The central premise of this essay is based on personal experiences in the field of applied theatre, mostly as projects carried out in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It was during the ...author's tenure there as educator and theatre practitioner that these trends emerged for her, and became dominant in my thoughts around the aesthetic of the practice they call applied theatre. To some degree, though, this aesthetic is also dominant in the theatre of the urban milieu of South African theatre. Her experience suggests that many participants she has encountered over the past twenty years or so are drawn to the presentation of self as tragic - what she refer to as the lure of tragedy. She suggests here that the lure of tragedy is powerful, but while there is a need to witness the multiple truths of South African lives, applied-theatre practitioners will need to exercise care not to trap their work in the tragic frame.
This paper seeks to establish a conversation between Glauber Rocha and Bertold Brecht, switching back and forth among their ideas on cinema, concluding with considerations on what brings the two ...closer –the ambition of becoming people’s artists– and what sets them apart from each other –their relationship with the subconscious
Este trabalho procura estabelecer um diálogo entre Glauber Rocha e Bertolt Brecht, num vai e vem entre as ideias de ambos sobre o cinema que termina com uma reflexão sobre aquilo que mais os aproxima –a ambição de tornar-se popular– e sobre o que os afasta –a relação com o inconsciente
In his analysis of four different modern playwrights, Peter Elung-Jensen writes about the metaphorical structure. In doing so, he brings the question of poetics to the foreground.
This essay introduces Angry Sandwich People, or, In Praise of Dialectics, a slide show and audio staging of a poem by Bertolt Brecht that Chto Delat made in collaboration with local activists and lay ...actors to commemorate the centenary of the Russian revolution of 1905. The text details the context of this artwork and its possible meanings.
The historical narrative of actor training has thus far been limited to the history of Eurocentric actor training. Put another way, it has been predominantly white. While the history of actor ...training has been understudied in general, the history of training for actors of color has been almost non-existent. Yet scholars including Alison Hodge and Mark Evans have made direct links between actor training and both the evolution of theatre and the development of personal, artistic, and socio-political worldviews. Since the recorded history of actor training focuses almost exclusively on white practitioners, however, this history privileges the experiences and perspectives of white practitioners over those of color. Rooted in the argument that a history of actor training based so exclusively on whiteness is incomplete and inaccurate, this dissertation explores the history of actor training for Latinx actors, especially those who participated in and came out of the Chicanx Theatre Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and who went on to engage in other training programs afterwards. Relying primarily on original archival research, I document multifaceted attempts to train Latinx actors in the United States in the mid- to late twentieth century. In five chapters, I examine the beginnings of Latinx actor training in the United States; the Theatre of the Sphere training system devised by Luis Valdez and the El Teatro Campesino ensemble in the 1960s and 1970s; the various training opportunities offered by TENAZ (Teatro Nacional de Aztlán), a national network of Chicano theatres that operated from the late 1960s into the early 1990s; the efforts of the Old Globe Theatre’s Teatro Meta program in the 1980s; and the short-lived MFA program in Hispanic-American Theatre established by Jorge Huerta at the University of California, San Diego in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In examining these efforts, I argue that theatre artists and practitioners of color have historically engaged in their own training practices when white, mainstream training have failed to include them. In the process, I highlight the overall whiteness and Eurocentrism of historical accounts of actor training in the United States. I suggest that the dominance of white artists and training systems has placed extra burdens on artists, teachers, and actors of color to create more culturally specific approaches that address their specific needs. Ultimately, I argue that such approaches offer key information about how individuals and programs might begin to diversify training programs in ways that are more culturally inclusive. In sum, I argue that these largely undocumented efforts deserve a place in the history of both actor training and theatre in the United States, so that they may inform actor training moving forward.
In 1965, Yoko Ono, a Japanese performance artist, performed Cut Piece at Carnegie Hall in New York City. During the performance, Ono sat on stage and invited the audience to come up, cut off, and ...take a piece of her clothing. With the audience cutting a piece one by one, the behaviors from the previous participants impacted the later people's actions and the reflections from the auditorium. This study was undertaken in an effort to understand better Ono's artistic invention for Cut Piece: inspiring her audience to critically consider the outside world, including the interrelationships with other people and the existence of the established art institutions, with the support of the concert hall. By performing the piece at Carnegie Recital Hall instead of an art museum or art gallery, Ono promoted audience members to play two roles: observer and performer in her constructing artistic situation. According to the theatrical ideas of alienation and empathy, the two roles could guarantee the audience to both obtain critical thinking and emotional experience. Due to the revolution of Carnegie Hall from the private organization to non-profit one, Ono also waged an act of institutional critique, which criticized the functions and services of art institutions, especially the education for the public and the display of artworks. Therefore, through exploring new possibilities of a conventional musical hall, Ono specifically achieved her artistic and political goal of evoking audience members' critical rethink.
Contradiction has been widely used to describe the work of the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996); however, it does not fully encapsulate the complexity of the artist’s oeuvre. This thesis ...turns to the German director Bertolt Brecht’s notion of dialectical theater, which highlights the tensions, struggles, and interplay between contrary tendencies as a way to understand Gonzalez-Torres’s work. When the contradiction that marks the artist’s work is thought of in terms of dialectical theater, it can be better understood as layered and intentional. This thesis examines the necessary dialectical relationship presented in his work through the artist’s employment of theatrical devices that have allowed the artist to navigate the dialectical display of his public and private self. As a result, the scholarship debating Gonzalez-Torres’s work must also be viewed collectively as a necessary dialectical relationship that highlights the artist’s strategic exchange between his own practice and presence. It is essential to understand Gonzalez-Torres’s strategy to allow for the continual unearthing of ephemera related to the artist’s life that ultimately carries forth the dialectic, or tensions, between the artist’s practice and everlasting presence he ultimately staged.
Since its advent, advertising has had an uncomfortable, yet symbiotic relationship with the literary arts. While the advertising world soon recognised the advantages of harnessing the powerful ...rhetorical potential of poetry in its service, many poets have recognised equally the commercial advantages of applying their literary talents to the art of advertising. So long an integral part of society, it is hard to imagine a world without advertising. Therefore, when German spoken-word poet Bas Böttcher uses his poetry to reflect the world he lives in, the result is a literature strongly influenced by advertising. Immediately obvious is the influence of brand names, or similes based on advertising slogans. Perhaps less obvious is, for example, the formal influence of a McDonald's advertising campaign that inspired one of his best-known poems. At a deeper level, however, Böttcher recognises that poetry itself is like any other consumer product. It not only needs to satisfy customer demand for a quality product, but also, in today's saturated market, to be launched with its own integrated advertising campaign designed to attract public attention and create market interest.
The Consciousness Industry: A Symposium Hitchens, Christopher; Zizek, Slavoj; Steiner, George ...
Salmagundi (Saratoga Springs),
07/2015
187
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A symposium about the consciousness industry participated by Christopher Hitchens, James Miller, and George Steiner is presented. Among others, Miller says in 1970, German writer Hans Magnus ...Enzensberger offered his own criteria for progress, identifying what he regarded as an emancipatory use of the media, namely, decentralized programming, with each consumer a potential producer, and social control of the media by self-organized workers.
Patrizia Di Bello, Colette Wilson, Shamoon Zamir (eds), The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, London, IB Tauris, 2012, 288pp; £18.99 paperback After decades of relative neglect in ...comparison with mainstream histories of photography (approached as either a canonised art form, or in its expanded social, documentary or scientific cultures), and other relatively underresearched fields such as the photo-exhibition or the illustrated photographic press, in the last ten years photobooks have begun to receive the attention they warrant. Furthermore, like many collections with conference origins - so popular at present due to the pressures to publish brought to bear on British higher education - the chapters are far too short to offer the reader a satisfactorily in-depth treatment of the many complex subjects and objects examined. ...Di Bello and Zamir stress that although ethical, political and cultural issues are by no means of secondary concern, 'they are approached firstly through an analysis of aesthetic practice rather than through a methodology which privileges the social construction of visual meaning over the aesthetic' (p7).
