The contested space of death on stage (original) (raw)
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This dissertation will examine the function of dead bodies on the early modern stage and the different formats they assume such as: skulls separated from the rest of their remains, hanged bodies and mutilated corpses. It will look closely at how these bodies are used as props on-stage but also how they create spectacles that ask questions within Hamlet (Shakespeare), The Revenger's Tragedy (Middleton) and, The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd), while looking in passing at The Honest Whore (Dekker) for a comparison from another genre of the time. As a result of this, I will argue how the dead body on-stage explores anxieties felt towards the loss of identity that occurs through death and decomposition. In addition, it will investigate the link between characters who meditate on skulls, corpses, and revenge and how this disturbs their sense of self. Early modern revenge drama is primarily concerned with the ethical dilemmas surrounding the notion of revenge, but this dissertation will expand on this and suggest the dead body on-stage presents characters and the audience with a more extensive issue. One area of interest is the way the human form is treated during the process of revenge on both ends of the spectrum: the behaviour, handling and identity of the revenger in contrast to the management of the victim's body. This is due to the distinct physical and mental processes that occur on-stage from both parties. Revenge tragedy has been described as 'a carnival escape from everyday norms: gaudily spectacular, repulsive and yet fascinating' (Findlay, 1999, p.49), which indicates how there is something enticing about the plot lines the plays produce as they advocate and relish in carnal desires. It could also be attributed to a society of strict rules, regulation and religion, where class and reputation are paramount. As a result of the play's combination of brutal violence, dead bodies and gallows humours, watching these plays becomes a form of catharsis for the audience. In order to gain a full understanding of the plays and the themes they explore it is important to understand their context, especially in relation to mass death, disease and dissection. The Plague had been a prominent killer in England and around the world for many years, and around the time these plays were written, the endemic plague was sweeping the nation. In 1480, Naphy and Spicer outlines how 'plague returned every 14-20 years or maybe only once or twice in a lifetime' (2000, p.81), which indicates that the population would have been accustomed to a high mortality rate but also how the plays were conceived on a backdrop of mass death. I will examine closely the gravedigger scene within Hamlet and analyse it in Kelly-Anne Platt
The Limits of Operatic Deadness
_Cambridge Opera Journal_ Special Issue: Remaking the Aria, 2016
The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? 1 Angela Gheorghiu's 2011 studio album Homage to Callas includes an unusual musical offering. In addition to a number of 'favourite arias', the CD cover promises 'exclusive online access to a ground-breaking duet': a video of Gheorghiu singing the 'Habanera' from Carmen with Maria Callas. 2 A one-off experiment within the realm of opera, posthumous duets have been a significant trend in popular music since the early 1990s and are becoming increasingly common due to the extended possibilities of audio-visual digital manipulation. They are also attracting a healthy amount of scholarly attention. 3 In a particularly influential and far-reaching analysis, Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut have argued that duets between the dead and the living can provide a new model for understanding all manner of performance, complicating 'an unhelpful and overvalued schism between presence and absence that undergirds much literature on performance '. 4 Stanyek and Piekut's particular target is 'liveness', a cultural logic thatas Emanuele Senici, Martin Barker and others have notedhas imbued much opera on screen, over the last sixty years, with a rhetoric of presence, authenticity and televisual immediacy. 5 The sense in which posthumous duets may offer an alternative model for 15 There would be much more to say, of course, about how the posthumous duet relates to Maria Callas's rich afterlife. Michal Grover-Friedlander speaks beautifully about the death and life of Callas's voice in Operatic Afterlives (New York, 2011), 45-75.
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.
2016
This article refers to the famous question of the politicization versus aestheticization of art, recently discussed by Boris Groys in terms of usefulness and uselessness, or “design” and “art proper,” and, by criticizing Croys’ dualist approach, shows that in the biopolitical framework of contemporary ideology, the usefulness and uselessness pass into each other and thus create a circle within which any art is presented as individual or social therapy, or a sort of pharmakon that is both poison and cure. In search for another conception of art, the article addresses to some radical avantgarde conceptions of theatre, such as Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death, and, reflecting through the ways of recombining elements and principles of what Alain Badiou characterized as a “leftist threat” for the theatre, demonstrates a rational political kernel of their destructive force.
Actors and the Art of Performance: Under Exposure
Here we begin to delve into the true heart of the art of acting. If theater is no longer understood as a theater of representation, then what takes place on stage is a transformation at play with truth. Heiner Müller called it a symbolic death, the most central event of the theater. Its most fundamental and most intimate impact stems from the fear, shared by audience and actors, of the caesura of death and the horror of the definitive loss of ourselves as subjects. But does the fascination of theater not draw from the pleasure of metamorphosis, from gain, surplus, and the joy of the singular rightness of conditions? This interpretation ends in an ethical expectation of theater in which the stage becomes a site that reminds us what we, qua our existence, might have become. Such a foolish fable of felicitousness seems anachronistic. But the time of theater is outside of our time, it is a time of promises.
Auckland University of Technology, 2021
Employing the dramaturgical methodology of Pandemic/Epidemic Embodied Performance (‘PEEP’), this practice-led research project staged a live theatre production of the ancient Greek tragedy Antigone, by Sophocles, in Auckland, New Zealand, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the restriction placed on theatre because of the global pandemic, the resulting production actualised a range of methods for theatre to respond in times of crisis while retaining the aesthetics and ephemeral qualities of live performance. Integral to this research is an exploration of how ancient Greek tragedy is relevant to contemporary theatre audiences. The research project extensively engages with the scenographic work of practitioners Lizzie Clachan and Soutra Gilmour (focusing on their performance design contributions in British theatre), which influenced and informed the design of PEEP: Antigone. Artist Marcel Duchamp’s theoretic perception of spectatorship and liveness in Art is explored through his sculpture Étant Donnés: 1. La Chute d’eau, 2. Le Gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas). An examination of Robert Lepage’s roles as a dramaturg, director, and designer of the theatre, makes personal the pressures of working within the theatre and supported comprehension of the external conflicts that can obstruct the nature of theatre-making. Central to PEEP’s contextual focus is Feminist Theory and Theatre (FTT) in conjunction with Research as Theatre (RaT). These theories are explored through critical scholars Judith Butler and Yelena Gulzman, who subsequently argue for and against the approach that all research is categorically performative but not necessarily theatrical. Positioning the research through an epistemologically dramaturgical and theatrical perspective, the written thesis follows the structure of an ancient Greek tragic plot, with titles to guide the audience through the story of this research process.