Making the Representation Real: The Actor and the Spectator in Milo Rau’s ‘Theatrical Essays’ Mitleid and La Reprise

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-245
Author(s):  
Stuart Young
Keyword(s):  
Political Engagement ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Real ◽  
Political Performance ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Theatrical Representation ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The University

Exceptional in demonstrating the political engagement emerging in twenty-first-century performance is the corpus of the writer and director Milo Rau, whose practice is distinguished by its (re)meditation of the real. With detailed reference to Mitleid (2016) and La Reprise (2018), this article examines Rau’s self-reflexive strategies in (re)presenting testimony or an event as a means not of depicting the real, but of making the theatrical representation itself real in order to change the world rather than merely to portray it. The article focuses in particular on strategies relating to the actor-character and spectatorship. Rau’s interest in the positions of the actor and spectator illuminates issues that have arisen in the discourse of theatre witnessing and in recent scholarship on dramaturgical approaches and spectatorship in contemporary political performance. Essentially, Rau makes the performer’s habitus transparent, and challenges the spectator’s reflexivity, effectively rebutting the largely unchallenged assumption that characters who perform witnesses necessarily leave little room for the spectator to be a performing witness. Stuart Young is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Otago. His recent publications include the co-edited Ethical Exchanges: Translation, Adaptation, Dramaturgy (Brill Rodopi, 2017), while his practice-led research into Theatre of the Real includes The Keys are in the Margarine: A Verbatim Play about Dementia (2014).

The Red Theatre under the Bed

1987 ◽  
Vol 3 (11) ◽  
pp. 195-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Brenton
Keyword(s):  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Dario Fo ◽  
Political Impact ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The University

Howard Brenton began his theatrical career in the late 'sixties as one of the ‘Portable playwrights’, but quickly felt the need to utilize the resources available on larger stages-without compromising the political impact of his plays. Now established as one of the leading playwrights of his generation, Brenton works regularly with the National Theatre, and in the interview which follows the discussion ranges from his feelings about the ‘scandal’ worked up by the production there of The Romans in Britain to how his feelings about Brecht were affected by preparing their version of The Life of Galileo, and also covers his recent collaboration with David Hare, creating a monstrous press baron, in Pravda. Touching on other recent plays such as The Genius and Bloody Poetry, the discussion thus complements an earlier Theatre Quarterly interview with Howard Brenton, included in TQ17 (1975) and reprinted in New Theatre Voices of the Seventies, edited by Simon Trussler (Methuen, 1981). The interviewer, Tony Mitchell, currently teaches in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales, and is the author of Dario Fo: People's Court Jester (Methuen. 1984). His Methuen ‘Writer-File’ on Howard Brenton is due for publication in 1988.

The Political Effects of Entertainment Media

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael X. Delli Carpini
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Entertainment Media ◽  
Political World ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Political Effects

In recent years political communication scholars have begun to build a small but important body of quantitative research suggesting that the consumption of entertainment media can affect how citizens learn about, think about, and act in the political world. However, we have limited our ability to understand this relationship by treating entertainment media as a distinct and ghettoized area of study and by an overreliance on theories originating in the study of news and other overtly public affairs media. This chapter argues that what constitutes “politics,” “political engagement,” “political effects,” and “politically relevant media” is not based on inherent qualities of a particular genre, medium, or topic, but is rather are socially constructed. This has always been true, but it is arguably more so in the information environment of the twenty-first century, which for a variety of reasons challenges the presumed distinction between “news” and “entertainment.”

Coda: Inhabiting Institutions

2019 ◽  
pp. 211-215
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
The Future ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The University

The coda clarifies the political stakes of this book’s argument. Reflecting on the gap between people’s lived experiences of the university and public defenses of it, it argues that nineteenth-century realist novels provide strategies for inhabiting the twenty-first century university. We, too, can find political inspiration in anachronisms. The coda shows that postcolonial and queer theory’s untimely presence in the academy resist the impulse to define the future as merely an extension of the present.

scholarly journals Druga płeć awangardy? O książce Płeć awangardy

Wielogłos ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 161-180
Author(s):  
Jakub Skurtys
Keyword(s):  
Women's Studies ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Women’S Studies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Background ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The University ◽  
Common Understanding

Other Gender of Avant-Garde? On the Book Płeć awangardy The book Płeć awangardy [Gender of the Avant-Garde] is the first attempt of this kind at a comprehensive, gender-oriented presentation of the avant-garde tradition in Polish literary studies. The review of the volume starts with an outline of its place in the worldwide humanities, especially in the face of the increasingly dynamic development of women’s studies on the avant-garde. Individual texts are slightly different from the editorial introduction and its assumptions: a materialistic attempt to reclaim and reestablish feminism in the heart of the avant-garde. Thus, they are presented as a result of a meeting of several methodological schools with clear patronages at the University of Silesia: art historians, literary historians, literary critics, representatives of men’s studies, women’s studies, feminism and gender studies. Despite the political background of many of them, connected with avant-garde ideas of social and aesthetic emancipation, it is easy to see how far their dictionaries have diverged from each other and how difficult it is now to meet and establish a common understanding of basic concepts such as avant-garde, sex/gender or even political engagement.

Inverting the Formula: Devising through Adaptation

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 240-253
Author(s):  
Frank Camilleri
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Associate Professor ◽  
First Century ◽  
Research Centre ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Performance Project ◽  
Or Organization ◽  
The University ◽  
Artistic Director

Adaptation in contemporary performance takes on different forms and engages various strategies. In this article, Frank Camilleri explores the subject in terms of compositional devising via his practice as research in the area. He considers adaptation as a process of adjustment and modification that occurs at the level of format or organization, and which results from a change in context. He proposes terminological and structural frameworks, namely types, movements, modes, and phases of adaption. These taxonomies are then subsequently exemplified through three case studies from the author's performance and pedagogical work. Frank Camilleri is Associate Professor in Theatre Studies at the University of Malta, where he is Director of the School of Performing Arts and leads P21 (Performance 21), the research centre for Twenty-first Century Studies in Performance. He is Artistic Director of Icarus Performance Project and co-edits the Routledge/Icarus ‘Theatre as a Laboratory’ series.

scholarly journals If Indonesia is Too Hard to Understand, Let�s Start with Bali

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme MacRae
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Media ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Way

Stereotypical representations, especially those by the media, are for most outsideobservers, the means and an obstacle to understanding Indonesia. One way aroundsuch stereotypes is to look at the way Indonesians themselves understand Indonesia. This essay reports and re?ects on Balinese understandings of Indonesia in the wake of the political, economic and terrorist upheavals of the early years of the twenty-first century. It concludes with an epilogue and update, arguing that the real issues for understanding Indonesia are now environmental.

scholarly journals Du collectif, malgré tout dans le cinéma de Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Froger
Keyword(s):  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Double Jeopardy ◽  
Political Field ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Spectator

Dans ses deux premiers films, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche interprète un personnage qui, ayant écopé de la « double peine », finit par perdre sa place dans un aller et retour sans issue, entre son village algérien d’origine qui le rejette (Bled number One) et la France qui l’expulse puis le traque à son retour (Wesh wesh qu’est-ce qui se passe ?). À ce destin qui s’avère borné par la folie, d’un côté de la Méditerranée, ou par la mort de l’autre, le cinéaste oppose la créativité de ses propres collectifs de production, dont il laisse volontairement des traces dans chacun de ses films. Il entend ainsi, malgré tout, réinvestir, par le désir de groupe, le champ du politique, et par l’invention de formes cinématographiques, ne pas exclure le spectateur d’un sentiment de solidarité et de fraternité désancré de ses bases strictement communautaires. Adossé à la réalité vécue par une génération issue de l’immigration algérienne, née ou ayant grandi en France après l’indépendance de l’Algérie, le cinéma de Rabah Ameur-Zaimèche évoque les ambivalences de l’expérience groupale de ceux qui vont et viennent avec constance et intensité d’une rive à l’autre de leurs désirs d’appartenance et d’engagement. In his two first movies, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche plays a character who, subject to legal “double jeopardy”, finds himself lost in an inescapable back and forth between his native Algerian village, which rejects him, (Bled number One) and France, which expels him and then, upon his return, hunts him down (Wesh wesh qu’est-ce qui se passe ?). Against this fate, which ends in madness on one side of the Mediterranean or death on the other, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche sets the creativity of his production teams, traces of whose work remains in each of his films. Despite everything, the filmmaker looks to reinvest the political field with collective desire, and, through the use of inventive cinematic forms, insures that the spectator is allowed to partake of the feelings of solidarity and fraternity unmoored from strictly communitarian foundations. Drawing on the lived reality of a generation of people who were born or grew up in France after Algeria’s Independence, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s work evokes the ambivalences of those who move, with regularity and intensity, between both shores of their desire for belonging and political engagement.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

The Political and Aesthetic Power of the Everyday in Beckett's Happy Days

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Second World

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.

Religion and the Construction of a Christian Roman Polity

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-113
Author(s):  
Francesco Rotiroti
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Theories Of Religion ◽  
Ancient Christianity

This article seeks to define a theoretical framework for the study of the relation between religion and the political community in the Roman world and to analyze a particular case in point. The first part reviews two prominent theories of religion developed in the last fifty years through the combined efforts of anthropologists and classicists, arguing for their complementary contribution to the understanding of religion's political dimension. It also provides an overview of the approaches of recent scholarship to the relation between religion and the Roman polity, contextualizing the efforts of this article toward a theoretical reframing of the political and institutional elements of ancient Christianity. The second part focuses on the religious legislation of the Theodosian Code, with particular emphasis on the laws against the heretics and their performance in the construction of the political community. With their characteristic language of exclusion, these laws signal the persisting overlap between the borders of the political community and the borders of religion, in a manner that one would expect from pre-Christian civic religions. Nevertheless, the political essence of religion did also adapt to the ecumenical dimension of the empire. Indeed, the religious norms of the Code appear to structure a community whose borders tend to be identical to the borders of the whole inhabited world, within which there is no longer room for alternative affiliations; the only possible identity outside this community is that of the insane, not belonging to any political entity and thus unable to possess any right.

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