‘Everything Has a Fucking Value’: Negative Dialectics in the Work of Back to Back Theatre (original) (raw)
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The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography
2020
The objective to set up archives dedicated to collecting, collating, and researching performance practices in post-independence India, in order to rewrite colonial histories with a vision for the future, was a project initiated by the new state, then subsequently forgotten. However, this is an apt entry point to open up critical debates about how the post-colonial euphoria urged new scholarship and how, at the core of this, theatre and performance practices would be redefi ned. In tracing the history and politics of discourses around performativity and theatricality in the United States and Europe, Janelle Reinelt draws attention to the fact that the applications of the terms theatre and performance resonate with "local struggles" and enable "a challenge to these discourses in light of an increasingly urgent imperative to think and resituate performance theory in relation to our contemporary transnational situation" (2002 , 201). She argues that theatre and performance are not mere linguistic distinctions but are rooted in diff erent conceptual foundations with political implications. In post-colonial contexts, particularly in India, debates have focused on the dichotomy of theatre as a colonial import along with a wide range of heterogeneous local practices referred to as performance. Reviving, recovering, and archiving performances was therefore a much-anticipated and pedagogic post-colonial project of rewriting histories. As has become apparent, this was not merely in the realm of idealism, but ultimately had long-term implications for the discipline of theatre and performance studies in the Indian as well as other post-colonial contexts. Thus, in view of the colonial experience and its aftermath, the binary of theatre and performance collapsed into reductive categories layered with diff erent meanings than the ones prevalent in Western academies. This aff ected the course of the discipline in India and provoked crucial debates around secularism vis-à-vis communitarianism. Signifi cant in this context, I argue, was an intervention in the original binary perspectives, which often extended or changed meanings. The idea behind landmark debates is the hypothesis that while theatre histories can be researched and written, the study of performance practices cannot follow the critical historical method that is widely practised in the discipline. Instead, ethnography was seen as the means to research, archive, and write on performance practices. Meanwhile, theatre, which continued
TDR/The Drama Review, 2011
Matters: Theatres in the Second Part of the 20th Century) by Valentina Valentini, represents a breakthrough in theatre studies and performance theory outside of the Anglo-Saxon world. Its publication in Italy can be compared to the innovative works of Patrice Pavis (Languages of the Stage, 1982), Marco de Marinis (Capire il teatro [To Understand Theatre], 1988), and Hans-Thies Lehmann (The Postdramatic Theatre, 1999), which each introduced a major change in European theatre studies. A renowned Italian theatre scholar and professor at La Sapienza University in Rome, Valentini modestly claims that her book is meant as a textbook for teachers and students of theatre and performance practice and theory. However, it is also accessible to nonspecialists, who might be unfamiliar with the "archaeology" of contemporary performing arts and their main aspects: its 200 pages are very well equipped with numerous footnotes, titles, and sources, and richly illustrated with photographs from various historical and contemporary performances. Some of these represent memorable moments in the history of theatre and performance, while others serve to illustrate the main hypothesis: the complex relations between different performance and artistic practices can only be examined and analyzed from a contemporary philosophical perspective which, in turn, can contribute to the development of the field of theatre studies. References
2002
This book-length work offers a theatre-philosophy in the form of an ethics of appearing. Drawing on the work of contemporary philosophers, such as Nancy, Derrida, Lingis, Lévinas, Blanchot, Badiou and Deleuze, it elaborates the theme of ‘becoming unaccommodated’. Within this theme, anomalous disturbances in normal ‘states of affairs’, both on and off-stage, are shown to give rise to a specifically ethical experience of audience. Pathognomy, the art of tracking the ephemeral or elusive across varied terrain, as opposed to the systematizing impulse of physiognomy and its logic of recognition, is revived as an approach to exploring this phenomenon. Its defining feature is its manifestation as an event, a key term in contemporary ‘Continental’ philosophy. Bringing together a wide variety of source material drawn from theatre and performance studies, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies, the early chapters explore the experience of audience as the audience of experience. They examine particular forms of theatrical appearing and spectatorship, notions of fiasco and disaster underpinning performance, and an ethics of theatrical experience. Shifting in scale from the macro to the micro level, these concerns are then focused around an engagement with the face as the prime figure of appearance, elaborated in the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas and ‘disfigured’ in the garish symbol that stands for theatre – the masks of comedy and tragedy. The face and subsequently its oral/aural counterpart, the voice, are investigated via a logic of appearing or expression, a previously neglected and discredited concept. Expression is reanimated as an alternative to the tragic logic of representation. The anomalies of expression are explored via iconic images in artistic and scientific works deploying theatricalized presentations of human emotion, as well as via phenomenological consideration of other varieties of theatrical appearing, visual representation, everyday behaviour and non-linguistic utterance.
Acting, Disabled: Back to Back Theatre and the Politics of Appearance
Postdramatic Theatre and the Political: International Perspectives on Contemporary Performance, 2013
For Hans-Thies Lehmann, the political relevance of postdramatic theatre derives from its potential opposition to spectacle and representation. Referencing Debord, Lehmann writes, ‘the task of theatre must be to create situations rather than spectacles,’ such that ‘the structural problem becomes exactly how to suspend the fundamental law of the spectacle itself.’ The work of Australian theatre company Back to Back, which for over 20 years has employed performers with intellectual disabilities, might at first glance appear to embody the kind of resistance to spectacle that Lehmann describes. The ‘realness’ of the performers’ disability might be understood to transform the theatre-event into a situation rather than a spectacle, to which audiences are witnesses rather than spectators (to borrow Tim Etchells’ distinction). And yet, Back to Back’s most recent work, such as Food Court, seems to engage with questions and dynamics of theatrical spectacle and dramatic representation – not in order to overcome them, but rather as a way of engaging with the politics of appearance itself. Rather than getting to the ‘real’ politics behind these representational surfaces, the work stages the idea that disability is precisely a matter of appearance, and that, as Jacques Rancière has argued, the distribution of appearance is the domain of politics.
‘THEATRE IS ONLY ALIVE IF IT IS KICKING.’ SARAH KANE AND BLASTED
Ensuing John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956, a new angry young generation has appeared with more provocative and shocking works which have later been called 'in-yer-face' theatre by critic Aleks Sierz. It would not be wrong to say that Sarah Kane with her first play Blasted is the key figure of 'in-yer-face' theatre. Presenting dirty language, sex, nudity, violence on stage are shocking techniques that leave an indelible impression. In Blasted, Kane connects the interpersonal violence with the forgone conclusions of the war which is dirty, and she depicts this idea in a harsh way in which audiences may feel that as if Kane throws up on them while telling her story.The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the characteristics of in-yer-face theatre in Sarah Kane's Blasted.
Theatricality. A critical genealogy
2004
The notion of theatricality has, in recent years, emerged as a key term in the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies. Unlike most writings dealing with theatricality, this thesis presents theatricality as a rubric for a particular discourse. Beginning with a casestudy of a theatre review, I read an anti-theatricalist bias in the writer's genre distinctions of "theatre" and "performance". I do not, however, test the truth of these claims; rather, by deploying Foucauldian discourse analysis, I interpret the review as a "statement" and analyse how the reviewer activates notions of "theatricality" and "performance" as objects created by an already existing discourse. Following this introduction, the body of thesis is divided into two parts. The first, "Mapping the Discursive Field", begins by surveying a body of literature in which a struggle for interpretive dominance between contesting stakeholders in the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies is fought. Using Samuel Weber's reframing of Derrida's analysis of interpretation of interpretation, in Chapter 2, I argue that the discourse of the field is marked by the struggle between "nostalgic" and "affirmative" interpretation, and that in the discourse that emerges, certain inconsistencies arise. The disciplines of Theatre, and later, Performance Studies in the twentieth century are characterised, as Alan Woods (1989) notes, by a fetishisation of avant-gardist practices. It is not surprising, therefore, that the values and concerns of the avant-garde emerge in the discourse of Theatre and CHAPTER 7: The 16th/17th Century Epistemology Of "Theatre" 205 7.1 The medieval sense of being 206