Plays from a Marxist Perspective: Interpretations and Misinterpretations of Dario Fo

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-193
Author(s):  
R. G. Davis
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
The Political ◽  
Accidental Death ◽  
Adverse Conditions ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Dario Fo ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Epic Theatre ◽  
The 1960S

R. G. Davis directed the first commercial productions of Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist and We Won't Pay We Won't Pay!, both in Canada and the USA. In the context of the original close relevance of the plays to the political situation in Italy, he looks at how in the USA especially their force has been diluted if not extinguished by the imperative to conform to the inherent anti-communsm of American culture. R. G.Davis founded and directed the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the 1960s, and the Epic West Center for the Study of Bertolt Brecht and Epic Theatre at Berkeley in 1975. Later he returned to academia to study science and ecology, and visited Cuba to examine the culture of organic farming. He has contributed previously to New Theatre Quarterly and its predecessor, specifically on Fo in two articles for the original Theatre Quarterly: ‘Seven Anarchists I Have Known: American Approaches to Dario Fo’, in TQ 8 (1986), and ‘Dario Fo Off-Broadway: the Making of Left Culture under Adverse Conditions’, in TQ 40 (1981).

Seven Anarchists I Have Known: American Approaches to Dario Fo

1986 ◽  
Vol 2 (8) ◽  
pp. 313-319
Author(s):  
R. G. Davis
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Political ◽  
State University ◽  
Kind Permission ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Dario Fo ◽  
Theatre Production ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The Usa

In the final issue of the original series of Theatre Quarterly, TQ40 (1981), R. G. Davis described his experiences directing the plays of Dario Fo in Canada and the USA, focusing mainly on his work with We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! Here, he looks not only at his own but at the half-dozen other productions of Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist which have so far been presented in North America – and finds himself, in retrospect, critical of his own work, as well as that of others. He concludes that it is impossible to attempt Fo's plays properly without at least an understanding of the political point of view he sums up as ‘anarcho-communist’ – a point of view which must communicate through the leading players. A regular contributor to the present and its predecessor journal, R. G. Davis, who founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the sixties, is presently teaching at San Francisco State University, reviewing for the magazine of the California Confederation of the Arts (by whose kind permission the following article is reprinted), and is now engaged in staging his own adaptation of llya Ehrenburg's The Life of an Automobile, as an ‘imagistic theatre’ production.

A Director's Journey from Performance Art to Ecological Aesthetics

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-174
Author(s):  
R. G. Davis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Present Article ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ecological Aesthetics ◽  
Dario Fo ◽  
Experimental Project ◽  
Epic Theatre ◽  
Academic Qualifications

R.G. Davis founded the company that became the San Francisco Mime Troupe as an experimental project of the Actors' Workshop in 1959. He left the Troupe in 1970, formed the Epic West Center in Berkeley for the study of Bertolt Brecht and epic theatre, and became a pioneering director in the United States successively of the plays of Brecht and Dario Fo, on which he wrote in the original Theatre Quarterly 40 (Autumn–Winter 1981) and in New Theatre Quarterly 8 (November 1986). In this article he traces the course of his subsequent career in creating experimental storytelling events and, via an interlude garnering academic qualifications, into the field of ecological aesthetics, which he defines as ‘a Brechtian aesthetic and ecological socialism interrogating each other within a scientific ecological conception of nature’. The present article is based on a lecture he gave in June 2013 at Stanford University.

Having Their Say, Leaving Their Mark

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-153
Author(s):  
Adolphus G. Belk ◽  
Robert C. Smith ◽  
Sherri L. Wallace
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Adverse Conditions ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Independent Organization

In general, the founders of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists were “movement people.” Powerful agents of socialization such as the uprisings of the 1960s molded them into scholars with tremendous resolve to tackle systemic inequalities in the political science discipline. In forming NCOBPS as an independent organization, many sought to develop a Black perspective in political science to push the boundaries of knowledge and to use that scholarship to ameliorate the adverse conditions confronting Black people in the United States and around the globe. This paper utilizes historical documents, speeches, interviews, and other scholarly works to detail the lasting contributions of the founders and Black political scientists to the discipline, paying particular attention to their scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and civic engagement. It finds that while political science is much improved as a result of their efforts, there is still work to do if their goals are to be achieved.

Growth and Decline in South Africa's Churches, 1960-911

2000 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-369
Author(s):  
David Goodhew
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The Political ◽  
Global Trends ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Expanding Population ◽  
Almost All

AbstractSouth Africa's churches grew or declined so quickly in the years after 1960 that by 1991 the country's religious map had been redrawn. This article charts and offers explanations for such developments. Almost all Christian churches grew substantially in the first half of the twentieth century but mainline churches were dominant. They continued to grow numerically into the 1960s and 1970s, but were beginning to shrink as a proportion of the expanding population. By contrast, Roman Catholic, African Independent and smaller independent denominations were growing quickly. By the 1990s, mainline Protestant churches were suffering considerable decline and Roman Catholicism's growth had stalled. African Independent and other churches continued to grow rapidly. A matrix of forces help to explain this phenomenon-including the political situation, socio-economic pressures, secularisation and particular religious factors. A comparative perspective shows South Africa's churches to have much in common with African and global trends.

10. Realist criminology and victims

2021 ◽  
pp. 209-227
Author(s):  
Stephen Jones
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Political Background ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Realist Criminology

This chapter focuses on realist criminology, a phenomenon that appeared under different names in Britain and the USA during the 1980s. Just as with the re-emergence of interactionism and the development of the ‘new criminologies’ in the 1960s, realist criminology owes much to the political background of the day: what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Reagan–Thatcher Decade’, with right-wing governments in both countries. In such a climate, it is hardly surprising that little interest was shown in considerations of why people commit crimes, but great interest was shown in doing something about it. Out of this, two ‘realisms’ have emerged: a ‘Right Realism’ and a ‘Left Realism’.

scholarly journals Postcatastrophic Re-Reading of Tadeusz Hołuj’s Puste pole

2017 ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Adamczak
Keyword(s):  
Public Life ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The 1960S

This article deals with the re-interpretation of Tadeusz Hołuj’s drama Puste pole (1963; The Empty Field) and its theatrical staging by Józef Szajna in 1965. Based on the drama I want to demonstrate how the artists – who were both survivors of the concentration camp in Auschwitz – managed re-presenting the Holocaust despite the political situation and the accompanying anti-Semitic government campaign in Poland in the 1960s. The reception of the drama of then and nowadays shows how that re-presentation was once interpreted due to the political circumstances, which made the issue of the Holocaust and the Jews bannend from public life, language, and memory. Finally I explore how Hołuj’s drama can be read today when we approach it via postcatastophic re-reading determined by after-knowledge, retrospection, and retroactivity.

scholarly journals The Maniac as the Apocryphal Intervento: How Form Determines Substance in Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist

2022 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
AISHWARYA ALLA
Keyword(s):  
Boiling Point ◽  
The Political ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Accidental Death ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
Dario Fo ◽  
Stylistic Elements

The Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970) is one of famed Italian play-wright Dario Fo, written as a response the neo-fascist tension that reached a boiling point in during the ‘Hot Autumn.’ A period of immense turmoil in late 20th -cemtury Italy. The play draws from the conventions of the Brechtian form and commedia dell’arte, aptly transforming them into mechanisms that can help both the play and spectators subvert the high cultures of Gramscian cultural hegemony, absorbed into ADA’s comic microcosm. This essay explores how political and theatrical realms are immortalised and then pit against each other through the course of the play, with the character of the Maniac acting as a rhetorical device acting as the connection between the two. In essence, this paper believes that Style is considered over substance in many of the styles of theatre Accidental Death operates within; the stylistic elements that quantitatively constitute the Brechtian form, commedia dell’arte, and farce allow them to subvert the ‘high cultures’ that are held culpable in Gramscian cultural hegemony, all of which ADA absorbs into its comic microcosm. This leads to a sustained paradox between the political and theatrical dimensions of the play, where the theatrical lends credence to the political though the use of fictional formal elements.

scholarly journals The asymmetry of Laos conflict in the views of the RAND Corporation experts (1960–1973)

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-216
Author(s):  
Alexander I. Lyozin
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Rand Corporation ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Important Region ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Military ◽  
Secret War

The paper deals with analytical reports prepared by the experts of the RAND Corporation on the Secret War in Laos (19601973) between the Royal Laotian Army, tacit living in the United States, and the communist movement Patet Lao, which received assistance from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Initially, it was Laos, not Vietnam that was the strategic and important region of Southeast Asia in the concept of domino theory of the US policy. A vivid example is the study of Laos in the RAND Corporation, which began earlier than the study of Vietnam. Analyst reports were created on the basis of geography, demography, geology, economics, etc. The paper addresses reports on the development of the military-political situation in Laos by the experts of the corporation such as Joel Martin Halpern, Paul Langer and Joseph Zastoff. It is shown that a part of the research was carried out with the aim of developing the theory of counterinsurgency at the request of the Agency for Perspective Research under the Ministry of Defense of the USA for the development of a foreign policy strategy in the countries of the Third world. Special attention is paid to the connection of research on the situation in Laos with the analysis of the prospects of the American policy in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Some Aspects of Popular Theatre

1985 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-137
Author(s):  
Dario Fo
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Accidental Death ◽  
Popular Theatre ◽  
Political Comedy ◽  
Reference Guide ◽  
Full Reference ◽  
Dario Fo ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Unique Ability

It is a matter for pride that the old TQ was one of the first English-language journals to include material by and about the Italian dramatist Dario Fo. Our ‘Theatre Checklist’ on Fo in 1978 provided the first full reference guide to his plays (notably to his work since 1970 with the theatre collective La Comune), and Tony Mitchell contributed a documented study of Fo's one-man show Mistero Buffo to TQ 35 in 1979. In between, Belt and Braces had established Fo's British reputation with their long-running productions of Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can't Pay, Won't Pay – while in TQ40 Fo's leading American director, R. G. Davis, looked at some of the problems of presenting Fo in the USA. Now, Trumpets and Raspberries looks set to repeat the success of its predecessors at London's Phoenix Theatre. What sustains Dario Fo's unique ability to create political comedy which is at once hard-hitting yet widely accessible? As he suggests in the first of these articles (which originally appeared in Italian as an introduction to a volume of his plays), the answer lies in part in Fo's very rejection of the label ‘political’. Here, he analyzes some of the features by which he would rather distinguish his work as popular theatre, notably its traditional dependence on situation rather than character. In the second article, published in Italian in 1978, Fo examines the way in which this kind of theatre also fuses the elements of past culture with a critical examination of the present. Tony Mitchell, who translated both pieces, has just published a study of Fo. People's Court Jester, in the Methuen Theatrefiles series.

Public–private partnerships

2019 ◽  
pp. 429-444
Author(s):  
John Child ◽  
David Faulkner ◽  
Stephen Tallman ◽  
Linda Hsieh
Keyword(s):  
Private Sector ◽  
Public Private Partnership ◽  
Public Private Partnerships ◽  
The Political ◽  
Private Partnership ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Success Criteria ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Uk

Chapter 20 discusses public–private partnerships (PPPs) between government and major corporations. Generally, in PPPs the government sets the task and agrees the fee, while the private sector does the work and incurs the costs whilst receiving a contractually agreed profit. The project is normally building a major infrastructure facility. This arrangement has been very popular in the UK until recently, as well as in many other countries. In the USA a strong lobby is advocating the increased use of PPPs to update the country’s infrastructure. The chapter notes that the idea of public–private partnership is a good one in principle, but that scandals of excess profits (and sometimes losses) can result from deficiencies in negotiation and implementation. The chapter also considers success criteria for PPPs and concludes that they vary according to the political situation and hence motivation in the country in question.

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