Modern and Contemporary Political Theater from the Levant: A Critical Anthology, written by Robert Myers et Nada Saab

Arabica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-119
Author(s):  
Najla Nakhlé-Cerruti
Keyword(s):  
Political Theater

Investigating the President

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas L. Kriner ◽  
Eric Schickler
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Theater ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Presidential Power ◽  
Political Pressure ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Partisan Polarization ◽  
Approval Rating ◽  
Congressional Investigations ◽  
Over Time

Although congressional investigations have provided some of the most dramatic moments in American political history, they have often been dismissed as mere political theater. But these investigations are far more than grandstanding. This book shows that congressional investigations are a powerful tool for members of Congress to counter presidential aggrandizement. By shining a light on alleged executive wrongdoing, investigations can exert significant pressure on the president and materially affect policy outcomes. This book constructs the most comprehensive overview of congressional investigative oversight to date, analyzing nearly 13,000 days of hearings, spanning more than a century, from 1898 through 2014. The book examines the forces driving investigative power over time and across chambers, and identifies how hearings might influence the president’s strategic calculations through the erosion of the president’s public approval rating, and uncover the pathways through which investigations have shaped public policy. Put simply, by bringing significant political pressure to bear on the president, investigations often afford Congress a blunt, but effective check on presidential power—without the need to worry about veto threats or other hurdles such as Senate filibusters. In an era of intense partisan polarization and institutional dysfunction, the book delves into the dynamics of congressional investigations and how Congress leverages this tool to counterbalance presidential power.

Vēsturiskā atmiņa Latvijas teātra jaunās paaudzes mākslinieku darbos: izrādes „Dvēseļu utenis” piemērs

2020 ◽  
pp. 269-275
Author(s):  
Ieva Rodiņa
Keyword(s):  
Historical Memory ◽  
Intergenerational Relationships ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Political Theater ◽  
Hermeneutic Phenomenological ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Humanistic Study ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Flea Market

The aim of the research “Historical Memory in the Works of the New Generation of Latvian Theater Artists: The Example of “The Flea Market of the Souls” is to focus on the current but at the same time little discussed topic in Latvian theater – the change of generations and the social processes connected to it, that are expressed on the level of world views, experiences, intergenerational relationships. Most directly, these changes are reflected in the phenomenon of historical memory. The concept of “postmemory” was defined by German professor Marianne Hirsch in 1992, suggesting that future generations are closely related to the personal and collective cultural traumas of previous generations, which are passing on the past experience through historical memory, thus affecting the present. Grotesque, self-irony, and focusing on socio-political, provocative questions and themes are the connecting point of the generation of young Latvian playwrights born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including such personalities as Jānis Balodis, Rasa Bugavičute-Pēce, Matīss Gricmanis, Justīne Kļava, etc. However, unlike Matīss Gricmanis or Janis Balodis who represent the aesthetics of political theater, in Justīne Kļava’s works, sociopolitical processes become the background of a generally humanistic study of the relationships between generations. This theme is represented not only in “The Flea Market of the Souls”, but also in other plays, like “Jubilee ‘98” and “Club “Paradise””. The tendency to investigate the traces left by the Soviet heritage allows to define these works as autobiographical researches of the identity of the post-Soviet generation, analyzing life in today's Latvia in terms of historical memory. Using the semiotic, hermeneutic, phenomenological approach, the play “The Flea Market of the Souls” and its production in Dirty Deal Teatro (2017) are analyzed as one of the most vivid works reflecting the phenomenon of historical memory in recent Latvian original drama.

Cold War Political Theater

2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 535-538
Author(s):  
nigel j. ashton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Theater

scholarly journals Terra Madre 2006: Political Theater and Ritual Rhetoric in the Slow Food Movement

2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
adrian peace
Keyword(s):  
Political Theater ◽  
The Political ◽  
Slow Food ◽  
Political Spectacle ◽  
The Core ◽  
Global Character ◽  
Secular Rituals ◽  
The Many ◽  
Mega Event ◽  
Food Movement

The biannual mega-event of Terra Madre is now established as the political flagship of the Slow Food movement. It assembles in Turin the leading cosmopolitan figures of this neo-tribal, post modern organization, along with several thousand of its ordinary members, who were drawn in 2006 from the ranks of food producers, cooks and academics. The most significant secular rituals of Terra Madre involve the theatrical celebration of its global character, beginning with the assembly of representatives from some 1600 ““food communities”” distributed throughout the world. Equally important are the many smaller scale activities in which the details of the movement's politics are articulated and embellished, at times in strikingly rhetorical ways. In this paper, which is based on ethnographic research, the theatrical and rhetorical qualities of Terra Madre as a political spectacle are explored in some detail. It is argued, in conclusion, that what is inadvertently exposed are some of the political myths which lie at the core of the Slow Food movement's contemporary philosophy.

The micropolitics of public archaeology: Working with the ejido in Michoacán, Mexico

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna S Cohen ◽  
Rodrigo Solinis-Casparius
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Policy Science ◽  
Heritage Management ◽  
Political Theater ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Cultural Patrimony ◽  
Western Mexico ◽  
Local Practices

Approximately 90% of Mexican archaeological sites are on communal ejido lands and yet the Mexican Constitution stipulates that all cultural heritage is the property of the federal government. Considering this disconnect between federal and local practices, how can archaeologists work with ejido communities to help preserve cultural patrimony? This article explores the micropolitics associated with archaeological fieldwork on communal ejido lands in Western Mexico. We show how long-standing practices based on local histories, community political theater, and interpersonal relations shape fieldwork and cultural conservation initiatives in important and unintended ways. In our study near the site of Angamuco, Michoacán, we draw upon ethnographic and archival research and outreach projects over five field seasons, and address the tensions that emerge when informal micropolitical and formal top–down sociopolitical practices interface. We show how aspects of a policy science approach are appropriate for long-term community-supported archaeology and cultural heritage management.

scholarly journals The Year 1979 as a Turning Point in Syrian Theatre: From Politicization to Critical Humanism

2020 ◽  
pp. 277-287
Author(s):  
Friederike Pannewick
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Attempted Suicide ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Political Theater ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
Political Art ◽  
Generational Shift ◽  
Specific Individual ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Psychological Studies

Abstract This chapter investigates a crucial turning point in the writing of Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannous (1941–1997) in the late 1970s. This internationally acclaimed author belonged to a generation of Arab intellectuals and artists whose political and artistic identities were strongly shaped by the question of Palestine. After the Camp David Accords of 1978 and the resulting Egypt-Israel peace treaty, signed in 1979, Wannous attempted suicide and stopped writing plays for more than ten years. This chapter shows how the plays he published after this self-imposed silence moved away from a didactic, political theater and towards psychological studies focusing on individuals as well as minority and gender issues. This chapter asks whether the significant aesthetic and conceptual turn in Wannous’s work from the early 1990s onwards might go beyond the concerns of a specific individual artist. To what extent does it mark a generational shift in regard to the meaning and connotations of political art?

Staging Defeat: The Golden Cockerel and the Russo-Japanese War

2018 ◽  
pp. 197-220
Author(s):  
Marina Frolova-Walker
Keyword(s):  
Political Theater ◽  
Political Satire ◽  
Russian State ◽  
Russian Opera

This chapter examines The Golden Cockerel as a pointed political satire, prompted and shaped by the concrete events of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Indeed, Rimsky-Korsakov and his librettist saturated the libretto with direct and recognizable references to the recent war, turning the opera into a kind of topical political theater. Here, Rimsky-Korsakov appears as politically radical, and returns to the idioms of the Russian Style—not in a spirit of nostalgia, but with the aim of inventing and mocking his previous values, and also mocking the Russian state, whose hubris had led to a humiliating defeat. Ultimately, the Cockerel became a distorting mirror in which the previous seventy years of Russian opera and its nationalist preoccupations found an unflattering reflection.

There Will Be Trouble

TURBA ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-102
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
National Level ◽  
Political Theater ◽  
Public Funds ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Urban India ◽  
Theater Festivals ◽  
Contemporary Theater ◽  
New Theater ◽  
Pedagogical Discussion

It is perhaps more relevant now than ever before to prepare the ground for a pedagogical discussion on theater curation. Theater festivals have recently become prominent in India. It is true that India has cherished a ubiquitous tradition of festivals—utsavs and mahotsavs—for hundreds of years. Take, for example, the staging of Kudiyattam at ancient Sanskrit koothambalams, which would last several weeks in a festival atmosphere; the touring circuit of Assam mobile theater, which has created festival-like events since the 1950s; or the Marathi (political) theater, which has an active culture of more than a century of traveling and festival-like events. These are not the kind of festivals I am interested in for the purpose of this article—they have a “traditional” logic built into their purpose—but the kind that have emerged along secular lines in post-independent and urban India. These “new” theater festivals are primarily sponsored by the state, are supported by public funds at the regional and national level, and are therefore open to public participation and scrutiny. These festivals, wherever they are held, commonly include a multilingual and multicultural itinerary of plays. The intent behind the selection is largely driven by the post-colonial project, which is to “put together” an idea of modern India by including plays that have a critical outlook—these could be contemporary scripts, modern adaptations of classical plays, and works that explore contemporary vocabularies of performance (body-based, post-dramatic, experimental, etc.). Currently, India has over a dozen of these new theater festivals of varying scale; each running annually, each claiming to show the best of contemporary theater. In the absence of a touring circuit, these festivals provide artists with the opportunity to travel, to seek new audiences, to mingle with peers and masters, to be written about, and to woo award committees. Festivals are now doing for theater what exhibitions have done for visual art; they are highly visible events that offer immense resources and the promise of further influence. Festivals seem to bestow legitimacy on artistic work of a kind not seen before.

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