Performance, Theater, Drama

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Kastleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Performance Theater

Abstract This year saw the continued expansion of four vibrant conversations within the field of theater and performance studies. The first section of this review, ‘World Stages and Their Borders’, features scholarship that explores how theaters represent worlds beyond the nation’s territorial and symbolic boundaries. The second section, ‘Performing Critical Temporalities’, considers studies of minoritarian performance that engage with the lived experience of time. In the third section, ‘Theater After Liveness’, I discuss scholarship on modern drama that is in dialogue with theories of performance as a live event. A fourth section considers new works on the nineteenth-century theater, showing how ‘Celebrity, Publicity, and Amateurism’ are entwined. Finally, a brief concluding note outlines significant biographies and reference works released within the past year.

Epistemic self-esteem of philosophers in the face of philosophical disagreement

Human Affairs ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 328-342
Author(s):  
László Bernáth ◽  
János Tőzsér
Keyword(s):  
Self Esteem ◽  
Moderate Level ◽  
Significant Extent ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
Philosophical Beliefs ◽  
Low Level ◽  
The Third ◽  
Epistemic Peers ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Performance

AbstractOur paper consists of four parts. In the first part, we describe the challenge of the pervasive and permanent philosophical disagreement over philosophers’ epistemic self-esteem. In the second part, we investigate the attitude of philosophers who have high epistemic self-esteem even in the face of philosophical disagreement and who believe they have well-grounded philosophical knowledge. In the third section, we focus on the attitude of philosophers who maintain a moderate level of epistemic self-esteem because they do not attribute substantive philosophical knowledge to themselves but still believe that they have epistemic right to defend substantive philosophical beliefs. In the fourth section, we analyse the attitude of philosophers who have a low level of epistemic self-esteem in relation to substantive philosophical beliefs and make no attempt to defend those beliefs. We argue that when faced with philosophical disagreement philosophers either have to deny that the dissenting philosophers are their epistemic peers or have to admit that doing philosophy is less meaningful than it seemed before. In this second case, philosophical activity and performance should not contribute to the philosophers’ overall epistemic self-esteem to any significant extent.

‘She will wear the britsch’: Masculinity and the iconography of Prince Albert

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 199-222
Author(s):  
Hannah Bradshaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Art History ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Masculine Ideology ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Female Rule ◽  
And Performance

This article examines the early representations of Prince Albert that either satirize or attempt to reconcile the hierarchical ambiguities and issue of threatened masculinity that resulted from unconventional male consortship and female rule. It concludes that the latter was achieved through the development of a suitable and legible iconography for a nineteenth-century male consort in adherence with British iconographic tradition and values. Drawing from methods in nineteenth-century art history as well as gender and performance studies and anthropology, it argues that images of the male body play a fundamental role in the construction and perpetuation of masculine ideology and subjectivity through the creation of the semblance of an innate and axiomatic masculine archetype. In doing so, this article problematizes and historicizes masculinity by illuminating the plurality of expressions of masculinity and rejecting the essentialist narrative of masculinity as something measurable or quantifiable, as well as ahistorical, atemporal, apolitical and heteronormative.

Mental models, (de)compressions, and the actor’s process in body-swap movies

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 376-409
Author(s):  
Ahmed Abdel-Raheem
Keyword(s):  
Mental Models ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Concepts ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Number Of Publications

Abstract The body-swap comedy, where someone finds themselves inhabiting an entirely different body, is a well-established Hollywood tradition. Crucially, American filmmakers have tried every twist and contortion of this genre premise at a point or another over the past few decades. And yet, other countries, such as Egypt, Japan, and South Africa, seem to have just now put different spins on the theme. Nevertheless, this genre is under-theorized and under-explored. Drawing on insights from blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002), mental models (van Dijk 2014), and the actor’s process as described by, among others, Stanislavsky (1995, 2008) and Brecht (1964, 1970), this article provides cognitively plausible answers to the perennial questions: What is so funny in body-swap films? How do spectators make sense of this genre? How do blending processes operate in body-swap movies? Do spectators “live in the blend?” What patterns of compression or decompression are at work in body-swap templates? Can humor be a strong determiner of moral-political cognition? And what connections can be drawn between acting and cognitive neuroscience? A discussion of English and Arabic examples (i) points to some of the cultural concepts involved in body-swap films, (ii) shows how conceptual blending in humorous films serves to both perpetuate and modify culturally relevant concepts, and (iii) highlights the necessity to expand the current scope in compression, embodiment and identity research. More generally, then, this article presents a new cognitive theory of how cinema, television, or theatre communicates meaning. The most important aim of this study is thus to contribute to the small but growing number of publications that use the cognitive sciences to inform scholarly and practical explorations in theatre and performance studies, as well as to the study of Arab theatre and cinema, which are among the most neglected subjects in the field.

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.

Introduction

2007 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-105
Author(s):  
KRISTINA HAGSTRÖM STÅHL
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Performance Theory ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Critical Step ◽  
Self Evaluation ◽  
The Past ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender

In the past decade and a half, feminism and gender studies have undergone a process of critical self-scrutiny and re-assessment. Presently, the fields of theatre and performance studies are undertaking a similar project of self-evaluation, as evidenced by recent calls to assess the ‘state of the field’ as well as its future directions. Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harrison suggest in their recent co-edited volume, Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory, that any attempt to envision the future must begin by examining the present, which in turn entails looking to, and reflecting on, the legacies and remains of the past. In her article for this issue of TRI, ‘A Critical Step to the Side: Performing the Loss of the Mother’, Aston does precisely this, asking, ‘in what ways it might be critically productive to come back to the maternal as a subject for feminism’.

scholarly journals Under the Toa tree: The genealogy of the Tongan Chiefs

2021 ◽  
pp. 80-106
Author(s):  
Aletta Biersack
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Structural Models ◽  
Political Field ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Constitutional Monarchy ◽  
The Revolution

This paper examines the dualistic foundations of Tongan kingship by way of exploring the historicity of the Tongan polity. While paramounts allegedly descend "from the sky" and the god or gods living there, they are also kinsmen of the villagers living under them and are appraised as such. Whether by way of reproducing or transforming a political field, the mediation of duality requires human work, a practice and performance of kingship. The word genealogy in the title bears the burden of the entire argument. Referring directly to history, it enters into tension with the patrilineal and structural models of the past. The history to which it refers, in turn, is set in motion by the dual foundations of kingship: idioms and ideologies of divinity but existing in tension with the "leveling forces" of contractual modes of legitimation. My aim is to develop a framework adequate to the task of interpreting the revolution of the 19th century, when Tāufa'āhau, a secondary chief, executed sweeping reforms at once chiefly and populist: he suppressed the Tu'i Tonga title of his superior; created a superordinate one, the royal title of the constitutional monarchy he in part designed; and converted to Christianity. The third monarch of the Tupou dynasty Tāufa'āhau founded, Queen Sālote Tupou III, figures prominently in these pages as an ideologue. In her often veiled and diplomatic disparagement of the leaders of the past, Queen Sālote provides a window upon the genealogical politics this paper addresses.

The shape of musical improvisation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milton Mermikides ◽  
Eugene Feygelson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Violin Concerto ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
Musical Space ◽  
The Third

This chapter presents practitioner–researcher perspectives on shape in improvisation. A theoretical framework based in jazz improvisational pedagogy and practice is established, and employed in the analysis of examples from both jazz and classical-period repertoire. The chapter is laid out in five sections. The first section provides a brief overview of improvisational research, while the second discusses the concept of improvisation as ‘chains-of-thought’ (a logical narrative established through the repetition and transformation of musical objects). The third reflects upon improvisation as the limitation and variation of a changing set of musical parameters. Using this concept, the fourth section builds a theoretical model of improvisation as navigation through multidimensional musical space (M-Space). The final section uses this model in a detailed analysis of the nineteenth-century violinist Hubert Léonard’s cadenza for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto Op. 61.

Modern Ideas of the Present

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Wright
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Paris Commune ◽  
The Third ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
Commune Of 1871

With Walter Benjamin’s concept of a ‘messianic present’ as its starting point, this chapter uncovers the different ways in which modern history can be explored using concepts of time. It considers the tradition of revolution and the focus on ‘abstract, unknowable’ futures analysed by Reinhardt Koselleck and draws on the idea of plural experiences and concepts of time in the work of Georges Gurvitch. It suggests that the late nineteenth-century experience of time was thought through in new ways in France, particularly after the Paris Commune of 1871. The chapter explains the theoretical and ideological basis for a new focus on change in the present that emerged across the French political spectrum during the Third Republic (1870–1940).

scholarly journals Towards a Spectatorial Approach to Drama Analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-39
Author(s):  
Ulla Kallenbach ◽  
Annelis Kuhlmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Historical Investigation ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Analytical Practice

In recent years, the concept of dramaturgy has been expanded to include a wide range of new fields that rarely concern the analysis of the drama text itself, but rather the facilitation of creative processes. This article investigates dramaturgy as an analytical practice. The article provides an analytical, historical investigation of methodological approaches to drama analysis. The aim is to examine how drama analysis came to be regarded as a literary discipline that rarely considers aspects of performance and the material, scenic context for which the play was written. The study of drama thus became regarded as being distinct from theatre and performance studies. This approach, which has its roots in nineteenth century dramaturgy, effectively eliminated the spectator from its perspective in favour of a character and plot centred dramaturgy. It is the authors’ assertion that the drama text and theatrical performance should, nevertheless, be regarded as intrinsically interconnected and that the spectator must be “re-inserted” in the analysis of the written drama. The authors explore how we might re-think the field of dramaturgy as drama analysis by emphasizing the corporeal, spatial, performative, and cognitive aspects of the drama text together with an emphasis on the historical and scenic context.

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