dogmatic approach to instrumentation, duration, venue, scale, and function. Despite this diversity, Mitterer’s work maintains several important central tendencies: stylistically, the music is often characterized by layers of crackles, twitches, clicks, and pops (both electronic and acoustic), with a rustling, flickering, chirping, gestural energy. These more fragmented, granular layers are quite often combined with gradual, elongated, atmospheric, and lyrical material, though generally a sense of instability and unpredictability remains.

Making Knowledge/Playing Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 83-101
Author(s):  
Antje Budde ◽  
Sebastian Samur
Keyword(s):  
Experiential Learning ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Undergraduate Research ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

(A project of the Digital Dramaturgy Lab at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto) This article discusses the 2017 festival-based undergraduate course, “Theatre Criticism and Festival Dramaturgy in the Digital Age in the Context of Globalization—A Cultural-Comparative Approach” as a platform for experiential learning. The course, hosted by the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, and based on principles of our Digital Dramaturgy Lab, invited a small group of undergraduate students to critically investigate two festivals—the Toronto Fringe Festival and the Festival d’Avignon—in order to engage as festival observers in criticism and analysis of both individual performances and festival programming/event dramaturgy. We argue that site-specific modes of experiential learning employed in such a project can contribute in meaningful ways to, and expand, current discourses on festivalising/festivalization and eventification through undergraduate research. We focus on three modes of experiential learning: nomadic learning (learning on the move, digital mobility), embodied knowledge (learning through participation, experience, and feeling), and critical making (learning through a combination of critical thinking and physical making). The article begins with a brief practical and theoretical background to the course. It then examines historical conceptions of experiential learning in the performing arts, including theoriesadvanced by Burnet Hobgood, David Kolb and Ronald Fry, and Nancy Kindelan. The importance of the festival site is then discussed, followed by an examination of how the festivals supported thethree modes of experiential learning. Samples of student works are used to support this analysis.

Comedy in the Holocaust: the Theresienstadt Cabaret

1996 ◽  
Vol 12 (48) ◽  
pp. 299-308
Author(s):  
Roy Kift
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Opera Singers ◽  
The University ◽  
Stage Play ◽  
The Military

The concentration camp in Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic was unique, in that it was used by the Nazis as a ‘flagship’ ghetto to deceive the world about the real fate of the Jews. It contained an extraordinarily high proportion of VIPs – so-called Prominenten, well-known international personalities from the worlds of academia, medicine, politics, and the military, as well as leading composers, musicians, opera singers, actors, and cabarettists, most of whom were eventually murdered in Auschwitz. The author, Roy Kift, who first presented this paper at a conference on ‘The Shoah and Performance’ at the University of Glasgow in September 1995, is a free-lance dramatist who has been living in Germany since 1981, where he has written award-winning plays for stage and radio, and a prizewinning opera libretto, as well as directing for stage, television, and radio. His new stage play, Camp Comedy, set in Theresienstadt, was inspired by this paper, and includes original cabaret material: it centres on the nightmare dilemma encountered by Kurt Gerron in making the Nazi propaganda film, The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a Town. Roy Kift has contributed regular reports on contemporary German theatre to a number of magazines, including NTQ. His article on the GRIPS Theater in Berlin appeared in TQ39 (1981) and an article on Peter Zadek in NTQ4 (1985).

‘Gratuitous Assistance’? The West End Theatre Industry, Late Victorian Charity, and Patterns of Theatrical Fundraising

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Hindson
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Economic Potential ◽  
The West ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
And Performance ◽  
End Stage ◽  
University Of Bristol ◽  
The University

London's theatre industry and charity culture have been closely connected since the mid-nineteenth century. In this article Catherine Hindson explores the nature of this relationship in the later years of the century. Focusing on a charity bazaar held at the Royal Albert Hall in June 1899 to raise funds for the Charing Cross Hospital, she argues that extra-theatrical occasions staged for charity organizations were firmly located within the stage culture of the day. Rather than peripheral occasions, high-profile, public charity events functioned as significant forces in the reputation and success of the West End theatre industry and its personnel. They held cultural, social, and economic potential for theatrical performers and represent a key factor in the improvement in the moral and social status of the stage in this period. Catherine Hindson is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on popular performance between 1820 and 1930 and is currently completing a monograph on the actress, the West End stage, and charity between 1880 and 1930.

THE NINA VANCE ALLEY THEATRE PAPERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON LIBRARIES SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

2008 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-128
Author(s):  
Tammy Ravas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
University Of Houston ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
Artistic Director

The University of Houston (UH) Libraries' Special Collections possesses several groups of papers and other items related to theatre and the performing arts, one of which is the Nina Vance Alley Theatre Papers. These items were donated to Special Collections in 2000. What follows is a brief biography of Nina Vance and history of the Alley as well as some highlights of items contained within this collection. Nina Vance was the Alley's first artistic director, from 1947 until her death in 1980. Along with Margo Jones and Zelda Fichandler, she helped shape the American regional-theatre movement in the later twentieth century. During her tenure at the Alley she directed 102 plays, produced 245 shows, and was awarded major grants, including significant funding from the Ford Foundation. Despite Vance's achievements in these areas, as well as in establishing the Alley as a respected theatre in the United States and across the world, few works of scholarship exist on her career. This could be partially due to the fact that many primary sources on the Alley Theatre and its founder, such as those found at the UH Libraries' Special Collections, have not been well publicized.

scholarly journals ‘The Power of Attraction’: the Staging of Wilde and his Contemporaries at the St James's Theatre, 1892–1895

2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucie Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Financial Data ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Commercial Theatre ◽  
Regional Performance ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Significant Attention

The actor-manager system remained pivotal to West End production throughout the later nineteenth century. Focusing on one actor-manager, George Alexander, and using records of his expenditure on productions during the early 1890s, Lucie Sutherland demonstrates how financial data can be used to examine evolving relationships between industry leaders and dramatic authors in this era. She argues that this kind of evidence demonstrates not only the fiscal dimension to such relationships – level of investment per production, percentage of royalties paid – but also that the data may be analyzed to ascertain the responsiveness of an actor-manager to income generated. Here, significant attention is paid to box-office revenue and expenditure for the first productions of Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, exploring the income Alexander achieved by staging Wilde's drama prior to the arrest and trials of 1895. The use of quantitative data allows for close scrutiny of the work undertaken by prominent figures in the professional theatre; familiar narratives can be contested and endorsed through engagement with this type of material. Lucie Sutherland is a Teaching Associate in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham. She has written on aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British theatre, including regional performance cultures and the impact of increasing professional regulation (for example the emergence of an actors' union) upon commercial theatre. She is currently completing a critical biography of Alexander.

scholarly journals Acting Law | Law Acting: A Conversation with Dr Felix Nobis and Professor Gary Watt

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-200
Author(s):  
Sean Alexander Mulcahy ◽  
Sean Mulcahy
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Royal Shakespeare Company ◽  
Choral Ensemble ◽  
True Story ◽  
Police Shootings ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
Medical Defence

Dr Felix Nobis is a senior lecturer with the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University. He has worked as a professional actor for many years. He previously played an assistant to the Crown Prosecutor in the Australian television series, Janus, which was set in Melbourne, Victoria and based on the true story of a criminal family allegedly responsible for police shootings. He also played an advisor to a medical defence firm in the Australian television series MDA. He is a writer and professional storyteller. He has toured his one-person adaptation of Beowulf (2004) and one-person show Once Upon a Barstool (2006) internationally and has written on these experiences. His most recent work Boy Out of the Country (2016) is written in an Australian verse style and has just completed a tour of regional Victoria. Professor Gary Watt is an academic in the School of Law at the University of Warwick where his teaching includes advocacy and mooting. He also regularly leads rhetoric workshops at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He is the author of Dress, Law and Naked Truth (2013) and, most recently, Shakespeare’s Acts of Will: Law, Testament and Properties of Performance (2016), which explores rhetoric in law and theatre. He also co-wrote A Strange Eventful History, which he performed with Australian choral ensemble, The Song Company, to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.  

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