El cardenal Espinosa y Mateo Vázquez de Leca: su influencia en la actividad teatral de Miguel de Cervantes

When Cervantes returned from his captivity in Algiers, he began a prolific period as a theatrical playwright. It was then, between 1581 and 1591, that he wrote numerous comedies, tragedies, and sacramental autos. Cervantes’s theatrical training, however, is a mystery. He only remembers his youthful attendance of theatrical performances by Lope de Rueda, but he does not write anything about the Italian Commedia dell’arte, for example. In this article, I propose to study the influence of the ‘confessional’ politics of Cardinal Espinosa and Mateo Vázquez (1565-1591) on the theatrical conception of Miguel de Cervantes, as well as the influence of Juan López de Hoyos and Alonso Getino de Guzmán on his theatrical apprenticeship.

Women Who Kill

This chapter on murderesses first considers the theatrical training of young men at the collèges and then turns to Jean Bastier de La Péruse’s Médée (1556). The chapter examines how Médée offers a negative example of violence by manipulating the myth of the infamous filicide on the one hand, and, on the other, by gendering violence to show the irascibility of the female monster who escapes man’s control. The fear of and disdain for women in the period underline the topical urgency of this female threat. Indeed, by staging the murder of Médée’s children and placing this violence in the present tense, rather than keeping the filicides offstage, La Péruse’s tragedy suggests that the Medea archetype inspired by Euripides and Seneca was not simply a mythological figure of the past but very much a current concern in sixteenth-century France.

Reframing Vivien Leigh

Reframing Vivien Leigh takes a fresh new look at one of the twentieth century’s most iconic stars. Focusing on Vivien Leigh as a distinctly archival subject, the book draws upon original oral history work with curators, archivists, and fan collectives and extensive research within a network of official and unofficial archives around the world to produce alternative stories about her place within film history. The study examines an intriguing variety of historical correspondence, costume, scripts, photography, props, and memorabilia in order to reframe the dominant narratives that have surrounded her life and career. While Leigh’s glamour, collaborations with Laurence Olivier, and mental health form important coordinates for any study of the star, the book foregrounds a range of alternative contexts that emphasize her creative agency, examining her off-screen labor in areas such as theatrical training, adaptation, war work, producing, protesting, and interactions with her fan base. Part I examines a variety of case studies of Leigh’s screen and stage craft as they emerge from the archive, looking at Leigh’s varied collaborations, her investment in faithful adaptations, and her vocal training. It interconnects star studies, feminist film studies, and performance studies to produce a new take on stardom as creative process rather than stardom as image. Part II turns toward unofficial archives and local museum collections, centering the work of the archivist and the amateur collector and their impact on women’s star histories. It explores Leigh’s archival afterlives as they are constructed by a range of agents and institutions beyond the “official” star archive.

Introduction

To what extent is “Russian mysticism” the product of diplomacy and political conflict? A history of nonsymmetrical comparisons has led us astray from seeing connections. Some of these connections are evident in the practice of Russian theatrical training and its uptake in the United States, for instance, or in the popularity of a Russian version of a Western European reality show that pits psychics against each other. This introduction justifies comparative and connective analysis of the historical grounds and categories for communicative contact and its failures. It also establishes the importance of paying attention to the social structuring of attention in performances and in interactions, including interactions that are mass mediated as examples of unmediated or psychic contact.

Energy and Extrasensation

Capitalist and socialist countries alike accused the other of brainwashing its citizens, creating cogs and robots instead of artists or free thinkers. These worries, again, have historical roots in transnational, imperial-era scientific, spiritual, and artistic conversations about the ways energy and matter create or hinder thought and willful action. We can trace them, for instance, through the ways Russian directors appropriated Western psychophysics and Eastern martial arts and yoga into theatrical training. Means of dividing and aligning energy and matter—as signs of contact and its failures—have proliferated across media for performance. On various stages, energy and matter are shaped to test for free movements of thought or feeling, the impulses that belie automation. At the same time, it is by attending to the social division of sensory fields—and to differences among ways those divisions are themselves made visible or not—that we can see where efforts to signal contact lead to additional, unexpected effects.

Using Storytelling Theatrics for Leadership Training

The Problem How can leaders learn to use power in ways that minimize oppression and resistance, and instead are more liberating? As perceived oppression leads to resistance, leaders who are untrained in these power dynamics may enact oppressive behaviors and trigger resistance without awareness or intention to do so. The Solution This article describes a leadership training process we call storytelling theatrics. These storytelling theatrics formats explore power dynamics in multi-voiced scenarios that incorporate many perspectives. This method gives participants a voice in their own learning and creates actors instead of auditors. It brings hidden sources of oppression to center stage, to fully explore more liberating possibilities for both followers and leaders. Leaders can minimize repression and resistance if they understand, uncover, and confront these expressions of power. The Stakeholders Organizational leaders as well as their followers are stakeholders in this embodied theatrical training. This intervention creates benefit for both leaders and followers, because both are potentially oppressed by power dynamics.

Culture, Memory, and American Performer Training

In today's technologically complex and racially hybrid society, what is the meaning of ‘cultural memory’? Like performance, Ian Watson argues, culture ‘exists only in the doing’ – yet if our formative experiences are in that sense ‘rehearsals’ for life, the subsequent ‘performance’ is in a constant state of flux and renewal. Here, Ian Watson looks at the interface between theatrical and cultural training in American society, from the old apprenticeship system of the stock companies, through the Delsarte-based approach of the earliest conservatoires and the pervasiveness of Americanized Stanislavsky in the post-war period, towards a renewed concern with the techniques of voice and movement to meet the demands of both the classical and the contemporary experimental repertoires. In contrast to the deep cultural roots of much eastern theatrical training, perceptions of actor training in America are, he argues, as eclectic and diffuse as American society itself, and so (using Eugenio Barba's distinction) lean strongly towards creating a ‘professional’ rather than a ‘personal’ identity for the performer – one which ‘bears the signature of the hybrid narrative it springs from’. Ian Watson, who is an Advisory Editor of New Theatre Quarterly, teaches at Rutgers University–Newark, where he is the Acting Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. He is author of Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1993) and of Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002). He edited Performer Training across Cultures (Routledge, 2001), and has also published numerous articles on theatre in scholarly journals.