Two Masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Empty Space ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
Art Form ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Hebrew University ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

Kūṭiyāṭṭam, India’s only living traditional Sanskrit theatre, has been continually performed in Kerala for at least a thousand years. The actors and drummers create an entire world in the empty space of the stage by using spectacular costumes and make-up and by an immensely rich interplay of words, rhythms, mime, and gestures. This volume focuses on Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam, the two great masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam. It provides fundamental general remarks and relates them to pan-Indian reflections on aesthetics, philology, ritual studies, and history. Authored by scholars and active Kūṭiyāṭṭam performers, this is the first attempt to bring together a set of sustained, multi-faceted interpretations of these masterpieces-in-performance. With an aim to open up this ancient art form to readers interested in South Indian culture, religion, theatre and performance studies, philology, as well as literature, this volume offers a new way to access a major art form of pre-modern and modern Kerala. The University of Tuebingen in Germany and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel were partners in a long-term project studying and documenting Kūṭiyāṭṭam performances, including initiating full-scale performances of major works in the classical repertoire. We have been, in particular, focusing on the study of the two major, complex and ancient works, Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam, both of which we have seen and recorded in full. The articles in this volume are one of the results. They are supplemented with video-clips of lecture demonstrations provided online.

scholarly journals Performing with Plants in the Ob-scene Anthropocene

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-142
Author(s):  
Annette Arlander
Keyword(s):  
Performance Analysis ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Art Form ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Performance As Research ◽  
Artistic Research

Is there a way for the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic art form par excellence, the theatre, or performance art for that matter, to expand beyond their human and humanist bias? Is the term Anthropocene in any way useful for theatre and performance studies or performance-as-research? In the anthology Anthropocene Feminism (Grusin 2017) Rosi Braidotti proposes four theses for a posthumanist feminism: 1) feminism is not a humanism, 2) anthropos is off-center, 3) zoe is the ruling principle, 4) sexuality is a force beyond gender. These assertions can undoubtedly be put on stage, but do they have relevance for developing or understanding performance practices off-stage and off-center, such as those trying to explore alternative ways and sites of performing, like performing with plants? In this text, I examine Braidotti’s affirmative theses and explore their usefulness with regard to performance analysis, use some of my experiments in the artistic research project “Performing with plants” as examples, and consider what the implications and possible uses of these theses are for our understanding of performances with other-than-human entities, which we share our planet with.

Text and Stage: Shakespeare, Bibliography, and Performance Studies

1993 ◽  
Vol 9 (34) ◽  
pp. 179-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Holderness ◽  
Bryan Loughrey
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Traditional Practices ◽  
Textual Studies ◽  
Stage Directions ◽  
Theatrical Practice ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Harvester Wheatsheaf ◽  
The University ◽  
Comparative Examination ◽  
Research Director

This article continues the debate initiated by Brian Parker, who in NTQ24 (1990) offered a critique of the new Oxford Shakespeare, and one of its editors, Stanley Wells, who responded in NTQ 26 (1991) with a defence of his departure from traditional practices of textual conflation. Here, Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey suggest that, on a closer examination, there is evidence that editorial intervention and conflation have been regularly employed in the Oxford edition: and in arguing against all such attempts to reconstruct ‘authoritative’ texts, they propose that, in their inevitable absence, the originals present the closest we are likely to approach to recreating the collaborative theatrical practice of Shakespeare's time. In illustrating the effects of editorial intervention from a close comparative examination of particular passages, they suggest, for example, that the stage directions make a shovel a likelier object of Hamlet's graveside contemplation than Yorick's skull. Graham Holderness, newly-appointed Professor and Dean of Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire, and Bryan Loughrey, Research Director at Roehampton Institute, have recently begun, through the Centre for Textual Studies, a programme of publishing accessible reprints of the important early editions, of which the first three have now appeared from Harvester Wheatsheaf.

The Philosophy of Theater

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Y. Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
The Past ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Ontological Question ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Relationship

Theater—i.e., traditional text-based theater—is often considered the art form that most closely resembles lived life: real bodies in space play out a story through the passage of time. Because of this, theater (or theatre) has long been a laboratory of, and for, philosophical thought and reflection. The study of philosophy and theater has a history that dates back to, and flourished in, ancient Greece and Rome. While philosophers over the centuries have revisited the study of theater, the past four decades in particular have seen a noted and substantial increase of scholarship investigating this intersection between philosophy and theater. “Philosophy of theater” is, on one hand, a “field” that is just starting to take shape and is barely over a decade old; on another hand, it is a recognized subfield both of aesthetics and of theater and performance studies. And finally, it is also an amorphous concept, either not yet fleshed out, or intentionally amorphous and proudly organic. Philosophy of theater is also sometimes referred to—or is argued to be subsumed, more broadly, in—“performance philosophy,” which also refers to a network of academics and practitioners that publishes a book series and a journal of the same name. Regardless of what it is called or how it is classified, scholarship has coalesced around some fundamental preoccupations, which are not too dissimilar to questions that arise in other philosophies of. . . (e.g., art, film, dance, etc.). The debates in philosophy of theater mostly fall into three of the main branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics. The major metaphysical debates center on an ontological question: What is theater? Epistemological studies tend to focus on audience reception and/or how meaning is made and/or transmitted. Finally, studies in aesthetics focus on two main questions: (1) What is theater as an art form? (2) What is the relationship between dramatic text and theatrical performance? This article is intentionally narrow in its scope, focusing on philosophy and theater traditions that came out of Greek theater and philosophy, in order to ensure a sufficient amount of depth, not (merely) breadth.

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.

The Video Documentation of Theatrical Performance

1994 ◽  
Vol 10 (38) ◽  
pp. 183-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gay McAuley
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Video Technology ◽  
Previous Generation ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Video Documentation ◽  
Video Archives ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

Video technology has been widely available for the last twenty years, and offers possibilities for the documentation of theatrical performance that no previous generation has possessed. What are we doing with these possibilities? Why is it that we are only now taking some timid first steps towards the establishment of national or regional video archives? This article reports some findings from ten years of experimentation with recording formats and analysis, and urges the need for action by theatre practitioners, funding authorities, and university researchers to ensure that the theatrical output of another generation is not lost. The author, Gay McAuley, teaches in French and Performance Studies and is Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research in recent years has focused on the semiotics of performance and, in particular, the ways actors use text in the construction of performance. She is currently writing a book called Space in Performance.

‘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.

scholarly journals The translator

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Gabriela Saldanha
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Art Form ◽  
And Performance

Abstract This article proposes that in order to understand the nature of literary translation as an art form, we need to complement existing approaches drawing on literary, linguistic and sociological theories with insights derived from performance studies. As a way of exploring what the theorization of translation as performance art could contribute to our understanding of literary translation, I map four basic tenets of performance as restored behavior (Schechner 1985) to two translators’ (Margaret Jull Costa and Peter Bush) accounts of their practice. The mapping is illustrated with writings by and interviews with the translators, focusing on four points of contact: the unresolved dialectal tension between self and other, the deliberate, rehearsed nature of decisions, the need for distance between original and performance/translation, and the role of the audience.

scholarly journals Book Review: Theatre and Performance in the Neoliberal University edited by Kim Solga

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Keenan Shionalyn
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Effective Strategies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
University Setting ◽  
Community Relationships

Theatre and Performance in the Neoliberal University: Responses to an Academy in Crisis practically examines the utilization of performance methodology within the university setting. This edited collection combines diverse expertise to demonstrate effective strategies for navigating our art, scholarship, and teaching while working at a neoliberal university. Intending to operate alongside, rather than within, Kim Solga presents research and case studies utilizing performance as both a methodology for research and a tool to improve pedagogy and community relationships. Providing hope to scholar-artists working in theatre and performance studies, Solga’s work inspires creativity and provides a form of collaboration to strengthen our field and ensure its continuance.  

Interview with Milla Cozart Riggio, Angela Marino, and Paolo Vignolo

2022 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 282
Author(s):  
Emily Ruth Allen
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Associate Professor ◽  
University Of California ◽  
National University ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

Emily Ruth Allen interviews Milla Cozart Riggio, Angela Marino, and Paolo Vignolo on Festive Devils of the Americas (2015). Interview date: Feb 4, 2021 Milla Cozart Riggio is James J. Goodwin Professor of English Emerita at Trinity College. Angela Marino is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California Berkeley. Paolo Vignolo is Associate Professor of History at the National University of Colombia, Bogota

The Ramayana Narrative Tradition as a Resource for Performance

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-28
Author(s):  
Paula Richman
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Narrative Tradition ◽  
South Indian ◽  
And Performance

This chapter examines case studies of Ramayana performances from different Indian regions and their relationships to diverse Ramayana texts, and provides a map of the volume. “Orientations and Beginnings” sets out an overview of intersections between Ramayana Studies and Performance Studies. “The Politics of Caste” deals with a Hindi poem and play scripts about the beheading of Shambuk, a Shudra character in the Ramayana tradition, linking them to Dalit demands for equality in 20th- and 21st-century India. “Interrogating the Anti-Hero” examines performances centered on Ravana as anti-hero or as dissident artist. “Performing Gender” analyzes two South Indian performances: a modern Tamil play critiquing patriarchal constructions of the Ramayana, and Nangyarkuttu, a pre-modern solo dance form in Kerala, whose reconstruction is infused with a woman’s contemporary sensibility. “Conversations and Arguments” highlights debates about Ramayana productions in Kutiyattam, Sattriya, and Talamaddale. “Beyond Enactment” examines effects of Ramayana performances on everyday life and society.

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