Brexit on Stage: Two Verbatim Projects in Progress

The article deals with two post-Referendum projects launched by British national organizations, the National Theatre and the Guardian with Headlong, whose task was to reflect more accurately on a broader range of current British experience. The projects were written in response to questions on whether national artistic institutions, the subsidized “complex culture,” have not been out of touch with the rest of the country, notably the post-Referendum crisis. Both projects set out to research the crisis with documentary and quasi-documentary methods, to involve in an exercise in “listening” and to focus on polarisation, voter fatigue and lack of trust. The article concentrates on the two projects as variants of political theatre and on the ways they use the verbatim method in their attempts to diagnose and understand the crisis arguing, further on, that the effects differ, leading either to populism or to empathetic understanding and reconciliation.

The Feminist Struggle in Performing Arts in Brazil

This article summarizes recent transformations in the field of performing arts in Brazil, with attention to feminist theatrical production. It provides a description of the context of this branch of Brazilian political theatre, between the civil–military coup of 1964 and the present, focusing on 2015, a period named the Brazilian ‘Feminist Spring’. This historical arc of almost sixty years celebrates groups and artists which represent the dissemination of feminist discussion and poetics in all kinds of performative events in the theatrical field, as well as revealing the backlash represented by the anti-feminist policies of the Bolsonaro government, elected in late 2018.

Māori Election Petitions of the 1870s: Microcosms of Dynamic Māori and Pākehā Political Forces

Māori election petitions to the 1876 Eastern Māori and the 1879 Northern Māori elections were high-stakes political manoeuvres. The outcomes of such challenges were significant in the weighting of political power in Wellington. This was a time in New Zealand politics well before the formation of political parties. Political alignments were defined by a mixture of individual charismatic men with a smattering of provincial sympathies and individual and group economic interests. Larger-than-life Māori and Pākehā political characters were involved in the election petitions, providing a window not only into the complex Māori political relationships involved, but also into the stormy Pākehā political world of the 1870s. And this is the great lesson about election petitions. They involve raw politics, with all the political theatre and power play, which have as much significance in today’s politics as they did in the past. Election petitions are much more than legal challenges to electoral races. There are personalities involved, and ideological stances between the contesting individuals and groups that back those individuals. Māori had to navigate both the Pākehā realm of central and provincial politics as well as the realm of Māori kin-group politics at the whānau, hapū and iwi levels of Māoridom. The political complexities of these 1870s Māori election petitions were but a microcosm of dynamic Māori and Pākehā political forces in New Zealand society at the time.

Performing «Polishness»

This article is a review of Dariusz Kosiński’s Performing Poland: Rethinking Histories and Theatres (Aberystwyth 2019). The author points out that the book is an attempt at introducing several centuries of Polish theatre and performance to an international reader. It is divided into five sections which overlap chronologically, altogether creating a comprehensive presentation of Polish theatre. These sections are: theatre of festivities, theatre of fundamental questions, national theatre, political theatre, and theatre of the cultural metropolis. The author, however, draws attention to a problematic issue in Kosiński’s approach. Throughout the book he emphasizes the role of theatre and performance in asserting Polish national identity while ignoring the complex, multi-faceted character of any national identity.

The Speech Structure of the Media Environment and the Place of Stage Speech in It

The paper analyzes the speech structure of the media sphere and determines the place of theater speech practices. The main characteristic of media text, which determines its ontology, is utilitarianism — direct and spontaneous involvement in the general activities of society. The media text is always connected with the time and place of its publication, with the specific coordinates of social space-time. At the time of publication it has the communicative status of the real-time text. With the increase in the time span separating the time of publication of the text from the time of its reading, the communicative status of the media text changes, it becomes the text of the past tense. The main components of the media sphere (in the communicative environment of both traditional media and the Internet) are the speech practice of the media, aimed at forming and maintaining the stability of public consciousness, speech practice of advertising, marketing, PR, GR. This set is open. Analysis of the theatre speech practice provides the basis for referring theatrical speech to the sphere of media speech. Several types of theatrical speech have been identified based on the specifics of the use of semiotic systems and the degree of immediacy of the relation to the audience: the polycode scenic speech of the actor at the moment of his interaction with the audience; speech of actor, director, screenwriter, broadcast in the communicative environment of the media and the Internet. The basis for the analysis is the Russian drama as well as the performances of Erwin Piskator, the creator of the "Political Theatre" movement in Germany in the 20th century. It analyzes the director's approaches to the search for dramatic material, the methods of organizing theatrical time and space, the special relationship between the actor and the viewer, and non-traditional principles of casting performers.

Promises Made to Be Broken: Performance and Performativity in Digital Vaccine and Immunity Certification

Digital vaccination certification involves making many promises, few of which can realistically be kept. In this paper, we demonstrate how this phenomenon constitutes various forms of theatre – immunity theatre, border theatre, behavioural theatre and equality theatre – doing so by drawing on perspectives from technology regulation, migration studies and critical geopolitics. Technological theatre and political theatre often serve valid functions, but these forms are problematic for several reasons. First, they involve real-world infrastructures that, while unlikely to accomplish the task at hand, will nevertheless last a long time and be repurposed. They therefore constitute governance by data infrastructure, diverting action and control away from elected legislators to for-profit contractors. Second, vaccine certification effectively legitimises inequalities between countries and people by formalising ways to distinguish between the vaccinated and non-vaccinated and to exclude the latter, thus reinforcing both mobility and connectivity divides. It serves as a way to (further) close borders and to regulate, through code and infrastructure, access to public goods such as employment and public space. Finally, the project of certification displaces a more important action, namely addressing the radical inequality in countries’ ability to combat the pandemic.