Finding the Balance: Writing and Performing Ethics in Théâtre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravansérail (2003)

2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
William McEvoy
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Potential Conflict ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Creative Self ◽  
The University ◽  
Refugees And Asylum Seekers

Théâtre du Soleil’s latest production, Le Dernier Caravansérail (The Last Caravanserai), staged the stories and experiences of immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers from around the world. In this article, William McEvoy argues that the company was motivated both by a political agenda to make migrants more visible and a concern to investigate the ethical implications of its own creative processes. This led to a potential conflict between representing migrants directly on stage and a performance that reflected the company’s worries about turning migrants’ traumatic narratives into theatre and spectacle. Focusing on the concept of balance in the production, the article shows how Théâtre du Soleil presented the ethical negotiations between creative self and represented other through exploring the links between text and performance, writing and the body, and manipulation and resistance. William McEvoy is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Sussex, specializing in contemporary theatre and performance. He has published work on Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine, and his current research deals with the shifting role of the text in experimental and physical theatre.

‘Nice Girls’: the Vic Gives a Voice to Women of the Working Class

1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (42) ◽  
pp. 109-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Woodruff
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Community Arts ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
Company Policy ◽  
The University

Since its opening in 1961, the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent has arguably been England's most adventurous and inventive repertory theatre, distinguished by the number and range of new plays it has produced – and particularly by the series of local documentaries which has set out to explore and reflect the life of the local community. The first issue ofTheatre Quarterly(1971) covered the early years of the old Victoria Theatre, and included an article by the director, Peter Cheeseman, on the company policy and production style of what was then Britain's only permanent theatre in the round. In addition, a ‘Production Casebook’ followed the creative processes and the techniques involved in rehearsals of one of the early Vic documentaries, TheStaffordshire Rebels. Here, Graham Woodruff looks at developments in the later Vic documentaries and, in the light of current discourses on popular theatre, history, and class politics, examines the implications of a regional theatre giving voice to ‘women of the working class’ in the latest Vic documentary,Nice Girls. Graham Woodruff, who has been Head of Drama at the University of Birmingham and for sixteen years worked for Telford Community Arts, wrote in NTQ28 (1989) on the politics of community plays, and is currently undertaking research on the ways in which the contemporary theatre gives expression to workingclass voices and interests.

Dance Culture and Statuary Politics: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Myth of Primitivism

2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 280-285
Author(s):  
Gregory Sporton
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Dance Culture ◽  
Universal Values ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

Dance is often assumed to have universal values and to manifest a spirit of freedom, especially individual freedom. It is also the case that such freedom is perceived to be deeply rooted in the condition of humanity. In this article Gregory Sporton shows how these assumptions can mislead us about the basis on which dance operates. By citing the body as the original manifestation of expression, and linking dance practice to primitive experience, a sentimental picture of ourselves as dancers emerges. Taking dance practice in Taiwan as an example, the author shows how this ‘naturalist argument’ can be exploited by a political culture and in doing so divert questions of identity. For the visiting observer, dance appears to evidence political culture and social aspiration, identities that are fixed in the present rather than the archaic past. Gregory Sporton has had a substantial performing career in ballet, contemporary dance, opera, and performance art. He is Head of the School for Performance and Moving Image at the University of Central England.

Disseminating Folklore through Cultural Dance in South African Contemporary Theatre: A Case of Siva (Seven) Dance Production

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hulisani Ndou ◽  
Janine Lewis
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Word Of Mouth ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
The Body ◽  
Delivery Mode ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Communication Platform ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
And Performance

There is a consensus amongst folklorists that the dissemination of folklore is entrenched in the tradition of orality. The idea that folklores are ‘‘‘passed down’ from generation to generation through ‘word of mouth’ or ‘tales’ confines the folklore tradition to the mono-modal communication platform of the ‘spoken word.’’’ While the authors acknowledge the richness and expediency of this delivery mode, this article advocates for the use of physicality and performance as supplementary embodiments of folklore. It argues that since the aspects of the body in time and space are already phenomenologically- integrated into folklore through the realms of words and imagination, it is necessary to fully synthesise performativity into the folklore tradition both visually and theatrically through dance and movement.

Others, Spectatorship, and the Ethics of Verbatim Performance

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Duggan
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Live Music ◽  
Performance Texts ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University ◽  
Performance Research

In this article Patrick Duggan interrogates The Paper Birds' 2010 production Others to explore the political and ethical implications of embodying the (verbatim) texts of others. Built from a six-month exchange of letters between the company and a prisoner, a celebrity (a very non-committal Heather Mills, apparently), and an Iranian artist, Others fuses live music with verbatim and physical theatre texts to investigate the ‘otherness’ of women from vastly divergent cultural contexts. With equal measures of humour and honesty the performance deconstructs these voices both to highlight their particular concerns and problems and to interrogate larger issues relating to ‘others’ with whom we have conscious or unconscious contact. The ethical implications of continuing or discontinuing the correspondences with the three women are explored, and trauma and embodiment theories are used alongside Lévinasian and Russellian theories of ethics to ask what an encounter with such others might teach us about ourselves, about the traumatized other and about the ethics of encounter within performance texts. Patrick Duggan is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Exeter. A practising director, he has also taught extensively in the UK and Ireland as well as in Germany and the United States. He is author of Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance (Manchester University Press, 2012) and co-edited Reverberations: Britishness, Aesthetics and Small-Scale Theatres (Intellect, 2013) and a special issue of the journal Performance Research ‘On Trauma’ (Taylor and Francis, 2011).

scholarly journals Antecedents of job satisfaction among academic staff at a Saudi government university: Using partial square

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1628-1636
Author(s):  
Saleh Alharbi
Keyword(s):  
Job Satisfaction ◽  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Work Environment ◽  
Performance Appraisal ◽  
Financial Incentive ◽  
Academic Staff ◽  
The Body ◽  
Administrative Process ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

Abstract The study at hand explores the antecedents of job satisfaction that affect the degree of job satisfaction experienced by academic staff within a government university in Saudi Arabia. This research centers on the nascent University of Tabuk and endeavors to make a contribution that could provide significance to the body of research, especially in the Middle East. The sample of this study consists of 284 academic contractors at the university under study, namely Tabuk University. Smart-PLS Software analyzed the data, and the study revealed that work environment, administrative process, financial incentive and performance appraisal closely interlink with job satisfaction at Tabuk University, with scientific research and publication having little relation to the predictors of JS.

‘Man Is Ill Because He Is Badly Constructed’: Artaud, Klossowski and Deleuze in Search for the Earth Inside

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Dolphijn
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Performance

Starting with Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, this article analyses the ways in which Artaud's idea of the body without organs links up with various of his writings on the body and bodily theatre and with Deleuze and Guattari's later development of his ideas. Using Klossowski (or Klossowski's Nietzsche) to explain how the dominance of dialogue equals the dominance of God, I go on to examine how the Son (the facialised body), the Father (Language) and the Holy Spirit (Subjectification), need to be warded off in order to revitalize the body, reuniting it with ‘the earth’ it has been separated from. Artaud's writings on Balinese dancing and the Tarahumaran people pave the way for the new body to appear. Reconstructing the body through bodily practices, through religion and above all through art, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we are introduced not only to new ways of thinking theatre and performance art, but to life itself.

Staging the Spanish Golden Age

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Jeffs
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Common Goal ◽  
Collaborative Model ◽  
Spanish Golden Age ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Collaborative Strategies ◽  
And Performance

This book offers first-hand experiences from the rehearsal room of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2004–5 Spanish Golden Age season in order to put forth a collaborative model for translating, rehearsing, and performing Spanish Golden Age drama. Building on the RSC season, the volume proposes translation and communication methodologies that can feed the creative processes of working actors and directors, while maintaining an ethos of fidelity with regards to the original texts. A successful theatrical ensemble thrives on the mingling of these different voices directed towards a common goal. The work carried out during this season has repercussions in the areas comedia critics debate on the page; each of the chapters engages with one area of these overlapping disciplines. Now that the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Spanish Golden Age season has closed, this book posits a model for future productions of the comedia in English, one that recognizes the need for the languages of the scholar and the theatre artist to be made mutually intelligible by the use of collaborative strategies, mediated by a consultant or dramaturg proficient in both tongues. This model applies more generally to theatrical collaborations involving a translator, writer, and director, and is intended to be useful for translation and performance processes in any language.

Distributed Creativity

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Conceptual Frameworks ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Concert Music ◽  
Collaborative Creativity ◽  
Collaborative Working ◽  
Working Practices ◽  
And Performance

Creative practice in music takes place in a distributed and interactive manner embracing the activities of composers, performers and improvisers—despite the sharp division of labour between these roles that traditional concert culture often presents. Two distinctive features of contemporary music are the greater incorporation of improvisation and the development of integrated and collaborative working practices between composers and performers. By blurring the distinction between composition and performance, improvisation and collaboration provide important perspectives on the distributed creative processes that play a central role in much contemporary concert music. This volume explores how collaboration and improvisation enable and constrain these creative processes. Organized into three parts, thirteen chapters and twelve shorter Interventions present diverse perspectives on distributed and collaborative creativity in music, on a range of collaborations between composers and performers, and on the place of improvisation within contemporary music, broadly defined. The thirteen chapters provide more substantial discussions of a variety of conceptual frameworks and particular projects, while the twelve Interventions provide more informal contributions from a variety of practitioners (composers, performers, improvisers), giving direct insights into the pleasures and problems of working creatively in music in collaborative and improvised ways.

scholarly journals First-of-a-kind muography for nuclear waste characterization

2018 ◽  
Vol 377 (2137) ◽  
pp. 20180048 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Mahon ◽  
Anthony Clarkson ◽  
Simon Gardner ◽  
David Ireland ◽  
Ramsey Jebali ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Waste ◽  
Imaging System ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Cosmic Ray ◽  
Laboratory Facility ◽  
Waste Container ◽  
High Resolution Images ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University

In the last decade, there has been a surge in the number of academic research groups and commercial companies exploiting naturally occurring cosmic-ray muons for imaging purposes in a range of industrial and geological applications. Since 2009, researchers at the University of Glasgow and the UK National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) have pioneered this technique for the characterization of shielded nuclear waste containers with significant investment from the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and Sellafield Ltd. Lynkeos Technology Ltd. was formed in 2016 to commercialize the Muon Imaging System (MIS) technology that resulted from this industry-funded academic research. The design, construction and performance of the Lynkeos MIS is presented along with first experimental and commercial results. The high-resolution images include the identification of small fragments of uranium within a surrogate 500-litre intermediate level waste container and metal inclusions within thermally treated GeoMelt® R&D Product Samples. The latter of these are from Lynkeos' first commercial contract with the UK National Nuclear Laboratory. The Lynkeos MIS will be deployed at the NNL Central Laboratory facility on the Sellafield site in Summer 2018 where it will embark upon a series of industry trials. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Cosmic-ray muography’.

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