Who Tells the Story? Challenging Audiences through Performer Embodiment (original) (raw)
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New Literaria: An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2023
The critical argument around deconstruction destabilises the author and the relationship between the authorial authority over the text and the meaning-making process. A similar deconstructive turn also questioned the actor's positioning within the larger production apparatus in relation to the dramatic text. Looking at the changing ideological construction around the author in relation to the actor and performance, this paper argues that the re-animation of the author in the recent critical arena has opened up spaces where we can re-imagine the actor as well. The exclusion of the author from the bourgeois authority of the text has freed the text to be reconnected with the actor. Through this re-connection, the method of meaning-making gets a new dimension where neither the author nor the actor has full authority over the text. Still, they remain active part-takers in the meaning-making process. This paper contextualises how deconstruction as a theoretical premise and autobiographical narratives as active writing have a dialogue that portrays writing as a performing narrative: a creative synthesis between the narrating self and experiencing self. It is an enquiry into that 'theatrical' space where the autobiographical 'author' and actor melts down to become an organising function which can question the earlier production apparatus and simultaneously become a creative force. This paper is an objective epistemological endeavour to destabilise the production apparatus, thus opening up new possibilities of meaning and interpretation in examining the text, author, actor, and beyond.
Embodying Narrative, Staging Icons
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The cultural practices of contemporary cosplay and medieval mystery play are showcases for the phenomenon of narrative liminality in that they are clearly and necessarily tied to narrative sources but have a tendency to deplete the narrativity of these sources. The argument will move along four aspects of the practices that mark their movements from narrative into a liminal space. These aspects are first of all the storyworlds from which the practices draw their significance. Iconicity is the second aspect that is the connector between the storyworlds with their recognizable existents and the performance that is at the core of the cultural practices. Performance is therefore the third aspect, which directly leads into the final aspect of embodiment, the significance of the real body of the performer, which further removes the practices from their sources. The notion of 'moe,' or adoration, is introduced as a way to understand the motivation for the phenomena described. 1 The following essay is a substantial reworking and refocusing of a text that originally appeared in
The Three Bodies of Narration: A Cognitivist Poetics of the Actor’s Performance
The purpose of this article is to take a cognitivist approach to achieve an adequate understanding of the actor’s performance as a narrative an aesthetic factor. By way of introduction, a context is offered that explains what the actor’s performance has nearly always been considered in audiovisual works and previously in theatre, as something separate from the narration, a category reserved for diegesis. This is followed by a presentation of the general cognitivist conception as the most suitable approach to achieve this purpose, based on the central features of the concept of recognition, from which arises the central proposal of viewing actors as generators of the spectator’s attention, which is the first necessary condition for any story. The central part of the article is concerned with presenting the three main modes in which the actor’s presence arouses the spectator’s attention, elucidated with examples and an explanation of their narrative scope in each case. First, the value of the body in eliciting the neutral attention of the spectator to the character; secondly, the value of the exceptionality of the body in pertinent increments of spectator interest, which give rise to the emotions that are central to cognitivism, such as sympathy and empathy, which are thus determining factors in narrative processes; and finally, the article takes up one of the main debates in the field to offer an alternative to cognitivism and the main outcome of this research: acting, in its artistic sense, generates attention and emotions comparable with the most widely debated moral factors, such as allegiance. It is thus valid to consider that the actor’s performance as an artistic practice is the element with the greatest narrative depth insofar as it constitutes the stablest basis for the spectator’s attention.
When Narrative Becomes Theatrical
The Harold Pinter Review, 2021
Storytelling is an integral component of Irish tradition, folklore, and culture. Ireland's rich narrative tradition can be traced back to the early oral act of storytelling, undertaken by the seanchaí (storyteller or historian). Despite the wide spectrum of studies and broadly ranging arguments on storytelling in general and other specific aspects, in Irish drama narrative and the monologue, as well as narrative levels and types of narrators, have never been analyzed. In narratological terms Irish drama is rich with various degrees of diegetic narrativity employed differently by its various playwrights. This article looks more closely into a subject that until now has not received attention in the context of Irish theatre. In Irish theatre, in which language, narrative, and storytelling are recurrent topics, it is crucial that we understand how narrative is more complicated than the simple telling of a story and that it possesses techniques and levels that are worth reflecting o...