Queer dramaturgies: international perspectives on where performance leads queer (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Riot', 'Revolution' and 'Rape': The Theatre Relationship and Performance Breakdown
2005
This thesis considers theories about the relationship between theatre makers and audience members in theatre-how this relationship is established and how it can break down. The thesis posits that the breakdown of a theatre relationship is manifested in audience behaviour which, when it is severe enough, can lead to interventions in performance and, potentially, the breakdown of that performance. The thesis argues that audience intervention in a performance constitutes a seizure of 'performance power' from the theatre makers, which is sufficiently difficult to achieve that successful and sustained interventions can only be carried out by groups of audience members and, probably, organized in advance. Further, the thesis suggests that in its most extreme form, such interventions may bring about a transfer of roles and power between audience members and theatre makers such that a new quasi-theatrical 'performance of protest' is created. The thesis surveys three historical cases in which theatre performances were disrupted by deliberate audience interventions. In each case the nature of the intervention was slightly different and the effect upon the performance was also different. In the first example, the Plough and the Stars riots (Dublin, 1926) a preplanned protest occurred in the playhouse and, despite interruption, the performance continued. In the second instance, the audience at Living Theatre's Paradise Now (California 1969) erupted in spontaneous protest within the theatre and the performance was almost entirely subsumed. In the final study, the Mervyn Thompson case (Auckland 1984) the protest took two forms: first there was a vigilante-style attack on Thompson himself which took place well away from any theatre event but had strong theatrical references; then several of his performances were affected by organized lobbying, pickets and interruptions. The thesis asks why the rupture in the theatre relationship occurred in each case and considers what these instances have to tell us about the breakdown of theatre performance as a social phenomenon. The thesis finds that in all three cases the audience members carrying out the interventions belonged to pre-existing groups with prior experience in protest action. The thesis also finds that the protesters had all had direct experience of some other 'dramatic' or 'theatrical' event in their own lives; experiences that made the performance seem less relevant. Given this, the thesis argues that, in these cases, the propensity to disrupt was brought to the theatre relationship by the audience members rather than being a direct response to the performance, even where that performance was confrontational. These findings have implications for theatre study and practice: in particular, the thesis raises questions about how we look at performance breakdown. Rather than assuming audience protest is a simple response to the performance, the findings suggest that such events must be considered in the light of the wider social and political context of the performance, most particularly the audience members' preoccupations. Finally, the thesis asks whether audience protest, however theatrical it appears, can ever become substitute theatre in the true sense of that word. Special thanks are due to my chief supervisor Dr. Jan Pilditch, for all the encouragement, expert guidance and unfailing support I have received over the last few years. Thanks also to: Jeremy Bell, for support and friendship throughout; Dr. Will Peterson who lent me early encouragement and an invaluable wad of notes on Sean O'Casey; Dr. William Farrimond for challenging and pertinent feedback on draft chapters; Gaye Poole for astute comments and assistance with the Introduction; John Davies for insights on New Zealand theatre; Athenaide Dallett for inspiration and personal encouragement, Julia, Kirstine, the Fionas, the Catherines and other 'fellow-sufferers' for being great role models, great company and great cake bakers; Seth in California for illuminating the Berkeley of the 1960s; library staff and dept secretaries (particularly Joanne and Jean) for chasing up references, photocopying, organizing rooms and other invaluable acts of practical assistance; my colleagues in the Arts team at the School of Education for supporting me in the closing stages of my studies.
Performative Theatre: a queer theatre?
2020
Researcher Josette Feral has studied the reciprocity between performativity and theatricality in the field of theatrical studies. With the term “performative theatre”, she intends to build continuity between the notions against the traditional view which opposes theatre and performance. Taking her works as a starting point, I explore the dynamics of what I call the state of trans- (trance, transition, transformation, transidentity, transgression, transfer…) in performative theatre. The idea is therefore to go beyond the dualisms that oppose theatre and performance as well as femininity and masculinity, among others. How did the performative turn foster the emergence of a queer theatre? To what extent does this affect the way bodies exist on stage?
Queer theatre: a performative theatre?
Whatever - A Transdiciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies, 2020
Researcher Josette Féral has studied the reciprocity between performativity and theatricality in the field of theatrical studies. With the term “performative theatre”, she intends to build continuity between the notions against the traditional view which opposes theatre and performance. Taking her works as a starting point, I explore the dynamics of what I call the state of trans- (trance, transition, transformation, transidentity, transgression, transfer…) in performative theatre. The idea is therefore to go beyond the dualisms that oppose theatre and performance as well as femininity and masculinity, among others. How did the performative turn foster the emergence of a queer theatre? To what extent does this affect the way bodies exist on stage?
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
Troublesome Professionals: On the speculative reality of theatrical labour
Performance Research, 2013
This article explores what might be at stake when art and performance exposes the apparently peripheral structures of value and labour that support the art-event. For example, in the piece attributed to John Baldessari in the 11 Rooms exhibition at the 2011 Manchester International Festival (UK), the organizers attempted to stage a previously unrealized concept by Baldessari that centered around the display of a real human corpse. For various reasons, they were unable to do so and instead displayed printouts selected from a year of correspondence in which the bulk of activity was undertaken by relatively anonymous members of curatorial and technical staff. Or in Quarantine's theatre piece Entitled (2011), technicians carry out the actions they would normally undertake during the day before an audience arrives, but, now that an audience is present, they narrate their actions as they perform them. One way of understanding these gestures is as attempts to present labour as something ‘real’ that might interrupt the fakery of art: the real corpse, the real stagehands, etc. However, drawing on Alice Rayner's reading of Derrida and Marx and John Roberts' arguments about the logic of the readymade, I argue that the usefulness of the staging of labour in this way is not in the way that it presents some authentic action that overcomes theatre's artifice, but instead in the peculiar failure of theatrical actions to be fully present. Rather than the ‘reality’ of the labour interrupting the ‘representation’ of the theatre, we might regard this as theatre that shows us labour as it really is; it is just that when we see it for what it is, it isn't there.
PERFORMANCE SPACES AND SPATIAL PERFORMATIVITY Theatre has left the building
The Routledge Companion to Contemporary European Theatre and Performance , 2023
The opening decades of this new millennium are haunted by spectacular events associated with political upheaval, conflict, contamination, climate change, pandemics and the plight of those seeking refuge from such threats. How do these extended moments in nature and civilisation impact environments housing cultural events, which, as performative spacing, are themselves events and integral drivers of experience? No longer safe nor sound, architecture’s inveterate association with continuity, coherence and autonomy has submitted to the exigencies of time, action and movement, revealing an impossible task to provide secure containment for inherently uncontainable bodies. This chapter therefore reverse-engineers the cautionary tale of The Three Little Pigs, which privileges the value of building one’s house out of stable bricks, rather than rickety sticks or even more volatile straw. It exposes significant shifts for the environment housing theatre: from enduring standalone monuments of the 19th century; to more experimental sites of the 20th century; to ephemeral and transitory locations of the early 21st century, in which a deliberate homelessness reinforces the community itself as house. Like Elvis, ‘theatre has left the building’, suggesting a death of sorts to enduring forms of theatre architecture. This makes way for more dynamic spatialities seen in seminal contemporary European venues that proffer alternatives to the persistent cookie-cutter models of proscenium stage and black box studio.
Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2017
Investigating the burgeoning field of contemporary theatre and performance, both Andy Lavender's monograph Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement and Florian Malzacher's anthology Not Just a Mirror: Looking for the Political Theatre of Today examine the role theatre and performance play in the social, cultural, philosophical, economic, and political context of the twenty-first century, positing, with different emphases, an intricate relationship between the arts and society. Going beyond postmodernist assumptions of relativism and detachment, both contributions represent timely interventions as they explicitly re-engage with questions of meaning, politics, and commitment in the context of recent developments in theatre and performance studies. While Malzacher's contribution focusses specifically on political theatre, Lavender chooses a more expansive approach that also takes into account the relevance of performance theory for an analysis of contemporary culture. Thus, Lavender is interested in performance as a wider cultural phenomenon, asserting that "[t]he society of the spectacle became a multi-theatred communications zone" (195). Central to his argument, as the introduction and chapter 1 in part I, "Scenes of Engagement," cogently argue, is the assertion that society and performance have, in a new social commitment, taken a step beyond postmodernism into a new "age of engagement" (21). This turn towards engagement, which Lavender understands as both an investment in political processesan aspect which, however, remains largely unexplored in the bookand as an emphasis on personal experience and individual involvement, has been facilitated by the increasing availability of digital technologies, which have "extended the relativizing work of postmodernism, but also helped us to rediscover our voices and values, and our singular selves" (17). In this considerably transformed social and cultural context, theatre "has become more than itself, a compound of media" and has developed into "something other than an encounter between actors, or JCDE 2017; 5(2): 385-391