Introduction: The Laboratory and the Stage (original) (raw)
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Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination (ed.)
Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, 2019
Scientific thinking has long been linked to music theory and instrument making, yet the profound and often surprising intersections between the sciences and opera during the long nineteenth century are here explored for the first time. These touch on a wide variety of topics, including vocal physiology, theories of listening and sensory communication, technologies of theatrical machinery and discourses of biological degeneration. Taken together, the chapters reveal an intertwined cultural history that extends from backstage hydraulics to drawing-room hypnotism, and from laryngoscopy to theatrical aeronautics. Situated at the intersection of opera studies and the history of science, the book therefore offers a novel and illuminating set of case studies, of a kind that will appeal to historians of both science and opera, and of European culture more generally from the French Revolution to the end of the Victorian period.
Science on Stage: An Experiment of Theatricality
The consumerist society prevalent in the later part of nineteenth century Europe was extremely influential on the careers of scientists, their discoveries, and the presentation of discoveries. In Britain especially, scientific institutions needed to compete for patrons who sought public entertainment and were swayed by advertisements. The connection of science and society is the essence of this essay; however, within this broad topic, the focus is primarily on how historians have examined theatrical science. Theatrical science played an important role in both controversial public debates and studies of experimentation with electricity. In regard to the overall study of public science in nineteenth century Europe, successful performance lectures of this period reveal the dual nature of nineteenth century science as a transport into modernity and a mode for social mobility and popularity. The term theatrical science is most appropriate because, while the science and experimentation is of the utmost importance, successful lecturers, such as Michael Faraday, realized the potential of performing lectures in such a way that the science was presented clearly and interestingly to those outside the scientific community. The theatrics that one employed in a debate profoundly affected the position taken by society, and in turn the time and finances provided to a research topic. Public discourse, therefore, should also be studied as part of theatrical science. In a performance lecture, the speaker persuaded the audience through a series of experiments that both dazzled and educated them. In some cases, such as the controversies concerning mesmerism or anesthesiology, the performance lectures and public debates took place simultaneously.
Science on Stage: From “Doctor Faustus” to “Copenhagen”
Physics Today, 2007
Science on Stageis the first full-length study of the phenomenon of" science plays"--theatrical events that weave scientific content into the plot lines of the drama. The book investigates the tradition of science on the stage from the Renaissance to the present, ...
Attached is the Introduction to *The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain* (Oxford UP:2016). For the full text, copies are available for sale via OUP website. You can message me for a discount code. The book is also available through Oxford Scholarship Online. The first book-length study of the relationship of science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment explores crucial role of spectacle and performance in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was “staged” in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic. But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance: that is, the ways in which eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that reverberated across the laboratory, the lecture hall, the anatomy theater, and the public stage. Not only did the representation of science and scientists in eighteenth-century plays influence contemporary debates over the role that experimental science was to play in modern life, the theater shaped the very form that science itself was to take. By disciplining, and ultimately helping to legitimate, what was then called natural philosophy, the eighteenth-century stage helped to naturalize an epistemology based on self-evident, decontextualized facts that might speak for themselves. In this, the stage and the lab jointly fostered an Enlightenment culture of spectacle that transformed the conditions necessary for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge.
2009
What is a theatre laboratory? Why a theatre laboratory? This book attempts to answer these questions, focusing on the experiences and theories, the visions and the techniques, the differences and similarities of European theatre laboratories in the twentieth century. It studies in depth the Studios of Stanislavski and Meyerhold, the school of Decroux, the Teatr Laboratorium of Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwik Flaszen, as well as Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret. Theatre laboratories embody a theatre practice that defies the demands and fashions of the times, the usual ways of production and the sensible functions that stage art enjoys in our society. It is theatre that refuses to be only art and whose radical research forges new conditions with a view to changing both the actor and the spectator. This research transforms theatrical craft into a laboratory that has been compared to the laboratories of the alchemists, who worked not on material but on substance. The alchemists of the stage did not only operate on forms and styles, but mainly on the living substance of the theatre: the actor, seen not just as an artist but above all as a representative of a new human being. Laboratory theatres have rarely been at the centre of the news. Yet their underground activity has influenced theatre history. Without them, our very ideas of theatre, as shaped throughout the course of the twentieth century, would have been quite different. In this book Mirella Schino recounts, as in a novel, the vicissitudes of a group of practitioners and scholars who try to uncover the technical, political and spiritual perspectives behind the word ‘laboratory’ when applied to the theatre.