The effects of theatre-based vocal empowerment on young Egyptian women’s vocal and language characteristics

This study investigates the impact of a theatre-based vocal empowerment program on the vocal and language characteristics and the self-perceptions of young bilingual Egyptian women. The program used applied theatre, a dramatic practice that promotes civic action by utilizing improvisational techniques to engage participants in exploring solutions to self-identified community concerns. These techniques supported participants’ pursuit of vocal empowerment: the ability to comfortably express their intended content with a clear audible voice, accompanied by the belief that what they had to say was worthwhile. The program was implemented in Alexandria and Aswan, two Egyptian cities in different regions of the country, with distinct socio-economic profiles. Thirty-six young women from Aswan and nineteen from Alexandria participated. The program was facilitated in Arabic, for 90 minutes per day over twelve consecutive days in 2018. Participants in both groups spoke Arabic as a home language and studied English in school settings but differed in their educational experiences and English proficiency. The vocal and language characteristics of each participant were tested in Arabic and English pre- and post- program using a spontaneous speech task and a reading aloud task. Their self-perceptions were evaluated through a vocal self-perception survey. Results indicated that participants responded differently in each city. In Alexandria, participants showed significant improvement in language skills (e.g., mean length of utterance). In contrast, participants in Aswan showed a significant change in fundamental frequency. Overall, the self-surveys indicated that all participants experienced an increased sense of confidence, a stronger belief in self-authorship, and an increased desire to voice their opinions clearly in public; however, there were subtle differences between the groups. In analyzing these results, we conclude that to design effective vocal empowerment outreach programs internationally, it is necessary to consider participants’ cultural backgrounds, language diversity, and socio-economic status.

SOVIET SCIENTIFIC PERSONAL REPRESSIVE STATE APPARATUS AS AN OBJECT OF HISTORICAL SCIENCE OF SCIENCE STUDIES

Numerous studies by Russian scientists and historians of science are devoted to the state science policy in the USSR and its well-known achievements, but not enough attention is paid to the negative, socially repressed aspects of the Soviet science policy. Repressions became one of the main components of the state's scientific and personnel policy in the Stalinist era. The systemic analysis of the development of Soviet science declared in the scientific literature, limited only by its indisputably outstanding achievements, without under-standing the origins, causes and mechanisms of the repressed state apparatus that operated in the same period, sharply reduces the overall picture of the reliability of the study of Soviet science. The purpose of the study is to comprehend the diverse and dramatic practice of state repression in the system of Soviet science, because in the world history of science no other developed country has experienced such large-scale and tragic events in the functioning of the scientific society.

Theater as a Dictate of Power. The Problem of Freedom of the Dramatic Author in the Classical Epoch

The author of the article aims at revising traditional approaches to the definition of classicism, viewing it as an intrinsically mobile and heterogeneous semantic system. On the example of the tragedy as a dominant genre, it reveals that the French theater of the 17th century may be seen from two perspectives: as a social and cultural phenomenon and as а system that functions and transforms itself through the author’s efforts. The mobility of this dramatic practice relates to the paradigmatical relationship between the “power” and the “author”. The power is understood both in the narrow political and in the wider textual sense (e.g. violence that reveals itself on the textual level). The author is seen as a writing agent who consistently develops her own principles of dramatic writing and discloses herself in the text through the figures of the drama’s personas and the structure as a whole. The article seeks to show how Corneille the playwright simultaneously succumbed to the prevailing classical tendencies of his time and tried to distance from them. With this purpose in view, the article examines in detail how the rhetorical structure of the tragedy Horace was built; in particular, this concerns interaction, via attracrion and repulsion, of two different discursive positions represented by Horace and Sabina.

Facing Justice

Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation between face and intent, surface and significance, truth and semblance, nature and artifice. Using the legally attuned dramatist John Webster’s The White Devil as its central example, this chapter probes law’s preoccupation with legibility and the way in which drama enters into dialogue with it. In the process, law emerges an interface between an expressive mode and a hermeneutic model, and thus an imaginative resource for literary writers interested in selfhood and inwardness. Ultimately, the argument intimates how the gaps and dualities of the interrelation between the theatre and the law are used by early modern dramatic practice to conceptualize the larger interrelation between literary and legal epistemologies.

Der Calderón’sche auto sacramental in neuem Gewand. Spielarten seiner produktiven Rezeption zwischen Spanien, Frankreich und Mexiko

The staging of the Calderonian auto sacramental The Great Theatre of the World during the Salzburg Festival of 1922 marks the beginning of the discovery of this form of religious drama for the dramatic practice and theatre writing in the 20th century. The present paper aims to deal with the recuperation of this genre by well known Spanish, French and Mexican authors (Federico García Lorca and Rafael Alberti; Albert Camus and Emilio Carballido). They use this obsolescent genre, paradoxically, to renovate contemporary theatre. It is the allegorical structure of these plays that provides them with a pattern for the construction of an intentionally antinaturalistic theatre. The post-Tridentine obsession with the free will dogma is substituted by a more philosophical, non religious and, sometimes even irreverent, debate of human liberty. In the modern Mexican autos sacramentales the tendency to a syncretistic mixture of Christian and indigenous ideas and forms, inaugurated by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the famous nun from New Spain, finds an ironic continuation.

Introduction

The Introduction illustrates how humanists like Desiderius Erasmus, Philipp Melanchthon, and Martin Bucer imported the study of drama into theology, mining antique poetics for exegetical and philosophical tools, recruiting tragedy in particular to pedagogical, theological, and devotional ends. Tracing the simultaneous development of Reformed poetics and original works of tragoedia sacra across the first half of the sixteenth century, the Introduction also foregrounds the emergence of a precise philosophical idea of tragedy under the influence of Aristotle’s Poetics. The Introduction illustrates just how important tragedy had become to diverse reformers and Reformers by 1550, underscoring the theological and philosophical purchase of tragedy and the Poetics in and beyond dramatic practice.

Moving Texts

The texts of the Writings in their sometimes bewildering generic variety, and their use through the centuries in multiple changing liturgical and secular contexts, have provided composers and visual artists ample room to blur the lines separating one sensory experience from the next. This is true even for those texts that seem on the surface the most stubbornly discursive and aniconic (like Proverbs)—texts least amenable to sustained visual, musical, narrative, or dramatic treatment. As David Brown has argued, readers in each generation are set free to appropriate what the imagination can discover in the interstices of the moving texts that are a religion’s story. Responding to the Writings as diverse as the Psalms, Daniel, and Job in works like the Utrecht Psalter, the Ludus Danielis, or Blake’s engravings from the Book of Job, the scriptural artist becomes in effect a scriptural performer, imaginatively blurring the boundaries separating exegetical from liturgical, musical, visual, and dramatic practice.

Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–65

This chapter challenges conventional and critically resilient scholarly periodization of theatre in which 1660 is seen as inaugurating innovative theatre practice. It demonstrates that the reframing of the drama by William Davenant and Richard Flecknoe during the 1650s left a legacy to the Restoration, a legacy that in texts of the 1660s Davenant and Flecknoe attempted to obviate. Theatre historians have been subsequently reluctant to acknowledge continuities in dramatic practice and theatre production. This chapter argues that the influence of the drama of the 1650s was wide-ranging. Reformed aesthetics, the scenic stage, the female performer, political satire and the representation of love and honour in new world contexts, all aspects of the production of Commonwealth drama, are variously reconstituted in plays of the Restoration stage.

From Political Theater in Yugoslav Socialism to Political Performance in Global Capitalism: The Case of Slovenian Mladinsko Theater

Political theater is a trend that, during the avant-garde 1920s, emerged at the intersection of efforts to liberate artistic forms and oppressed groups in society. It was an influence on Slovenian theatrical artists at the Workers’ Stage (Delavski oder) already in the interwar period. A trend towards ‘political theater’, one of the tendencies of politicized performing arts in the period, flourished in Slovenia and other republics of the former Yugoslavia in the 1980s. Against the background of an identity crisis of the Yugoslav state and its ideology, political theater addressed great stories of History and the Revolution in a post-avant-garde manner. During the transition, political theater initially lost its edge but was reborn in the 21st century. As a post-dramatic practice associated with performance, it now parses its own politics. It is a forum for critiquing small, local stories that nonetheless evince the contradictions of a peripheral nation-state in the era of transnational late capitalism.

Beckett's Bedrooms: On Dirty Things and Thing Theory

This article draws on Bill Brown's ‘Thing Theory’ alongside more recent theoretical approaches to ‘things’ in order to investigate the peculiar depictions of filthy bedroom items that appear in Samuel Beckett's early works for screen. Focusing predominantly on the teleplay Eh Joe, the article discusses the manner in which Beckett's evocations of physical dirtiness persistently problematise and abstract the conventional functionality of everyday domestic objects in his work, not only causing ordinary items to seem less familiar and increasingly ambiguous, but also impacting upon the way that characters engage with their physical surroundings. By acknowledging and analysing these odd renderings of the material everyday the article attempts to shed new light on Beckett's artistic and conceptual interest in the physical world, and, furthermore, suggest that this interest may have played an important role in shaping Beckett's distinctive dramatic practice.