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.

Creating a “Lapp” Character

This article explores the ways in which the Sámi were represented in the early years of established theatre in Finland, starting with the Finnish Theatre (Suomalainen Teatteri) in 1872 and its successor the Finnish National Theatre (Suomen kansallisteatteri), 1902. Particular attention is paid to the role of costumes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their designs often involving the consultation of ethnographers, archaeologists, historians and visual artists. The widest archival evidence for this study consists of theatre photographs and plays, supported by contemporary publications and newspaper articles. Textual sources were augmented by the study of Sámi garments. By identifying and analysing the relevant plays, related stage photographs and newspaper reviews, it becomes clear that recurrent ways developed for representing Sámi people on the stage. This development of “Lapp” characters was established through costume in conspicuous ways, with the exaggeration of particular features of Sámi dress leading to a recognizable trope of the “Lapp” costume.

ACHIEVING SUSTAINABLE URBANIZATION OF THE NATIONAL THEATRE IN LONDON THROUGH CHANGE OF USE AND FUNCTIONS OF ARCHITECTURE

The human population is currently on the rise and most Europeans live in urban areas, leading to increased urbanization. The change comes with its challenges, as cities, architecture, and urban spaces need to become more fluid, multi-functional, and innovative. This paper examines whether a change of use of public spaces, and functions of architectural and urban forms, can be used as an element in the implementation of sustainable urbanization. The theoretical framework of this paper focuses on literature findings relating to identified key aspects such as innovative approaches in changes of use — recycling and upcycling, green infrastructure and financial aspects, concepts of “right of the place”, and public participation. These aspects are addressed on both theoretical and practical levels, with the National Theatre in London as a case study. Findings convey that the change of use of spaces can be utilized to achieve sustainable urbanization, together with the management of functions and uses of architectural and urban forms. However, further research is needed with various stakeholders to identify a solid and inherent database, as a foundation on which the most optimal urban spaces would emerge, by identifying new functions and uses of urban space and architecture.

The World of Odour in the Slovenian Performing Arts

The article provides an overview of performances on Slovenian stages that have used odour to stimulate the audience’s senses and arouse transformational effects. Representing the first research of this kind into Slovenian culture, the author demonstrates that odour was used as a means of sensory perception, especially in experimental theatre practices since the 1970s. One of the first such works was Cimetova vrata ladje norcev in druge spremembe (The Cinnamon Door of the Ship of Fools and Other Changes), a performance art piece directed by Tomaž Kralj at Glej Theatre in 1975. In the 1990s, the interest in olfactory perceptions grew among theatre-makers who successfully used odour to implement the aesthetics of the real in post-dramatic theatre and achieve the immersion of the spectator. This role of odour in theatre also continues in the 21st century. Barbara Pia Jenič began deliberately and continuously developing the poetics of scent at the Sensorium Theatre, which she founded in 2001 with Gabriel Hernandez. In her creation of sensorial events, Jenič relies on the methodologies of Enrique Vargas, with which she became acquainted as an actress and scent designer in his group Teatro de los Sentidos and creatively developed them at the Sensorium Theatre. As a scent designer, Jenič has collaborated with other Slovenian theatres, among others, on the 2015 operatorium, The Tenth Daughter (Deseta hči) by Svetlana Makarovič (based on the libretto by Milko Lazar, directed by Rocco) at the Slovenian National Theatre – Opera and Ballet Ljubljana.

Old Plays, New Narratives

When a theatrical performance is digitally broadcast live to cinemas, the limitations of temporal and spatial specificity are removed and the theatrical experience is simultaneously opened up to a wider audience and inherently altered. One such production, Coriolanus (Donmar Warehouse, 2013-14), starring an actor with a particularly enthusiastic online fan community, was broadcast to cinemas by National Theatre Live, where fans recorded it on digital devices, extracted clips and produced animated gifs, which they captioned to reinterpret the play, sharing them online, removed from their original context. The transformation of theatre texts to cinemas to social media platforms raises exciting questions related to how fans interact with culture both as consumers and as producers of new media texts. How do the different transformations (technical and actively fan-produced) affect both the narrative and the cultural experience? How do new texts function as surrogates for, and extensions of, the ‘official' narrative, as well as new interactive narratives in their own right? This paper addresses these questions in the context of a specific theatrical event as it crossed the boundary from a live, co-located experience first into cinema, and then into interactive hypertexts and memes. Drawing on theories of fandom and participatory culture, as well as post-Web 2.0 analyses of Internet behaviours, the paper examines fan production of new media texts and how they both transmit and transform the source narrative via interpretation, re-interpretation, and misinterpretation. Image Credit: Still of fromhiddleswithlove (2014)

Faces of the Captives: Aesthetic Distance and Emotional Absorption in Young Children's Engagement with Theatre

<p>When Captain Hook has the lost boys tied up on his ship he cannot recognise that the sparkle on the ‘faces of the captives’ is the thrill of mimesis. It has been suggested that if young children cannot distinguish between reality and illusion then instead of suspending disbelief in the stage world, they will actually believe and therefore experience a dangerous level of emotional absorption. Using Peter Pan as a frame of reference, this thesis examines responses to three contemporary theatre works, Capital E National Theatre for Children’s Songs of the Sea and Boxes and Scottish company Catherine Wheels’ White to challenge the idea that aesthetic distance provides a necessary protective function. Instead, it will be argued that the imagination, empathy and emotion contagion provide the conditions in which children can capably enter the aesthetic space of fictional worlds on stage.</p>

Faces of the Captives: Aesthetic Distance and Emotional Absorption in Young Children's Engagement with Theatre

<p>When Captain Hook has the lost boys tied up on his ship he cannot recognise that the sparkle on the ‘faces of the captives’ is the thrill of mimesis. It has been suggested that if young children cannot distinguish between reality and illusion then instead of suspending disbelief in the stage world, they will actually believe and therefore experience a dangerous level of emotional absorption. Using Peter Pan as a frame of reference, this thesis examines responses to three contemporary theatre works, Capital E National Theatre for Children’s Songs of the Sea and Boxes and Scottish company Catherine Wheels’ White to challenge the idea that aesthetic distance provides a necessary protective function. Instead, it will be argued that the imagination, empathy and emotion contagion provide the conditions in which children can capably enter the aesthetic space of fictional worlds on stage.</p>

Seanchan 's Quest Restoring of the Poet's Right in Yeasts' Play The King's Threshold

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), the prominent Irish poet and dramatist was one of the foremost figures of twentieth-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Revival, and together with lady Gregory and Edward Martyn established the Abby Theatre, and served as its chief playwright during its early years. He was awarded the Noble Prize in literature for his always inspired poetry which in a highly artistic form gave expression to the spirit of a whole nation. The paper aims at analyzing the poet's quest for social freedom and poet's right in the state. The King's Threshold was first performed by the Irish National Theatre Society at the Molesworth Hall, in Dublin on 7 October, 1903. It is founded upon a Midieval-Irish story of the demands of the poets at the court of King Guaire at Gort, Co. Galway; it was also influenced by Edwin Ellis's play Sancan the bard (1905) which was published ten years earlier, by Edwin Ellis.