Interview with Michael Silverstone, cofounder of the company 600 Highwaymen with Abigail Browde. The interview was conducted by emails from May, 7th to August, 17th.
Sämi Ludwig, Professor of American Studies at the Université de Haute Alsace (Mulhouse, France), successfully takes up any author’s challenge to pique his potential readers’ curiosity from the front ...cover. His enigmatic title Resurrecting the First Great American Play. Imperial Politics and Colonial Ambitions in Frontier Detroit acts as an incentive for any inquiring minds who would immerse themselves in the book to unravel the mystery about the forgotten original American dramatic piece. We ...
“Doubleness on the New York Contemporary Experimental Stage: Bodies and Technology” explores the representations of bodies in a corpus of plays by New York artists from the “New American ...Avant-Garde.” Intermediality, or the co-presence or superimposition of different artistic media, creates dual bodies: technological monsters that are half-human and half-video, grotesque minotaurs at once men and puppets. A “place for viewing,” theatre, theatron, is turned by artists into a showcase displaying post-human bodies. To what extent does the use of technology annihilate or magnify the physical presence of the actor, the traditional soul and raison d’être of the art of the theatre? To answer this question, this paper focuses on works by the pioneering Wooster Group (1975-), the eminent Big Art Group (1999-) and the new rising star of the New York experimental scene, Andrew Schneider (2015-). I develop the concept of doubleness in order to define the nature of the interactions between bodies and technology in the various shows of the artists.
In spite of the originality of Gertrude Stein’s modernist plays, her dramatic work remains largely unknown. This paper focuses on the writer’s early plays which are considered from the perspective of ...the landscape. If Stein considers her 1922 play Lend a Hand or Four Religions, as her first “landscape play”, the plays from Geography and Plays (written before 1922 and the publication of the volume) can be seen as prototypes of Stein’s dramatic landscaping. These plays can be read as landscapes of the intimate in that they translate the subjectivity of a writer, of her phantasmatic characters, and also of her readers. To demonstrate that subjectivity is prevailing in Stein’s works, the use of the terms “geography” and “landscape” will be studied, before focusing on Stein’s pictorial writing. Finally, the focus will be on the agency of the readers-spectators.
In 1968, Jean Vilar invited the Living Theatre to the XXIIth edition of the Avignon Festival. This invitation of the American anarchist company was part of the new policy of Vilar who was eager to ...open his festival to the younger generation and to new theatrical forms. Yet, in the wake of the revolution of May in Paris, Vilar’s festival was debased as a “cultural supermarket” by Jean-Jacques Lebel and the enragés with whom the Living Theatre sympathized and a second revolution took place that summer 1968 in Avignon. The Odéon and Avignon crises of May and July, when theatres became the stages of spectacular heated debates about the creation of a new society, demonstrated the synergy between the political and the theatrical by simultaneously enhancing the theatricality of politics and the politics of theatre. Interestingly (and paradoxically), in spite of the importance of the part played by The Living Theatre in this French Revolution of 1968, official history has been oblivious of the involvement of the American company. This amnesia is symptomatic of the trauma of the lost utopian dreams which 1968 came to represent. The fifty anniversary of the revolution of 1968 is the occasion to lift the veil on the forgotten episodes of this historical moment, to turn back the clock and further discover about the participation of The Living Theatre.
This paper is a study of The Wooster Group’s staging of identity-related tensions in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. Using Judith Butler’s theories on performativity as an analytical framework, ...this paper shows how Elizabeth LeCompte’s iconoclastic American company deconstructs O’Neill’s 1920 work to “trouble” the traditional configurations of both gender and race. By playing with the codes of representation, The Wooster Group sheds light on the artificiality of the conventional binary system opposing the masculine to the feminine and Whites to Blacks. As they subvert traditional signs and symbols, The Wooster Group creates an “aesthetic of resistance,” this paper argues, opening onto a reconfiguration of gender and race identities.
Produced in 1916 by the Provincetown Players, the play Trifles by Susan Glaspell, defined by scholars as “the mother of the Modern American theatre,” stages the unveiling of the invisible. A crime ...has been committed in the Wrights’ farm and the representatives of the law, accompanied by the wives, have come to find evidence to convict Mrs. Wright of the murder of her husband. In this detective play, the chiaroscuro effect appears as a principle which structures this work in which the playwright literalizes the metaphor of social invisibility to denounce patriarchal oppression and encourage the audience to reflect upon the mechanisms underpinning the norms on which the society of the beginning of the 20th century was based.
Entretien avec Nicole Birmann Bloom, Chargée de mission, Arts de la scène, au service culturel de l’ambassade de France à New York. L’échange a été conduit par courriel entre le 6 juillet et 28 août ...2020.
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