Theater Reform and the Masque in Marvell's Upon Appleton House

The signature scene shifts, pastoral settings, and perspectival instabilities of Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House squarely align the poem with the theatrical tradition of the court masque, a tradition that was effectively moribund at the at the time of the poem’s composition in 1651.  The influence of the masque on Upon Appleton House (and other Marvell works) has been widely noted, but the significance of his poem in the longer history of English theater––specifically, in the discourse of theatrical reform––has not been fully considered.  In Upon Appleton House, Marvell not only applies the strategies and techniques of the masque, but he also engages with ideas central to the ongoing debate between opponents and defenders of the stage.  As such, his poem anticipates the reforms and innovations attempted by William Davenant, Richard Flecknoe, and others who campaigned to revive theater in Interregnum England.  However, Marvell’s appropriation of masque theatrics is not tethered to the goals of reform.  His poem is distinctly the product of the post-regicide, pre-Protectorate imagination, when the theaters are shuttered, dramatic performance is driven underground, and the fate of the commonwealth is precarious.  Accordingly, his method is not to establish a mode of theater palatable to republican interests, but instead to defamiliarize theatrical representation in a way that responds to the uncertainty of the moment.

Making the Representation Real: The Actor and the Spectator in Milo Rau’s ‘Theatrical Essays’ Mitleid and La Reprise

Exceptional in demonstrating the political engagement emerging in twenty-first-century performance is the corpus of the writer and director Milo Rau, whose practice is distinguished by its (re)meditation of the real. With detailed reference to Mitleid (2016) and La Reprise (2018), this article examines Rau’s self-reflexive strategies in (re)presenting testimony or an event as a means not of depicting the real, but of making the theatrical representation itself real in order to change the world rather than merely to portray it. The article focuses in particular on strategies relating to the actor-character and spectatorship. Rau’s interest in the positions of the actor and spectator illuminates issues that have arisen in the discourse of theatre witnessing and in recent scholarship on dramaturgical approaches and spectatorship in contemporary political performance. Essentially, Rau makes the performer’s habitus transparent, and challenges the spectator’s reflexivity, effectively rebutting the largely unchallenged assumption that characters who perform witnesses necessarily leave little room for the spectator to be a performing witness. Stuart Young is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Otago. His recent publications include the co-edited Ethical Exchanges: Translation, Adaptation, Dramaturgy (Brill Rodopi, 2017), while his practice-led research into Theatre of the Real includes The Keys are in the Margarine: A Verbatim Play about Dementia (2014).

PHILOSOPHY AND THEATRE IN THE CENTURY OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The theatrical performance has always been a continual concern during all the history of humanity, because it performs an art where people have certain stories that arouse many feelings and insights to the spectators. It highlights the fact that the theatrical performance has special importance for philosophical reflection, especially in the characteristic illustration of the philosophy of the eighteenth century. In this context, several thinkers participated intensely of the political reality of this time, using the theatrical practice on several occasions, both for the contribution to the intellectual framework and to portray the daily life of the rising class, namely the bourgeoisie. Among these thinkers, this paper will highlight the Voltaire conceptions of representation of the aristocratic theater, establishing it as a powerful means of education; Diderot about the genesis of the drama, where art had the function of refining and instructing individuals, representing the aspirations of the bourgeoisie. Since the conception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau about the theater, unlike the two mentioned thinkers, says the educational role of the theater is illusory, as the theatrical representation only reflects the passions of their audience. Thus, it is emphasized that the Genevan thinker followed a contrary understanding to the thinkers of the period.

WHAT DOES THE TERM TOGATA ‘REALLY’ MEAN?

This article aims to shed fresh light on the meaning of the term togata. It conducts an analysis of the term as it appeared in ancient sources,1 investigating in particular both how and why ancient authors across several periods focussed their attention on the togata. The paper will also distinguish between the attestation of the term togata in ancient writers, who are likely to have actually watched these theatrical performances in person and known more directly what they were talking about, and the usage of the term by later grammarians, who would have had no opportunity to watch such performances. These later authors, rather, were simply guessing what kind of theatrical representation could have been performed onstage (much as we do nowadays) and did so by adopting obvious differences in terminology.

Joy and Love in Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy Waring’s 1944 Black Feminist Musical Polk County

What makes Zora Neale Hurston different as a musical theatre writer is her concern about the creation of safe spaces for black women actors. By looking at the theatrical representation of black women in Hurston and Dorothy Waring’s Polk County, it is possible to see ways in which they resist intersecting oppressions of gender and race. Hurston’s adaptation of the blues and folk music for the musical is also subject to analysis, as is her lasting impact on musical theatre.

Comunicación videoescénica: la enunciación audiovisual en el teatro

This research analyzes the use of audiovisual technology in the context of the video-scenic drama, a hybrid product that results from the integration of audiovisual enunciation in theatrical representation. The purpose is to determine the modifications that the audiovisual projection introduces in the fundamental components of the drama and in its construction phases. Through the in-depth interview or scientific interview, data has been collected from ten experts in the field of theatrical creation. Once analyzed, exposes a specific poetic that rules the construction of the video-scenic drama, focused on a figurative expansion of the character's action and an expansion of space and time, based on the fragmentation and flexibility of the audiovisual image. Similarly, it has been shown that the use of audiovisuals broadens the elective possibilities of the stage director and forces to establish of new constructive strategies.

THE EXPERIENCE OF ABSURDITY: EXISTENTIALISTIC PARADIGM AND PARADIGM OF THEATRE OF THE ABSURD (WITH REGARD TO SAMUEL BECKET'S PLAY 'NOT I')

This article circles around the phenomenon of absurdity and absurd which appears to be greatly elaborated by Albert Camus and Theatre of the Absurd. The article reflects mainly upon Becket's dramatic monologue "Not I", which might be characterized as a sort of missing link between two forms of absurd. The style of Albert Camus puts emphasis on the inner experience extrapolated by means of the author. In this sense, the feeling of despair and existential crisis, typical for existentialism in general, brings into existence the absurdity of being as such. In comparison with that, the manner, in which Theatre of the Absurd presents current states of things, organizes the comic dimension of a given situation. To put it another way, Theatre of the Absurd sets up living intersubjectivity, which is a sense-formative precondition of the laughter, and dynamic omnipresence of the inner experience literally declared on the scene. Becket's "Not I" deploys, on the one hand, the existentialistic understanding of human beings, and, on the other, the theatrical representation injected with intersubjectivity. The article takes into account Deleuzian approach towards cinematography in order to conceptualize Becket's play. The notion of affection-image, which is taken from Deleuze, illustrates the structure and essentially the nature of images taking place in "Not I". Becket draws special attention to the image of the voice with regard to audial metaphors, which the main heroine uses during all the time of self-enunciation. Behind the words that she speaks there is an implicit trauma, which is unknown to the contemplators of the performance. It is noteworthy to admit that the organization of the play makes visible only the mouth of the heroine whereas everything remains in the shadows. Deleuzian affection-image deals with annihilated spatial-temporal coordinates and absolutization of the face (faceification). The quality of metaphors in the monologue and the decoration of space establish the phenomenon of absurdity in Becket's "Not I".

Opening Spaces

This paper explores the construction of dramatic space in the prologues of classical Greek drama. Drawing from theater scholarship on the phenomenology of space, I show how tragedians and comedians alike experimented with how to shape their audience’s understanding of a play’s setting. I focus on opening scenes in plays by Sophocles and Aristophanes where a character sees with and for the audience, and demonstrate how these moments of staged spectatorship are not necessarily straightforward or seamless; they can facilitate the viewing of dramatic space but also, by laying it bare, reveal its complications. Sometimes there are multiple representational possibilities for physical space within and around the theater; sometimes physical and fictional space are to be seen simultaneously; sometimes the representational gap between physical and fictional space is kept open for a surprisingly long time. Such exposure of the process of theatrical representation, I argue, can draw the audience in as a co-participant in a drama’s production.