Kyle Gillette | Trinity University, Texas (original) (raw)
Books by Kyle Gillette
Routledge, 2020
The Invisible City explores urban spaces from the perspective of a traveler, writer, and creator ... more The Invisible City explores urban spaces from the perspective of a traveler, writer, and creator of theatre to illuminate how cities offer travelers and residents theatrical visions whilst also remaining mostly invisible, beyond the limits of attention.
The text explores the city as both stage and content in three parts. Firstly, it follows in pattern Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities, wherein Marco Polo describes cities to the Mongol emperor Kublai Kahn, to produce a constellation of vignettes recalling individual cities through travel writing and engagement with artworks. Secondly, Gillette traces the Teatro Potlach group and its ongoing immersive, site-specific performance project Invisible Cities, which has staged performances in dozens of cities across Europe and the Americas. The final part of the book offers useful exercises for artists and travelers interested in researching their own invisible cities.
Written for practitioners, travelers, students and thinkers interested in the city as site and source of performance, The Invisible City mixes travelogue with criticism and cleverly combines philosophical meditations with theatrical pedagogy.
Routledge, 2016
"Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not going to play this particular scene tonight." - Sabina Thornton W... more "Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not going to play this particular scene tonight." - Sabina
Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) telescopes an audacious stretch of western history and mythology into a family drama, showing how the course of human events operates like theatre itself: constantly mutable, vanishing and beginning again.
Kyle Gillette explores Wilder’s extraordinary play in three parts. Part I unpacks the play’s singular yet deeply interconnected place in theatre history, comparing its metatheatrics to those of Stein, Pirandello and Brecht, and finding its anticipation of American fantasias in the works of Vogel and Kushner. Part II turns to the play’s many historic and mythic sources, and examines its concentration of western progress and power into the model of a white, American upper-middle-class nuclear family. Part III takes a longer view, tangling with the play’s philosophical stakes.
Gillette magnifies the play’s ideas and connections, teasing out historical, theoretical and philosophical questions on behalf of readers, scholars and audience members alike.
McFarland, May 8, 2014
Railway travel has had a significant influence on modern theatre’s sense of space and time. Early... more Railway travel has had a significant influence on modern theatre’s sense of space and time. Early in the 20th century, breakthroughs—ranging from F.T. Marinetti’s futurist manifestos to epic theatre’s use of the treadmill—explored the mechanical rhythms and perceptual effects of railway travel to investigate history, technology, and motion. After World War II, some playwrights and auteur directors, from Armand Gatti to Robert Wilson to Amiri Baraka, looked to locomotion not as a radically new space and time but as a reminder of obsolescence, complicity in the Holocaust, and its role in uprooting people from their communities. By analyzing theatrical representations of railway travel, this book argues that modern theatre’s perceptual, historical and social productions of space and time were stretched by theatre’s attempts to stage the locomotive.
Papers by Kyle Gillette
Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination, ed Benjamin Linder, 2022
Leaving Rome and proceeding for an hour toward the northeast, you reach Fara Sabina, a city with ... more Leaving Rome and proceeding for an hour toward the northeast, you reach Fara Sabina, a city with medieval walls, an alleyway of cats, a stairway to nowhere. Down implausibly labyrinthine staircases and alleyways, you behold the main church on the piazza, built over a temple to an obsolete god. Across the piazza is a museum devoted to Sabine archaeology that precedes the empire of Rome by centuries. Beyond the bell tower on the belvedere and the bakery at its base—on a clear day—you can see all the way to St. Peter’s.
Performance Research, Jan 1, 2007
Performance Research, Jan 1, 2010
Pirandello Society of America, 2021
Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka (eds), Pirandello's Visual Philosophy: Imagination and Thought Across Media (Fairleigh Dickinson), 2017
Luigi Pirandello gives the world of his play Henry IV a vivid antiquarian texture, endowing the c... more Luigi Pirandello gives the world of his play Henry IV a vivid antiquarian texture, endowing the carefully recreated throne room, prop swords and costumes of the Holy Roman Emperor with the aura of fact. As the audience comes to learn, however, its scenic truth claim is provisional, dependent on frames of reality established by characters who are themselves actors in an elaborate charade. When “mad” Henry enters, everyone behaves according to the social codes and performed identities the visual space demands. When Henry leaves, his guards light cigarettes; his family speaks openly about his madness; the throne room flickers between authenticity and manifest falseness. Eventually Henry, the only spectator whose belief in this world is supposed to be genuine, reveals that he has been merely playing the madman for many years, choosing to embrace the illusion recreated for his benefit though he also recognizes its factual unreality.
As Pirandello’s characters unpack the implications of their relative commitment to this metatheatrical scenography, they wrestle with questions about what it means to be a subject. In particular, Henry and his psychoanalyst tease out how consciousness arises in what philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty might call the horizon of perception. What they articulate, however, is only a representation of a philosophical inquiry already performed visually. The dialogue replays the metaphysical metatheatrics the spectators have just experienced directly. We “willingly suspend our disbelief” in scenic verisimilitude but then again must suspend that very suspension, faced with the twice-removed duplicity of an inauthentic madman and his uncanny refraction of both acting and spectatorship.
This essay develops Henry IV’s implications for attempting to represent the ways consciousness and especially the sense of a continuous self arise in the perceptual field. Drawing from ideas about subjective experience and sensory phenomena from Merleau-Ponty and Bert States, I dwell particularly on the doctor’s idea of a “cure,” which involves animating the anachronistic portraits of Henry and Marchioness Matilda of Tuscany by replacing the paintings with the costumed younger generation who has grown up to resemble perfectly their former selves. Hinging on the conflation of static self-image with the medium of portrait painting (and its corollary opposite: the conflation of selfhood’s mutability with the medium of live performance), this attempted cure probes the ontological status of identity through the juxtaposition of mediums.
Modern Drama: world drama from 1850 to the present, Jan 1, 2005
Comparative Drama, 2012
and the brain ... raving away on its own ... trying to make sense of it ... or make it stop ... o... more and the brain ... raving away on its own ... trying to make sense of it ... or make it stop ... or in the past ... dragging up the past ... flashes from all over ... --Samuel Beckett, Not I Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest ... Be mindful of the passing of time, and engage yourself in zazen as though you are saving your head from fire. --Eihei Dogen Samuel Beckett's late plays stage minimal images of body and mind: a woman sits in an autonomously-moving rocking chair listening to her recorded voice (Rockaby); a disembodied head breathes audibly while three recordings of his voice play (That Time); a mouth suspended in the dark speaks a rapid outpouring of disjointed phrases (Not I). As the actor Donald Davis put it, Not I's visual and aural minimalism (like many of Beckett's plays from the 1970s and 80s) makes Waiting for Godot look "like an MGM musical." (1) Devoid of whole characters and dynamic action, these brief pieces stage streams of thought and physically restrained human figures surrounded by dark voids. Critics have framed these pieces' baffling simplicity and suffering within European literary and philosophical paradigms ranging from the "psychographic landscapes" of Dante Alighieri's Inferno and Purgatorio, to the psychoanalytic thinking of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan, to Gilles Deleuze's notions of the "exhausted" in language and image. (2) Some of these paradigms touch on the ways Beckett pushes to the limits of subjectivity and discursive thought itself, but they tend to do so from within conceptual and metaphysical frameworks. As an alternative lens through which to read these late plays, Japanese Zen Buddhism also suggests the limits of subjectivity and discursive thought but offers a far more concrete paradigm for contextualizing these plays within a tradition of mental and physical practice. (3) Several scholars have noted deep affinities between Beckett's writing and Zen philosophy, from Buddhism's influence on Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophical pessimism influenced Beckett, to the formal similarities between Beckett's theater and Japanese Noh plays. (4) Paul Foster's Beckett and Zen suggests that Beckett's novels distill the dilemma of existence that Buddhism recognizes as a fundamental human condition but that Beckett fails to find a way out. (5) Combining the enigmatic illogic of Zen with chaos theory, John Kundert-Gibbs's No-Thing is Left to Tell reads Beckett's plays as visual and conceptual riddles that, like koans, baffle the dualistic mind, defeating discursive thought from within. (6) Extending this work beyond Zen ideas to Zen practice, the enigmatic figures who sparsely populate Beckett's late stages appear not as symbolic tropes in the representational and metaphysical traditions of European art, but instead look like ritual enactments of the mind's basic nature. Instead of Dante's damned half-buried in ice, the immobilized figures of That Time and Rockaby begin to look like the meditator in zazen (seated meditation), observing thoughts and perceptions arise in the present moment through restrained bodies. Instead of a spirit condemned forever to pace her own level of Hell, or Jung's example of a woman with the feeling of never having been born, May's prescribed and tightly choreographed pacing in Footfalls begins to resemble a monk in kinhin (walking meditation), repeating slow steps around a cyclical path as deliberate practice. Mouth's refusal to articulate a first-person subject position in Not I, as I will posit here, may even suggest a liberating rather than pathological negation of self. Beneath these surface affinities lies a deeper connection between Beckett's gestures of self-negation and their embodied thought. Beckett's 1973 play Not I in particular, this essay suggests, fleshes out the mental suffering that Buddhism cites as being caused by grasping thoughts or sensations and clinging to the delusion of a persistent self. …
Abstract: Over a century after railway travel began to change the ways in which communities, iden... more Abstract: Over a century after railway travel began to change the ways in which communities, identities, and space interacted, certain influential playwrights and directors explored the theater's relationship to space and time by staging railway travel. Theater studies has analyzed ...
The Invisible City, 2020
Folgt auf den Personalwechsel im Präsidentenbüro der Rollenwechsel bei Selenskyj?
Reviews by Kyle Gillette
Routledge, 2020
The Invisible City explores urban spaces from the perspective of a traveler, writer, and creator ... more The Invisible City explores urban spaces from the perspective of a traveler, writer, and creator of theatre to illuminate how cities offer travelers and residents theatrical visions whilst also remaining mostly invisible, beyond the limits of attention.
The text explores the city as both stage and content in three parts. Firstly, it follows in pattern Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities, wherein Marco Polo describes cities to the Mongol emperor Kublai Kahn, to produce a constellation of vignettes recalling individual cities through travel writing and engagement with artworks. Secondly, Gillette traces the Teatro Potlach group and its ongoing immersive, site-specific performance project Invisible Cities, which has staged performances in dozens of cities across Europe and the Americas. The final part of the book offers useful exercises for artists and travelers interested in researching their own invisible cities.
Written for practitioners, travelers, students and thinkers interested in the city as site and source of performance, The Invisible City mixes travelogue with criticism and cleverly combines philosophical meditations with theatrical pedagogy.
Routledge, 2016
"Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not going to play this particular scene tonight." - Sabina Thornton W... more "Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not going to play this particular scene tonight." - Sabina
Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) telescopes an audacious stretch of western history and mythology into a family drama, showing how the course of human events operates like theatre itself: constantly mutable, vanishing and beginning again.
Kyle Gillette explores Wilder’s extraordinary play in three parts. Part I unpacks the play’s singular yet deeply interconnected place in theatre history, comparing its metatheatrics to those of Stein, Pirandello and Brecht, and finding its anticipation of American fantasias in the works of Vogel and Kushner. Part II turns to the play’s many historic and mythic sources, and examines its concentration of western progress and power into the model of a white, American upper-middle-class nuclear family. Part III takes a longer view, tangling with the play’s philosophical stakes.
Gillette magnifies the play’s ideas and connections, teasing out historical, theoretical and philosophical questions on behalf of readers, scholars and audience members alike.
McFarland, May 8, 2014
Railway travel has had a significant influence on modern theatre’s sense of space and time. Early... more Railway travel has had a significant influence on modern theatre’s sense of space and time. Early in the 20th century, breakthroughs—ranging from F.T. Marinetti’s futurist manifestos to epic theatre’s use of the treadmill—explored the mechanical rhythms and perceptual effects of railway travel to investigate history, technology, and motion. After World War II, some playwrights and auteur directors, from Armand Gatti to Robert Wilson to Amiri Baraka, looked to locomotion not as a radically new space and time but as a reminder of obsolescence, complicity in the Holocaust, and its role in uprooting people from their communities. By analyzing theatrical representations of railway travel, this book argues that modern theatre’s perceptual, historical and social productions of space and time were stretched by theatre’s attempts to stage the locomotive.
Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination, ed Benjamin Linder, 2022
Leaving Rome and proceeding for an hour toward the northeast, you reach Fara Sabina, a city with ... more Leaving Rome and proceeding for an hour toward the northeast, you reach Fara Sabina, a city with medieval walls, an alleyway of cats, a stairway to nowhere. Down implausibly labyrinthine staircases and alleyways, you behold the main church on the piazza, built over a temple to an obsolete god. Across the piazza is a museum devoted to Sabine archaeology that precedes the empire of Rome by centuries. Beyond the bell tower on the belvedere and the bakery at its base—on a clear day—you can see all the way to St. Peter’s.
Performance Research, Jan 1, 2007
Performance Research, Jan 1, 2010
Pirandello Society of America, 2021
Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka (eds), Pirandello's Visual Philosophy: Imagination and Thought Across Media (Fairleigh Dickinson), 2017
Luigi Pirandello gives the world of his play Henry IV a vivid antiquarian texture, endowing the c... more Luigi Pirandello gives the world of his play Henry IV a vivid antiquarian texture, endowing the carefully recreated throne room, prop swords and costumes of the Holy Roman Emperor with the aura of fact. As the audience comes to learn, however, its scenic truth claim is provisional, dependent on frames of reality established by characters who are themselves actors in an elaborate charade. When “mad” Henry enters, everyone behaves according to the social codes and performed identities the visual space demands. When Henry leaves, his guards light cigarettes; his family speaks openly about his madness; the throne room flickers between authenticity and manifest falseness. Eventually Henry, the only spectator whose belief in this world is supposed to be genuine, reveals that he has been merely playing the madman for many years, choosing to embrace the illusion recreated for his benefit though he also recognizes its factual unreality.
As Pirandello’s characters unpack the implications of their relative commitment to this metatheatrical scenography, they wrestle with questions about what it means to be a subject. In particular, Henry and his psychoanalyst tease out how consciousness arises in what philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty might call the horizon of perception. What they articulate, however, is only a representation of a philosophical inquiry already performed visually. The dialogue replays the metaphysical metatheatrics the spectators have just experienced directly. We “willingly suspend our disbelief” in scenic verisimilitude but then again must suspend that very suspension, faced with the twice-removed duplicity of an inauthentic madman and his uncanny refraction of both acting and spectatorship.
This essay develops Henry IV’s implications for attempting to represent the ways consciousness and especially the sense of a continuous self arise in the perceptual field. Drawing from ideas about subjective experience and sensory phenomena from Merleau-Ponty and Bert States, I dwell particularly on the doctor’s idea of a “cure,” which involves animating the anachronistic portraits of Henry and Marchioness Matilda of Tuscany by replacing the paintings with the costumed younger generation who has grown up to resemble perfectly their former selves. Hinging on the conflation of static self-image with the medium of portrait painting (and its corollary opposite: the conflation of selfhood’s mutability with the medium of live performance), this attempted cure probes the ontological status of identity through the juxtaposition of mediums.
Modern Drama: world drama from 1850 to the present, Jan 1, 2005
Comparative Drama, 2012
and the brain ... raving away on its own ... trying to make sense of it ... or make it stop ... o... more and the brain ... raving away on its own ... trying to make sense of it ... or make it stop ... or in the past ... dragging up the past ... flashes from all over ... --Samuel Beckett, Not I Set aside all involvements and let the myriad things rest ... Be mindful of the passing of time, and engage yourself in zazen as though you are saving your head from fire. --Eihei Dogen Samuel Beckett's late plays stage minimal images of body and mind: a woman sits in an autonomously-moving rocking chair listening to her recorded voice (Rockaby); a disembodied head breathes audibly while three recordings of his voice play (That Time); a mouth suspended in the dark speaks a rapid outpouring of disjointed phrases (Not I). As the actor Donald Davis put it, Not I's visual and aural minimalism (like many of Beckett's plays from the 1970s and 80s) makes Waiting for Godot look "like an MGM musical." (1) Devoid of whole characters and dynamic action, these brief pieces stage streams of thought and physically restrained human figures surrounded by dark voids. Critics have framed these pieces' baffling simplicity and suffering within European literary and philosophical paradigms ranging from the "psychographic landscapes" of Dante Alighieri's Inferno and Purgatorio, to the psychoanalytic thinking of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan, to Gilles Deleuze's notions of the "exhausted" in language and image. (2) Some of these paradigms touch on the ways Beckett pushes to the limits of subjectivity and discursive thought itself, but they tend to do so from within conceptual and metaphysical frameworks. As an alternative lens through which to read these late plays, Japanese Zen Buddhism also suggests the limits of subjectivity and discursive thought but offers a far more concrete paradigm for contextualizing these plays within a tradition of mental and physical practice. (3) Several scholars have noted deep affinities between Beckett's writing and Zen philosophy, from Buddhism's influence on Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophical pessimism influenced Beckett, to the formal similarities between Beckett's theater and Japanese Noh plays. (4) Paul Foster's Beckett and Zen suggests that Beckett's novels distill the dilemma of existence that Buddhism recognizes as a fundamental human condition but that Beckett fails to find a way out. (5) Combining the enigmatic illogic of Zen with chaos theory, John Kundert-Gibbs's No-Thing is Left to Tell reads Beckett's plays as visual and conceptual riddles that, like koans, baffle the dualistic mind, defeating discursive thought from within. (6) Extending this work beyond Zen ideas to Zen practice, the enigmatic figures who sparsely populate Beckett's late stages appear not as symbolic tropes in the representational and metaphysical traditions of European art, but instead look like ritual enactments of the mind's basic nature. Instead of Dante's damned half-buried in ice, the immobilized figures of That Time and Rockaby begin to look like the meditator in zazen (seated meditation), observing thoughts and perceptions arise in the present moment through restrained bodies. Instead of a spirit condemned forever to pace her own level of Hell, or Jung's example of a woman with the feeling of never having been born, May's prescribed and tightly choreographed pacing in Footfalls begins to resemble a monk in kinhin (walking meditation), repeating slow steps around a cyclical path as deliberate practice. Mouth's refusal to articulate a first-person subject position in Not I, as I will posit here, may even suggest a liberating rather than pathological negation of self. Beneath these surface affinities lies a deeper connection between Beckett's gestures of self-negation and their embodied thought. Beckett's 1973 play Not I in particular, this essay suggests, fleshes out the mental suffering that Buddhism cites as being caused by grasping thoughts or sensations and clinging to the delusion of a persistent self. …
Abstract: Over a century after railway travel began to change the ways in which communities, iden... more Abstract: Over a century after railway travel began to change the ways in which communities, identities, and space interacted, certain influential playwrights and directors explored the theater's relationship to space and time by staging railway travel. Theater studies has analyzed ...
The Invisible City, 2020
Folgt auf den Personalwechsel im Präsidentenbüro der Rollenwechsel bei Selenskyj?
Theatre Survey, 2020
concerns into the realm of social media, digital art, and campus protest. The book’s insights are... more concerns into the realm of social media, digital art, and campus protest. The book’s insights are rigorously produced and articulated, but also nimble and refreshingly frank. Its structure abets its purpose: in addition to the case studies that make up the four main chapters, a shorter critical interlude precedes each. This interstitial material effectively forges explicit connections among the book’s major sites, often bringing recurring themes back to the fore, but the interludes also meaningfully shift the rhythm and tone of the book’s address to its reader; it’s tempting, if perhaps a stretch, to think of those rhythmic shifts as imbuing the text with something like the breath that Grobe describes as animating the confessional poets’ readings of their work. Throughout the text, too, the author offers playful asides that work as a kind of confession in miniature, marking the explicit performance of Grobe’s writerly voice and persona. One effect of grouping together such a multitu...
Modern Drama, 2016
The Illuminated Theatre is a beautiful monograph about the ways in which images work on and throu... more The Illuminated Theatre is a beautiful monograph about the ways in which images work on and through spectators. Kelleher offers a lucid yet nuanced provocation for scholars, artists, and readers interested in theatre of the twenty-first century.