Theatre and the Presidential Debates: the Role of Performance in Voter Choice

2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 336-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Watson
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Presentation Of Self ◽  
Presidential Debates ◽  
Scholarly Journals ◽  
Visual And Performing Arts ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
Rutgers University ◽  
Voter Choice ◽  
Performer Training

The fictionalized account in the recent film The Queen of Tony Blair's coaching of Her Majesty into a more voter-friendly response to the death of Princess Diana, largely through the medium of television, is a pertinent reminder of how the presentation of self on television subtly modifies the presentation of self in everyday life. In this article, Ian Watson considers how the now-ritualized debates between the main contenders in American presidential elections are stage-managed to enhance what their supporters suppose to be their candidate's most sympathetic features – supposedly learning the lessons of the first such debate, between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, which displayed Nixon in such an unappealing light. However, what are ostensibly strengths or weaknesses may be read as quite other by an audience attuned to reading signifiers in film or television drama – or simply empathic towards what others perceive as failings, as in the case of reactions to George W. Bush's inarticulacies, awkward mannerisms, and failed jokes, which some read not as signs of ineptness but of an endearing humanity. Ian Watson, who is a Contributing Editor of New Theatre Quarterly, teaches at Rutgers University, Newark, where he is the Acting Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. He is author of Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1993) and of Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002). He edited Performer Training across Cultures (Routledge, 2001), and has published numerous articles on theatre in scholarly journals.

Letter to an Editor: the Yesterday and Today of Poland's Teatr Ósmego Dnia

2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-60
Author(s):  
Ian Watson
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Economic Environment ◽  
Scholarly Journals ◽  
Visual And Performing Arts ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
Rutgers University ◽  
Form Part ◽  
Performer Training ◽  
International Circuit ◽  
Odin Teatret

Teatro Ósmego Dnia, the Theatre of the Eighth Day, has for forty years flourished in Poland, never as part of the established theatre, but as one of what Eugenio Barba calls the ‘floating islands’ – those companies which live as much as make theatre, and form part of an informal international circuit of like-minded though distinct and individual groups. Ian Watson here shapes his own memories of the group in the form of a letter to one of NTQ's co-editors, with whom he has shared experiences of Polish theatre, and in particular the work of Eighth Day, relating their history to the changing political and economic environment in Poland, and the company's relationship with the outside world. Ian Watson, who is a Contributing Editor of New Theatre Quarterly, teaches at Rutgers University, Newark, where he is the Acting Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. He is author of Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1993) and of Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002). He edited Performer Training across Cultures (Routledge, 2001), and has published numerous articles on theatre in scholarly journals.

Naming the Frame: the Role of the Pre-Interpretive in Theatrical Reception

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (50) ◽  
pp. 161-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Watson
Keyword(s):  
New Jersey ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Visual And Performing Arts ◽  
Rutgers University ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Suspension Of Disbelief

When is a theatre event not a theatre event? Where, in the shifting relationships between (and even the shifting definitions of) actor and audience in modern and postmodern performance, is a useful line to be drawn – if only for purposes of analysis and discussion? How adequate are such traditional concepts as the ‘suspension of disbelief’, when the distinction between the ‘realities’ of the theatre and of the everyday begin to merge or dissolve? Ian Watson, an advisory editor of NTQ who teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark Campus of Rutgers University, New Jersey, here explores how the issue is affected by the differing pre-interpretive perspectives of performers and spectators. In this light he describes three recent theatre events – the Broadway production of Death and the Maiden, Harold Pinter's London production of Circe and Bravo, and an instance of Augusto Boal's ‘Invisible Theatre’ – to suggest that it is in these perceptual variations that the clue to understanding theatrical reality may lie.

Releasing the ‘Profound Physicality of Performance’

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (52) ◽  
pp. 329-338
Author(s):  
JoAnne Akalaitis
Keyword(s):  
New Jersey ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Visual And Performing Arts ◽  
Rutgers University ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Relationship

In the following interview, JoAnne Akalaitis discusses her experiences as an actress and director with the Mabou Mines company; her artistic encounters with Beckett, Brecht, and Genet; her thoughts about the relationship between art and politics; and her belief in the connection between the physical and the emotional in performance. Deborah Saivetz is a director and performer who teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark Campus of Rutgers University, New Jersey. She assisted JoAnne Akalaitis on her production of John Ford's Jacobean tragedy Tis Pity She's aWhore at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and performed in Akalaitis's workshop production of The Mormon Project at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. She had several opportunities to talk at length with Akalaitis during the months that they worked together.

Theatre after the Dictatorships: Developments in Chile and Argentina

1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (41) ◽  
pp. 40-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Watson ◽  
Susana Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Visual And Performing Arts ◽  
Rutgers University ◽  
Latin American Theatre

Ian Watson and Susana Epstein went to Chile and Argentina in the summer of 1992 in order to interview several leading theatre artists about the differences the political changes in their countries had made to their own work and the work of their colleagues. Although, as the authors stress, they made no attempt to conduct a systematic study of the theatrical implications of the shift from authoritarianism to democracy, their findings suggest some parallels with the situation in Eastern Europe. Ian Watson, who heads the Theatre Division in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Rutgers University, Newark, is a theatre scholar whose main interests include contemporary Latin American theatre. Susana Epstein, an expatriate Argentine, is a Contributing Editor of The Drama Review.

‘What Counts is the Landscape’: the Making of Pino DiBuduo's ‘Invisible Cities’

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-64
Author(s):  
Deborah Saivetz
Keyword(s):  
New Jersey ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Assistant Professor ◽  
Visual And Performing Arts ◽  
Rutgers University ◽  
Northwestern University ◽  
Assistant Director ◽  
A Site

In October 1998 the Italian director Pino DiBuduo visited the Newark, New Jersey, campus of Rutgers University on the occasion of the major international conference, ‘Arts Transforming the Urban Environment’ For the occasion, he transformed a bleakly concrete teaching block on the Newark campus into a site for the latest of his Invisible Cities projects. These had originated in his Teatro Potlach company's residency in the Italian village of Fara Sabina in 1991, where DiBudo's intention – as in a number of site-specific variations on Invisible Cities since – was to render ‘visible’ aspects of the everyday urban environment which we no longer have the imagination or the patience to ‘see’. While Deborah Saivetz looks also at this original Italian project, and at a later version in Klagenfurt, Austria, she concentrates here on the Newark production, whose development she recorded – in this opening article in her own and DiBuduo's words, and in the following piece through the experiences and recollections of the participants. Deborah Saivetz holds a doctorate in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and is currently Assistant Professor of Theater in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark campus of Rutgers University. Her directorial work includes productions for the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, the Drama League of New York's Directors’ Project, New York's Alchemy Courthouse Theater, and the Parallax Theater Company in Chicago. She has also worked with JoAnne Akalaitis as assistant director on John Ford's ‘Tis Pity She's a Whore at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, and created original theatre pieces with Chicago's Industrial Theater and Oxygen Jukebox.

Culture, Memory, and American Performer Training

2003 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Watson
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Subsequent Performance ◽  
Visual And Performing Arts ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
Constant State ◽  
Formative Experiences ◽  
Post War ◽  
American Society ◽  
Theatrical Training ◽  
Performer Training

In today's technologically complex and racially hybrid society, what is the meaning of ‘cultural memory’? Like performance, Ian Watson argues, culture ‘exists only in the doing’ – yet if our formative experiences are in that sense ‘rehearsals’ for life, the subsequent ‘performance’ is in a constant state of flux and renewal. Here, Ian Watson looks at the interface between theatrical and cultural training in American society, from the old apprenticeship system of the stock companies, through the Delsarte-based approach of the earliest conservatoires and the pervasiveness of Americanized Stanislavsky in the post-war period, towards a renewed concern with the techniques of voice and movement to meet the demands of both the classical and the contemporary experimental repertoires. In contrast to the deep cultural roots of much eastern theatrical training, perceptions of actor training in America are, he argues, as eclectic and diffuse as American society itself, and so (using Eugenio Barba's distinction) lean strongly towards creating a ‘professional’ rather than a ‘personal’ identity for the performer – one which ‘bears the signature of the hybrid narrative it springs from’. Ian Watson, who is an Advisory Editor of New Theatre Quarterly, teaches at Rutgers University–Newark, where he is the Acting Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. He is author of Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1993) and of Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002). He edited Performer Training across Cultures (Routledge, 2001), and has also published numerous articles on theatre in scholarly journals.

scholarly journals Media, identity, and online communities in a changing Arab world

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 1035-1042
Author(s):  
Eid Mohamed ◽  
Aziz Douai ◽  
Adel Iskandar
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Arab World ◽  
User Generated Content ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Visual And Performing Arts ◽  
User Comments ◽  
Media Politics

Our Special Issue captures the interplay of media, politics, religion, and culture in shaping Arabs’ search for more stable governing models at crossroads of global, regional, and national challenges through systematic and integrated analyses of evolving and contested Arab visual and performing arts, including media (traditional and alternative), in revolutionary and unstable public spheres. This special issue examines the role of new media in the construction of online communities in the Arab world. It contributes to the understanding of how user-generated content empowers these new publics and the novel communities established by user comments on social media and news websites. Specifically, it explores these online communities and their perceptions of the role of user-generated content to contribute to politics, and potentially engage other citizens in the public debate.

News, Television, and Performance: the Case of the Los Angeles Riots

1998 ◽  
Vol 14 (55) ◽  
pp. 210-219
Author(s):  
Ian Watson
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Television News ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Visual And Performing Arts ◽  
And Performance ◽  
News Event

When the ‘action’ at major news events is observed over days or weeks by television cameras, how far does the medium become, whether knowingly or not, a participant and shaper in the action it observes? How far does the action itself become, to some degree, a performance before the cameras? While not ignoring either the moral or practical implications of such questions, lan Watson sets out primarily to analyze the ‘frame’ of television news broadcasting, and to consider the events within that frame as elements of performance. He considers the six days of rioting in Los Angeles in 1992, sparked by the acquittal of police officers charged with the beating of Rodney King – itself caught on camera – as a case study, in which the often ignored role of the observer, whether the news anchor-man in the studio or the audience watching at home, comes in for corrective scrutiny. He concludes that in the ‘mediated present’ of the news event on television, the medium is indeed as much a producer as a reporter of an action which is pervasively shaped by its presence. An Advisory Editor and regular contributor to New Theatre Quarterly, lan Watson teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Rutgers, where he is Co-ordinator of the Theatre and Television Programs.

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