Staging Violence in Sarah Kane’s Blasted & Ali Abdulnebi Al Ziadi’s Fourth Generation: A Comparative Study (original) (raw)
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Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Violence: Staging the Role of Theatre
2022
This book examines a series of contemporary plays where writers put theatre itself on stage. The texts examined variously dramatize how theatre falls short in response to the demands of violence, expose its implication in structures of violence—including racism and gender-based violence—and illustrate how it might effectively resist violence through reconfiguring representation. Case studies, which include Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present and Fairview, Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author, provide a range of practice-based perspectives on the question of whether theatre is capable of accounting for and expressing the complexities of structural and interpersonal violence as both lived in the body and borne out in society. The book will appeal to scholars and artists working in the areas of violence, theatre and ethics, witnessing, memory and trauma, spectatorship and contemporary dramaturgy, as well as to those interested in both the doubts and dreams we have about the role of theatre in the twenty-first century. Introduction: Staging the Role of Theatre, Performative Violence and Self-Reflexive Dramaturgy: A Study of Guillermo Calderón’s Kiss and Other Works “Touching Something Real”: The Critique of Historical and Theatrical Methodology in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present… The Ethics of Imagining Others: The Limits of “Performative Witness” in Michael Redhill’s Goodness and Erik Ehn’s Thistle Staging Rage: A Feminist Perspective on Theatrical Self-Reflexivity in Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author Metatheatrical Dramaturgies of Reception: Mirroring the Audience in Ontroerend Goed’s Audience and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview Conclusion
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Performance Research, 2019
This article examines how theatricality, specifically metatheatricality, functions in the depiction of perpetrators of violence and considers this from an ethical perspective. Performances that dwell on the ideologies and behaviours of perpetrators of violence are difficult to stage and present a range of ethical problems, including whether it is appropriate to grant the privilege of ‘presence’ to such figures, the risk of reiterating violent ideology, the risk of occluding the experiences of the victims and sensitivity to survivors of violence. These ethical problems in turn generate a set of aesthetic problems. This article focuses on two case studies where metatheatrical devices are used as a response to the challenges outlined above: Manifesto 2083 (2012), a solo performance about mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik by Danish theatre-makers Christian Lollike, Olaf Højgaard and Tanja Diers; and Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary about Indonesian government death squads of the 1960s, The Act of Killing (2012). While metatheatricality may at first glance seem to negate theatricality through pointing to the constructedness of theatrical illusion, I draw from Samuel Weber’s explanation of theatricality, in particular his notion of ‘linked separation,’ to suggest that metatheatricality, in fact, constitutes an intensification of theatricality. Moreover, I propose that the concept of ‘linked separation’ provides an effective critical lens through which to scrutinize the ethical dimensions of the uses of metatheatricality as a response to violence.
Performing Atrocity: Staging Experiences of Violence and Conflict
Representing the Experience of War and Atrocity: Interdisciplinary Explorations in Visual Criminology, 2019
In this chapter, I focus on the phenomenon of staged performance as a medium through which experiences of atrocity and violence are being increasingly articulated by those who experienced them directly. Drawing chiefly on the rationales underpinning Teya Sepinuck’s Theatre of Witness and the collaborative work of Bravo 22 Company and The Drive Project, the chapter interrogates two broad questions emanating from projects of this nature. Firstly, for scholars exploring relationships between bodies, violence, injury, memory, memorialisation, and reconciliation, what exactly is it about these performances that should constitute ‘the empirical’? Exploring a form of expression more apt, it may be claimed, at capturing the visual and the visceral, as well as the unspoken and the unspeakable, I argue that any analytical attempts to harness the power of staged performance must resist the temptation to reify its meaning. Rather than trying to decipher ‘the real meaning’ of a play, for example, I argue that only approaches which pay close attention to the practices of production and consumption associated with the performance are able to faithfully comment upon its all-important context. Secondly, I consider the potential ethical contradictions of documentary theatre as an artistic site of investigation for the social sciences which have frequently exemplified an overly individualistic and risk-averse logic characteristic of Western epistemology and pedagogy.
As we look back on it, the early 1990s are regarded as an exciting period in British Theatre. Playwrights such as Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Martin McDonagh and Anthony Neilson represented the beginning of a new theatrical renaissance (Bicer 75). This new angry generation produced art that was labeled as provocative, speculative, confrontational, sensational, shocking, taboo-breaking, brutal, bleak, gloomy and dark. For Kane specifically, her first production of Blasted in the London Royal Court Theatre was a self-conscious depiction of the traumas of war using the Bosnian conflict of the early 1990s as a central motivation. Kane’s techniques are of the school of post-dramatic theatre pioneered by Hans-Thies Lehman in that they challenge audiences by cleansing and breaking down traditional dramatic methods of classical dramaturgy (Bicer 76). The performance starts in a hotel in Leeds with the seduction and eventual sexual assault of the character Cate by journalist Ian. While initially shocking, our interpretation of the scene is now as a means of staging post-dramatic pain and catharsis and shows the violation of women in pain dialectically.
Representations of Violence in Literature, Culture and Arts (international conference, Turkey)
Convegno internazionale, Turchia, 2021
"Rapes, murders, honor killings: forms of violence in Giovanni Verga’s short stories", relazione tenuta presso il convegno internazionale £Representations of Violence in Literature, Culture and Arts£ organizzato dall’Osmaniye Korkut Ata University (in collaborazione con Ege University, Pamukkale University, Izmir Katip Celebi University and Istanbul Medeniyet University), Turkey, 20-22 ottobre 2021
Violence in the Arts: Performing & Witnessing
The wide subject of violence in art presents the scholar of today with a whole range of theoretical possibilities in the treatment of the chosen topic. The change of major aesthetical concepts in the period of modernism, post-modern aesthetic egalitarianism with levelling of traditionally high and traditionally low genres, new treatment of identity issues, cultural relativism, and other symptoms of post-modernity have brought about new narrative strategies, causing dramatic change in all aesthetical concepts, offering new perspective to old ideas such as the idea of empathy. The main ambition behind this text is to analyze some recent works on the crossroad of art intervention and performance, and to point to the difference between ideas- based conceptual subversion on the one hand, and body-based transgression in the performance that involves physical pain.
The Rhetorics of Violence in Jalila Baccar and Fadhel Jaïbi’s Violence(s)
TAYR Quarterly, 2018
Based on rhetorics of violence and discourses of gender supported by the theoretical works of Pierre Bourdieu, A. Ballinger, and Bertolt Brecht, this article first investigates the concept of violence through the performance of Jalila Baccar and Fadhel Jaïbi’sViolence(s) (2015).In this play an examination of the new forms of violence helps us pay particular attention to violence enacted by men and women against their minoritized groups, and how, when harmed, these groups go against the grain. My purpose in this article is to demonstrate how such forms of violence appeal to the audiences’ emotions and intellect. A Brechtian reading of Violence(s)with reference to Tsunami (2013) and Fear(s) (2017), also by Baccar and Jaïbi will assist comprehension of the development of violence and the resulting frustration provoked by the Arab Spring’s ongoing political, ethnic, economic, and religious conflicts and its subsequent impact on the Arab citizen’s daily behaviours and attitudes.
A De-sacrlisation of Violence in Modern British Playwriting
Manchester University, 2014
My thesis journey was initially motivated by an interest in the individual’s search for God, the self and the other (neighbour, men/women and enemy) as represented in the play texts. This call for a personal relationship with the ‘other’ highlights the individual’s feelings of unease and strangeness at a time when, one might argue, the majority belittles the role of religion, in support of scientific discoveries and human rights. Here, the French philosopher René Girard - whose anthropological and scientific interest in violence, religion and human culture has shaped my research - argues that the progress of humankind would not have become a reality without what he terms sacrifice. Here, I should confirm that the main influence on the early steps of finding my research topic were Peter Shaffer, Slavoj Žižek, Julia Kristeva and Mikhail Bakhtin rather than Rene Girard. This thesis explores several interconnected relationships, the most important of which is between humour and violence or forms of ‘sacrifice’ in the plays of six British playwrights – Peter Barnes and Peter Shaffer, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane as well as Caryl Churchill and David Rudkin. It is this strange relationship which leads me later on to uncover and explore the representations of the stranger, the victim/iser and the foreigner in their works. The return of the stranger – the dead, the ashes of victims of extreme violence, the ghosts, the prisoners and the children - is inseparable from the search for individuality in a world ruled by the gods of war, money and dark humour. My research findings are viewed in the light of two narratives: the first is to do with the upper world and the second is to do with the lower as defined by Bakhtin’s idea of the carnival and the culture of folk humour in the Middle Ages. The upper is serious, official, exclusive and authoritative whereas the second is festive, comic, mythical and popular. It is hard to describe the relationship between these narratives as simply oppositional (some say iconoclastic) because they are coexistent and rely on one another. At this point, the different professional and ideological positions of the playwrights are important aspects in arriving at an understanding of the ways they collapse the borders between humour and terror, the banquet and the battle, carnivals and trials, the parade and economic exploitation, clownery and politics. Though these playwrights are not preachers or reformers, they challenge our easy laughter and our role as we witness the risen from the dead, those in the flames or in the future signalling to us to halt our participation and face responsibility for the victims.