Review: Social Works (original) (raw)
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Performance Paradigm, 2012
As an emerging Australian community-engaged artist, scholar and teacher in the 1990s, I used to struggle to find resources to help me critically contextualise community performance. I found theory in this area dominated by texts like Ann Jellicoe’s’ The Community Play (source of the overtly celebratory “Colway method” of community theatre making); or by the psycho-political writings of Augusto Boal, and/or related theatre-in-development models, tied to Marxist political models and forum theatre methods (Boal, 1985; Jellicoe, 1987). In Australia, writing in this area seemed focused closely on local issues, sociological frameworks, and governmental funding rhetoric, rather than on analysis of this particular form of art-making (Hawkins, 1993). None of these texts helped me to frame the socially engaged, interdisciplinary, polyphonic and increasingly site-specific performance events I was observing, and taking part in creating. Of course, the field of Performance Studies has always bee...
Essay on Stage: The Artistic Practice Introducing a Germ into the Cultural Matrix
Creating for the Stage and Play, Arti della Performance: orizzonti e culture, Collana diretta da Matteo Casari e Gerardo Guccini:, 2021
The chapter will take a closer look at a specific writing procedure for the stage, the essay on stage, a form of expression within a given performative system that reveals the limits of that system as inadequate, imposed. A theatrical essay or an essay on stage belongs to the tradition of the bordercrossing experimental performance-art pieces conceptualized in the 20 th century by Craig, Artaud, Meyerhold, futurist synthetic theatre, neo-avant-garde theatre, and others. I. Towards a definition of the term One can call an essay on stage any performance practice that (like the essay according to Graham Good) makes «a claim to truth, but not permanent truth. Its truths are particular, of the here and now. Nothing is carried over» (Good 1988: 9). This specific form and procedure produce particular truths and reveals the limits of artistic genres. It is far from a stable category, and it establishes its inventiveness and singularity by operating at the very unstable limits of the theatrical and by reinventing the category of theatricality itself. Among numerous possible examples of this "critical art", we will choose the following ones: 1) The 2009 performance Alice in Wonderland: A Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization, (Alice nel paese delle meraviglie-Saggio sulla fine di una civiltà) by the Italian director Armando Punzo, staged in Voltera Prison; 2) The 2012 performance Drawers (Schubladen) by the German collective She She Pop; and 3) Oliver Frljić's 2016 performance Our Violence and Your Violence (Naše nasilje in vaše nasilje) based on Peter Weiss's novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (Ästhetik des Widerstands). Using these examples, we will try to map this specific textual procedure that produces what Badiou terms «a generic vacillation» (Badiou 1990: 91).
Between Theatre and Society The Question of Understanding
2002
The theatre artist must communicate to and be relevant in the society, bearing in mind that "an incommunicative art is a dilution of the essential aspect of the art" and more so, that i very work of art is created to satisfy a need, a need passionate enough to give it birth; for as Mao Tse Tung put it, works of art which lack artistic quality have no force, however progressive they are politically. This is why it becomes imperative for the theatre artist to pursue what Haus Arp tags "concrete art" -