PERFORMING CRISIS IN GREEK THEATRE: SCENOGRAPHIC STRATEGIES AS DRAMATURGIES OF CRISIS

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (46) ◽  
pp. 45-70
Author(s):  
María Konomi ◽  

This essay will investigate a series of performances in Greece that showcase the theme of crisis discussed through the particular frame of their expanded scenographic strategies as dramaturgies of crisis. This expanded scenography is not restricted to politics and aesthetics of scenographic representation extending well beyond traditional staging paradigms to aspects that reinstate the emergence of social realities and a fundamentally social conception of space. Indicatively, this includes strategies like introducing various charged elements from lived experi-ence and contemporary visual culture, as well as conflictual aesthetics of the crisis and visual and spatial dramaturgies of the precarious. Sce-nographic dramaturgies of crisis seem to thrive on new spatial perfor-mance forms that directly interact with social realities and real spaces (like site-specific performance), while they mobilize a renewed address to found, shared public space putting to use strategies of participation. In this context of the crisis, the widespread multimedia idioms and the proliferation of video and cinematic idioms are also notable. Perfor-mances that thematize aspects of the crisis, such as Revolt Athens (2016), and the twin site-specific performances built with a core topographical address, Tea Time Europe (2014-15) and Eat Time Europe (2016) will be an-alyzed as key case studies to exemplify and further contextualize their scenographic approaches as content and context-oriented formulations, as visual and spatial dramaturgies that provide us with an entryway into performing crisis.

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMILIE PINE ◽  
MAEVE CASSERLY ◽  
TOM LANE

Digital-audio performance walks can be powerful performances, responding to troubling pasts, giving voice to testimony, and creating an affective geography that satisfies a participant's desire to connect with the city rather than just walk through it. Yet digital-audio performance walks also raise questions about performance and voyeurism, and the disconnection of private headphone experience, alongside issues of agency, detachment and appropriation. This article addresses key issues associated with digital-audio performance walks, using two case studies of performance walks (from Israel and Ireland), that aim to communicate politically charged and painful histories, which are at once ‘now’ and ‘then’, ‘here’ and ‘there’. The article considers some of the risks in digital-audio performance walks: dark tourism, privatization and empathic quietism. Finally, the article assesses what creative strategies are available to creators – and audiences – to make collaborative performance walks that galvanize spectators to become active witnesses.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 355-368
Author(s):  
Victoria Bianchi

This article explores how performance and character can be used to represent the lives of real women in spaces of heritage. It focuses on two different site-specific performances created by the author in the South Ayrshire region of Scotland: CauseWay: The Story of the Alloway Suffragettes and In Hidden Spaces: The Untold Stories of the Women of Rozelle House. These were created with a practice-as-research methodology and aim to offer new models for the use of character in site-specific performance practice. The article explores the variety of methods and techniques used, including verbatim writing, spatial exploration, and Herstorical research, in order to demonstrate the ways in which women’s narratives were represented in a theoretically informed, site-specific manner. Drawing on Phil Smith’s mythogeography, and responding to Laurajane Smith’s work on gender and heritage, the conflicting tensions of identity, performance, and authenticity are drawn together to offer flexible characterization as a new model for the creation of feminist heritage performance. Victoria Bianchi is a theatre-maker and academic in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow. Her work explores the relationship between space, feminism, and identity. She has written and performed work for the National Trust for Scotland, Camden People’s Theatre, and Assembly at Edinburgh, among other institutions.


Author(s):  
Martin Lundsteen ◽  
Miquel Fernández González

AbstractRecent studies have argued for more nuanced understandings of zero tolerance (ZT) policing, rendering it essential to analyze the significance and actual workings of the policies in practice, including the context in which they are introduced. This article aims to accomplish this through a comparison of two case studies in Catalonia: one in the neighborhood of Raval in Barcelona and one in Salt—a municipality in the comarca (or county) of Girona. We identify a transformation in the use of ZT policies in Catalonia and a contradiction between their social effects and proclaimed objectives. This article attempts to address how specific sociocultural groups gain power and privilege from these policies. The main argument is that a set of commonsensical ideas have become hegemonic, which allows and naturalizes certain sociocultural practices in urban space, while persecuting others, fundamentally pitting two categories against each other: the desired civil citizen and the undesirable and uncivil stranger.


2005 ◽  
Vol 81 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 148-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Lynn Wood ◽  
Carl G. Enfield ◽  
Felipe P. Espinoza ◽  
Michael Annable ◽  
Michael C. Brooks ◽  
...  

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-69
Author(s):  
Heather Harrington

Abstract How people move and appear in public spaces is a reflection of the cultural, religious and socio-political forces in a society. This article, built on an earlier work titled ’Site-Specific Dance: Women in the Middle East’ (2016), addresses the ways in which dance in a public space can support the principles of freedom of expression and gender equality in Tunisia. I explore the character of public space before, during, and after the Arab Spring uprisings. Adopting an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, I focus on the efforts of two Tunisian dancers – Bahri Ben Yahmed (a dancer, choreographer and filmmaker based in Tunis, who has trained in ballet, modern dance and hip hop) and Ahmed Guerfel (a dancer based in Gabès, who has trained in hip hop) – to examine movement in a public space to address political issues facing the society. An analysis of data obtained from Yahmed and Guerfel, including structured interviews, videos, photos, articles and e-mail correspondence, supports the argument that dance performed in public spaces is more effective in shaping the politics of the society than dance performed on the proscenium stage. Definitions and properties of everyday choreography, site and the proscenium stage are analysed, along with examples of site-specific political protest choreography in Egypt, Turkey and Tunisia. I engage with the theories of social scientist Erving Goffman, which propose that a public space can serve as a stage, where people both embody politics and can embody a protest against those politics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 11-31
Author(s):  
Fernando Clara

The essay takes as a starting point Goebbels’ speech delivered at the closing session of the Continental Advertising Congress, held in Vienna in June 1938, and explores the transformations that the communicational public space of the first half of the twentieth century underwent following the two world conflicts that erupted then. In the first part, the essay addresses the progressive hybridisation of public discourse at the time, the increasing blurring of information, advertising and propaganda, and the rapid acceleration of the international circulation of communication during the period. In this context, special attention is paid to actors who, though not new to the international political scene – such as foreign correspondents and news agencies –, gained a new and decisive importance throughout the period in question. The second part analyses two case studies involving these actors and their power on the international political scene during World War II. Geographically, the two case studies are centred around an axis that is usually considered peripheral to the war – neutral Portugal – but which appears central and, in a way, paradigmatic to the “Great War of Words” that was also being fought in the international public space.


2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gertjan Medema ◽  
Patrick Smeets

System assessment is the part of the Water Safety Plan that evaluates whether a water supply system is capable of producing drinking water that meets the health-based targets. System assessment can be done at increasing level of detail, requiring more site specific information as the level of detail increases. Four case studies are presented with increasing level of detail, showing the type of information that is required for each of these levels and how each level informs risk management. The first case study shows how a system assessment can be performed without other site specific information than the type of source water and the type of treatment processes. The required data for the system assessment are collected from the large body of literature available. The second case study uses site specific microbial indicator data. The third study uses pathogen data and the fourth case study combines data on pathogens, microbial indicators and process parameters. The case studies show that the level of detail required largely depends on the risk management question.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 155-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elesa Huibregtse

On 25 October 1993, British artist Rachel Whiteread revealed her most ambitious sculptural work to date – House. The solidified space of this Victorian-era, terraced home physically existed for a mere 80 days; yet, during this time it became the subject of an intense media interest and heated public debate which reached the United Kingdom’s Houses of Parliament. While House has been discussed in depth within art historical scholarship for almost 30 years, trends in this academic body of work tend to focus on absence and memory in a highly contested public space, as well as thoughts on loss, death, architecture, the art market, politics and gentrification in London’s East End during the latter part of the twentieth century. What is lacking, however, is an examination of House within the larger context of visual culture and what it may, or may not, mean for contemporary viewers. Analysing the historical context of the work’s location through a Marxist lens, reveals the dehumanization which occurred within the East End’s class constructs throughout the nineteenth century, and its effect on housing policies well into the twentieth century. Reading the sculptural work itself, using the methodologies of semiotics, unveils mythologies regarding what is and is not expendable in our western spaces; particularly, the working class, houses and works of art in post-industrial capitalist societies. The ideologies embedded within these mythologies continue to appear in our mass media images to this day, leaving unanswered questions regarding what is truly valued in our societies. Thus, Whiteread’s unique work is an artistic intervention into an image-saturated environment, asking the viewers and readers of cultural texts to consider at what point in time we will seek to change how we treat that which has been arguably undervalued.


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