Theory for Theatre Studies: Space by Kim Solga

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-211
Author(s):  
Eileen Curley
Keyword(s):  
Theatre Studies

The Messy Business of Art, Research, and Collaboration: Audience Engagement in Home/Less/Mess

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Farough
Keyword(s):  
Research Project ◽  
Audience Engagement ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Art Research

AbstractThe subject of theatre audience engagement has preoccupied scholars and practitioners in theatre studies and research-informed theatre. Yet at the same time, there is a profound absence of data about audience members. The Canadian play and research project,

The Theatrical Memory of Space: from Piscator and Brecht to Belgrade

2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 358-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvija Jestrovic
Keyword(s):  
Postdoctoral Fellow ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The University ◽  
The City

In this article, Silvija Jestrovic introduces the notion of spatial inter-performativity to discuss theatre's relationship to actual political and cultural spaces. Focusing on the Berlin of the 1920s in performances of Brecht and Piscator, then on a street procession of the Générik Vapeur troupe that took place in Belgrade in 1994, she examines how theatrical and political spaces refer to and transform one another. Silvija Jestrovic was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at York University in Toronto, and has recently taken up an appointment in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick. She is currently working on a book-length project entitled Avant-Garde and the City.

A Conversation on Directing Opera

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 246-255
Author(s):  
Katie Mitchell ◽  
Mario Frendo
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Musical Score ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Don Giovanni ◽  
National Opera ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
And Performance

Katie Mitchell has been directing opera since 1996, when she debuted on the operatic stage with Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni at the Welsh National Opera. Since then, she has directed more than twenty-nine operas in major opera houses around the world. Mitchell here speaks of her directorial approach when working with the genre, addressing various aspects of interest for those who want a better grasp of the dynamics of opera-making in the twenty-first century. Ranging from the director’s imprint, or signature on the work they put on the stage, to the relationships forged with people running opera institutions, Mitchell reflects on her experiences when staging opera productions. She sheds light on some fundamental differences between theatre-making and opera production, including the issue of text – the libretto, the dramatic text, and the musical score – and the very basic fact that in opera a director is working with singers, that is, with musicians whose attitude and behaviour on stage is necessarily different from that of actors in the theatre. Running throughout the conversation is Mitchell’s commitment to ensure that young and contemporary audiences do not see opera as a museum artefact but as a living performative experience that resonates with the aesthetics and political imperatives of our contemporary world. She speaks of the uncompromising political imperatives that remain central to her work ethic, even if this means deserting a project before it starts, and reflects on her long-term working relations with opera institutions that are open to new and alternative approaches to opera-making strategies. Mitchell underlines her respect for the specific rules of an art form that, because of its collaborative nature, must allow more space for theatre-makers to venture within its complex performative paths if it wants to secure a place in the future. Mario Frendo is Senior Lecturer of Theatre and Performance and Head of the Department of Theatre Studies at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta, where he is the director of CaP, a research group focusing on the links between culture and performance.

scholarly journals Picturing Nineteenth-Century Female Theatre Managers: the Iconology of Eliza Vestris and Sara Lane

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-21
Author(s):  
Janice Norwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Professional Activities ◽  
Theatrical Management ◽  
Aesthetic Practice ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The University

Lucia Elizabeth Vestris (1797–1856) and Sara Lane (1822–99) were two pioneering women in nineteenth-century theatre history. Both were accomplished singers who made their names initially in comic and breeches roles and, during periods when theatrical management was almost exclusively confined to men, both ran successful theatre companies in London. Despite these parallels in their professional activities, there are substantial disparities in the scrutiny to which their personal lives were subjected and in how their contemporaries and posterity have memorialized them. In this article, Janice Norwood examines a range of portraits and cartoons of the two women, revealing how the images created and reflected the women's public identities, as well as recording changes in aesthetic practice and social attitudes. She argues that the women's iconology was fundamentally shaped by the contemporary discourse of gender difference. Janice Norwood is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Drama, and Theatre Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. She has published on various aspects of nineteenth-century theatre history and edited a volume on Vestris for the Lives of Shakespearian Actors series (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011).

Innovative Spirit at the Heart of Theatre Studies

2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 203-204
Author(s):  
Baz Kershaw
Keyword(s):  
Actor Training ◽  
Stage Management ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
International Standing

Clive Barker made an exceptional contribution to British theatre studies and its international standing. No one else of his generation travelled the extraordinary distance from a conventional stage-management course to become a world leader in actor training workshops, as well as an editor and scholar of distinction. He was a pioneer in bridging the uneasy divide between the professional theatre and its serious study in British universities.

scholarly journals Sign Language Interpreting in Theatre: Using the Human Body to Create Pictures of the Human Soul

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Michael Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Mirror Neuron System ◽  
Mirror Neuron ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Neuron System ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
Neurological Research ◽  
Sign Language Interpreting

This paper explores theatrical interpreting for Deaf spectators, a specialism that both blurs the separation between translation and interpreting, and replaces these potentials with a paradigm in which the translator's body is central to the production of the target text. Meaningful written translations of dramatic texts into sign language are not currently possible. For Deaf people to access Shakespeare or Moliere in their own language usually means attending a sign language interpreted performance, a typically disappointing experience that fails to provide accessibility or to fulfil the potential of a dynamically equivalent theatrical translation. I argue that when such interpreting events fail, significant contributory factors are the challenges involved in producing such a target text and the insufficient embodiment of that text. The second of these factors suggests that the existing conference and community models of interpreting are insufficient in describing theatrical interpreting. I propose that a model drawn from Theatre Studies, namely psychophysical acting, might be more effective for conceptualising theatrical interpreting. I also draw on theories from neurological research into the Mirror Neuron System to suggest that a highly visual and physical approach to performance (be that by actors or interpreters) is more effective in building a strong actor-spectator interaction than a performance in which meaning is conveyed by spoken words. Arguably this difference in language impact between signed and spoken is irrelevant to hearing audiences attending spoken language plays, but I suggest that for all theatre translators the implications are significant: it is not enough to create a literary translation as the target text; it is also essential to produce a text that suggests physicality. The aim should be the creation of a text which demands full expression through the body, the best picture of the human soul and the fundamental medium of theatre.

scholarly journals The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection

10.16993/baq ◽  
2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Individual Case ◽  
Media History ◽  
Cultural Objects ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Media Objects ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
The Aesthetic

The Power of the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical Reflection gathers fourteen individual case studies where intermedial issues—issues concerning that which takes place in between media—are explored in relation to a range of different cultural objects and contexts, different methodological approaches, and different disciplinary perspectives. The cases investigate the intermediality of such manifold objects and phenomena as contemporary installation art, twentieth-century geography books, renaissance sculpture, media theory, and public architecture of the 1970s. They also bring together scholars from the disciplines of art history, comparative literature, theatre studies, musicology, and the history of ideas.Starting out from an inclusive understanding of intermediality as “relations between media conventionally perceived as different,” each author specifies and investigates “intermediality” in their own particular case; that is, each examines how it is inflected by particular objects, methods, and research questions. “Intermediality” thus serves both as a concept employed to cover an inclusive range of cultural objects, cultural contexts, methodological approaches, and so on, and as a concept to be modelled out by the particular cases it is brought to bear on. Rather than merely applying a predefined concept, the objectives are experimental. The authors explore the concept of intermediality as a malleable tool of research.This volume further makes a point of transgressing the divide between media history and semiotically and/or aesthetically oriented intermedial studies. The former concerns the specificity of media technologies and media interrelations in socially, politically, and epistemologically defined space and time, and the latter targets formal considerations of media objects and its various meaning-making elements. These two conventionally separated fields of research are integrated in order to produce a richer understanding of the analytical and historical, as well as the aesthetic and technological, conditions and possibilities of intermedial phenomena.

scholarly journals Społecznie konstruowane ciała i performatywna magia: Teoria socjologiczna Pierre’a Bourdieu w badaniach performatywnych

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucyna Kopciewicz
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The Subject

Social construction of the body and the performative magic: Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory in performance studiesPerformance studies are a developing field of social science which draws on the insights of sociology, ethnography, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, theatre studies and communication studies. The object of performance studies is human activity seen as expression which constitutes the process of production and reproduction of subjectivity. In this text the author analyses Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory from the perspective of performance studies: of questions about social agency, understood as constructing the subject within a specific field of power. The author focuses particularly on the following aspects of individual and collective practices as described by Pierre Bourdieu: spatial practices, bodily practices, and masculine domination. Społecznie konstruowane ciała i performatywna magia: Teoria socjologiczna Pierre’a Bourdieu w badaniach performatywnychPerformatyka jest rozwijającą się dziedziną badań społecznych, która korzysta z dorobku socjologii, etnografii, studiów kulturowych, antropologii kulturowej, teatrologii, studiów nad komunikowaniem. Przedmiotem badań performatywnych jest aktywność ludzka rozumiana jako ekspresja, która stanowi proces wytwarzania i reprodukowania podmiotowości. W niniejszym tekście autorka analizuje teorię socjologiczną Pierre’a Bourdieu w perspektywie performatyki: pytań o społeczną sprawczość rozumianą jako konstruowanie podmiotu w określonym polu władzy. Szczególnemu namysłowi autorka poddaje następujące aspekty indywidualnych i zbiorowych praktyk opisane przez Pierre’a Bourdieu: praktyki przestrzenne, praktyki cielesne, męska dominacja.

scholarly journals To the question of transformation of literary texts into stage version (“Three Years” of A. P. Chekhov in theatrical interpretation of S. V. Zhenovach)

Litera ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 33-41
Author(s):  
Daria Savinova
Keyword(s):  
Literary Text ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Action Identification ◽  
Unpublished Manuscript ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Authorial Intent ◽  
Stage Direction ◽  
New Type ◽  
Theatre Studies

This article is dedicated to the question of text transformation from authorial intent to stage impersonation. Despite the established tradition of studying the questions of recoding of literary text into theatrical, there is yet no theoretical-literary substantiation. Recoding is considered a complex process of creating a new type of text by the theatre director for staging a play. Therefore, an attempt is made to analyze the elements of transformation of literary text into its stage version, using the example of S. V. Zhenovach’s unpublished manuscript for stage direction based on A. P. Chekhov’s novella “Three Years”. The novelty of this research consists in determination of the patterns in transformation of literary text into stage version. The tools and means of expression applied in theatre and literature are different. If in literature it is possible to set several task and solve them all within the framework of the novel, then in theatre, it must be one ultimate task that organizes the action. Identification of the key peculiarities of existence of such type of text as “stage direction” on the example of transformation of the novella “The Years” from the authorial intent to stage impersonation demonstrated its significance for not only theatre studies, but also the theory of literature.

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