Martin Crimp has been one of the most prominent playwrights on the British stage since his first appearance. Although his oeuvre consists of absurdist and postdramatic plays, he translated classic ...texts such as Cyrano De Bergerac, Rhinoceros, The Seagull and The Misanthrope. Fewer Emergencies is a short play that forms part of Crimp's triptych, which also includes Whole Blue Sky and Face to the Wall. In Fewer Emergencies, Crimp creates a theatrical atmosphere that deconstructs the tenets of conventional dramatic theatre. In the playlet the characterisation is reminiscent of his earlier thought-provoking Attempts on Her Life, which had no obvious character attributions. In Fewer Emergencies he makes a similar kind of characterisation. He simply numbers the characters 1, 2, 3. In this way, Crimp creates an inspiring theatrical space. The aim of this study is to uncover the postdramatic theatricality of Crimp's Fewer Emergencies.
Upon his recent death, this article revisits the major contributions of Dr. Hans-Thies Lehmann to contemporary debates on theatre aesthetics. Lehmann’s concept of a postdramatic theatre—that is, a ...theatre that has moved beyond the central importance of dramatic texts—is surveyed some two decades after he made his primary interventions in the field. The article furthermore reviews Lehmann’s influence in the Anglophone discipline of theatre studies and in the global field of theatre production.
Christoph Schlingensiefs autoreferenzielles Theater verhandelt Kunst- und Künstlerdiskurse im Kontext avantgardistischer Theorie und Praxis. In detaillierten Text- und Aufführungsanalysen nimmt ...Giovanna-Beatrice Carlesso zwei der komplexesten und anspielungsreichsten Inszenierungen des Autor-Regisseurs in den Blick, um ein dichtes Netz aus intermedialen Selbst- und Fremdzitaten im Nexus von Kunst, Terror und Tod zu entwirren. Dabei beleuchtet sie erstmals die longue durée des Künstlerdramas und erforscht dessen Weiterentwicklung durch Schlingensief in Zeiten der Postdramatik.
En 2019, la compañía Teatro En Vilo, dirigida por Andrea Jiménez y Noemí Rodríguez, presentó en el escenario del Centro Dramático Nacional el espectáculo Man Up. A través del juego entre siete ...personajes diferentes, la pieza plantea una profunda reflexión sobre el significado mismo de “lo masculino” y el rol que lleva aparejado. Este trabaj0 emplea una metodología eminentemente cualitativa aplicada al análisis de dicho montaje. Así, se reflexiona sobre el modo en que distintas estrategias teatrales como la autoficción, el posdrama o la estética carnavalesca están puestas al servicio de un enjuiciamiento de las consecuencias de la masculinidad tradicional en distintos ámbitos: el identitario, el familiar, el afectivo…, y la necesidad de repensar de cara al futuro nuevos discursos alejados del relato hegemónico sobre el género.
This article looks at the presence and function of animals in the dramatic works of Sarah Kane, a recognized protagonist of the experimental theatre scene in Britain and abroad. The by now massive ...scholarship on Kane has tended to see her work as epitomizing the move beyond the dramatic paradigm famously theorized by Hans-Thies Lehmann, and as equally marked by increasingly dehumanised constructions of subjectivity that culminate in the disembodied theatrical landscapes of her late plays. The research presented here addresses a hitherto unexplored dimension to Kane’s joint engagement with the boundaries of subjectivity and the boundaries of theatre, namely, the pervasive presence of animals across her entire oeuvre and their thought-provoking intersections with the human subjects with whom they share the stage. Through a combination of textual and performance analysis, I chart the complex, changing configurations of this relationship of co-habitation and mutual implication, offering an extensive discussion of the role of animals as key players in Kane’s dramaturgy of simulacra.
The figure of the undead woman suicide features prominently in the œuvres of both Heiner Müller and Elfriede Jelinek. This article examines the significance of that figure to Müller's Die ...Hamletmaschine and Jelinek's Ulrike Maria Stuart, two plays about what kind of political action is possible in the modern media society. It argues that while Ophelia's return from the dead is depicted as a challenge to the status quo - she stops killing herself so that she can enact change on a larger scale - Jelinek's Ulrike is a figure who embodies modern political inertia: she cannot even manage to stay dead, much less change the world. Notably, both revenant protagonists are doubled by the postdramatic texts themselves, which can be described as both 'undead' and 'suicidal': 'undead', because they are subversive re-workings of previous texts, and 'suicidal', because they repeatedly undermine their own authority. Here again, though, the dual nature of undeadness - its capacity to represent either genuine subversiveness or mindless zombification - comes to the fore. While Die Hamletmaschine is an 'undead' text which aims to terrify its viewer into action, Ulrike Maria Stuart is a play which suggests that subversion is almost impossible in late capitalism.
Lithuanian theatre has always been known for its visual metaphors and dramaturgy of directorial images, where the language of literary text is translated into visual metaphors created on stage by a ...director. Due to this quality, some critics have argued that Lithuanian theatre has been demonstrating postdramatic characteristics for a long time. However, one should note that visual metaphors of modern Lithuanian theatre have been based on and controlled by literary text and never quite established a more autonomous and self-contained visuality. Dramatic text remained the point of departure whether the director chose to illustrate or concretise it, to transform or deform it. However, in post-Soviet Lithuanian theatre, these relations have been gradually turning discontinuous, their intensity often varied within the framework of the same performance. Fragmentary cracks, when images, departed from the roles of commentators or illustrators of textual meanings, turned into flashes of independent visions that were seen by the critics as an obvious shift towards a radical image-centric position or, to use the term of Hans-Thies Lehmann,
theatre. However, the recent performance
(2017, Lithuanian National Drama Theatre) by Polish theatre artist Lukasz Twarkowski, produced twenty years after the initial introduction of the term
into the Lithuanian context, has paradoxically started a storm of divisive opinions in the Lithuanian theatre milieu. It became the focal point of discussions about the intrinsic character of Lithuanian theatre, especially its embedded attitudes towards drama text and acting—notoriously challenging factors for many international collaborations. The article analyses the ongoing debates about the term
theatre and its interpretations in Lithuanian theatre criticism, taking the example of
as a case study.
This paper centres on three theatre productions related to Shakespeare's Richard III, all directed by the Taiwanese director Wang Chia-Ming, whose work had been featured in Paris Autumn Festival in ...2019. The first of these productions, Richard III and His Underground Parking Lot (2014), was his collaboration with the School of Theatre Arts of Taipei National University of Arts, while R3: The Life and Death of Richard III, taking inspiration from the first production, was commissioned by the National Theatre and Concert Hall for the 2015 Taiwan International Festival of Arts (TIFA 2015). Not being exhausted by possibilities of retelling the Richard III story, Wang created Blood and Rose Ensemble (2017) for National Theatre's Experimental Theatre. For both Parking Lots and R3, Wang developed an acting device of 'voice-body disassociation,' in which actors mimed the movement of one character and dubbed the voice of another character. Breaking the integrity of characters in this way, Wang was able to reconstruct and question the politic of narration and paved his way to Blood and Rose Ensemble. This essay looks at how Wang's narrative strategies in these postdramatic productions turned into an apparatus of history-making that is also relevant to his Taiwanese audience.
PDF
