This article is about Beatbox Academy (BA), a participatory performance project at Battersea Arts Centre led by Conrad Murray, and its adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), for the ...devised beatbox theatre show Frankenstein: How to Make a Monster (2018-) (FHMM). It proposes that the experience and energy of the young performers, empowered through vocal technologies and participatory practices, provided the catalyst for 'fission impossible' – a reanimated theatre public that is integrated with a wider circuit of cultural production (Haraway 1985). The article explores how the vocal percussion techniques of beatboxing extend and animate the human body, and how the 'cyborgian dramaturgies' of microphones and sound amplification deployed in FHMM heightened the performers' capacities to ignite physiological and affective responses in audience members individually and as a body constituted as 'crowd' (Henriques 2010). Tracking physical and affective response in the body of the author, the article documents a moment of creation and 'otherness' in FHMM that played with culturally familiar notions of 'liveness'. A particular moment of electrification, or frisson, as well as the rhythmic and affective charges of beatbox performance throughout the show, animated the performers and audience members in ways that explored processes and experiences of shared creation and social othering (Ahmed 2004). Galvanising theatre itself, the author argues, the energies circulated by the BA performers brought an experience of collective exhilaration that suggested alternative and joyful social relations and a rewiring and extension of the 'integrated circuit' of British theatre.
This paper focuses on the links between the dramatic construction of Euripides’ Heracles and the three mythological innovations ascribed to the poet: the introduction of the usurper Lycus, the ...postponement of Heracles’ murders until after the completion of his labours and Theseus’ intervention. These three moments of the mythical action find their own coherence in the dramatic construction of the play, based on the duality of a character who is able at the same time to perform the greatest deeds and to commit a terrible crime.
Our contribution sheds light on the dramaturgies of evaluation that precede candidate selection in academic organizations. The dramaturgies unfold across committee meetings, reviews, and reports that ...funnel the pool of candidates into a shortlist of prospective members. Because they are prolonged and not all stages involve copresence, the continuity and consistency of evaluative processes is a central dramaturgical problem. It highlights the constitutive role of written documents for the continuity and consistency of organizational evaluation processes. We marshal evidence from a comparative study on academic candidacy in two organizational settings: grantmakers, who select candidates for funding, and universities, who select candidates for professorships. Drawing on archived records produced in the context of research grant applications and professorial recruitments between 1950 and 2000, we distinguish two regimes of textual agency throughout the processes of evaluation: documents structure the process of candidate selection throughout dramaturgical stages, and they act as relays that transfer assessments of human actors across dramaturgical stages and time. In addition, by focusing on organizational access and showing how organizations make people before even hiring them, we draw attention to the emergence of a highly scripted dramatic figure in academic life: the candidate.
Accounting for nature as capital is touted as a promising way of aligning environmental conservation with global capitalism by valuing nature like economic assets. Both its proponents and detractors ...speculate on what its promises might achieve if they were fully realized, i.e., if nature were actually accounted for, capitalized or commodified. There is, however, an enduring disjunction between vision and execution in this field: the promises simply do not materialize. Economizing nature proves to be extremely complex, raising not only technical hurdles but also intractable conceptual and ontological issues. We suggest taking a critical realist approach to natural capital accounting, acknowledging the inherent resistance of nature to being treated as capital. We consider the arenas dedicated to natural capital accounting as the sites of singular dramaturgical performances, whose effects extend beyond the integration of nature into economic decision making. Drawing on documents, interviews and observations at events dedicated to natural capital accounting, we highlight their theatrical character and reveal the effects they produce. This article aims to contribute to the investigation of environmental governance arenas by emphasizing their significance as venues for symbolic performance and achievement, extending beyond the traditional emphasis on regulatory and hoped-for environmental transformations.
This article examines the genesis, making processes and performance choices of Cake Daddy, a queer and fat-positive live performance work (Belfast, Melbourne, Sydney, 2018-19). The show was made in ...response to performer-creator Ross Anderson-Doherty's experience of shock and fatphobia in the audience's reaction to his naked fat body in a previous production. This experience - and the unpacking of it - proved a catalyst for Anderson-Doherty to respond in the best way he knows: through performance and his own form of queer performance pedagogy. Through a Practice as Research methodology we, who are also members of the Cake Daddy creative team, trace the queer and "fat" dramaturgical choices within the creation and staging of this fat-positive and celebratory production. This includes the hybrid cabaret-theater form of the production, its (at times) conversational/dialogic mode, the visibility and participation of audiences, the virtuosity of Anderson-Doherty's singing and hosting, the sharing of deeply personal material, the flaunting of fat/ness and fat sexuality onstage and the shared act of committing to a fat-positive community pledge: all of these, we assert, lead to a fat-queer utopian performative moment. Borrowing from queer theory's move to see queer as a verb, rather than a noun, Anderson-Doherty's co-option of fat as a verb has brought this forth: Anderson-Doherty "fattens" the space - and in the performance's final moments he teaches audiences to conjugate that verb together as a temporary community.
The purpose of the article is to analyze the peculiarities of animated documentary films’ production in the modern film process. It also aims to investigate the specifics of the combination of real ...facts and events with the animation of the storyline sequence in films, reveal modern animation techniques and the specifics of their combination with footage, determine their impact on the viewer, and identify the peculiarities of using storyboards for organizational and filming processes. Research methodology. It consists in applying of the following methods: theoretical-comparative – comparison of foreign animation-documentary films of the last century with modern ones; practical – disclosure of the peculiarities of work on “animadocs” and plagiarism in author’s and studio projects; analysis – the influence of audiovisual means of expression on the audience’s perception of animation style, sound accompaniment, and counterpoint in animated documentary cinema. Scientific novelty. For the first time the influence of stylistic features of animated documentaries on the viewers’ perception of the depicted events has been analyzed, the importance of using storyboards during the organizational and shooting process in Ukraine has been systematized, the main aspects of working with film dramaturgy have been revealed and the problems of using non-linear dramaturgy in animated films have been considered, the differences in story presentation between feature films and animated documentaries have been revealed. Conclusions. The peculiarities of animated documentary film production in the modern film process have been analyzed, the peculiarities of combining real facts and events with animation of the sequence of storylines in films have been investigated, and modern animation techniques and the peculiarities of their combination with film frames have been revealed, the specifics of film production and their impact on the viewer through audiovisual means of expression have been determined.
This paper addresses the migration theme as an embodied experience performed by myself in two installation pieces, which serve as examples to explore the notions of displacement and territory in ...phenomenology and semiotic of culture points of view. A mode of performed narrative within moving images attempts to imagine other existences, through cognition and body studies. Presence and politics in ageless aesthetic forms amplify a performativity experience in body and image, related to Greek Hellenic sites and Brazilian countryside landscapes. How do the visual arts act as both a reenactment of a continuous present through affected sites and a dramaturgy of the moving image, through a migrant body in continuous creation of belonging in unknown lands and seas?
The present study is an attempt to reveal features of the Bashkir dramaturgy of the 1930s when Bashkir literature was seeking to solve the problem of a new hero. The comprehensive analysis of the ...Bashkir dramas was carried out. In analyzing the principles of reflecting reality, researching genre and style features, determining the range of topics and problems, the nature of the conflict of dramatic works of these years, the study revealed a trend of gradual transition of Bashkir drama from diverse musical and ethnographic plays on the historical past to a realistic depiction of modernity, the dramas of characters, the psychological depiction of the spiritual world of heroes. The relevance of the study is due to the growing interest in the multidimensional study of the features of Bashkir literature, in particular, the dramaturgy of the 1930s, when a socio-psychological drama was first created in the works by S. Miftakhov, B. Bikbay, K. Dayan.The musical and ethnographic works by M. Burangulov, Kh. Gabitov, Kh. Ibragimov, S. Mirasov, F. Suleymanov and others dominated the Bashkir drama of the 1920s. Poetics, style, action development were predetermined by the customs and mores of bygone antiquity, inter-clan and family relations. The spirit of renewal that accompanied the development of Bashkir poetry and prose in the 1930s also captured the dramaturgy of those years; the young Bashkir stage literature gradually moved from folklore to professional theatrical art, came close to depicting modernity.
This article investigates how French playwright Florian Zeller positions his writing with respect to realism in his play The Father (Le Père, 2012) and what his dramaturgy of porosity adds to the ...representation of dementia in contemporary theatre. Through an analysis of the text of The Father and its West End theatre production (2015), this article demonstrates the ways in which this play challenges the dominant perspective in theatre that depicts dementia from the perspective of the outsiders – i.e., those who do not have dementia. On stage, the perceived reality of persons living with dementia has often been portrayed as an illusion, in contrast to the 'true' reality perceived by neurotypical people. This article examines how Zeller's dramaturgy of porosity, by making the audience see the reality from the perspective of the protagonist living with dementia, generates encounters with alternative ways of perceiving and relating to the world. While drawing on theoretical discussions on neurodivergent aesthetics, this paper argues that contemporary theatre can evoke divergent consciousnesses of persons with dementia by using dramaturgical and theatrical strategies.
PDF
